The Education Department plans to dissolve the office that supports the country’s 5 million English learners.

The move comes as the Trump administration has called to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and to stop funding English language acquisition programs in the federal budget. The country’s English learner student population includes U.S. citizen children of immigrant parents as well as authorized and undocumented immigrant children, communities that are reeling from the .

The Office of English Language Acquisition . Last August, the Department that many states and school districts rely on to protect the rights of immigrant students.

Education Department officials said dissolving the office and assigning its work to offices doing related work would be better for English learners.

In an emailed statement, Assistant Education Secretary Kirsten Baesler said the changes would align work across teams within the department, reduce administrative burden, and “empower states to design integrated supports.”

“English Learners should never be treated as a siloed program, set aside as an afterthought,” Baesler said. “When English language acquisition is embedded across core priorities like literacy, academic content, educator preparation, and accountability, it receives the seriousness and sustained focus it deserves.”

The Education Department informed Congress of the changes in a February letter. first reported on the moves and the letter Tuesday.

According to the letter, distribution of federal Title III money that helps states educate English learners will be handled by the same office that distributes other large federal programs such as Title I.

�հ��ܳ���’s calls for eliminating Title III funding as a separate program, even as he also signed an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States. Congress last year disregarded a similar budget proposal and .

Training programs for teachers who work with English learners will move to the Office of Effective Educator Development Programs, the letter said. Language programs for Native American and Alaska Native children will move to the Office of Indian Education.

The changes do not affect the rights of English learner students under federal law. However, many advocates and educators said the office played a critical role in ensuring federal funds were spent appropriately and in sharing best practices and new research.

More of that responsibility now . While the Education Department says that shift is appropriate, many school districts historically have failed to meet the needs of English learners, leading to lawsuits.

The Education Department is in the process of , while programs related to educating Native American students are moving to the Department of the Interior.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

When he declared in March 2025 that he wanted the Education Department “closed immediately,” it wasn’t just a sound bite. It was a promise. A promise to dismantle the one system meant to protect the children this country has always underserved: Black children. The ink on the Emancipation Proclamation might be old, but the mindset that fought it never really went away. It just put on another suit.

After emancipation, freed Black families built schools with their own hands. They hired teachers, scraped together funds and insisted that their children would learn to read even if they had to do so in secret. The backlash was swift and violent. White mobs , , and state lawmakers passed inequitable that kept Black students in crumbling classrooms with hand-me-down, tattered books.

By 1980, after decades of states proving they couldn’t or wouldn’t by Black and poor students, the federal government stepped in. President Jimmy Carter created the Education Department to make sure that every child, no matter where they lived or what color they were, had a fair shot at learning.

I think of my grandson, an autistic Black boy with an individualized education plan who depends on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and other federal programs. Without these protections and funding that come from the federal level, the system will fail children like him. States don’t have an excellent track record of protecting students with disabilities, especially Black boys. When we remove federal oversight, we aren’t saving money. We’re sacrificing children.

As a former public school teacher, I’ve seen firsthand what happens when education depends on ZIP codes rather than fairness: Wealthy, mostly white districts keep thriving. Meanwhile, schools that serve Black and brown kids are stuck under leaking ceilings, flipping through worn-out books older than their teachers.

And yet here we are in 2025, watching the federal government try to hand over the keys to the states. Thousands of education workers are out of work, civil rights offices are closed, and the Trump administration appointees have completely gutted oversight.

They’ve shut down seven of the 12 regional offices for the department’s Office for Civil Rights and attempted to lay off employees, only to try to bring back some of those workers. All this chaos means fewer investigations into discrimination, fewer checks on racist discipline policies and fewer protections for Black children who are already suspended and expelled at rates than their white peers.

Now we are supposed to trust states to do the right thing? The same states shouting “local control” are banning DEI programs, censoring Black history and whitewashing textbooks. AP African American Studies. Texas once approved a curriculum that called enslaved people “.” Local control isn’t reform. It’s cultural erasure disguised as policy.

Black children are the first to feel the sting. To this day, our kids attend schools with fewer resources, larger class sizes and outdated materials. Federal programs like Title I and IDEA keep those schools alive. Without them, special education funding dries up, class sizes balloon and talented teachers walk away. Take them away, and you widen that gap on purpose.

When you strip education from federal protection, you don’t get freedom, you get chaos. You get 50 different versions of what a child is worth, determined by 50 governors with 50 different agendas. We’ve seen this movie before.

These moves raise significant concerns that the federal government won’t be able to meet its legal obligations to students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ().

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has numerous times that federal special education funding will continue flowing, no matter where the office and programs land within the government. But what she has not acknowledged — and what is troubling — is how moving the program to an agency like HHS inevitably shifts the focus of special ed from education to health care, thus pathologizing disabled students.

This is especially true considering HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made about children with autism, calling them tragic and doubting their ability to lead full and meaningful lives. His statements indicate a belief that a medical diagnosis absolutely leads to tragic outcomes — which is simply untrue. 

Framing students with disabilities solely in medical terms hinders their potential for growth by narrowly confining them to a diagnosis and perceived limitations — resulting in low expectations in school. As recently as the , this allowed most states to exclude disabled students from academic assessments. Many schools encouraged their parents to keep their children at home on testing days.

Since then, the country has steadily moved away from low expectations for students with disabilities. Under the Biden administration, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services issued specifically focused on setting a high bar for these children. The guidance included a focus on inclusive education practices to ensure students with disabilities have access to high-quality education with the opportunity to meet challenging goals. It also offered details about how states and districts could leverage federal funding to achieve those ends. 

Inclusive education practices are flexible and creative. Using such an approach, a team determining appropriate classroom settings during an Individualized Education Program meeting might decide that instead of placing a student in need of behavioral support in a segregated class of peers with disabilities, the student could be put in a general-education classroom, assisted by a paraprofessional or special education teacher. operates this way. Teachers or paraprofessionals accompany students with disabilities to general-education classes, providing behavioral and academic support in real time, innovatively and effectively meeting a child’s unique education needs. Instead of limiting children with disabilities, guidance and practices like these help students look to an expansive future. 

But between moving special education to HHS and the longer-term to convert IDEA grants into formula block grants, it will fall to the states to ensure that their special education laws and regulations are robust. IDEA includes minimum requirements for supporting disabled students. States can and should do more, including developing their own laws and guidance on issues like inclusion, challenging academic standards, teacher and service provider support and training, and requirements to provide services in an equitable manner to all students.

Families and advocates can work to hold states and districts accountable by, for example, pushing for state-level disaggregated reporting on timely provision of services, restrictive class and school placements, and disproportionate disciplinary practices. Additionally, states must work toward timely resolutions of and for any violations of disabled students’ civil rights. 

Leaving schools without timely access to federal funding to provide legally mandated services means students will unnecessarily struggle, and their lack of progress will be used as an indication of the failures of the current program. There have already been that shifts of education programs to other federal agencies have tied up resources in even more layers of bureaucracy. 

Shifting responsibility for specific IDEA and special education programs to HHS means that when states come looking for guidance, the staff with deep understanding of the interplay among civil rights, disability and education will no longer be available to help them. What guidance they do receive could be limited and unsupportive of students’ true intellectual, cognitive or physical capabilities.

Burying special education deep in the can only make things more difficult for children with disabilities. Finding essential services that families are desperate to reach will be like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of IDEA. What should be a time for celebrating milestones in increasing inclusivity and accessibility in America’s public schools has instead been fraught with fear and fights to retain the unique supports provided to disabled children through the Department of Education. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn’t. 

Harold Hinds, is a civil rights attorney and Ph.D. student at the New School’s School for Public Engagement, also contributed to this essay.

This is being packaged as a way to streamline the department’s work. But out here in rural America, where I’m from, it’s clear that this kind of chaos will hurt the most vulnerable students first.

Under the plan, the Department of Labor will be responsible for overseeing K-12 programs. The Department of the Interior will run Native American education programs. The Department of Health and Human Services will ​​take over campus-based child care programs for college students. The State Department will assume international education and student-exchange functions, including programs that support global language and area-studies partnerships. And the administration has hinted that it will announce the transfer of additional programs in the coming months. 

There will be no clear authority, little technical assistance provided to districts like mine in rural areas, blurred accountability and conflicting priorities. This will interrupt funding and services that will wreak havoc on student outcomes.

Rural districts already operate with limited staff and underfunded central offices. In many places, one superintendent will be handling Title I, special education, federal grants, transportation, food service and student services all on their own — often while also overseeing district operations. Now, imagine telling that same superintendent that instead of leaning on the Department of Education for guidance, they must contact Labor for help with one set of programs, Interior for another, HHS for a third and the State Department for others. That’s not reform; it’s an obstacle course.

In addition, these agencies all use different payment systems, which only complicates the flow of funding to districts. I have extensive experience working with the G5 payment system, the Department of Education’s central online platform for managing grant funds. I’ve used earlier versions under multiple administrations — Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. While no system is perfect, G5 has been relatively straightforward and predictable. When issues arise, there’s a clear structure for technical assistance and problem-solving.

