From Lived Experience to Public Trust: Stewardship, Service, and the Future of Federal Education Data

Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center 

Public trust in data is not sustained by laws or technologies alone. It is sustained by people—by their integrity, discipline, and commitment to serve the public faithfully over time. If we remain grounded in those principles, federal statistics will continue to endure, adapt, and matter. This address will trace my personal and professional journey shaped by ancestry, education, and decades of public service in federal statistics. Raised by families whose lives were defined by enslavement, sharecropping, domestic labor, and the civil-rights struggle in North Carolina, I reflect on how those lived experiences, an education rooted entirely in historically Black colleges and universities, and a career dedicated to teaching statistics and quantitative methods together formed my understanding of data as a tool for equity, fairness, and accountability. Drawing on my decades-long role as a leader and public face of the Nation's Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, over the course of my career, I discuss what it means to earn and sustain public trust in an era of institutional disruption, disappearing federal data, and a rapidly changing science and data ecosystem. This moment, while fraught, offers an opportunity to reaffirm the ethical foundations of federal statistics, to repair and refine systems long in need of modernization, and to prepare thoughtfully for the integration of AI and new data-science methods.