NCES Blog

National Center for Education Statistics

Happy New Year from the ECLS-K:2024!

Happy New Year!

With the start of 2025, many of us are making new year’s resolutions, thinking ahead to what we can change and improve upon in the coming year. We here on the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2023–24 (ECLS-K:2024) team are doing the same. We are planning for another year of study activities and are excited that the new data being added to the ECLS program will be able to inform research, policy, and practice over the coming years.

The ECLS-K:2024 has a busy year ahead. We are processing the data collected from respondents during the 2023-24 school year in preparation for our first data file release in early 2026. We’re also building upon lessons learned from our field work last spring to improve our data collection procedures for all future study rounds. We continue to update participants on resources available from NCES via our study newsletters.

We will be collecting the second round of data this spring. Direct assessments of reading, math, and executive function will be conducted with students, most of whom will have advanced to first grade for the 2024-25 school year. Parents, teachers (including special education teachers), and school administrators will complete surveys. So much of the rich information we have on children, their experiences, and their outcomes comes from these adults in children’s lives. These additional rounds of collection will provide data that allow for examinations of children’s experiences and progress across the elementary school years.

Many of you are excited to start working with the ECLS-K:2024 data, and we are working hard to get them ready for release. The ECLS-K:2024 collects data on emerging topics of relevance to families, educators, and policymakers, some of which have not been fully examined in our earlier ECLS program studies. For instance, one of the most notable events between the earlier ECLS program studies and the time the ECLS-K:2024 was launched is the COVID-19 pandemic. The ECLS-K:2024 is NCES’s first early childhood longitudinal study to provide data on students who experienced the coronavirus pandemic. We included items in the ECLS-K:2024 kindergarten surveys to ask parents about:

  • Any family concerns about their kindergartner’s education and services received, given the pandemic;
  • Reasons for delaying their child’s enrollment in kindergarten for those children whose kindergarten entry was delayed;
  • Children’s social and learning experiences during the pandemic (for example, limited in-person and virtual interactions with others, participation in learning pods and extracurricular activities);
  • Early care and education arrangements during the pandemic;
  • Gaps or delays in receiving IFSP-, IEP-, or 504 plan-related services during the pandemic; and
  • Increases in stress due to the pandemic.

In the kindergarten year we also asked school administrators whether:

  • they used blended or hybrid instruction during the 2023-24 school year; and
  • the school received any funding or federal aid to pay for COVID-related expenses through the American Rescue Plan and, if so, how the funding was used.

Classroom teachers provided kindergarten year information about:

  • concerns about kindergarten readiness due to the pandemic;
  • strategies to address kindergarten readiness and learning loss;
  • professional development related to remote learning; and
  • severity of professional challenges.

Additionally, many items used in the ECLS-K:2024 had previously been included in the sister studies, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011). By comparing data from these same questions across different groups of children who have participated in the ECLS program studies, we can see differences and similarities in education and child development outcomes between the pre- and post-COVID worlds. For example, we will be able to update information like what’s shown in the infographic below, which uses ECLS-K:2011 data to show how children’s positive learning behaviors in the fall of kindergarten relate to children’s academic scores in the later grades.

In addition to the information on the post-pandemic experiences of young children, as discussed in our blog post last March, our upcoming data release will provide rich, descriptive information about kindergartners and their families.  With our first ECLS-K:2024 data file release, the ECLS program will  provide information on some topics for the first time, including  suspensions; school-level percentages of students who are chronically absent, experiencing homelessness, and from migrant families; number of school days disrupted or canceled due to emergencies; and school policy on and use of funds raised by parent-teacher association/parent-teacher organization.

The ECLS-K:2024 team is optimistic this will be a great year for the study. We hope you’ll continue to follow the ECLS-K:2024 through 2025 and beyond, to learn how the latest cohort progresses.


Blog post graphic showing key data points on early childhood students who exhibit positive learning behaviors at kindergarten entry


Want to learn more?