That predictability would be lost. Requiring districts to navigate multiple payment systems across different agencies will introduce unnecessary complexity, slow reimbursements and increase the risk of errors. Small rural districts don’t have the administrative capacity to manage multiple federal accounting systems, and even short delays can disrupt payroll, special education contracts and student services.

These delays mean postponing reading interventions, suspending behavioral health services for vulnerable students or holding off on hiring staff. Since the creation of the Small Rural School Achievement program in 2001, which provides grants essential to bridging rural funding gaps, I hadn’t experienced a single delay in federal education funding — until this year. This is clear evidence that instability in Washington quickly reaches rural communities.

The students who rely most on stable federal support are the ones most harmed when a system enters a period of chaos. These include children with disabilities, Indigenous students, English learners and kids from low-income families. They depend on programs that require consistency, not fragmentation. If the Trump administration’s plan proceeds, those services will be stalled and undermined and could even vanish into bureaucratic gaps. 

If the administration really wants to support states, there are common-sense steps that won’t plunge schools into chaos, such as streamlining federal grant applications, reducing duplicate reporting requirements, updating outdated data systems and expanding technical assistance. These are practical changes that could make life easier for school staff and families.

At the end of the day, rural America survives on stability. We know what happens when a barn collapses or a herd scatters — everyone suffers, and it takes much more effort to bring things back under control than it would have taken to fortify the structure in the first place.

The same principle is true here. Breaking up the Department of Education and scattering its shards throughout the federal government isn’t reform. It’s disruption. And rural schools, tribal communities and vulnerable students will be the ones who pay the steepest price. 

At issue: a working list of “professional” programs that require advanced degrees and licenses. Circulated online last month, it amounts to just 11 fields, including doctors, dentists and attorneys, among others.

Left out are virtually all other professions that, in many cases, require advanced degrees and licenses. 

The proposed change is part of a GOP effort to trim not just student debt and federal spending but college costs more broadly. 

In practical terms, enrolling in a “professional” program would give students the ability to borrow up to $50,000 per year in federal loans, or $200,000 over the course of their graduate school career. By contrast, programs that don’t fall into one of the 11 fields would give students access to just $20,500 a year, or $100,000 total. That often doesn’t cover the cost of a graduate education, advocates say, leaving students to rely on families or expensive private loans.

“It is a bad situation for a lot of professions,” said Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the , which represents college presidents. The council has over the list, saying the U.S. Department of Education should broaden it to include, among others, nurses, social workers and many kinds of teachers.

In a , the American Association of Colleges of Nursing said it was “deeply concerned” by the department’s proposed definition, saying it “excludes nursing and significantly limits student loan access.”

In a statement, Education Department spokeswoman Ellen Keast blamed social media “misinformation” about the rule-making process for confusion about the administration’s moves. Much of the uproar has spread via videos on sites like and .

Keast said the plans are still in development, and that reducing lending limits will reduce students’ costs. “We expect that institutions charging tuition rates well above market prices will consider lowering tuition thanks to these historic reforms,” she said.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told The 74 the student debt crisis “will not be solved by making arbitrary judgements about which professions ‘deserve’ support. Lifetime and annual borrowing caps hit career-changers and graduate students hardest, especially as the cost of higher education continues to rise.”

AFT also represents nurses, librarians, higher education faculty and graduate students who teach and do research.

Dina Kastner, public policy and advocacy manager for the National Association of Social Workers, said federal loan limits “will really have an impact” on social work students.

“For people who are going to graduate school — particularly in a profession like social work, where a graduate degree is needed for a lot of the work that social workers do — it’s definitely a problem,” she said in an interview. 

The association has been hearing “consistently” from members since details about the changes began trickling out, she said.

A consensus or a ‘stranglehold’?

While the effort is part of a broader one by Congress in President �հ��ܳ���’s to limit the burden of graduate student debt and cap federal borrowing, details of the two categories actually took shape as the Education Department initiated the rule-making process, said ACE’s Fansmith.

Department representatives proposed that instead of trying to figure out all of the programs that fit under the “professional” category, they would rely on a list of 10 professions originally cited as “examples” — and declared that those are eligible for the higher borrowing limits. 

“You would think it’s an oversight, because the actual statutory language says these 10 are ‘examples,’” Fansmith said. “Essentially, what they said was, ‘We are going to do the minimum possible,’ in part because they’re really trying to limit how much students can borrow.” That, despite the fact that in several fields, such as education and nursing, employers are facing huge demands for highly trained workers, he said. 

After two weeks of talks, Fansmith said, negotiators agreed to add an 11th category to the “professional” list: clinical psychology.

He called the process “completely crazy” and not what Congress intended for the lending program. “This administration is kind of shooting ourselves in the foot and doing something that’s going to have really lasting harm until it’s overturned.”

In its statement, the department did not directly address the process it followed, but in a “Myth vs. Fact” , issued Nov. 24, it called the proposed limits on lending “commonsense” and said a negotiating committee offered “a consensus definition” for the two categories — one that it says is now being bent out of shape by fear-mongering “progressive voices.”

The department said federal data indicates that 95% of nursing students borrow below the annual $100,000 loan limit “and therefore are not affected by the new caps.”

It also noted that it “has not prejudged the rulemaking process and may make changes in response to public comments” over the next few months.

That hasn’t stopped professional groups from protesting in advance. The nurses’ association said that, as of 2022, more than one in four RNs planned to leave nursing or retire over the next five years. One in five holds a master’s degree or higher, it said, and demand for nurses with advanced degrees — in clinical specialties, teaching and research — “far outstrips the supply.”

‘Drowning in debt’

The move to limit lending comes, in part, from a conservative belief that expanding financial aid via big federal loans not only creates a debt problem for students — it also allows universities to quietly inflate costs as many students borrow the entire amount needed to attend.

The idea is sometimes called , after former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. In 1987, he wrote that increases in federal aid had “enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.”

Nearly 40 years later, the idea lives on: In 2023 when Republicans in Congress to lower college costs, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said, “Our federal higher education financing system contributes more to the problem than the solution. Colleges and universities using the availability of federal loans to increase their tuitions have left too many students drowning in debt without a path for success.”

Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in October said Congress’s budget bill, which will Grad PLUS loans as of July 2026, has bring costs down. As an example, he said Santa Clara University School of Law next fall will give incoming full-time students a guaranteed $16,000 tuition scholarship, renewable for up to three years, the duration of the program. That amounts to an effective $16,000 cut in net tuition, he said.

The relationship between credit availability and tuition rates is difficult to track directly, but a few studies have found a connection. In 2015, economist David O. Lucca and colleagues changes in subsidized loan maximums had an effect on tuition, especially for “more expensive degrees, those offered by private institutions, and for two-year or vocational programs.” Other studies have found the effect more pronounced in .

By contrast, in 2017, , who studies college costs at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, law school tuition rates and found “far less evidence for the Bennett Hypothesis than I expected to see.” 

He offered several explanations, among them that law schools that raise tuition by more than competitors may see declines in applicants and revenue, and that greater availability of federal loans simply shifts students’ debt out of private banks and into the public system: In 2003, he noted, 36% of law students took out private loans. By 2011, five years after Grad PLUS loans debuted, it was just 5%.

Kastner of the social workers’ association said limiting how much graduate students can borrow, combined with the of Grad PLUS loans, is “a double whammy” for students. As a result, many will be forced to rely once again on private banks, which demand higher interest rates and offer fewer protections if they can’t pay loans back.

Asked if she had sympathy for the effort to lower students’ debt burden by restricting graduate borrowing, Kastner replied, “I don’t see it that way. I think it’s just making things more difficult for students.”

Kastner herself struggled to get her degree in the mid-1990s. By the time she began her social work career in Chicago in 1997, her debt amounted to about $40,000. Her monthly payment: $600, the equivalent one semi-monthly paycheck. 

She eventually got help from her parents to pay back her loans, but said squeezing new professionals will present “a real challenge,” especially for first-generation students “who may not have the family resources to really help them bridge that gap.”

ACE’s Fansmith said the department should be considering policies, such as income- based repayment and long-term loan forgiveness, that could actually address budgetary and student debt problems “without simply saying, ‘You can’t access the education.’”

He noted that the final rules, slated to take effect in July, won’t be written until early next year. In the meantime, he anticipates heated public comments from nurses, social workers, educators and other professions. 

“It wouldn’t be shocking to see Congress step in,” said Fansmith. “Nurses are, understandably and appropriately, a really sympathetic group.” And everyone sees the need for more of them, he said. “So these kinds of decisions that are really harmful for our country, honestly, might get re-evaluated.”

New York City schools with fewer students than projected will not have to give back money midyear, Education Department officials announced Monday, as the public school system saw its biggest enrollment drop in four years.

