The White House sent shockwaves through the education community last week when it suspended an esteemed federal official responsible for “the nation’s report card.” The move, experts say, could hamper the collection of data that exposes racial disparities in the nation’s K-12 schools.
Peggy Carr, a career Department of Education administrator who runs the National Center for Education Statistics, has played an “unmatched” role in helping the country understand how students perform in school. While some reports suggest that budget cuts may have played a role, the Trump administration placed her on administrative leave on Feb. 24 without explanation.
“I’m still processing and have no words to share right now. It’s a lot to take in,” Carr said in an email to The74, an education news website, declining to answer further questions.
Carr’s suspension comes less than a month after the release of the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores and less than a week after Department of Education officials canceled an upcoming math and reading test for 17-year-olds. The NEAP showed continued declines in student performance, especially among historically marginalized students.
As commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics in 2021, Carr helped education stakeholders track data and trends without partisan interference. If she were fired — which has been the pattern after a Trump administration suspension — it could disrupt the Center’s work measuring student achievement.
The National Center for Education Statistics has been a lifeline for education data across the U.S. If its data on student performance were manipulated or buried, it would become harder for civil rights advocates, educators and families to hold policymakers and schools accountable for inequities inside and outside the classroom.
Catherine Lhamon, former assistant secretary of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, said Carr “is the foremost data head in the country in terms of what statistics mean, what the right data questions are to be asking, and how to analyze the data.” Without Carr, she asks, “will we have data to know about opportunities for kids in school, how they’re performing, and what we need to do about it?”
Why Peggy Carr matters
For more than 30 years, Carr has played a major role in helping the country understand how students perform in school via the NAEP. Andrew Kolstad, her senior technical adviser in the 1990s, tells The74 that Carr “did a lot of homework preparing and rehearsing for presentations of NAEP results, so that she knew the results thoroughly and could answer any questions.”
“People in the department and in the testing industry called on her for her experience,” he says.
Chester Finn, president emeritus of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank, said Carr won his respect for “meticulously” fact-checking his 2022 book, “Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP.”
She offered a number of critical judgments “without ever once trying to compromise my authorial integrity or get in my face,” he told The74. “In her day job, she’s been superb at explaining and interpreting NAEP data without spinning it or crossing the line into causation.”
The Civil rights implications: What this means for Black students
Carr’s unexpected removal could disrupt critical data collection that exposes racial educational disparities. Without trusted, independent data, Black students, who are impacted by such hurdles the most, and their families could lose the ability to challenge inequities in school funding, disproportionate discipline rates, access to advanced courses, and so much more.
Lhamon says Carr’s suspension could set a dangerous precedent: If government officials can remove expert administrators at will to control data, they could possibly attempt to do the same for any other government data reports.
“It’s not only civil rights data collection,” she says, “it’s about all the data collections.”
Some education experts remain hopeful that research institutions and advocacy groups will step up in the event that President Donald Trump cuts funding for data collection.
“I hope and expect that we find new funding avenues even during the Trump years,” Henry Smith, assistant professor of education policy at Johns Hopkins University, tells Education Week. “Perhaps by securing funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services if not the Education Department.”
This article was originally published by Word in Black.
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