Be on the lookout for one ECLS blog post per season in 2025, with the next one slated for release in the spring. Stay tuned!

By Jill Carlivati McCarroll, NCES

Celebrating the ECLS-K:2024: Learning about Our Nation’s Teachers, Principals, and Schools

Hello December! With Thanksgiving wrapped up, this is the perfect time to thank all the staff that support the ECLS study. We recognize all that principals, teachers, and other school staff do for the ECLS study, and we are very grateful! In most schools, staff have been hard at work for weeks, or even months, communicating with our school recruiter staff, and we thank them for all of their effort.

Although the ECLS-K:2024 did not conduct study activities in classrooms in the fall of 2024, we have been getting ready for our next data collection in spring 2025, when most of the study children will have advanced to first grade. Just as we are thankful for the schools, principals, and teachers around the country, we are thankful for our team of dedicated ECLS staffers who are preparing for our next set of activities. Over the past few months, we have been reaching out to schools that participated last year—as well as the schools to which our study children have transferred—and preparing them for the next round of ECLS activities. Staying in touch with schools this fall before we visit them in the spring allows for us to identify any changes that have occurred with the schools, such as administration changes or staff changes, or any scheduling constraints that we will work around to make study participation as easy as possible for them. This way, when we do get ready to talk with our participants in the spring, the schools will be well prepared for our arrival!

As mentioned in previous blogs, the data we collect from schools, such as information on their school’s characteristics, play a vital role in our understanding of the resources available to and outstanding needs of the school systems across the United States. For example, did you know that 84.6 percent of public elementary schools educating kindergartners in 2010-11 had translators available to parents? With a growing and diverse population, it’s important to know what resources are available for children and their families today, and the forthcoming ECLS-K:2024 data will provide that answer.

In all rounds of ECLS-K:2024 data collection, the study collects in-depth information from participating students’ teachers. In the base (kindergarten) year of the study, the data are nationally representative of teachers of kindergartners, data which when compared to the earlier ECLS program studies, provide us with insight into trends in the composition of America’s kindergarten teachers over the decades. In later years of ECLS-K:2024, including in the upcoming spring 2025 data collection, teachers continue to provide information on both themselves and their study students. The ECLS-K:2024 isn’t the only NCES study that collects data from teachers (and school administrators); information on teacher characteristics such as race/ethnicity, educational background, and gender is provided by school and teacher respondents in numerous NCES studies, just as they are by our ECLS-K:2024 respondents. For instance, while we learned about kindergartners’ teachers in the 2010-11 school year from the ECLS-K:2024’s sister study, the ECLS-K:2011, we learned more about teachers of all elementary and secondary grades from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) in the 2011-12 school year, one year after the ECLS-K:2011 kindergarten teacher data were collected. For example, from SASS we know that in 2011-12, of all public elementary and secondary school teachers, 4 percent had less than a Bachelor’s degree, 40 percent had a Bachelor’s degree, 48 percent had a Master’s degree, 8 percent had an Education Specialist degree, and 1 percent had a Doctoral degree. Male public school teachers made up 24 percent of teachers in 2011–12, whereas females made up 76 percent of teachers.

We’ll know even more about America’s educators with the release of the ECLS-K:2024 kindergarten data, as the study is nationally representative of kindergarten teachers during the 2023-24 school year.  We haven’t had a nationally representative sample of teachers in an ECLS program study since the ECLS-K’s 1998-99 collection, so the ECLS team and all of those who rely on our data are very excited about our upcoming data release! Our teacher data will allow the public, including scholars, educators, and local and federal governments to better understand how our current American educational policies impact teachers, and the differences in the kindergarten teacher population 25 years apart.

Not to be forgotten, the ECLS-K:2024 2023-24 data are also nationally representative of schools that educated kindergartners in that school year.  We can’t wait to see how schools today compare to the schools educating kindergartners in 1998–99 and 2010–11.  
We receive all our valuable school and teacher data from our participating ECLS-K:2024 school administrators and teachers; a huge thank you to you all!
 