Enrollment in the city’s K-12 and preschool programs fell by about 22,000, or 2.4%, compared to last year, according to the Education Department’s preliminary numbers. A total of 884,400 students were enrolled in the city’s traditional public schools as of Oct. 31, according to the figures.

Nearly two-thirds of the city’s roughly 1,600 schools had fewer students than projected, officials said. In past years, those schools would have had to pay back a total of more than $250 million to the city. But those funds will now stay with schools.

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“As we navigate enrollment fluctuations and uncertainty around federal funding, we’re committed to providing stability and ensuring every school has the resources it needs,” schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said in a statement.

The remaining third of schools whose enrollment was higher than projected will receive extra money to account for the additional students, officials said, but didn’t say how much that will cost.

In some ways, Mayor Eric Adams’ parting gift to schools could become a headache for the next mayor, who will have to confront the costly but popular initiative.

City officials did not immediately offer an explanation for the enrollment drop, but it’s likely that changing immigration patterns played a role. Over the three school years prior to this one, city schools absorbed an influx of roughly 50,000 migrant students.

That surge helped offset declining enrollment, keeping the city’s student numbers relatively flat between 2022 and 2024. But immigration into the and has ground to a halt under President Donald �հ��ܳ���’s enforcement efforts. Adams has closed many of the emergency shelters the city opened to house migrants.

Several educators at schools with large immigrant populations have noticed sharp enrollment declines this year, driven by existing students leaving and fewer new ones showing up.

“We definitely have seen a decline this year in our schools that serve newcomers,” said John Sullivan, the superintendent overseeing transfer schools geared toward older high school students, at a hearing last week with the City Council.

Manhattan’s Liberty High School Academy for Newcomers is down about 200 students this year compared to its average enrollment in recent years, Sullivan said. More students learning English are dropping out of school early to take jobs, he said.

ELLIS Prep, another high school in the Bronx geared toward older newcomers, has , Principal Norma Vega said. The school is down about 30 students from last year and roughly 20 students under its projection for this year. That meant Vega would have had to pay back roughly $333,000 if the city had followed through with the midyear clawback.

Keeping that money will allow her to continue funding field trips, computers for students, and extra tutoring, she said.

Vega already missed the deadline for this school year to cut teachers, which means she would have started next school year with a deficit and likely would have lost her English as a New Language coordinator, one of her newest hires.

“It’s a blessing” to not have to pay back the funds midyear, Vega said.

Before the pandemic, schools typically had to give money back to the city during the middle of the school year if they enrolled fewer students than projected. (Those that enrolled more students would get extra funds midyear.)

The policy to keep school budgets afloat despite enrollment, known as being “held harmless,” was initially enacted during the pandemic when many schools saw their rosters dwindle but had mounting needs to support students academically and emotionally.

Enrollment citywide has been on the decline for a decade, but went into freefall during the pandemic, . This year’s enrollment decline is the largest since the 2021-22 school year, when enrollment fell by around 36,000 students, or 3.8%, from the previous year.

The city halted the hold harmless only to

Last school year, the decision not to claw back school budgets midyear meant schools hung onto $157 million they would have otherwise had to give back. City officials to ensure that no schools started out this school year with less funding than they had at the start of last school year.

This year’s total is far larger, given the steeper enrollment decline.

Emily Paige, the principal of Urban Assembly Unison, a small Brooklyn middle school, said she was on the hook for roughly $100,000 because of enrollment losses — enough to cover an entire teacher salary.

While the hold harmless policy is widely popular among school staff and families, it can be an unsustainable practice, some observers say, artificially inflating schools’ budgets and creating even more difficult financial decisions down the road as the city confronts increasingly expensive small schools.

The union representing principals, the Council for School Administrators, or CSA, claimed the move as a victory for its members, saying in an email to principals on Sunday its “top priority” this year has been ensuring the city kept its promise to hold schools harmless.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

From cutting social safety net programs and enacting unaccountable voucher programs at the expense of public schools to limiting access to financial aid for higher education, these stormy waters are setting American students adrift, eliminating important protections and creating ever greater barriers to an equitable education that sets young people up for success as adults. 

It’s more than just money; as Congress and the Trump administration have instituted perilous funding cuts that reduced support for nutrition programs, limited undocumented students’ access to important programs and dialed back enforcement of civil rights laws, federal agencies have eliminated and undermined vital data and education research. Without this information, there is no way to know how schools are working to address academic and opportunity disparities — particularly for Black and Latino students, multilingual learners, students with disabilities and those from low-income backgrounds. 

The U.S. Department of Education by inviting states to seek waivers from the that have, for over two decades, required annual student testing and public, disaggregated reporting of those results. Allowing states to alter established assessment systems and hide data on school quality will leave parents, educators and policymakers without important information they need to help students succeed. 

In order for this to work, the federal government will need partners in states to do the dirty work. Unfortunately, history shows they’ll be amenable. 

At least three states have already begun the formal process of asking for waivers from accountability. 

Oklahoma, which already lowered the bar for proficiency on its state assessments, wants to and replace them with a series of as-yet unidentified tests throughout the year to measure student achievement in language arts and math or the Classic Learning Test, which covers a more limited knowledge base — primarily the Western and Christian canons — and has been used primarily for homeschool and private school students. The Oklahoma waiver would also mean the state could stop providing testing accommodations and alternate assessments for students with disabilities and English learners. Together, this would make it impossible to measure the academic progress of all students.

Indiana wants to redirect federal funding away from migrant students, at-risk kids, multilingual learners, children in rural areas and the lowest-performing schools. State leaders also seek to change how they rate schools, in a way that would tell families, advocates, policymakers, and others little because of the proposed methodology.

Like Indiana, Iowa wants the power to redirect federal funds away from underserved student groups. But Iowa goes a step further, asking the department to reinterpret the law to let it stop prioritizing federal funds for schools with the highest poverty levels. Not only would this be overreach by the Department of Education — legally, it can’t allow this type of change without congressional approval — it would change the rules for all states, undermining the objective of Title I to increase financial support for students in high-poverty school districts.

It remains to be seen what other ideas states will cook up under the guise of promoting innovation and reducing administrative burdens, and how those initiatives will endanger students’ educational opportunities. But the leaders of 12 states wrote to Washington earlier this year, requesting not only a robust use of federal waiver authority, but a strong deference to state law and a consolidation of federal education funding. 

To be sure, there is a place for federal flexibility. The Education Department in the first Trump administration wisely gave a year’s reprieve on annual testing when the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools. The Biden administration offered flexibility for Montana to test a new, innovative assessment model, while maintaining civil rights protections. Current federal law already allows states to experiment with innovative assessments and funding, although few states have taken advantage of these initiatives.

This isn’t some wonky technical issue; annual assessments provide important information that helps parents make educational decisions for their children, teachers to adjust classroom practices and policymakers to craft laws and allocate resources. Strong accountability measures force adults to take a hard look at how schools are serving the most vulnerable students and take action. Targeted funding provides additional opportunities for students from backgrounds long marginalized by America’s education system. 

This waiver program is just one in a series of decisions that is putting students and the country’s future at risk. Ending the collection of this data will limit everyone’s ability to see the long-term consequences of other harmful policies.   

The Education Department should reconsider its stance on waivers and instead do what’s right for students: ensure that states remain accountable for improving outcomes. Real students’ futures — and America’s future as a nation — are at stake.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Education Department is looking to move the $15 billion Individuals with Disabilities Education Act program outside of the agency, the Washington Post�����ճܱ���岹��.

In a statement to States Newsroom, department spokesperson Madi Biedermann did not explicitly confirm the report, but said the department is generally looking for ways to move its operations to other agencies. President Donald Trump has pledged to eliminate the Education Department.

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The agency “is exploring additional partnerships with federal agencies to support special education programs without any interruption or impact on students with disabilities, but no agreement has been signed,” Biedermann wrote.

Biedermann said Education Secretary Linda McMahon “has been very clear that her goal is to put herself out of a job by shutting down the Department of Education and returning education to the states” and that McMahon is “fully committed to protecting the federal funding streams that support our nation’s students with disabilities.”

�հ��ܳ���’s administration moved to lay off 465 department employees, including 121 at the��, earlier this month amid the ongoing government shutdown.

A federal judge has����from carrying out the layoffs, but the ruling provides only short-term relief as legal proceedings unfold.

The department’s many responsibilities include guaranteeing a free public education for students with disabilities through IDEA.

Trump has already suggested rehousing special education services under the Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.����in March that the agency is “fully prepared” to take on that responsibility.

Fully transferring responsibility for IDEA would require an act of Congress — a significant undertaking given that at least 60 votes are needed to break a Senate filibuster and Republicans hold just 53 seats.

Nearly all staff members in the Office of Special Education Programs and the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education were affected when the department began issuing termination notices Friday. The Office for Civil Rights also saw new cuts after losing half of its staff earlier this year.

