unexpected termination
Peggy Carr, the first woman and person of colour to lead the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), was abruptly fired in February 2025 without any explanation given. Carr was the commissioner of NCES for three and a half years, a period marked by her efforts to modernise the agency and build it into a respected federal statistical body.
The dismissal occurred amidst broader dismantling efforts of the U.S. Department of Education and its statistical functions under President Donald Trump’s administration. The Education Department, in partnership with DOGE employees, found contracts with overhead and administrative expenses that exceeded 50 percent, which they considered as contractors taking advantage of the American taxpayer.
Carr was attempting to save the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), as DOGE was demanding aggressive cuts. She wished she could have built an in-house statistical agency like those at the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but this required congressional authorization for the Education Department to increase its headcount, which never happened.
Carr's priority was to maintain the integrity of the NAEP exam, even when DOGE demanded 50 percent cuts to its $185 million budget. She was concerned that such cuts would compromise the exam's quality. Carr also expressed concern about the maintenance of historical datasets, as when DOGE canceled the contracts, NCES had 550 datasets scattered in different locations.
Following her dismissal, Carr's deputy, Chris Chapman, was also fired in a round of mass layoffs on March 11. The agency was then leaderless until July 7, when another senior department official was told to add NCES to his responsibilities.
Carr described her firing as a “professional tragedy” both for herself and for the NCES. She is concerned that her removal threatens the nonpartisan, objective monitoring of American education data. The ironic aspect, she noted, was that her increasingly grim statistical reports on education outcomes were publicly cited by Trump as part of his rationale for dismantling the Education Department.
Despite her dismissal, Carr plans to stay involved in education statistics - but from the outside. She is in close touch with her former team and has been talking with states and school districts about calculating where they rank on an international yardstick. Carr helped build the National Assessment of Educational Progress into the influential Nation's Report Card, a testament to her commitment to education statistics.
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- The dismissal of Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), sparked concerns about inequality in education, as her efforts to maintain the integrity of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) clashed with political agendas that prioritized budget cuts over statistic quality.
- The innovation of modernizing the NCES to a respected federal statistical body, as Carr aimed to do, faces challenges in a political climate that overlooks the importance of education data, leading to decaying historical datasets and potential reductions in general-news reporting about education inequality.
