Created through the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the independent statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Its mission is to provide scientific evidence on which to ground education practice and policy, and to share this information in an accessible format with policymakers, educators, parents, and the public.

For years, the IES has relied on the National Education Association’s (NEA) publication, “Rankings of the States and Estimates of School Statistics.” But that source has always been faulty—it contains only a single page of technical notes and gives little detail on how it estimates and collects data on rankings.

What’s more, there is no evidence that the IES has ever independently verified NEA data or evaluated its methodology before including the NEA’s teacher salary data in official U.S. Department of Education publications. The NEA is a highly partisan, politically motivated organization that funnels hundreds of millions of the dues it collects from public teachers into far-left political causes.

In response to the Department of Education’s request for public input on IES reporting, Defending Education has submitted a formal comment urging IES to eliminate any and all reliance on the NEA in its annual reports. 

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