A few weeks ago, the Good Science Project newsletter discussed many ill-advised cancellations of education contracts by DOGE, including everything from randomized trials of reading programs, to the national statistics on how US students are performing.
Stuart, how did you come to believe these people might be thoughtful or well-intentioned? Nothing before the election or since would lead me to believe anything but the opposite. This is about ideology, malice and pettiness. Not efficiency or efficacy.
Yeah, I'd say it's quite obvious that the GOP doesn't want public education to exist at all and it's not one of their goals to determine what works and what doesn't. They'd like public education to exist only insofar as they can use it to indoctrinate children into their vision of the future. They've said as much.
Stuart, the situation is even worse. Full disclosure, my organization was performing contracts for IES/NCES to collect the data that they compiled and published. NCES was a fairly small organization, so contractors like us did a lot of the data collection work, guided by our own expert statisticians and survey methodologists. Those contracts were terminated by DOGE, and many had a data deletion clause. Unless Dept. of Education archived the data, ALL the historical microdata is GONE. That's the raw data collected, not the stuff that's been scrubbed, aggregated, and anonymized for publication on federal websites.
At a minimum, transferring the survey work (if that actually happens) will take time, because the experts at the contractors who ran the surveys will not be there to help with transition. Many of them are losing their jobs now that the contracts are gone, and they aren't going to stick around. So even if the historical datasets still exist, all the annual datasets will have a break of at least 2 years or more in their time series, and future data collections are not guaranteed to be comparable to the historical data.
Many annual IES reports are also mandated by long-standing laws, and those reports will not be published for the foreseeable future. But if the Congress won't do anything, who has standing to sue? And how would the government fix the situation now that it's so broken?
If it was an open dataset, it may have been archived by the organizations of private citizens that were working tirelessly on backing up government data for months before inauguration because they saw this coming.
The issue is that researchers often need the original microdata for their research. Those data include with information that can't be directly shared with the public due to privacy and confidentiality requirements. Researchers go through special licensing and vetting procedures to get access to the data, and they are NOT allowed to store it outside of government systems. Those are the datasets that I'm afraid are gone, which means no one will ever be able to replicate the research conducted using those datasets.
If it was an open dataset, it may have been archived by the organizations of private citizens that were working tirelessly on backing up government data for months before inauguration because they saw this coming.
If you honestly think that this current government is interested in hiding statistics or ending the tracking of education statistics, you've got another thing coming. These are growing pains. Such a task can be delegated to another federal department to aggregate state data. As if it is not far-left educrats and demagogues that have a vested interest in hiding or obscuring statistics displaying failed policies and the fruits of pedagogical bunk.
Are you kidding me? I surely do not think you are blivious to the decade-long mission of teacher labor unions and administrative bodies to smear standardized testing practices, minimize educational benchmarks, and do away with previously required coursework? This has been a result of the failure of 'whole language reading,' 'indigenous ways' of learning math, and other misadventures straight out of the captured university ed departments. When they realized their practices wouldn't solve the 'learning gaps,' the abandonment of measuring such 'gaps' started. All true.
Stuart, how did you come to believe these people might be thoughtful or well-intentioned? Nothing before the election or since would lead me to believe anything but the opposite. This is about ideology, malice and pettiness. Not efficiency or efficacy.
Yeah, I'd say it's quite obvious that the GOP doesn't want public education to exist at all and it's not one of their goals to determine what works and what doesn't. They'd like public education to exist only insofar as they can use it to indoctrinate children into their vision of the future. They've said as much.
Stuart, the situation is even worse. Full disclosure, my organization was performing contracts for IES/NCES to collect the data that they compiled and published. NCES was a fairly small organization, so contractors like us did a lot of the data collection work, guided by our own expert statisticians and survey methodologists. Those contracts were terminated by DOGE, and many had a data deletion clause. Unless Dept. of Education archived the data, ALL the historical microdata is GONE. That's the raw data collected, not the stuff that's been scrubbed, aggregated, and anonymized for publication on federal websites.
At a minimum, transferring the survey work (if that actually happens) will take time, because the experts at the contractors who ran the surveys will not be there to help with transition. Many of them are losing their jobs now that the contracts are gone, and they aren't going to stick around. So even if the historical datasets still exist, all the annual datasets will have a break of at least 2 years or more in their time series, and future data collections are not guaranteed to be comparable to the historical data.
Many annual IES reports are also mandated by long-standing laws, and those reports will not be published for the foreseeable future. But if the Congress won't do anything, who has standing to sue? And how would the government fix the situation now that it's so broken?
If it was an open dataset, it may have been archived by the organizations of private citizens that were working tirelessly on backing up government data for months before inauguration because they saw this coming.
The issue is that researchers often need the original microdata for their research. Those data include with information that can't be directly shared with the public due to privacy and confidentiality requirements. Researchers go through special licensing and vetting procedures to get access to the data, and they are NOT allowed to store it outside of government systems. Those are the datasets that I'm afraid are gone, which means no one will ever be able to replicate the research conducted using those datasets.
Well that is just awful. This really is a nightmare. Thank you for explaining. I just hope all of this will be in the past one day.
If it was an open dataset, it may have been archived by the organizations of private citizens that were working tirelessly on backing up government data for months before inauguration because they saw this coming.
This work can and should be shifted to the States.
If you honestly think that this current government is interested in hiding statistics or ending the tracking of education statistics, you've got another thing coming. These are growing pains. Such a task can be delegated to another federal department to aggregate state data. As if it is not far-left educrats and demagogues that have a vested interest in hiding or obscuring statistics displaying failed policies and the fruits of pedagogical bunk.
Nothing in your comment is accurate or well-informed.
Are you kidding me? I surely do not think you are blivious to the decade-long mission of teacher labor unions and administrative bodies to smear standardized testing practices, minimize educational benchmarks, and do away with previously required coursework? This has been a result of the failure of 'whole language reading,' 'indigenous ways' of learning math, and other misadventures straight out of the captured university ed departments. When they realized their practices wouldn't solve the 'learning gaps,' the abandonment of measuring such 'gaps' started. All true.
*oblivious, cannot edit
And this is all because they have been so explicitly and cynically race-conscious;