The Quarterly was developed to address the needs of policymakers, education advocates, and their staff. It will be released on a regular and timely basis, and will also be available on the NCES Web Site. We designed the Quarterly with the goal of providing users with a single comprehensive source of information about all NCES products.

Shortly after becoming the Commissioner of NCES, I summarized my goals for the agency in terms of four values: quality, predictability, usefulness, and timeliness. I believe that the Quarterly embodies these values and represents a major step forward in the NCES effort to communicate with its constituents and respond to their needs.

The Quarterly will present the results of carefully reviewed reports based on data from a large number and variety of surveys. NCES is proud of its record of producing data of the highest quality, and we believe that the resulting analyses reflect this in their relevance and contribution to education research. The Quarterly will enhance the impact of NCES products by helping to disseminate them to a wider audience.

The Quarterly will appear on a predictable schedule. There will be four issues per year, appearing in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. These four issues will cover all publications released by NCES during the year. Users will be aware of release cycles for upcoming issues and can plan accordingly.

The Quarterly is designed to be user-friendly and useful to the education statistics and policy communities. Each issue of the periodical will include a large number of important reports on a variety of topics related to education. The reports will be organized by subject matter, and an annual index will be provided to facilitate using the publication as a reference. Considerable effort has been expended on making the format and style of the reports readable. We believe that the overall design of each issue will make it easy for readers to find information of interest.

Finally, the Quarterly will be timely. Each issue will contain reports and publications that will have been released in the most recent quarter. We have stressed the importance of this feature of the publication and, as a result, the production schedule has been arranged so that each issue will appear as soon as possible after the end of the quarter.