Congress created the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) through the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002. IES is the independent statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Its job is to collect scientific evidence to guide education policy, and to share that information clearly with policymakers, educators, and the public.
For years, IES has relied on the National Education Association’s (NEA) annual report, “Rankings of the States and Estimates of School Statistics.” But that source has always been flawed. It has only a single page of technical notes and says little about how it collects data or estimates rankings. There is also no evidence that IES has ever independently checked the NEA’s data or reviewed its methods before putting NEA teacher salary figures in official Department of Education publications. The NEA is a highly partisan, politically driven group that sends hundreds of millions of dollars in dues collected from public school teachers to far-left political causes.
On October 15, 2025, in response to the Department’s request for public input on IES reporting, Defending Education (DE) submitted a comment urging IES to end all reliance on NEA data in its annual reports.
Read the full comment below:
