Helping You Find the Education Data You Need

We want to inform all our readers that this is the last issue of the Education Statistics Quarterly. Launched in the spring of 1999, the Quarterly was designed to be a comprehensive source of regularly issued summaries of all NCES publications and data products under one cover. While we will no longer publish the Quarterly, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) remains committed to disseminating data to the broadest possible audience to meet the ever-increasing demand for information on the status of education in the United States and other countries. As the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing education data, NCES has many activities under way to reach education data users.

The first place for readers to turn is the newly redesigned NCES website at http://nces.ed.gov. Users can access nearly 2,000 publications on all aspects of education, including prekindergarten through postsecondary education, vocational and adult education, libraries, national assessments, and information on U.S. student performance in an international context from the results of international surveys. These publications and related data products are contained in an online catalog with customized search capabilities. In addition, the website provides a variety of online data tools so that users can build their own tables using raw data from NCES surveys. The website also provides searchable databases to find the location of and information on numerous education institutions, including public school districts, public and private schools, and libraries. The popular College Navigator tool has information on 7,000 colleges, universities, and technical institutions in the United States. In addition, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has a new and flexible data tool, the NAEP Data Explorer, that allows the user to create statistical tables based on NAEP student performance results and factors that may be related to student learning. NCES has efforts under way to move more of its databases to the Data Analysis System (DAS) so that users will have increased access to our data for their own research needs.

Another place to find out about NCES data collections and products is the featured publication in this issue, Programs and Plans. This publication provides a comprehensive and user-friendly overview of all NCES statistical programs and plans for future work. This new edition contains an index to help readers find information on popular topics such as parents, teachers, public schools, assessments, dropouts, and student aid.

In closing, we want to thank you for your readership and urge you to continue to turn to NCES for your education data needs. To keep current, please sign up on the NCES website for News Flash to start receiving e-mail alerts about new products in areas of interest to you. A special thanks goes to the various members of the editorial board throughout the Quarterly's history, to the managing editor, other contributing staff, and expert commentators.