Last week, the US Department of Education (ED) announced it had entered into six interagency agreements (IAAs) with four other federal agencies to shift a large portion of its K–12 and postsecondary education portfolio out of ED. Most noteworthy are the agreements moving the work of the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of Postsecondary to the Department of Labor (DOL). The announcement offers little detail and questions remain.
One of ED’s key functions is to conduct research and collect and publish data to understand the quality of our K–12 and postsecondary education programs, protect the civil rights of students, and help families make informed decisions about education pathways. Accomplishing that function requires high-quality data, strong privacy protections, and public trust in the integrity of the data collections. At its core, it requires knowing who is responsible for the data.
Last week’s actions didn’t happen in a vacuum. The transfer of programmatic responsibility for most of ED’s K–12 and postsecondary programs to another agency combined with previous efforts to eliminate most of the staff of the National Center for Education Statistics raises more questions about who actually is responsible for federal education data and what protocols and safeguards are in place to ensure students’ data privacy.
As the nation’s chief data advocates, the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) is concerned about how this federal data can continue to be the accurate and trusted information it has been for decades. We shared some of our most immediate questions last week—but the list continues to grow. Here’s our current list of questions about how these IAAs will work:
- How will these changes impact state and local governments and staff as they navigate reporting data to several different federal agencies with potentially competing priorities?
- Who is responsible for ensuring the safe use of student data now and going forward? As the administration uses more federal and state data for purposes outside of its original intended use, who is monitoring or authorizing these decisions?
- Who is responsible for maintaining the accuracy and timeliness of ED’s data infrastructure such as EdFacts, EdDataExpress, and the College Scorecard?
- To whom do states and institutions submit their data?
- Who do states and institutions call with questions about data collections and submissions?
- What data sharing agreements are in place between DOL and ED to allow for staff at both agencies to access student data?
- Will staff at DOL have access to education data, and if so, have they been trained in the requirements of Family Educational Rights Privacy Act and the Protection of Pupil Rights Act?
- What systems and protocols are in place to ensure student data is not improperly stored, shared, or released?
While pathways through education and workforce are not siloed, access to high-quality data that is collected and published by staff with experience handling education data is crucial to ensuring that students, parents, policymakers, and the public can make informed decisions. As the federal structure shifts, federal leaders must answer these questions to guarantee continued access to this data. Undoubtedly more questions will arise in the coming days and months. DQC would love to hear any others that are on partners’ minds. We will add them to our list as we continue to seek answers from ED.
