The department has been cut to roughly half of its former size since Trump's inauguration. Although it has promised that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) would not be affected by the more than $900 million in cuts laid out by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, it has lost the vast majority of the workforce within the data-collecting arm in charge of the tests.
More than 100 Institute of Education Sciences employees were laid off in a March 11 announcement, slashing the former 184-member, $800 million department to a handful of employees. That included almost all of the National Center for Education Statistics, which is tasked with conducting nationwide research including NAEP assessments.
NAEP tests gauge students' progress across several grade levels and subjects, including fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading, every two years at certain public and private schools across the country.
Although all states have some form of school accountability systems, NAEP is the only standardized test that compares students across the country, said Duncan Klussmann, a University of Houston clinical associate professor and former Spring Branch ISD Superintendent.
"If NAEP goes away, then you're not going to have this ability to really compare student performance across 50 states," Klussmann said.
TESTING CUT
Released Jan. 29, the test's most recent results highlighted a "sobering" trend of languishing academic recovery after COVID, according to then-NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr.
Citing funding issues, the department cut its long-term assessment on 17-year-olds scheduled to be administered in March. Although the test had not been administered since 2012, it would have provided key data on students' post-secondary readiness five years after COVID, said Erin Baumgartner, the director of Rice University's Houston Education Research Consortium.
"I think (it) could have been very valuable information for understanding, especially post-COVID, how students were doing," Baumgartner said. "We haven't really had it as a resource in recent years, and the fact that it was coming back would have been great, but not as bad as if we were losing some of the other subject areas."
Some education experts, including former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and NAEP supervising board member Diane Ravitch, worry about the remainder of the test's future. Carr was placed on paid leave Feb. 26, and almost all of the remaining NAEP administrators were laid off weeks later.
"NCES was like the beating heart of the Department of Education, and they've cut the heart out. That is the nonpartisan center of the education department which has been absolutely crucial in understanding what's happening in American education," said Ravitch, a Houston native. "They can't monitor anything (because) there's nobody left to do it. I don't know how they will be able to continue with NAEP in the future because there's no staff."
While NAEP primarily reports on statewide data, it also releases information on some of the country's largest districts, including Houston ISD. Students who took the test at more than 100 HISD campuses in January 2024 saw growth in fourth-grade math scores but did not see significant change in other subjects as students slipped further nationwide.
"We're always thinking about, 'How do we ensure Houston becomes the leading education city in the country?'" said Cary Wright, chief executive officer of education research nonprofit Good Reason Houston. "And we actually need tools to help us understand how well we are doing relative to other urban metropolitan centers."
Losing NAEP could also erase data on growing achievement gaps across states and certain student populations, including economically disadvantaged students, Baumgartner said. Lower-performing students saw steeper post-COVID declines across the country when compared with higher-performing students.
"It benefits our country to have an educated population. It's going to be good for our economy to have an educated population," Baumgartner said. "If we're not making sure that everyone has access to education and is treated appropriately, then I think that the (United States) is going to struggle globally for a while."
OTHER DEPARTMENT CHANGES
The cuts come as Trump mulls closing the Department of Education altogether.
"The Department of Education is not working as intended," new Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a speech titled Our Department's Final Mission. "Since its establishment in 1980, taxpayers have entrusted the department with over $1 trillion, yet student outcomes have consistently languished."
Federal funding makes up about 14 percent of public school budgets, largely for low-income schools and special education, the Associated Press reported. Houston ISD received just under $189 million in federal funding in the 2023-24 school year.
The department is also responsible for the Office for Civil Rights, which enforces federal civil rights laws in schools and other recipients of its federal funding. The civil rights office has been cut in half since Trump's inauguration.
"There's a lot going on with how the federal government is reevaluating the existence of or the role of the Department of Education," Wright said. "The entity itself, I think, was founded in many ways due to this belief that education is the way to the American dream, and I think one of the key roles that the department needs to play is to offer the public and policymakers a reckoning of how states are doing, in particular, to get kids on a path to that dream."
Higher education institutions — including their departments dedicated to public school research — rely more heavily on federal education funding. That includes the Houston Education Research Consortium, which offers districts including Houston ISD free research on topics from family support centers to emergent bilingual students.
"To the extent that all of those resources go away as options for us being able to support school districts, it's going to make it harder for us to do what we were trying to do, and ultimately make it harder for school districts to have access to research to be driving their decision making," Baumgartner said.
MORE UNCERTAINTY
Trump will need an act of Congress, meaning 60 Senate votes, to close the department. Ravitch said that remains unlikely since the Senate currently hosts 53 Republicans.
But the removal of NAEP testing paired with more states' adoption of school vouchers, which could bring more students to private schools that are largely not subject to accountability rankings, means that states could soon have a significant loss of education data.
"The trend lines will all be broken, and we'll have no reporting by which to come to any judgment about doing things differently or doing more of the same," Ravitch said. "We'll know less than we ever knew."
In previous rounds of cuts, the department said that NAEP would remain unaffected by staffing changes. The 74 reported Tuesday that sources familiar with the changes have heard that NAEP could remain intact but be administered by a new department, such as the National Assessment Governing Board.
"The question is, which things are actually going to get eliminated?" Klussmann said. "Which things are going to stay? Where are they going to go, and how effective will those agencies or departments be in administering if they don't really understand the educational landscape?"
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