An opaque public education system doesn’t just fail to solve its own problems—it fails to justify its own existence

By the American Statistical Association’s count, 36.6% of the data products developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to observe the demographics, efficacy, and safety of our nation’s schools, have been abandoned in 2025. The American Statistical Association’s NCES Study and Project Tracker shows that, out of 71 monitored data collections, projects, and programs offered by the statistical agency, 26 are “inactive.”

The suspended sets include in-progress multiyear studies such as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2023-24 and the High School and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 2022, which is the first High School and Beyond (HS&B) study to track the educational experiences and life outcomes of high-school students following the COVID-19 pandemic. The HS&B study is due for its first follow-up collection in Spring 2026.

Other inactive data projects include the National Household Education Surveys Program, which gathers data on families’ educational activities and can be used to show shifts towards practices like homeschooling over time, and the National Training, Education, and Workforce Survey—an experimental survey meant to measure the relationship between non-degree credentials and employment outcomes. The College Navigator tool is also listed as inactive, as well as NCES’s contribution to the Education at a Glance Report, which compares nations’ education systems at a global scale.

The ASA’s NCES tracker uses government records as its sources: the federal contractor database, the Federal Register, OIRA’s Information Collection Review, and the 2026 Forecast of U.S. Department of Education Contract Opportunities. The tracker was last updated on March 13, 2026.

The information from federal surveys and longitudinal studies is used to identify nationwide problems. Without that data, states, with varying education standards, available resources, and political interests, are unable to provide a clear of a picture of their issues, even when their individual data is aggregated.

But an opaque public education system doesn’t just fail to solve its own problems—it fails to justify its own existence. When its successes are invisible, it becomes easier to dismantle. Advocates are left with less evidence as private and charter school interests push for public funding. Beyond the dismantling of the Department of Education, the loss of reliable education data could help accelerate the erosion of public education as we know it.