On August 24, 2021, President Biden announced the appointment of Dr. Peggy G. Carr as Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education. Prior to serving as the Commissioner, Carr was the Associate Commissioner for Assessment at NCES, where she oversaw the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and a portfolio of large-scale international assessments, including the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Carr also served as Acting Commissioner of NCES between 2016 and 2018.
Since joining NCES in the early 1990s, Carr has played a lead role in planning, directing, and managing NAEP and the international assessments through several major milestones, such as the transition from paper-and-pencil assessments to digitally based ones. During her decades-long tenure with NAEP, Carr managed all aspects of its technical infrastructure, including item development, data collections, scoring, psychometrics, analysis, and reporting. Most recently, in January 2021, at the request of Secretary Cardona’s office and in response to an IES Executive Presidential Order to gather data on school openings and modes of instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, Carr led the development and implementation of the NAEP 2021 Monthly School Survey. The survey reported crucial information on the reopening of schools for in-person learning from February through June of 2021, and it will provide valuable context for understanding student achievement results from the upcoming NAEP assessments in 2022.
Before coming to NCES, Carr served as the chief statistician for the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. While in this role, she applied statistics and survey methods to the field of discrimination in U.S. schools and institutions.
Carr received her B.S. in psychology, with a concentration in statistics, from North Carolina Central University. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Howard University.