Education Department Stops Updating Key School Data After Cutting Research Arm

Key federal databases that tracked American schools since 1962 is now running on outdated numbers. After Education Department gutted their research arm last year, large portions of the Digest of Education Statistics (covering per-student spending, teacher pay, enrollment, and student safety) have not been refreshed in more than a year. 

The Department says new contracts are coming, but the public (and researchers) are operating without current school data in the meantime.

Why it matters: Researchers, journalists, school boards, and parents rely on the Digest as the single reliable source for U.S. school statistics. When it stops updating, every downstream estimate (from college affordability projections to state-level school funding comparisons) gets harder to verify.

The big picture: After DOGE canceled Education Department research contracts in February 2025 and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) was largely laid off, many key statistics in the Digest have not been updated since January 2025. The Department says a new contract will be awarded before the close of the fiscal year in September 2026.

By The Numbers

Data tables that have not been refreshed since at least January 2025 include:

• Per-student spending and revenue at public schools
• Federal funding for education
• Enrollment among children ages 3–5
• Shares of students in special education, English learner, and gifted and talented programs
• Student-to-teacher ratios
• Teacher prep program enrollment
• Average teacher salary
• Principal turnover rates
• SAT and ACT participation
• Homicides and suicides in schools
• Public school disciplinary incidents
• Share of recent high school graduates immediately enrolling in college

Roughly $300 million in IES funding appropriated by Congress is at risk of going unspent, according to an analysis published by the Hechinger Report.

The Backstory: The federal government has collected school data since 1870, and the Digest launched in 1962. Some tables draw thousands of citations in a single month.

How this connects: For readers tracking the cost of education, the Digest has been the go-to source for verifying inflation-adjusted school spending, college enrollment trends among high school graduates, and teacher pay benchmarks — data points that feed directly into how families assess college affordability and the K-12-to-college pipeline.

Until federal updates resume, anyone modeling education costs will need to stitch together state reports, NEA data, and individual federal reports to fill the gap.

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