“T��� track record for challenging [reductions in force] in the courts hasn’t been great,” Emily Merolli, a partner with the Sligo Law Group and a former attorney in the department’s general counsel’s office, said during a call with reporters after the hearing. “We still very much consider these offices and these programs to be in immediate danger.”

She was among those eliminated in the mass layoffs in March, which were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in July while the case moves forward. In a second case, an appeals court last month gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon the OK to lay off roughly 250 OCR staff and attorneys.

In her ruling Wednesday, Judge Susan Illston from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, a Clinton appointee, said the that sued over the layoffs are likely to prove that the administration had no authority to let staff go while they were furloughed during a shutdown. Later this month, she’ll hold a second hearing on whether the employees can remain on the job as the court considers the merits of the case. 

It is “far from normal for an administration to fire line-level civilian employees during a government shutdown as a way to punish the opposing political party,” . During the hearing, she said the department’s “ready, aim, fire approach” to reform would be “enormously disruptive” to students.

On Tuesday, President Trump that he’s using the current government shutdown to slash “Democrat programs that we want to close up or we never wanted to happen.” Advocates have described the cuts as an attack on vulnerable students, including the more than who receive services under the Individuals with Disabilities Act. Late Tuesday, nearly 400 organizations issued demanding that the administration “reverse course immediately and restore staffing and transparency at the U.S. Department of Education.” 

In a separate , state special education directors said they were “confused and concerned” by the cuts and worried IDEA funding could lapse with fewer staff ensuring the payments go out on time. McMahon responded Wednesday, saying that the shutdown has not interrupted funding, including money for special education.

“Two weeks in, millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid and schools are operating as normal,” she . “It confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states.”

But Michael Anderson, a lawyer at Sligo and a former department attorney who focused on major grant programs like Title I said the secretary’s statement “loses sight of the big picture.”

Staff cuts are like “deferred maintenance on a car or a home,” he said. “Over time, the effects of not having experienced, knowledgeable staff administering federal education programs” could lead to significant problems. 

Even proponents of eliminating the department were taken aback by this latest round of cuts. Neal McCluskey, director of educational freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, has been a vocal supporter of closing the Education Department and said the president has the authority to cut employees as long as he keeps enough staff to do the work mandated by Congress. But he said he didn’t understand how the administration could use the shutdown to justify additional layoffs.

The standoff between Democrats and Republicans over the shutdown “feels like a game of chicken, which is bad public policy,” he said. “But [it] seems to be increasingly how federal politics works.”

‘Disability doesn’t fly a flag’

News of the cuts over the weekend left parents and advocates feeling betrayed after Trump and McMahon vowed not to cut “anything that was going to harm or infringe upon the rights of kids with disabilities,” said Jennifer Coco, interim executive director of the Center for Learner Equity. The center advocates for students with disabilities who attend charter schools, which often struggle to provide students with disabilities a better education than they’d receive in a district school.��

The staff who received layoff notices, she said, “represent decades of expertise in understanding what folks in the field needed … to make things better for kids.”

In March, as part of his effort to close the agency, Trump said it would “work out very well” to move the administration of IDEA to the Department of Health and Human Services. But his administration cut in the Administration for Children and Families in April, and plans to eliminate additional , including those to improve preschool.

Ensuring that states follow IDEA is one of the core functions of the Office of Special Education Programs, or OSEP. Earlier this year, the office put in the country on notice that they were failing to adequately serve children with disabilities. 

struggled with timelines for evaluating students for special education services. Michigan saw a of complaints from parents of children with dyslexia who weren’t receiving the reading help they needed. And an investigation found the District of Columbia often delayed services to young children, forcing parents to file lawsuits in order to get services.  

With or without federal monitoring, states “still have the obligation to make sure that the laws are followed,” said Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. 

But parents often look to OSEP for help. In fact, positions slated for elimination include those who take calls directly from parents of children with disabilities “who probably feel like they have exhausted all of their resources at the state level at the local level,” said Becca Walawender, the former director of policy and planning in the department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. 

She took offense at the president’s characterization that special education is a “Democrat program.”

“Disability doesn’t fly a flag,” said Walawender, now a senior adviser to Sligo. “People with disabilities exist in all states, red or blue, across socioeconomic lines, across races, religions. Rural, urban — it doesn’t matter.”

Julie Melear, a parent who has navigated special education systems in Colorado, Virginia and Idaho, sought help from federal staff multiple times when she felt her two boys weren’t getting appropriate services for dyslexia. It took OSEP to require the Fairfax County Public Schools to reimburse her for tutoring services the district was required to provide following the pandemic. Now she has a complaint against the Colorado Department of Education. She argues that the state has refused to investigate districts for failing to reimburse parents at market rates when they seek outside evaluations for their children.

“I am concerned that [the department] essentially is turning over federal dollars to let Colorado do whatever it wants,” Melear said. Colorado is that “needs assistance” from the department, according to federal officials. 

A Colorado department spokeswoman said officials had not received the complaint but that districts can “set reasonable cost limits” as long as they don’t prevent parents from getting an outside evaluation.

‘Be careful of what you ask for’

Other parents with a long history of filing state and federal special education complaints point to problems at the federal level. Officials often “moved slowly and allowed noncompliance to continue for too long,” said Callie Oettinger, an advocate in Virginia. There are some parents, she said, who have no problem with federal employees losing their jobs. 

“At the same time, they’re terrified because, as problematic as some staff members were, they did more than the states,” she said. “It’s a case of be careful of what you ask for.” 

It took federal officials, she said, to force Texas in 2017 to lift on the number of students receiving special education services. The limit meant that schools often denied special education services to students with autism, ADHD and epilepsy or offered cheaper accommodations. Gov. Greg Abbott blamed teachers, while educators insisted they were following the Texas Education Agency’s instructions to identify fewer students for special instruction.

“Can you imagine Texas without OSEP’s monitoring?” Oettinger asked. “Not even major investigations by the and others, which made the noncompliance public, resulted in the state making its own changes.”

‘Without any recourse’

The special education office often works hand-in-hand with the Office for Civil Rights when schools violate student rights. In fact, despite the investigations that make the news, nearly 70% of the complaints OCR handles are related to disability, said Beth Gellman-Beer, co-founder of Evergreen Education Solutions, a consulting firm, and a former regional director for OCR’s Philadelphia office.

One OCR attorney who received a layoff notice said she’s “deeply concerned” about how the potential layoffs could affect students.

“T��� mass elimination of OCR offices that have over 25,000 open cases leaves those complainants without any recourse, let alone answers as to if their case will move forward,” she said. She asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “States are not prepared to handle these concerns.”

States could also see cash flow problems if the department can’t process grant payments in a timely manner because it doesn’t have enough staff, experts said. States and districts have to spend money up front on salaries, supplies and vendor contracts and then request reimbursements from the department.

Small districts, charter schools and rural districts are often “operating payroll to payroll,” Catherine Pozniak, a consultant and former assistant state superintendent in Louisiana, said on the call with reporters. “T���y cannot afford to wait for weeks to get their reimbursements.” 

The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which administers the complex Title I program and and other grants for K-12 schools, was among those hardest hit, losing 132 employees according to an email from the Office of Management and Budget shared with The 74. 

The downsizing could affect one of the department’s top priorities: charter schools. In late September, McMahon announced she was releasing $500 million in grants for charters. But if the charter office is gutted, “who’s going to administer those grants and run grant competitions in the future?” Anderson asked. 

The proposed cuts also come as states, such as Iowa, Indiana and Alabama, seek waivers from laws related to funding, testing and accountability. In general, states don’t lean on the office for “day-to-day guidance,” said Dale Chu, an independent consultant who focuses on testing and accountability. 

But before he resigned Oct. 1, former Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters was preparing to submit a request to cancel all tests required by the Every Student Succeeds Act — a proposal that federal officials said McMahon was unlikely to approve. It’s unclear whether Superintendent Lindel Fields, his replacement, will follow through with the request. 

“If something like Oklahoma’s waiver proposal were on the table, you’d want a functioning federal partner to keep things tethered to the law,” Chu said. He also feels bad for Kirsten Baesler, confirmed last week as the new head of elementary and secondary education. She’s potentially “walking into an office that’s been hollowed out, and she’ll need to rebuild trust and capacity once the lights come back on.”

‘Meaningful work’

After McMahon let over 1,300 people go in March, some career employees knew they were vulnerable. Andrea Falken has spent 15 years working in the Office of Communications and Outreach, where one of her signature accomplishments was running the department’s , which recognized schools for saving energy and encouraging sustainability. 

“It pleased a lot of people across the country, in red and blue states alike,” she said. “We received scores of notes and even several awards for this work.” 

With an administration that plans to to improve air quality and reduce pollution, the department . Falken was reassigned to handle public records requests and draft a weekly newsletter. The office has dropped from about 80 employees to a skeleton crew mostly working on social media, videos, and the department’s website, she said. 