Want to learn more?  

This wraps up our 2024 blog series on celebrating ECLS-K:2024, but we’ll be back with future blogs with information on the ECLS program and upcoming data releases in the coming years.  In the meantime, feel free to reach out to the ECLS study team at ECLS@ed.gov with any questions or comments. We’d love to hear from you!

By Korrie Johnson and Jill Carlivati McCarroll, NCES

Civics Education in Public Schools: Lessons and Activities Around the 2024 Election

In September of this year, the School Pulse Panel (SPP), NCES’s innovative approach to delivering timely information on public K-12 schools in the U.S., surveyed around 1,500 school leaders on their school’s plans to incorporate the 2024 national election into lessons and whether they planned to run any election-related activities such as mock debates or mock voting. While schools were not asked what type of content was included in these lessons or in the election-related activities, the findings presented here show the prevalence of election-related information and engagement opportunities in the nation’s public schools.

Figure 1 shows the percentage of schools that reported that teachers were incorporating the 2024 national election into their lessons, for each of the respective grades. More than half of public schools reported that teachers were incorporating the national election into their lessons at fourth and higher grades, peaking at twelfth grade (85 percent). 


Figure 1. Percentage of public schools that had at least one teacher incorporating the 2024 national election cycle into lessons, by grade, 2024-25 school year

Graph showing the % of public schools with at least one teacher incorporating the 2024 election into lessons by grade. K is 31%, 12 is 85%, with a consistent climb from K to 12. Grade 6 to 7 drops from 66 to 63%, grade 8 to 9 drops from 75 to 69%.


Overall, 77 percent of public schools reported that they had teachers incorporating the election into their lessons. There was some regional variation in the percentage of schools that reported teachers incorporating the election, with higher percentages of public schools in the Northeast (82 percent) and Midwest (82 percent) incorporating the election compared to schools in the South (75 percent) and West (74 percent).

In addition to lessons, school leaders reported on various special programming activities centered around the 2024 election. Overall, 52 percent of public schools reported having one or more of the following: voter registration opportunities for students 1, mock debates, mock voting, assemblies/guest speakers, or some other program related to the election. As seen in Figure 2, a higher percentage of high/secondary schools reported running these kinds of programs, compared to elementary or middle/combined schools. Table 1 shows the percentages of schools offering each of these programs for all public schools and by school level.


Figure 2. Percentage of public schools with any special programming around the 2024 national election cycle, by school level, 2024-25 school year

Bar graph showing 52% of all public schools with special programming around the 2024 national election. Elementary schools are at 40%, middle/combined schools are at 50%, and high/secondary schools are at 81%.


Table 1. Percentage of public schools with selected special programming activities around the 2024 national election cycle, by school level, 2024-25 school year

  All public schools   Elementary Middle/combined High/secondary
Voter registration opportunities for studentsa 66   42 72
Mock voting 37   35 40 41
Assemblies/guest speakers 12   8 11 24
Other special programming 7   6 6 8

 

a Only asked of schools serving 11th- or 12th- grade students.

 

‡ Reporting standards not met. The coefficient of variation is greater than 50 percent or there are too few cases for a reliable analysis.


Among public schools enrolling students in 11th- or 12th- grade, 66 percent reported that they held voter registration opportunities for their students. Figure 3 shows the variation in the percentage of schools that offered registration opportunities by school neighborhood poverty level, percent students of color, school size, school locale, and region. Among different school sizes, a lower percentage of the smallest schools in the country (0-299 students) held voter registration events for their students, compared to all other school size groups. Among regions, a higher percentage of schools in the Northeast reported providing these opportunities, compared to the Midwest and West.


