National education nonprofit Education Resource Strategies (ERS) is thrilled to announce the launch of its new fiscally sponsored project, the Strategic Public Educational National Data (SPEND) Initiative, a non-partisan, public-interest organization dedicated to sustaining and modernizing the technical infrastructure that supports the nation’s education finance data. 

“For decades, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has provided the essential groundwork for understanding education finance in America,” said Katie Roy, Executive Director of SPEND. “Our goal is to build upon that foundation, ensuring the core data pipeline remains stable while introducing technical modernizations that reflect the evolving needs of state leaders and the research community.” 

While NCES datasets have long served as the bedrock of the education field, recent reductions in the U.S. Department of Education have impacted NCES’ ability to maintain its fiscal data collection and reporting, which is essential for the accurate distribution of federal formula grants, longitudinal academic research, and state-level resource benchmarking. 

SPEND serves as an objective technical authority and infrastructure steward, seeking to preserve and extend this national resource by: 

• Sustaining data continuity by continuing the previous work by NCES while making efforts to increase its efficiency and usability. 

• Modernizing data collection methods by piloting an automated collection engine that uses machine learning to map local school district data directly to a universal standard. This technical upgrade aims to reduce the reporting burden on State Education Agencies (SEAs) while improving data quality and timeliness. 

“ERS has over 20 years of deep experience working with financial data to help district leaders make better resource allocation decisions,” said Jonathan Travers, ERS President. “With Katie’s leadership and ERS’ sponsorship, SPEND won’t just fill the gap, but will also make improvements that expand the accuracy and usability of data, and ultimately the impact data can have on public education.”

SPEND will operate as an independent, incubated center hosted by ERS. The center is structured to operate with significant autonomy, allowing SPEND to focus exclusively on technical modernization and the objective execution of data translation to serve the entire national education landscape. 

About Education Resource Strategies

Education Resource Strategies empowers school system leaders to make transformational shifts in resources, structures, and practices so that all students—especially those with the greatest learning needs and those furthest from opportunity—attend a school where they can learn and thrive.