“T���y were not effectively utilizing my 20-plus years of professional experience, graduate degrees or multiple languages,” she said. “T���y were not using us for meaningful work. They did not want us to do anything, really.”

As the department undertakes this effort, especially in light of deep cuts to IES and that took place earlier this year, it’s important to recognize and protect what’s working in our federal education research and development system, as well as what needs improvement. If department leaders are serious about revisiting their approach to IES, there are concrete steps they can take to protect and strengthen education research and development, making it even more effective and efficient in the long run.

, a coalition of leading education research and development organizations across the country, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon outlining actionable recommendations for the administration. These recommendations fall into three categories: prioritizing research that addresses pressing state and local needs; maximizing impact through coordination, scale, and infrastructure; and helping states and districts turn their knowledge into operational success through improved communication and support.

Education researchers, policymakers and educators should be part of the process of identifying the most urgent needs or research questions. To accomplish that, the department should establish learning agendas, which can help identify and align those priorities.

Once those needs are identified, the administration can create faster research tracks for high-need topics, using IES’s current grant program as a model for success. It can also streamline study approvals by decentralizing IES’s review processes and accelerating launch and response timelines. And it should lean on rapid-cycle tools like the School PULSE survey to deliver real-time data to states and districts.

To streamline the collection and use of data relevant to school communities across the country, the administration can pursue modernizations like the innovative 2024 creation of EDPass, which transformed the way states submit federal reports to EDfacts, reduced the burden of those submitting data and enabled faster public reporting. Programs like the Regional Education Laboratories and Comprehensive Centers (CCs) were already working in close partnership with states and districts; IES can restart these programs and build on their strengths by positioning RELs to identify key, local data and evidence needs, and using CCs to support the implementation of evidence-based policies and practices.

Building on ongoing efforts, the administration can act now to solve the “last mile” challenge: ensuring valuable data and evidence-based policies and programs make it into classrooms in ways that are clear and actionable. Harnessing new technologies such as artificial intelligence and social media, along with and approaches such as professional networks and coaching structures in school districts, can help reach teachers frequently and repeatedly to provide up-to-date, trustworthy information on what works, where and why.

The administration can require every applicable IES-funded research study on policy and practice to include a practitioner-facing implementation resource, and create a framework for recognizing states, districts, and even individual educators that are using research and evidence-based policy effectively to improve student achievement.����

At its best, the federal education research and development system generates valuable evidence on what works, supports states and districts in addressing their unique needs, collects and analyzes vital national data, and represents a critical cross-country link to share valuable insights and best practices across states and regions.

The recommendations outlined above – informed by researchers and educators on the front lines of supporting our nation’s students and families – will help ensure that every part of the system is more responsive to the needs of states and districts and can transform isolated success stories into scalable, sustained improvement. 

Our collective goal should be to build a federal education research and development system that is efficient, effective, and accountable. The administration can make progress toward that goal by working collaboratively with the researchers and educators, and by focusing on strategic updates to IES that will pave the way for stronger research and development now and, ultimately, better outcomes for students, educators and families across the country. 

Parking permits. Desk space. Access cards.

, the U.S. Department of Education instead has spent weeks ostensibly working on the logistics. Meanwhile, the Trump administration wants the U.S. Supreme Court to decide they don’t have to restore those jobs after all.

The legal argument over the job status of Education Department workers is testing the extent to which President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon can reshape the federal bureaucracy without congressional approval.

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The employees, meanwhile, remain in limbo, getting paid for jobs they aren’t allowed to perform.

An analysis done by the union representing Education Department employees estimates the government is spending about $7 million a month for workers not to work. That figure does not include supervisors who are not part of the American Federation of Government Employee Local 252.

“It is terribly inefficient,” said Brittany Coleman, chief steward for AFGE Local 252 and an attorney in the Office for Civil Rights. “T��� American people are not getting what they need because we can’t do our jobs.”

in March, a week after she was confirmed by the Senate, and described them as a first step toward dismantling the Education Department. A few days later, directing McMahon to do everything in her legal authority to shut down the department.

The Somerville and Easthampton school districts in Massachusetts, along with the American Federation of Teachers, other education groups, sued McMahon over the cuts. They argued the layoffs were so extensive that the Education Department would not be able to perform its duties under the law.

The , , and the particularly hard. These agencies are responsible for federally mandated work within the Education Department. By law, only Congress can get rid of the Education Department.

U.S. District Court Judge Myong Joun agreed, issuing a sweeping preliminary injunction in May that ordered the Education Department to bring laid off employees back to work and blocked any further effort to dismantle or substantively restructure the department.

The Trump administration sought a stay of that order, and the case is on the emergency docket of the Supreme Court, where a decision could come any day.

In the , Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the harms the various plaintiffs had described were largely hypothetical, that they had not shown the department wasn’t fulfilling its duties, and that they didn’t have standing to sue because layoffs primarily affect department employees, not states, school districts, and education organizations.

Sauer further argued that the injunction violates the separation of powers, putting the judicial branch in charge of employment decisions that are the purview of the executive branch.

“T��� injunction rests on the untenable assumption that every terminated employee is necessary to perform the Department of Education’s statutory functions,” Sauer wrote in a court filing. “That injunction effectively appoints the district court to a Cabinet role and bars the Executive Branch from terminating anyone.”

The Supreme Court, with a conservative 6-3 majority, has been friendlier to the administration’s arguments than lower court judges. Already the court has allowed to through the courts. And it has .

The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last week, Joun issued a telling the Education Department that it must reinstate employees in the Office for Civil Rights. The Victims Rights Law Center and other groups had described thousands of cases left in limbo, with children suffering severe bullying or unable to safely return to school.

Meanwhile, the Education Department continues to file weekly updates with Joun about the complexities of reinstating the laid-off employees. , Chief of Staff Rachel Oglesby said an “ad hoc committee of senior leadership” is meeting weekly to figure out where employees might park and where they should report to work.

Since the layoffs, the department has closed regional offices, consolidated offices in three Washington, D.C. buildings into one, reduced its contracts for parking space, and discontinued an interoffice shuttle.

In the , Oglesby said the department is working on a “reintegration plan.”

Coleman said she finds these updates “laughable.”

“If you are really willing to do what the court is telling you to do, then your working group would have figured out a way to get us our laptops,” she said.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Judge Myong J. Joun of the District Court in Boston in the preliminary injunction that the Trump administration had sought to “effectively dismantle” the Education Department without congressional approval and prevented the federal government from carrying out programs mandated by law. 

Trump administration officials have claimed the March layoffs of more than 1,300 federal education workers were designed to increase government efficiency and were separate from efforts to eliminate the agency outright, claims that Joun deemed “plainly not true.” 

“Defendants fail to cite to a single case that holds that the Secretary’s authority is so broad that she can unilaterally dismantle a department by firing nearly the entire staff, or that her discretion permits her to make a ‘shell’ department,” Joun, a Biden appointee, wrote. 

Combined with early retirements and buyouts offered by the administration, the layoffs left the Education Department with about half as many employees as it had when Trump took office in January. That same month, Trump signed an executive order calling on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”

The Trump administration has acknowledged it cannot eliminate the 45-year-old department — long a goal of conservatives — without congressional approval despite layoffs that have left numerous offices unstaffed. Yet there is “no evidence” the Trump administration is working with Congress to achieve its goal or that the layoffs have made the agency more efficient, Joun wrote. “Rather, the record is replete with evidence of the opposite.” 

“A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all,” he said. “This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself.”

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Education Department said it plans to appeal. 

In a statement, Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann blasted the court order and called Joun “a far-left Judge” who overstepped his authority and the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit to halt the layoffs — including two Massachusetts school districts and the American Federation of Teachers — ”biased.” Also suing to stop the layoffs is 21 Democratic state attorneys general. 

“President Trump and the Senate-confirmed Secretary of Education clearly have the authority to make decisions about agency reorganization efforts, not an unelected Judge with a political axe to grind,” Biedermann said. “This ruling is not in the best interest of American students or families. We will immediately challenge this on an emergency basis.”

Cutting the federal education workforce in half — from 4,133 to 2,183 — undermines its ability to distribute special education funding to schools, protect students’ civil rights and provide financial aid for college students, plaintiffs allege. They include the elimination of all Office of General Counsel attorneys, who specialize in K-12 grants related to special education, and most lawyers focused on student privacy issues. Plaintiffs also allege the cuts hampered the agency’s ability to manage a federal student loan program that provides financial assistance to nearly 13 million students across about 6,100 colleges and universities. 

The Office for Civil Rights was among those hardest hit by layoffs, with seven of its 12 regional offices shut down entirely. The move has left thousands of pending civil rights cases — including those that allege racial discrimination and sexual misconduct — in limbo. 

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the temporary injunction the “first step to reverse this war on knowledge.” Yet the damage is already being felt in schools, said Jessica Tang, president of the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts. 

“T��� White House is not above the law, and we will never stop fighting on behalf of our students and our public schools and the protections, services and resources they need to thrive,” Tang said in a media release.

