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Each issue of the newsletter will highlight how one of the nation’s statistical agencies or units is using the SAP as a tool for evidence building. This newsletter explores the success stories at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
The NCES is the federal statistical agency of the U.S. Department of Education. NCES is located within the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES). NCES’s mission, codified in the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, is to “collect, report, analyze, and disseminate statistical data related to education in the United States and in other nations.” NCES’s data cover the full range of education, from early childhood to adult education, and include information from many groups involved in the education system—students, staff, and schools/institutions at the K–12 and postsecondary levels, parents, adult learners, local education agencies, and state education agencies.
Since the launch of the SAP portal in December 2022, NCES has made more than 325 datasets—which were previously available only through the agency’s licensing program—available for researchers to request through the SAP. NCES is adding more datasets to the SAP Data Catalog each month. The default practice at NCES is to make available as much data collected for statistical purposes as possible so that researchers can use them for secondary analysis. For decades, NCES has had a robust program for making confidential data (i.e., restricted-use data) available to researchers. This practice made the transition to SAP relatively easy for NCES, eliminating the need to build a confidential data access program from scratch.
The NCES datasets in the SAP Data Catalog represent collections from each of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) centers that release datasets for secondary analysis. The restricted-use data repository includes datasets from the early 1970s to the present. These datasets range from single, one-time collections like the Evaluation of the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) and the U.S. International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) to regular, ongoing collections like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—also known as the Nation’s Report Card—and the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS).
Researchers from academic institutions and research organizations across the United States request access to NCES datasets to investigate a variety of research questions. In recently submitted SAP applications, researchers have proposed to investigate how implementing remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic affected student success, teacher attrition/mobility, and how work-based learning affects students’ postgraduation employment benefits. The SAP has expanded awareness of NCES datasets and the researcher base that may be interested in using NCES datasets. This larger audience has resulted in a greater variety in application research questions and, consequently, NCES has received an increase in requests that propose combining NCES datasets with other agencies’ data in novel ways. For example, one research team has proposed using workforce and geographic data in conjunction with data from one of NCES’s high school longitudinal studies to examine how parents’ education level and job opportunities may be related to the outcomes of students living in rural versus urban areas. We look forward to seeing more applications like this from researchers who are generating evidence for sound policymaking and to improve education!
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