Figure 3. Among public schools enrolling students in 11th- or 12th- grade, percentage that had voter registration opportunities for their students, by school characteristics, 2024-25 school year

Graph showing that 66% of all public schools offering grades 11 and 12 had voter registration. Low poverty neighborhood schools were 66%, while high-poverty were 68%. Varying stats for % of students being students of color, for school size, for region, and for school locale difference.


To explore these data – for all public schools and by neighborhood poverty level, percent students of color, school level, school size, locale, and region – check out the interactive SPP dashboard.

[1]Only among schools serving 11th- or 12th- grade students.

Common Core of Data (CCD) Nonfiscal Data Releases – How the National Center for Education Statistics Improved Timeliness

What is the Common Core of Data?

Every year, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) releases nonfiscal data files from the Common Core of Data (CCD), one of the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED’s) primary resources on public elementary and secondary school districts, schools, and students. CCD nonfiscal data are made available to the public as data files, as well as in user-friendly data tools, and include the district and school directory (location, operational status, and grades offered) as well as data on student membership (by grade, sex, and race/ethnicity), full-time equivalent staff and teachers, and the number of students eligible for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP)

Why is CCD so important?

The CCD is a trusted data source used by ED stakeholders, researchers, and the public. Timely release of high-quality, accurate CCD data is critical not only to these stakeholders but also to ED’s commitment to providing high-quality data products. 

CCD data are now released within months of submission by states!

Bar Graph reporting the night of months from the due date to the CCD release 4 months in SY 2023-24, 5 months in SY 2022-23, 8 month in SY 2020-21, 11 month in SY 2018-19 and 20 month in SY 2016-17Over the past several years, NCES made process improvements to the collection and dissemination of CCD data (described below) that allow NCES to release the CCD data more quickly than ever before. As a result of these changes, the school year (SY) 2023-24 CCD data files will be available to the public less than 4 months after the July 2024 submission due date.

In contrast, the SY 2016-17 CCD data files were due in May 2017 and released January 2019 (a full 20 months later).

What has NCES done to release HIGH-QUALITY CCD nonfiscal data so quickly?

NCES modernized the CCD nonfiscal data quality (DQ) review and file production process in two phases:

Phase 1: Modernized CCD DQ review and file production. Defined the DQ standard through business rules, held state data providers to the defined DQ standard, developed a system to provide DQ feedback to states within a few days of submission, and improved the public file format.

This CCD data quality system developed in Phase 1 served as a sandbox for the broader EDFacts modernization project, called EDPass. EDPass is a centralized data submission system used by ED to standardize data submissions across ED offices. 

Phase 2: Full modernization of data submissions with EDPass. NCES manages the EDPass data submission tool for use by ED stakeholders including NCES, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE), and the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). The new submission tool, rolled out with the SY 2022-23 collection cycle, eliminated the time-consuming post-submission DQ process by running DQ checks at upload and requiring states to address all data quality issues prior to data submission. Critical components of this successful implementation included:

  • Clear message from ED that high-quality data are expected at the due date
    • NCES communicated the change in the submission process to state CCD Coordinators 2 years in advance
    • Due dates were shifted to accommodate pre-submission DQ checks and to give states more time to get accustomed to the new process
    • ED set due dates and held states accountable for the quality of the data; poor- quality data were suppressed and late data submissions were not included in data releases
  • Investments in people and technology
    • NCES’s new EDPass submission system is user-friendly
    • NCES CCD staff and contractors increased direct support to states during data collection through well-attended office hour sessions
  • Improved data quality process
    • NCES published the full catalog of standardized business rules that align with data file specifications
    • States receive data quality results within minutes of a file upload
    • EDPass system does not allow states to submit any uploaded data files until all identified DQ issues are addressed
  • Enhanced DQ reports
    • All DQ results are available for ED stakeholder use immediately after the collection due date
    • Data notes that accompany file releases provide state explanations for identified DQ issues and are built directly from state comments provided during data submission
  • State buy-in
    • State data submitters contributed feedback on the new system and processes during development
    • States made systematic internal data governance improvements in response to EDPass modernization and the improved data quality process