In interviews with The 74 Thursday, laid-off Education Department staffers reacted with cautious optimism. It remained unclear if, or when, they might return to their old jobs — or if they even want to go back. 

Keith McNamara, a laid-off Education Department data governance specialist, said he’s “tempering my enthusiasm a bit” to see if Joun’s order is overturned on appeal. But he said he was “ a lot more hopeful than I was yesterday” about the potential for the department to return to the way it operated prior to the cuts. 

For federal workers, he said the challenges have been ongoing and monumental, saying the last few months without work have “been very chaotic.” 

“It’s been very difficult to look for other work because tens of thousands of us are all pouring into the job market at the same time,” he told The 74. “It’s been very stressful.” 

Rachel Gittleman, who worked as a policy analyst in the financial aid office before getting terminated, called the court order on Thursday “a really broad rebuke on the administration’s attempt to shut down this critically important department.” 

“But in many ways, the damage has already been done” as fired employees begin to find new jobs, Gittleman said, and Education Department leadership works to push people out.  

McNamara said it was unclear Thursday whether the department would order fired employees back to work. Nearly his entire team was eliminated, he said, so it was uncertain what work he might do if he returned to the job. Asked if he was interested in doing so, he responded “I’d have to really think about that.”

“Quite frankly, I don’t think this administration is taking the job that the Education Department is supposed to be doing very seriously,” he said. “I’m not sure I’d want to work for an agency that — from the very top — is hostile to the work that the department does.”

Yet in their quest to close the department, President Donald Trump and U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon have said they plan to move special education administration to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and push as much overall responsibility for education as possible to the states. 

Backers of this shift advocate allowing states and districts to use the money as they see fit. “Most IDEA funding should be converted into a no-strings formula block grant targeted at students with disabilities and distributed directly to local education agencies,” the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 recommends. 

One of the red state education leaders pushing to be freed of spending rules, Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters has even said he wants to use IDEA to fund vouchers for children with disabilities to attend private schools.

Families who use vouchers for private school choice lose IDEA protections for their children. 

Like many of the new administration’s edicts, critics say, much of what has been proposed is likely illegal. And yet, by gutting the agency responsible for enforcing special education laws, Trump and McMahon may get their way. 

“Part of the really challenging moment we are in is on one hand reminding everybody of what’s in the law and what should happen, and then recognizing that we’re living in extrajudicial times where saying, ‘Well it’s in the law, so that can’t happen’ clearly isn’t enough,” says Jennifer Coco, interim executive director of the Center for Learner Equity, which advocates for high-quality special education. “T���re’s been a pretty broad pronouncement that this administration is thinking about moving [special education] anyway.”

Concerns about those plans fall into two broad areas.

First, moving responsibility for students with disabilities to HHS means taking oversight away from experts in specialized instruction and handing it to an agency ill-equipped to administer non-medical programs. With its own mass firings under the direction of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who continues to promote a disproven link between vaccines and autism — HHS will be hard-pressed to adequately attend to children’s health, much less their education, say disability advocates.

Second, advocates predict that states and districts, freed of oversight and rules about spending IDEA dollars, will consign increasing numbers of disabled students to segregated special education classrooms. This raises fears of a reversal of decades-long efforts to integrate students with disabilities with their general-education peers whenever possible and returning to the pre-IDEA norm of isolation and institutionalization. 

It could even mean “making some determinations that we just don’t think [some kids are] capable of learning,” says Coco. “Even if the law says you can’t do that, we have enough examples in our history where decisionmakers have a tendency to go back to that in a way that’s really harmful to kids.” 

Currently, the Education Department oversees the distribution of about 10% of school funding nationwide. By law, most of that money goes to states to pay for specific services. Title I funds help offset the cost of educating children from low-income families, for example, while other grants pay for instruction for English learners and teacher training. 

It is unclear whether McMahon to deviate from requiring funds to be spent according to established guidelines. The legal guardrails on IDEA funds may be the toughest to skirt. If the secretary ultimately loosens the rules, advocates fear state and local officials will be quick to segregate many more special education students from their general-education peers. 

Before the department’s creation in 1979, children with disabilities were the purview of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, says Weade James, senior director for K-12 education policy at the liberal Center for American Progress. 

They were typically denied the opportunity to learn in regular classrooms — and often could not attend school at all. No one monitored the quality of instruction. 

“We’ve been down this road before,” says James. “When you leave this up to the states, those things go unchecked. Reverting back to that reverts back to segregation.”

Today, two-thirds of special education students spend 60% or more of their school day in classrooms with their non-disabled peers where, as the law intended, they are most likely to receive grade-level instruction. Keeping them in what IDEA terms this “least restrictive environment” often requires parental advocacy and legal oversight. 

Congress has never funded special education anywhere near the level it promised when it passed IDEA, leaving states to come up with the lion’s share of the money. Most school systems still have to divert general education dollars to make up shortfalls. 

Because of this — and despite federal requirements that they not reduce special education spending, except in narrow circumstances — states and districts are frequently on the lookout for ways to cut costs. 

One example: In 2016, a Houston Chronicle found that Texas education officials had for years threatened to sanction districts that identified more than 8.5% of their students as having disabilities that merited an individualized education program, the legal document spelling out how their needs would be met. Nationwide, some 15% qualify for services. 

Advocates complained about the number of children — including students who are blind, deaf, hearing-impaired or medically fragile — going unserved. But until the Chronicle’s investigation, the department failed to intervene. In recent weeks, the division that investigates complaints when students’ rights are violated has been . 

Also stripped to bare-bones staffing were the parts of the agency dedicated to researching strategies for educating disabled students and training their teachers. This, too, is likely to fuel segregation because poorly equipped educators often resort to sending a challenged student out of general education. 

“It is easier for the adults involved to remove children with disabilities when they can’t or won’t support those kids,” says Carrie Gillispie, senior policy analyst at the think tank New America. “If the adults in the room don’t have the resources they need, it’s easier to remove the child.”

Other endangered services include Medicaid reimbursement for in-school therapies and health care for children who are medically fragile or have chronic conditions; early childhood services that diagnose youngsters at ages when interventions are likely to have the most profound impact; and vocational programs to help older students become independent and enter the workforce.

Unable to get local or state officials to enforce their kids’ rights, and effectively shut out of the department’s complaints process, affluent parents will increasingly turn to the courts, Gillispie predicts. 

“But for the families with fewer means and less social capital, it’s going to be especially hard,” she says. “Every month is a big time period for kids. A little kid waiting a month or two for education, accessible education, can mean a big difference for really young kids.” 

The U.S. Department of Education is giving state education agencies 10 days to certify that their schools do not engage in any practices that the administration believes illegally promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In a letter sent Thursday, the Education Department told state schools chiefs that they must that their schools are in compliance with its controversial interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and with the .

Those that do not sign will not receive any federal funding, officials said. Federal funding represents about 10% of all K-12 funding nationwide but makes up a larger share of local budgets in high-poverty districts.

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The threat comes as many school districts are preparing their budgets for the next school year.

“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal antidiscrimination requirements.

“Unfortunately, we have seen too many schools flout or outright violate these obligations, including by using DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another based on identity characteristics in clear violation of Title VI.”

The Students for Fair Admissions decision barred the use of racial considerations in college admissions but . But that the decision meant any consideration of race or of proxies for race in educational settings would violate civil rights law.

The Trump administration has said that would extend to considering race as a factor in school admissions, hiring or promoting staff, awarding students scholarships or prizes, providing students with administrative support, and deciding how students should be sanctioned or disciplined.

For example, dropping the use of test scores as an admissions criteria for a selective program with the hopes of increasing racial diversity or holding a separate graduation ceremony to recognize students of a particular ethnic group could violate the law.

Many legal experts believe the administration’s interpretation is incorrect and goes much further than the Supreme Court did.

The generated significant confusion among school and district leaders and is . At the same time, conservative groups have adopted its argument to challenge initiatives that aim to address long-standing disparities, such as .

The demand that state education agencies certify compliance represents the latest attempt by the Trump administration to change local practices without engaging in lengthy investigations of individual complaints. State education departments would be responsible for ensuring school districts and charter schools comply.

The administration has slashed staff in the Office for Civil Rights as part of a larger downsizing of the Education Department.

Historically, even when school districts were found to be in violation of the law, the federal government has worked with them on resolution agreements .

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

But while some of the cuts are, in his words, “dumb,” and show a lack of experience among the cost-cutters, Schneider has also pushed against many critics’ assertions that the Trump administration will effectively destroy the agency. In his view, the cuts offer an opportunity “to clean out the attic” of old, dusty policies and revitalize essential research functions. Those include the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which he maintains has lost its way and grown prohibitively expensive while in some cases duplicating the work of independent researchers.

A conservative who has held top roles in both of the last two Republican administrations, as well as the most recent Democratic one, he’s the ultimate education insider — Schneider’s conversations often invoke an alphabet soup of government agencies, contractors and think tanks. Yet he’s unusually candid about his time in government, especially now that he is no longer there.

