One of the highlights of JSM 2026 was the opportunity to welcome Peggy Carr as the speaker for my President’s Invited Address. Before her talk, Peggy and I had a conversation that was recorded for JSM TV. Since our time together at JSM, I continued to think about the ideas we discussed and reached out with additional questions. It was a pleasure to talk with Peggy, and I want to highlight this important conversation in this month’s President’s Corner.
Jeri: We’ve both worked in the federal statistical system for quite a few years, so was there a moment in your career when you first realized public service was what you wanted?
Peggy: I would identify the moment when I realized that I needed to leave my institution where I was working and where I got my PhD, Howard University, and realized I needed to get out in the world. I was helping a student and he said to me, “You need to have a bigger footprint. This is important work that you’re doing here at the university, but I think you could do a lot better and reach more people if you work for the federal government.” I said no the first year, but he came back the next year, and I realized that maybe he was right.
Jeri: We know you as a statistician, but I’ve always thought there was something else that motivated you, that there was something deeper. Where did that come from?
Peggy: Well, it’s interesting, because I was just talking about Howard University, and if I had to stick with a theme that I really think answers the question, I would say Howard. Howard University has a motto. It is Truth and Service. So, I would give credit to Howard University.
Jeri: If you were advising someone early in their career, what would you encourage them to learn?
Peggy: First, they need to be good statisticians. They need to have intellectual curiosity. But there’s something that they’re not going to learn in school. They’re not going to learn how to be a recipient of good mentorship or what it means to be a steward of public data, official data. That’s what I would say, when you go into this field. Learn from those who’ve been in it.
Jeri: It sounds like you were fortunate enough to have somebody do that for you. And I know I was fortunate to have somebody help me understand that, too.
Peggy: Emerson Elliott. For those of you who might have known Emerson, he was the first commissioner of NCES [National Center for Education Statistics] in the US Department of Education. He hired me, and he mentored me. He probably never realized how important he was to me. That’s the other thing; when you are a mentor, you may not even realize how much it means to someone else. But thank you for asking that.
Jeri: In addition to NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, are there other NCES data collections you would like to highlight that you feel are especially important to educational research nationally or internationally?
Peggy: Absolutely. NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] has been a central part of my professional life, but one of the things I came to appreciate even more deeply as commissioner was the extraordinary breadth of the NCES portfolio.
Some NCES data collections are really part of the nation’s education data infrastructure. The Common Core of Data and the Private School Survey tell us who and where our schools and students are, and they also provide the sampling frames on which countless other studies depend. Integrated Postsecondary Education Data plays a similarly foundational role in higher education. And Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates adds the geographic dimension, allowing us to understand education in the context of communities, school district boundaries, poverty, and place. It generates millions of downloads each year.
I would also highlight NCES’s longitudinal studies. Studies such as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies and the High School Longitudinal Study allow us to follow students over time. Cross-sectional statistics can tell us what is happening; longitudinal data can help us understand how and why educational pathways develop as they do. Their value compounds over time, which is why protecting their continuity is so important.
And finally, I would emphasize the international studies. The United States cannot understand its educational progress in isolation. The newly released PISA 2025 results are a good example. US students continue to perform above the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development] average in reading and science and near the average in mathematics, but the longer-term declines in reading and mathematics should concern us. International comparisons provide something national statistics alone cannot—a wider lens through which to judge both our strengths and our challenges.
That is what I came to understand as commissioner: NCES is not simply a collection of surveys and assessments. It is a statistical infrastructure that allows the nation to understand itself educationally.
Jeri: Is there anything you would want to tell school leaders and communities about how they can better use and interpret educational data to help them make better decisions?
Peggy: I would encourage school leaders and communities to think of themselves not simply as providers or consumers of data, but as partners in understanding what is happening in education.
That becomes especially important as responsibility for education data continues to evolve across federal, state, and local levels. The relationship needs to be two-way. Federal statistics can provide national benchmarks, common definitions, scientific standards, and a broader context. States, districts, schools, teachers, families, and communities bring something equally essential: knowledge of the conditions behind the numbers and the questions that most need answering.
But I would add one caution that I think is increasingly important. We live in a world in which almost anyone can generate data—and AI will make producing analyses, charts, and apparent “findings” easier still. That makes statistical literacy more important, not less.
We need to understand the difference between having data and having trustworthy evidence. Official statistics are produced according to rigorous professional standards, with attention to quality, transparency, objectivity, independence, privacy, and relevance. Those principles matter because important decisions about children and schools can follow from the numbers we produce. Official statistics are a public good.
So, my advice to education leaders is not simply to use more data. Ask where the data came from, how they were produced, what they can and cannot tell you, and whose experiences may be hidden by an average. Then bring that evidence together with professional judgment and community knowledge.
Good decisions require data. But they also require the capacity to understand data wisely—that’s the value of statistical literacy.
We live in a world in which almost anyone can generate data—and AI will make producing analyses, charts, and apparent “findings” easier still. That makes statistical literacy more important, not less.
Jeri: Having been in public service for more than three decades, as you look toward your future, what are the one or two most important things you want to carry forward?
Peggy: For much of my career, I thought it would be difficult to find work more consequential than the Nation’s Report Card. NAEP is a national treasure. It gives the country an independent measure of what our students know and can do, and I remain deeply committed to protecting it.
Then I became commissioner of NCES and my perspective widened. Student achievement is enormously important, but it represents only one part of what a nation needs to know about education. We also need to understand who our students are, the schools and institutions they attend, their teachers, their opportunities to learn, the resources available to them, and the pathways they follow through education and into adult life.
Now, on the other side of my federal service, the lens has widened again. What I want most to carry forward is the case for official statistics themselves and for stewardship of the institutions that produce them. A democracy needs information about itself that people can trust—information produced independently, professionally, transparently, and without regard to whether the findings are what one wants to hear.
That is no longer an abstract principle to me. I have seen across more than three decades of public service what becomes possible when a country makes a sustained investment in trustworthy statistics. Those data allow us to see disparities that might otherwise remain invisible, measure progress honestly, hold institutions accountable, and make better decisions.
So, perhaps the umbrella has simply grown larger over the course of my career. Now, I want to help make the case for something larger still: that trustworthy official statistics are part of the infrastructure of a healthy democracy—and that stewardship of that infrastructure is a public responsibility.
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