National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

History and Mission

The mission of NCES dates back to 1867, when Congress created a Department of Education to collect statistics on the condition and progress of education in the states and territories. NCES, however, [Page 607]came into being, as a distinct federal agency, in January 1965 when the Office of Education was reorganized (preceding passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which greatly expanded the federal role in education). The creation of NCES was in large part a response to growing concerns in the early 1960s about the objectivity and reliability of federal statistics.

Until the 1970s, NCES continued to do the same statistical work that had been done at the Office of Education. This consisted mostly of compiling and tabulating, on calculators, administrative data collected from states, districts, and schools, based on occasional surveys sent out to all known schools or institutions of higher education. These summary data were then published in national reports on U.S. public and private elementary and secondary schools and institutions of higher education. Such data were generally meager (e.g., largely limited to total enrollment counts, numbers of teachers, basic revenues and expenditures, number of degrees conferred) and suffered from the poor administrative record keeping of some states, districts, and schools as well as from incomplete and missing survey responses.

To improve the quality of available national data, NCES entered the business of data production in the 1970s. In 1971, NCES first took over responsibility for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which directly assesses achievement of a nationally representative sample of students and collects background information about them, their teachers, and their schools. In 1972, NCES launched the first of a series of longitudinal studies with the National Longitudinal Study of the 1970s (NLS-72), which surveyed a nationally representative sample of high school seniors in 1972, collecting detailed information about their background and school experiences, and surveyed them again five times between 1973 and 1986 to see what their further education and job experiences were. National Assessment of Educational Progress and NLS-72 transformed NCES from an agency primarily dedicated to tabulating received data into a true statistical agency, facing issues of sample designs, response rates, imputation methods, standard errors, inferences, valid statistical comparisons, and computer programming. At the same time, the data from these studies gave educational reformers the means to make more compelling claims about student achievement in the nation at large, such as the authors of A Nation at Risk famously did by selectively using National Assessment of Educational Progress data to argue that U.S. students' knowledge was in decline.

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