A political scientist by training, Schneider has spent nearly two decades in education research. He served three years as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics under President George W. Bush, then spent a decade as a vice president at the non-profit American Institutes for Research. He returned to government in 2018, appointed by President Trump to lead the Institute of Education Sciences, and stayed on until 2024 under President Biden.

Through it all, he has remained an independent voice even while in office, telling The 74 in 2023, for instance, that the reason Biden hadn’t fired him along with other Trump appointees was that education research wasn’t considered important enough for the president to bother. 

Over the course of six years at IES, he tried — mostly unsuccessfully, he admits — to reform the department into “a modern science and statistics agency.” He’s honest about his limitations, saying he “tried really hard to modernize the place” without much success. While Musk and his cost-cutters last month took a chainsaw to IES, he observes, when he led it, “I didn’t even have a scalpel. I had a dull butter knife.”

While many education advocates are decrying �հ��ܳ���’s bid to eliminate the Education Department, Schneider has said carefully breaking it up could actually produce “a more efficient, dynamic and responsive school system — all things the Department of Education has been hard-pressed to do.”

Schneider sat down for a wide-ranging conversation last week with The 74’s Greg Toppo. They discussed the difficulties of reforming what he considers a hidebound agency, the opportunities of starting over and what the future might hold for NAEP, also known as the Nation’s Report Card. 

Now a non-resident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, he is cagey when pressed about returning to IES in a second Trump term. Schneider notes that the deep cuts have left no actual agency to run. “Who wants to go in there and head a 20-person unit?” But leading a revamped IES, he admits, would present “a wonderful challenge.”

At the end of the day, though, he says it remains an open question whether the next step in the Trump administration’s plans is rebuilding or neglect.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: I wanted to start with something you said about Musk’s crew a couple of weeks ago — namely that given your work to reform IES, you were “a little envious” they could “do it all in one day.” Let’s drill down. Is that what you had in mind when you were there? Or did this go further?

Schneider: [Laughs.] Let me try to figure out the best way of putting this. The issue, of course, is that IES was a 23-year-old institution. A lot of stuff got locked in. None of this is surprising: Institutions get locked down and they keep doing the same thing over and over again. I tried hard to change things. It was almost impossible. I tried to get Congress to create ARPA Ed — [National Center for Advanced Development in Education, an agency to develop and scale innovative, cutting-edge practices and tools]. A lot of people worked really hard, but we were never able to get it through Congress.

Whether Congress will ever do anything is a different question. But the fact of the matter is that even though people were in favor of it and we had a lot of political support, we still couldn’t get it across the finish line. Well, now the National Center for Education Research doesn’t exist anymore. There’s one person left there. So whether or not this is naive, we don’t need NCADE anymore. We should rebuild NCER to look like ARPA Ed. We don’t need any legislation for that, because it’s in the purview of the director to do that. That’s an amazing opportunity. We can just create a modern research funding organization with no need for congressional action.

My colleague Kevin Mahnken recently talked to Doug Harris from Tulane. He said IES is “being knocked over by these cuts.” I think beneath a lot of this is people like Doug worried that this administration is simply anti-science. It sounds like you are saying the opposite. Should this give people like Doug a little hope?

As of right now, we have no indication except every once in a while some words bubble out: “Oh, we are going to rebuild IES. We are looking for a future direction for IES.” But there is no concrete plan. So the proof is going to happen in the next several months. If the department says, “Yes, we are redoing NCER, we are redoing NCES,” which are the two biggest units that are most in need of repair, and they announce plans to rebuild them in a modern way, then we’re fine. But if nothing ever happens and we end up with three people at NCES and one person at NCER, we’ve got a problem.

You have no sense one way or another?

You probably hear the same things I do. I have no concrete information about any plans to rebuild. I hear rumors. But until concrete plans are announced and actions are undertaken, then we should maintain a healthy skepticism. That said, I still believe that if this administration wants to modernize IES, they have an opportunity that no one’s ever had before — since 2002.

Since they created it.

Congress created IES in 2002, and it was a brand new, innovative organization that radically changed the way education research was done. Well, 23 years later, that opportunity repeats itself. So my hope, and maybe this is naive, is that we grab that opportunity. We know a lot more about education research. We know a lot more about modern statistical data collections — and we learned a lot from NCES. For example, the lack of timeliness hurt them endlessly. So now it’s like an open field. Let’s build a better edifice now than what we had a year ago.

Let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of this vision. One of the first shocks to the system we got was in February when DOGE canceled all those federal contracts. And one of the hardest hit was AIR, where you spent 10 years. I wonder to what extent your views have been shaped by being an insider there. Is this a sector that needs a shock to the system?

There are at least two parts of that question. So there’s the question of the quality of the work. AIR does good work. I don’t think there’s any question. The big contract houses are capable of doing quite good work. However, people are really pissed off about the overhead rate [also known as indirect costs covering expenses] that these contract houses and universities charge. The overhead rate is just too high. When I was at IES after the pandemic, AIR got rid of their building on Thomas Jefferson St. [in affluent Georgetown] — a huge, expensive building. Many, many people ended up working at home, and the rest went with much less — and much cheaper — office space.

So after AIR shed that big office space, I called up [Contracts and Acquisition Management], the contracts management people in the department, and I said, “You know, the overhead is based on many factors, but office space and parking are major components. They’ve reduced the cost of their offices — they didn’t get rid of them, but they downsized and went to cheaper places. So let’s renegotiate their overhead rate.” [He imitates CAM officers]: “No, no, no, no, no, no.” I couldn’t get CAM to even consider reducing the overhead rate to reflect the lower cost.

Just to be clear: You couldn’t get the department to lower the cost?

The department had to reopen the negotiations. And they would not. I’m not sure what the right word is. It’s laziness, corruption. This was wrong. Why were we paying such high overhead rates when their costs went down? And you know as well as I do that many, many, many organizations got rid of office space and reduced their costs. So why wasn’t CAM renegotiating overhead rates? I never was able to get a good answer. 

But that’s a department problem, not an AIR or Mathematica problem.

Yes and no. Clearly the department had within its authority to reopen those negotiations. But the problem, of course, is that the agencies end up getting captured by the people they’re supposed to regulate, the people they’re supposed to monitor. [Test developer] ETS and NAEP are an even clearer example: How much money went to ETS to do things that they weren’t capable of doing? 

Such as?

Such as building the platform for NAEP. The software. This is not firsthand, so it could be hearsay, but the people from DOGE looked at the platform that ETS had built for NAEP, and they just said, “What is this? This is not the way modern software is built.” And I believe that’s because we used ETS, which is a testing company, not a tech company, to build the platform. And again, that has to do with the overly close relationship between NCES and ETS.

This is not just an Ed and contractor issue. We know this exists in other places besides education: the close relationship between the contractors and the agencies that are supposed to be supervising them. This is a well-known problem. The companies capture the government agency. [Editors Note: Asked to respond to Schneider’s comments, Christine Betaneli, an associate vice president at ETS, released the following statement Tuesday: “ETS delivers nearly 50 million tests every year across the US and around the world on robust technology platforms. We have consistently delivered innovations on NAEP suited to the specific requests of NCES. We’re incredibly proud of the unmatched quality we have provided to the American people in supporting the Nation’s Report Card. We will continue to innovate on behalf of America’s teachers, parents and children who rely on this critical data to improve access to quality education nationwide.”]

How do you prevent that from happening in the next iteration of this department? Is it just by bringing in totally new people? Is it by changing the contours of the contracts? Is it by doing things totally differently?

There are a couple of things. First of all, there’s a serious cultural issue. That’s clear. I will tell you another story, and this will give you some more depth to how bad this can be. When I first showed up at IES, we brought in [consulting firm] McKinsey & Co. to do an analysis of how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. They went around and interviewed people — staffers, program officers — to try to get some idea of what was going on. And remember, this is an outside consulting company we hired. They interviewed one of the program officers who said to this outside consultant, “I’m never giving up this contract. You will have to pry it out of my dead hands.” I mean, that’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s also illegal. This is a long-term project officer who admitted to an outside person that they had been totally captured, totally in bed with the contract shop. That a veteran project officer would say this to an outside consultant says there’s something really, really wrong.

So the culture is a problem. Is the scope of what the department does a problem as well? 

Yeah. 

Is a breakup necessary to change the culture?

Do we need to break up IES and move all these pieces around? If the goal is to shrink the department, or make the department go away, then we have to find homes for these activities. But when I wrote that last summer, I was not envisioning the disappearance of 90% of the workforce.

I believe if we don’t get congressional approval to end the department, it’s going to be around. But I keep thinking about both NCES and NCER, the two largest units, and there’s now an open field. I’ve always had problems with NCES. As a major federal statistical agency, like many other federal statistical agencies, they just kept falling further and further behind. But we can now imagine, we can actually execute, rebuilding NCES as a modern, lean and mean statistical agency.