Conclusions

As demonstrated by the SY 2023-24 CCD data release, ED’s bold investment in EDPass technology and end-to-end process changes allow for the release of high-quality, consistent data products more quickly than ever. The benefits from this investment, however, reach beyond data products, resulting in significant burden reductions both for states and for ED program offices that use the data. EDPass modernization also supports compliance with the Information Quality Act, the ED-wide Data Strategy effort to improve data access and advance the strategic use of data and, more broadly, ED’s efforts to comply with the November 2023 Office of Inspector General Management Challenges report.  

Finally, while the gains from the EDPass modernization are illustrated in this blog through the SY 2023-24 CCD nonfiscal data release, this modernization impacts ALL data collected through the EDFacts submission system and will enable earlier release of high-quality data by other program offices, including OESE through ED Data Express and OSEP through ED’s Open Data Platform.  

Celebrating National Principals Month: Highlights from the National Teacher and Principal Survey

October is National Principals Month! This celebration marks the invaluable leadership contributions of U.S. K–12 public and private school principals.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) would like to thank principals and administrators from across the country whose support and guidance improve their schools and the successes of their students and staff each and every day.

The data in this blog would not be possible without the participation of principals and school staff in the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS). We have recently concluded the 2023–24 NTPS; to learn more about our most recent data on teachers’ and principals’ experiences and perspectives, please stay tuned to NCES’s website for upcoming reports.

Here are some facts and figures about principals from the NTPS for the 2020–21 school year. Click the links to dig deeper into each of the topics.

 

Principals’ Educational Attainment, Salary, and Professional Experiences in the 2020–21 school year

 

Figure 1. Percentage distribution of 2020–21 public school principals, by 2021–22 status

Bar graph showing the percentage of school principals who stayed at the same school, moved schools, or left the principalship. Data is broken down between public school, private school, and an aggregate. 80-83% stayed, 3-5% moved, 10-11% left.

 

Principal Satisfaction in the 2020–21 School Year

  • The 202021 NTPS asked all K12 public and private school principals to rate the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with six different statements about their position as a principal (figure 2).
    • About 94 percent of all principals agreed that they were generally satisfied with being a principal at their school.
    • About 34 percent indicated they don’t seem to have as much enthusiasm now as they did when they began their job.
    • About 24 percent indicated they would leave their job as soon as possible if they could get a higher-paying job.
    • About 17 percent indicated the stress and disappointments involved in being a principal at their school weren’t really worth it.
    • Some 17 percent of all principals agreed that they thought about staying home from school because they were just too tired to go.
    • About 17 percent thought about transferring to another school.

 

Figure 2. Percentage of all K–12 school principals who agreed with statements about their position as a principal: 2020–21

Bar graph showing the percentage of principals who agreed with statements about job satisfaction. 94% surveyed reported being generally satisfied, 34% reported lowered enthusiasm, and 17% reported being unsatisfied with their schools or burnt out.

 

 

Demographics and Other Characteristics of Principals in the 2020–21 school year

 

Figure 3. Percentage distribution of all K–12 school principal sex by race/ethnicity: 2020–21

Bar graph showing the percentage of principals by sex, race, and ethnicity. 78% identified as white, 43% white female, 35% male. 10% identified as Black or African American (7% female, 3% male), 9% Hispanic. Multiple/ or other were approx. 1% each.

For more information about the National Teacher and Principal Survey, please visit https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ntps/. More findings and details are available in the NTPS schoolteacher, and principal First Look reports.


[1] At least 1 year beyond the master’s level.

[2] Principals who selected “Hispanic,” which includes Latino, as their ethnicity are referred to as Hispanic regardless of race. All other race categories in this blog exclude persons of Hispanic ethnicity.

[3] Principals were asked whether they were male or female. Although this variable is labeled “sex,” the questionnaire did not use either the term “gender” or “sex.”