• Trump made cuts to the Department of Education's research arm, which fuels the Nation's Report Card.
• Research and data collection at the department are critical to tracking students' math and reading progress.
• One department employee told BI the cuts amount to a "dismembering" of the agency.

The Nation's Report Card is on notice.

Employees said the Department of Education's ability to conduct its periodic measure of US students' progress in math and reading could be severely hampered after the White House DOGE office announced earlier this month that it ended more than $900 million in research contracts.

The Trump administration says the cuts will promote efficiency. Department employees BI spoke to said they'll halt crucial funding for the neediest schools and cripple its ability to measure student achievement.

The cuts impact a vast array of research that allows the agency to dole out billions in grants and other programs that education policy experts said are crucial for the most underresourced schools and students. This includes contracts that analyze data to identify rural school districts eligible for federal assistance, and those that study early childhood and school safety issues.

This also includes the Education Department's National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests, more commonly known as the Nation's Report Card, which tracks kids' progress in subjects including reading and math. NAEP has assessed student academic achievement for the last three decades. Last year, it found that eighth-grade reading levels hit a 30-year low.

"I have grave concerns about our future, even if the lights were able to turn on tomorrow, I don't know — what's already been done is just very detrimental," one employee of the Institute of Education Sciences — the Department's research and statistics arm facing severe spending cuts — told BI.

Three employees BI spoke to requested anonymity because they fear retaliation from the Education Department or DOGE for speaking with the media.

Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the Department of Education, told BI, "The agency continues to support NAEP and transparency around measures of student outcomes," Biedermann said.

Biedermann said the Department canceled the long-term trend assessments for 17-year-olds, but other tests, including those for fourth and eighth graders, are "continuing as normal."

The Education Department posted on X on February 12, "We want to ensure that every dollar being spent is directed toward improving education for kids — not conferences and reports on reports."

Still, some agency employees and experts said contracts — including those that manage EdFacts and the Common Core of Data — to collect the data necessary for those studies have been canceled, which would make conducting them much more difficult.

The IES employee insisted that NAEP could not continue without certain canceled DOGE contracts for data collection. In a February 21 letter to the Education Department, a dozen Democratic members of Congress condemned the contract cancellations and said the administration's claim that NAEP and other key programs would not be impacted "simply is not true."

"This is the absolute worst time to divest from education research," another Department employee told Business Insider, referring to the recent NAEP scores. "To just cut all of our datasets for what's leading to that, what indicators, what states are falling behind — it's so bad for being able to make any type of data-driven decisions for how to help get kids back on track."

The Institute of Education Sciences is a nonpartisan data collection and research arm that measures educational outcomes to help the department allocate funds to students with disabilities, low-income schools, and rural schools.

With the cuts underway, the IES employee said the Department's work is at a standstill.

"That essentially is like cutting off our arms, our legs, and it's essentially totally dismembering us, and it's keeping us from being able to actually do our work," she said.

Jeopardizing billions in funding

IES's research and data support a wide range of Department functions, including billions of dollars in funding for high-poverty schools and students with disabilities. Every state receives Title I funding to help low-income students, but the amounts vary on school needs.

"You can't do anything if you don't actually know where are the schools, what are the schools, are they open or closed? And how many kiddos go to them? You can't do really anything if you don't have that very first building block," the IES employee said. "Without that, everything else falls."

One of these grants — the Rural Education Achievement Program — helps rural schools that need more support than they get from their state and local governments. But without the data IES collects on students and schools across the country, the federal government won't be able to determine school eligibility and make funding allocations, said one employee of the Department's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE).

"All of sudden, this money is going to be gone because we can't make awards because they canceled this IES data contract," the employee said.

Tracking the progress of America's students in math and reading

Without studies like NAEP, Department employees and education experts said states and local governments will lack crucial information on best practices for K-12 learning and methods to improve teacher training and quality.

Weadé James, senior director for K-12 policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, pointed to kids' literacy as one example, which has sunk to its lowest levels in decades.

"We know that research advances our knowledge of what evidence and research-based practices should look like in teaching and learning, and with cuts at IES, we're going to have limited knowledge around the science of reading and how to improve teaching students' literacy skills," James said.

James referred to the "Mississippi Miracle" as an example of NAEP's significance; between 2013 and 2019, NAEP scores showed that literacy in Mississippi continued to rise after it adopted better evidence-based methods for teaching reading, even in areas with high child poverty rates that usually align with lower literacy levels.

Rachel Dinkes, the president and CEO of Knowledge Alliance — a nonprofit focused on improving K-12 public education through research-based practices — told BI that some of the project cuts dealt with improving math achievement in Appalachia and improving teacher recruitment in rural areas in Alaska.

"The cancellation of this work will not only derail the current work, but leave communities, parents, teachers, looking for evidence-based information that they may not be able to find," Dinkes said.

Eliminating the Department of Education

The research cuts mark a key step toward Trump's overall aim to dismantle the Department of Education. He has not yet signed an executive order to officially begin that process, but he previously said that he wants the agency to be eliminated "immediately" and for Education Secretary Linda McMahon to put herself out of a job.

While McMahon and some GOP lawmakers have suggested shifting the Department's responsibilities to other federal agencies, like the Treasury Department, but that could be tricky now that so many contracts have been canceled this month.

"The contracts are gone. You can't just renew them," the OESE employee said. "Even if we're outsourced to other agencies to do the work, that's essentially starting from scratch."

And James said that there's no proof those efforts would actually improve the US education system.

"There's nothing that shows us that this is actually a solution that is that's going to lead to better results than we do have now," James said.

Trump has accused the Department of Education of promoting extreme ideology in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, part of a broader anti-DEI campaign by the Trump administration. Earlier this month, the Department ordered schools across the country to end "racial preferences" in admissions, hiring, and other areas or risk losing federal funds. The agency legally cannot shape curriculum in classrooms.

NBC News reported earlier this month that dozens of Education Department employees who attended a diversity training course during Trump's first term in office were put on paid leave. On February 20, the Department said that it had so far canceled $350 million in "woke spending" at the Department.

"They are basically Control F-ing for their buzzword," the OESE employee said. But "the entire purpose of the Department of Education is equity, not in the DEI sense, but in like, we make up the gaps in local and federal funding and regulations."

Dinkes said that the future of the US education system is too important to be making cuts across the board without acknowledging the longer-term implications.

"There's even an efficiency argument to be made of having the federal government provide these sources of support at the national level of what works for whom and where," Dinkes said. "Who's to say when we cut it that it's ever going to come back. So let's continue to work on making this better, but let's not cut short what we currently have."

Have a tip or experience to share? Contact these reporters via Signal at elizarelman.57 and asheffey.97 or via email at [email protected] and [email protected]. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.