ECLS canceled mid-study, ending follow-up of 15,000 post-Covid kindergartners
The National Center for Education Statistics, the federal statistical agency that for decades has tracked the state of American education, has been reduced to roughly a dozen staffers after the Trump administration fired nearly half of the Department of Education’s workforce and allowed the Department of Government Efficiency to cancel nearly $900 million in contracts. The reductions come as US reading and math scores have fallen to their lowest point in a quarter-century, according to the Guardian.
NCES’s headcount dropped from about 100 to four after the layoffs and contract terminations, then recovered partially through rehiring to its current staffing of 12, according to the agency’s website. Most of the agency’s ongoing data collections and reports appear inactive or reduced in scope, according to a tracker maintained by the American Statistical Association and based on publicly available information. The education department did not answer questions about how many data collections have been terminated, according to the Guardian.
The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a roughly decennial survey that has followed thousands of students from kindergarten through fifth grade since 1998, was among the terminated studies. Last winter, DOGE canceled the $47 million contract in the middle of the study’s third iteration, just as the contractor Westat was preparing to follow up with a group of 15,000 first graders it had first surveyed in fall 2023, when the students were entering kindergarten. The cohort would have been the first survey of children born after Covid, with new questions tailored to understanding the effects of the pandemic, including childcare arrangements and hybrid in-person and online instruction.
For Peggy Carr, the former NCES commissioner, who was abruptly fired last spring after nearly four decades at the agency, the termination of ECLS was “probably the most painful example” of the cuts.
“We were going to study them into their first and third grade years to see how the pandemic influenced their development and their learning, but now we’ll never know because we’re not able to follow these children into the future,” Carr said.
Since it began, the ECLS has been cited in nearly 3,000 academic papers, including research on early reading as a predictor of later literacy, the development of executive function skills, and the effects of full-day versus half-day kindergarten on reading and math learning. Daphna Bassok, a professor at the University of Virginia who studies the outcomes of early childhood education policies, said the loss leaves the country without a tool to assess the impact of major investments in preschool and Head Start.
“We as a country made huge investments in early childhood and we have all sorts of policies that get rolled out around introducing preschool, or Head Start, or different early interventions, and we basically don’t have a tool with which to say, OK, and to what extent did that work?” Bassok said.
Two other longitudinal studies were canceled in their final years. The Beginning Postsecondary Students study (BPS) 20-25, which tracked more than 30,000 students who started college in fall 2019, was abandoned before its conclusion in 2025. The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, which followed 23,000 ninth graders into their early 30s, was also terminated mid-stream.
Advocates said the Trump administration’s cuts to education data let years of work and millions of government dollars go to waste. “These cuts were wasteful and didn’t really save taxpayer money because most of that work had already been done,” said Diane Cheng, vice-president for policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
The education department also owed several million dollars in termination fees to contractors. A large portion of the funding had already been spent upfront on studies like the ECLS before any data was collected. “There’s a huge amount spent on development, like just setting up the sample, reaching out to the schools, reaching out to the families, the states, getting participation, setting up the questionnaires,” said one person familiar with the process. “All of that had to be done before any data was collected.”
Carolyn Grim, who spent 15 years at NCES as an education statistician before retiring early in 2025 and is now founder and executive director of the non-profit Agora Education Research, likened the cuts to shooting the messenger. “Dismantling a statistical agency is just shooting the messenger,” Grim said. “It makes no more sense than saying: ‘I’m going to just fire my accountant because I can’t control my spending.’”
In a statement to the Guardian, Savannah Newhouse, an education department spokesperson, defended the changes as a reform effort. “The Trump administration is committed to ensuring that IES delivers usable, high-quality statistics, data and resources for educators, researchers and other stakeholders,” she wrote. “NCES and IES were in need of reform – and that work is well underway.” Newhouse said the Institute of Education Sciences, NCES’s parent agency, continues to administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as The Nation’s Report Card.
Several NCES data collections have been reinstated, including the National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey, the primary source researchers use to track how students pay for college, and the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, which measures outcomes of bachelor’s degree recipients for a decade after graduation. “We know that advocacy and litigation create important public pressure for the department to rethink its decisions and move forward with data collections that it canceled,” Cheng said.
Multiple groups, including Cheng’s, have filed lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s cuts to funding and staffing for education data and research — part of a broader wave of outcry from researchers, advocates, teachers, and parents opposing the administration’s goal of eliminating the Department of Education entirely.