When the dust settles from the educational chaos being created by Trump administration, students — especially students from low-income backgrounds, students of color, students with disabilities, English learners, and students in rural areas — will be worse off, and the Trump administration wants to make sure you don’t have the data and research to prove it.

The War on Education Data

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, provides the only honest data we have about how the country is doing to prepare students to participate in the global economy. On April 21st, the board that oversees NAEP announced that it was scaling back on tested subjects and grades over the next eight years — in a preemptive attempt to appease DOGE. For the foreseeable future, we won’t know how 12th graders are doing in reading and math in specific states, or how 8th graders are doing in science in specific districts. Plans to administer the long-term trend assessment in 2029 have been cancelled. There won’t be an assessment at all on how well schools are teaching students to write — it’ll be more than 20 years before we get new data. And state-level results for eighth graders in U.S. History won’t be reported — which is particularly problematic given what we know about some states’ efforts to stop teaching honest history in classrooms. Meanwhile, the Department claims that the 2026 NAEP assessments in math and reading are on track, but they’ve conveniently left out an update on the planed Civics and U.S. History assessments in 2026, and it’s hard to believe that’s true with just three people left in the agency running it.

The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) — the online public library about education research for everyone — was set to run out of money on April 23rd. ERIC is a one-stop catalog for education-related reports, old and new. It’s free to the public, you don’t need to create an account to use it, and it’s better than Google. According to an email from IES on April 28th, the Department of Education renewed the contract that manages ERIC, but with a ‘refined’ scope, that includes closing the helpdesk and eliminating its dedicated social media presence — changes that will make the resource less responsive to users’ needs. But given this administration’s constant shifts on policy issues big and small, ERIC is still not safe. Running out of money likely means that the ERIC website will remain operational, but new content will not be added. But it does cost money to keep the lights on, and eventually, the resource could die from neglect. If ERIC shuts down, it will become a whole lot harder to find that report on teacher effectiveness or uses of Title I funding that you just know exists, but can’t find by searching the Department of Education’s main website or Google.

The Continuous Assault on Education Research

Amid the outrage we researchers feel about this week’s data destruction and the executive orders , we can’t forget that this builds on a series of equally devastating actions.

Last month, the Department cancelled the long-overdue national assessment for 17-year-olds, despite promises that the assessment would be spared. NAEP, or the Nation’s Report Card, gave us clear data on how devastating the pandemic was for learning experiences for fourth and eighth graders, thanks to administration’s actions, we’ll never have similar data on how high school students fared.

The month before, the government sabotaged its ability to collect and report data on how students are doing and conduct and disseminate needed research on what works to improve student outcomes by cancelling millions of dollars’ worth of contracts and firing thousands of people who do that work.

Americans want education to be better in this country, in every state, and in every district, and we need our federal government to be truth tellers and continue collecting and reporting data and funding and sharing research — not wage a war on measurement. Scaling back NAEP and ERIC and other data collections, research, and technical assistance activities that help make schools better is another step that this administration is taking in the wrong direction.