What about this position appealed to you?

I believe making good policy decisions requires access to high-quality data. As such, I have been a user of NCES data for years. I saw the opportunity to take a leadership role at NCES as a way to ensure and improve the quality of data for the entire education research realm. It is my hope that during my time at NCES, I will be able to help expand the types and quality of the data made available to parents, teachers, students, researchers, and policymakers.

Describe the top 2–3 priorities you have for the National Center for Education Statistics.

One of my primary goals while at NCES is to develop an improved measure of socioeconomic status (SES). For decades, education researchers have used eligibility for free and reduced lunches under the US Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program (NSLP) as a proxy for poverty.

Free and reduced lunch eligibility has never been a good measure of student SES because, as traditionally used, it provides only two categories (eligible and not eligible) and because application for NSLP is voluntary. Students tend to opt out as they age to avoid the stigma of being identified as being “in poverty.” Additionally, a few charter schools and private schools do not participate in the NSLP program, which results in under-reporting of students in poverty. Finally, the Department of Agriculture has made recent changes to the NSLP eligibility regulations. While these changes result in increased participation in the NSLP program, they weaken eligibility status as a proxy for poverty in research analyses.

NCES staff had already been working on an alternative measure of SES using data from several sources before I arrived. I hope to be able to bring the development of a new SES to fruition during my time here.

Another goal I have is to improve NCES’s website. NCES has a plethora of data available on a wide range of topics, but navigating the website to get to the data can be a daunting task. I plan to work with NCES to develop a more user-friendly, easier-to-navigate website.

What do you see as your biggest challenge(s) for NCES?

NCES is an established government agency with ingrained practices. That means change will likely be slow and incremental. While we definitely don’t, for example, want individual whims to result in major changes to longitudinal data collections, change is necessary for improvement. We will have a lot of organizational inertia to overcome to implement improvements to NCES’s processes.

How can the statistical community help you?

The greatest assistance the statistical community can give NCES or any government agency is to provide support of our mission to the public. Our government statistical agencies are made up of thousands of people who work hard every day to provide reliable, accurate data to decision-makers and the public for supporting the greater good. At the same time, statistical agencies across the federal government are struggling to gather data because too many individuals refuse to participate in our surveys.

The public is becoming more comfortable with data and demand data be readily available. But at the same time, fewer people are willing to share their individual data than in the past. There seems to be a misunderstanding of the fact that most data or statistics reported by federal agencies are aggregates of the information provided by individual respondents to federal agencies’ surveys.

Prior to your tenure, what do you see as the biggest recent accomplishment of the agency?

NCES is a treasure trove of useful data. This makes it hard to cite a single “biggest” accomplishment. However, one of the stronger accomplishments has been the establishment of a school-level finance data collection. For those who have not explored this area of policy, it would probably come as a shock to know many states and districts cannot tell you how much money is spent at a specific school. Because public education finances have long been handled at the district level, the accounting systems have not been organized in a manner that makes reporting of school-level expenditures possible.

Consequently, when researchers have done analyses of per pupil expenditures such as the impact of providing additional funding for students with exceptional needs, they have typically used district-level average spending. That practice may be masking the true impact of such spending.

For example, it assumes additional funding for, say, students in poverty actually equates to additional expenditures in schools serving students in poverty. Only recently has NCES, working with several state departments of education, begun to collect the school-level expenditure data necessary to properly complete such analyses. To me, getting the school-level expenditure data will be a large improvement for the analysis of education funding. It is my hope that during my tenure at NCES, we can partner with every state to improve this critical data collection.