NAEP Costs May Have Played Role in Move to Sideline Testing Official Peggy Carr

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For more than 20 years, Peggy Carr has helped the nation understand how students are performing in school. Even before former President Joe Biden appointed her commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics in 2021, she had long been the face of the testing program known as the Nation’s Report Card.

But that era ended abruptly Monday when the U.S. Department of Education put Carr, who has worked across both Republican and Democratic administrations, on paid leave. A department spokeswoman cited the fact that Biden appointed Carr to the position. Carr’s term was set to expire in 2027.

“I’m still processing and have no words to share right now. It’s a lot to take in,” Carr said in an email, declining to answer further questions. 

The move, coming less than a week after officials canceled an upcoming math and reading test for 17 year olds, raises questions about the future of the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Carr earned respect from both sides of the aisle with her ability to present the results — both promising and discouraging — in an objective way. Some former officials say the decision to put her on leave reflects President Donald Trump’s desire to streamline NAEP. But others say losing her expertise at a time when student performance still hasn’t recovered from the pandemic could compromise the integrity of the assessment program.

“Without knowledgeable decision makers like Peggy Carr, it is likely that the scientific quality of NAEP, and other important data collections, will be eroded,” said Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist and former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets NAEP policy. He added that political interpretations of the data could undermine public trust in the assessment’s value. “Today, schools and states must face up to the reality of their performance. If given the chance, some states will argue that their poor performance is just a matter of poor data — allowing them to avoid addressing any performance problems.”

Andrew Ho, a Harvard University assessment expert and also a former board member, called Carr an “institution” and “truth teller” who presented testing results in a nonpartisan way.

But others say politics had nothing to do with the decision to let Carr go. 

Mark Schneider, a Trump appointee who stepped down last March as director of the Institute for Education Sciences, which includes NCES and NAEP, said the program’s increasing costs during Carr’s tenure were out of step with an administration determined to cut spending. 

“NAEP is going to take a haircut. I don’t think there’s a question about that,” said Schneider, Carr’s former supervisor and NCES commissioner under George W. Bush. “The question is ‘How do you prioritize what it does in a harsh fiscal environment?’ ”

He argued that canceling the long-term trend test for 17 year olds is just the first step toward making NAEP, which costs $192 million, a leaner operation that concentrates on math and reading. 

“We’ve been doing main NAEP since the 1990s. Why do we need long-term trend tests?” he asked. “NAEP has grown and grown and grown, and from my perspective, it’s way too expensive.”

‘Did a lot of homework’

Carr began her long career with the federal government as a chief statistician in the Office for Civil Rights before moving to NCES in 1993. For over 20 years, she served as associate commissioner for assessment and has long translated NAEP and international assessment results for reporters, educators and policymakers. 

“She did a lot of homework preparing and rehearsing for presentations of NAEP results, so that she knew the results thoroughly and could answer any questions,” said Andrew Kolstad, who served as her senior technical adviser in the 1990s. “People in the department and in the testing industry called on her for her experience.”

Chester Finn, president emeritus of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and former chair of the board, said Carr won his respect for “meticulously” fact-checking his 2022 book, Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP.

She offered a number of critical judgments “without ever once trying to compromise my authorial integrity or get in my face,” he said. “In her day job, she’s been superb at explaining and interpreting NAEP data without spinning it or crossing the line into causation.”

When students took the first NAEP tests after COVID school closures, Carr wanted to brace the public for sharp declines. In an exclusive interview with The 74 in 2022, she said that while scores for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math were already falling prior to the pandemic, “it’s more than likely we’re going to see the bottom drop even more.”

While some former commissioners served under only one president, others worked through transitions to new administrations. Carr served as acting commissioner under President Barack Obama and Trump until the latter appointed Lynn Woodworth. Under Biden, Woodworth stayed on until the end of his term in 2021. 

Carr wasn’t alone in asking for more resources for NCES, which collects and analyzes data on all aspects of education, including enrollment trends and the state of the teacher workforce. During his tenure Woodworth pushed for more in-house staff and equipment, rather than contracting with outside agencies, but said his requests were always denied.

Schneider applauded Carr for driving the requirement under No Child Left Behind to administer the core NAEP math and reading tests every two years. The law required states to participate to receive federal funds. 

​​”Someone had to turn NAEP into that machine to deliver on a regular basis data required by law,” he said. “She deserves all the credit in the world for that.”

Carr also led the transition to a digital testing format in 2018 and to automated scoring of students’ answers in 2022. But Schneider, who has indicated he wouldn’t rule out returning to his former position, said the program hasn’t kept up with “modern data-collection techniques.”

He’d prefer the next commissioner to have state-level experience and to be more “critical of these big research houses” like ETS, which has held NAEP contracts for roughly 40 years and just won another competition in January. 

“The challenge for NAEP, and more broadly for NCES,” Schneider said, “is modernization — creating new data systems that are faster, cheaper, better.”

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