NCES: Forging New Partnerships

A Vision for Education Statistics

Josh DeLaRosa

Director, Annual Reports and Information Staff

National Center for Education Statistics

Josue.delarosa@ed.gov
Relevant – High Quality – Useful to Customer

• For over 150 years, serving our education community has been NCES’s priority. 

• As a data-driven organization, NCES has used a collection of tools to understand:

– Customer needs

– Effectiveness delivery of our services 

• “Deepen and broaden engagement with current and potential data users to better understand their needs 

and how NCES can more efficiently meet those needs”

The Education Sciences Reform Act (of 2002). H.R. 3801, Section 151(b). Available: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-107hr3801enr/pdf/BILLS-107hr3801enr.pdfNational Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and 

Medicine. 2022. 

Provasnik, S., Barnett, M., Snyder, T., Zhang, A., and Cui, J. (2022). Number of Elementary and Secondary Schools. A Retrospective Look at U.S. Education Statistics. (NCES 2022-080). U.S. Department of Education. 

Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved [March 1, 2023], from https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/annualreports/topical-studies/retrospective/#/elem-sec-ed/num-of-elem-sec-schools/.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Vision and Roadmap for Education Statistics. Washington, D C: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/26392.
How Do Mandates Shape Our Approach to Responsiveness?

Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology

Framework for Data Quality

All statistical agencies (and parent agencies) are subject to mandates directing us to 

ensure data products are relevant and useful.

Consumer-centered approach in service delivery:

• Define who are our users?

• What data products are valuable to users?

• What is the policy impact of our different data products?

• When is the data useful?

• What level of granularity do our consumers need?

• What areas do our data products currently not speak to?

Statistical Policy Directive No. 1: Fundamental responsibilities of federal statistical agencies and recognized statistical u nits. 79 Federal Register 71609 

(December 2, 2014)

Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President , OMB Circular A-11, Preparation, Submission and Execution of the Budget (2016)

Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President , OMB Memedom M-23-22 Delivering a Digital-First Public Experience (2023)

Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President , OMB Memedom M-17-06 Delivering a Policies for Federal Agency Public 

Websites and Digital Services (2017)

Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology. 2020. A Framework for Data Quality. FCSM 20-04. Federal Committee on Statistical 

Methodology. September 2020. 
From Bibliography to...

• Participating in the pilot offered the potential 

leverage organically produced information in a 

more efficient manner

https://nces.ed.gov/bibliography/
Actionable Insights

• Participating in the pilot offered the potential 

leverage organically produced information in a 

more efficient manner.

• Author information

– Location

– Affiliation

• Keywords

• Journal details

• Speed & Scalability:

– Automation of ML

– Potential to deploy ML on additional 

sources

Pilot Results
APIs and Workbooks

• Machine readable by default is key to efficiency

• Dashboards provide quick insights for executives 

• APIs support additional use cases, further 

exploration

• Jupyter Notebook provide additional access to the 

data
Data Linkage < > Policy Relevancy

• The ability to link journal articles to external data 

sources is another application of efficiency 

leading to insights.

• The commitment to providing information on the 

relationship between the data NCES data products 

and “policy documents” is valued.
What’s Next

• Results of the ML are preliminary. Continue to expand search, train & test model

• Relevant – High Quality – Useful to Customer

– Workshops with researchers within the education community to gather their feedback

– Identify companion datasets to explore partnership opportunities

– Incorporate data into operational decisions 

• Explore results further

– Policy documents

– Interaction between datasets

– Data products/ data tools

• Linkage to Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System

– Sector

– Minority Serving Institutions/HBCU

– Degree of Urbanization

• Richer understanding of usage

– How was the data accessed?

– Context 
Granular Relevance of Blended Data Products

Start

Integrated 

Postsecondary 

Education Data 

System 

Digest of 

Education 

State Higher Education 

Executive Officers 

Association, State Higher 

Education Finance

U.S. Bureau of 

Economic 

Analysis, State 

and Local 

Personal Income 

data Higher Education in 

Science and 

Engineering Report

End
Complements Other Tools & Efforts

The Democratizing Data platform is part of the larger 

effort at NCES to understand users and uses:

✓ Bibliography Tool

✓ Customer satisfaction surveys

✓ Digital Object Identifiers (DOI)

Platform builds on these effort by improving speed and scalability

– Provides citations data in machine-readable format

– Efficient and systematic means of outputting data regarding academic citations of NCES data 

– Supports exploration of granular data on uses and users
Thank You

Josue.delarosa@ed.gov