For example, the state longitudinal data systems. I’ve written about a different vision of how to build that. The [Trial Urban District Assessments, NAEP tests given in 27 urban school systems] are incredibly expensive. Nobody can tell me how much they cost. I’ve asked many, many times how much they are, and the fact of the matter is, we don’t need them anymore, because we have other ways of getting estimates for these large cities. I’m talking about Tom Kane and Sean Reardon [who have developed an detailing achievement nationwide]. They compute the exact same statistics that TUDA does.

So that actually leads me to my next question: What is your vision for something like NAEP? Can a lot of it go away?

For me, the most important thing about NAEP is the state-by-state comparisons. They’re important because governors hold the keys to so much education reform, and they care about the comparisons. When NAEP came out several months ago, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, they all cared about these things. Virginia had a 50-minute release event with the governor, [Virginia Education Secretary] Aimee Guidera and the Superintendent of Schools [Lisa Coons]. That’s three of the heaviest hitters in the world of education, all lined up, talking about the importance of the state-by-state comparisons and what they were doing to address Virginia’s on NAEP. 

That alone is an amazing demonstration of the power of the state-by-state comparisons. Do we need a $185 million-a-year NAEP to generate the trend line and the state-by-state comparisons? 

I’ll give you another example: There are at least three different sub-domains in NAEP math. I’ve never seen anybody talk about those sub-scores. How much does that cost? Why do we keep doing it? We just need to bring some sanity to what we’ve built over 50 years that have grown up over time, the cost of those things, the backwardness of many of those things, and say, “Hey, we don’t have to keep doing this.” And part of the reason we don’t have to keep doing this — I mean, it’s a sad thing to say — is because the people in NCES who were committed to this are gone. 

I don’t want to leave that point without addressing institutional memory and knowledge. A lot of the people who are gone know how these things work. Getting rid of those people might have changed the culture, but it also might have hollowed out the agency’s ability to get the next NAEP report out. Does that keep you up at night? 

Clearly, that’s the horns of a dilemma. But where is the time, where’s the energy, where are the people to rethink this stuff? Part of the problem was that there was not sufficient rethinking. The machine worked. It got out on time. Many problems were solved by just raising more money. I attended NAGB [National Assessment Governing Board] meetings for 10 years. Every time there was a budget presentation, inevitably, the budget was in the red. And so then we have to cut this, and we have to cut that. And it was never like, “What is it that we need to preserve, instead of going to Congress and asking for another $30 million and getting $10 million?” That wasn’t the thought process.

So I went to OMB [the Office of Management and Budget], and asked them to take the appropriation that Congress gave for NAEP and put 10% aside in a separate fund for R&D. I asked Congress to do this, and then OMB, because there was no commitment by the leadership of NCES and NAEP to spend that kind of money on R&D. Instead, it was always, “We need this money for the operations. We need money to do this other task.” As a result, NAEP lost its leading edge. The demands of running the operation are real. But if you never stop to think about what you’re doing, then you’re going to end up behind.

But to many, the way these agencies were trimmed doesn’t seem any smarter. There was a lot of cutting with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel. My sense is that’s going to require a great deal of work just to bring back basic functions. Am I right?

The years that I was at IES, I didn’t even have a scalpel. I had a dull butter knife. There are so many quotes about this: “Breaking things is easy, rebuilding things is hard.” From Hamilton: “Winning is easy, governing is hard.” All of that is true. And it’s just so much easier to just say, “No, no, no, no, no,” than to start rebuilding. Mancur Olson, a brilliant economist, wrote a book called . He had his finger right on the pulse. Over time, what happens is that you start accumulating all these lobbyists and all these interest groups and all this stasis, and it just builds up and builds up and nothing can get done, because you end up with this incredible superstructure of groups and people who are totally vested in the status quo. And he says, every once in a while, you just need to just blow the shit up and rebuild.

There’s a lot of concern about the rebuilding. How do you calm people’s fears that there is no rebuilding coming?

Look, there’s nothing we can do right now except wait and lobby Congress and the department that the rebuild is important. And I hope they know that the rebuild is important. Again, you can just give things away: Give NCES to BLS [the Bureau of Labor and Statistics] etc., but some of that stuff is going to require congressional action. Good luck on that. In some ways, again, we have an open field. Let’s take the opportunity to build that back in a much more modern, efficient way.

It seems like a lot of people, especially on the right, are talking in terms of the department reaching its sell-by date. But if you can change the culture and remove the barnacles, or whatever you want to call them, what’s the point of breaking it up?

As they say, that’s above my pay grade. [Laughs.] I’m writing a whole series of papers about what can be done and I think they’re all reasonable and in the realm of the possible. I have not had any contact with anybody in the department about any of my visions or plans. But there are ways to rebuild this so it looks like a modern science and statistics agency.

Would you like to lead it at some point?

If there’s anything there. [Laughs.] There’s nothing there. What do we have, 20 people left in that whole organization? NAGB is moving into [the Lyndon Baines Johnson Building, the department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.] because it’s pretty much empty. And I assume IES will also end up moving into LBJ, but the fact of the matter is all of these places are ghost towns now.

Before the pandemic, we were trying to argue, incredibly, about creating 10 more desks for the growth of IES. And then, of course, after the pandemic, there was nobody left. Nobody came back to the office. The place was pretty much empty already. And then the executive order had everybody coming back to the office — and then everybody got fired. I don’t know what happened in between “You must be back in the office five days a week,” and “By the way, you’re fired.” I don’t know what it was like. I know from friends it was not a fun place to be.

If I’m reading between the lines correctly here, it sounds like you’d like to lead IES, but you’d like someone to rebuild it first.

First of all, I’m not answering that question. Many people have asked me if I would go back. But I have a lovely life. I live an eight-minute walk from AEI. AEI is a very generous organization. They’ve never said no to any reasonable request I’ve had, so it’s extremely pleasant, extremely easy. But I spent six years at IES. I tried really hard to modernize the place. For someone who wants to create the next version of IES, there are incredible challenges, but the rewards of doing it would be amazing. But they’ve already eviscerated the unit. Who wants to go in there and head a 20-person unit? But if there is a taste to rebuild IES to look like a modern organization, that’s a wonderful challenge. 

Could what you’re describing just as easily be done privately?

A lot of people are talking about that: How can philanthropy stand up and take over the role that IES used to have? Even the biggest foundations don’t have the kind of money IES had. IES spent over $100 million a year supporting education research, just from NCER. There’s no foundation that has that kind of money, and I’m not even sure if there’s a coalition of foundations that could come up with anywhere near that kind of money for research.

So there’s an indispensable role for research funded by IES or the Department of Education or some part of the federal government. But the return on that investment was not sufficient. I don’t know if part of the suspicion of IES was just a gut-level reaction to “Too big, too big, too big,” and how much of it was, “Hey, we have spent all these billions of dollars over the last 20 years and what have we got to show? We have declining NAEP scores. We don’t have any evidence of increasing achievement, etc, etc.” I’m not sure if the antagonism towards education research was because it wasn’t working or because it’s just that we were anti-science. I truly don’t know.

Years ago, we looked at how many math interventions have any evidence of success. It turned out to be about 15%. This was a very depressing number, until you start looking around at what the success rate is in any science: 10% of clinical trials work, 90% fail. And then of course, we’re learning that even among the 10% that work, there’s an incredible amount of dishonesty, lying, cheating. The “replication crisis” — we’ve glommed onto that term — says there’s a lot of stuff going on in the sciences that are not kosher. So at one level, the antipathy towards the Department of Education is, “This is not a function that the federal government should be involved in. This is all state and local.” O.K., I got that, and I believe a lot of that is true. But even in the most extreme form of federalism, there is a role for government support of research. There is a government role for statistics. And the question then is: How do we focus that to help states and local governments, parents, teachers, students achieve more? A lot of what happened was that that tight focal point just disappeared.  

If I’m translating what you’re saying correctly, you don’t know how we got to this point in terms of the mechanisms of the cuts, and you don’t know what people were thinking. But in a way, you’re saying it’s not really important, because we needed to get this done.

We needed to get this done. A lot of what was done was incredibly important and was needed. There’s no question about it. But we’re going to come back to the same theme over and over again: For six years I had a butter knife, and then these guys show up in a day with a chainsaw and they cleared out all the detritus and all the underbrush. But what do we do now? That’s what matters.

As , the department told 41 states and the District of Columbia they had another year to spend down the rest of the $122 billion for schools awarded in the 2021 American Rescue Plan. Among the biggest potential losers from McMahon’s move are Texas and Pennsylvania, which have well over $200 million in unspent funds, according to a department spreadsheet shared by a source close to the department. The source asked not to be named to protect former staff members from retaliation. Several more states, including Ohio, New York and Tennessee, have over $100 million left over.

In a letter to state chiefs, Education Secretary Linda McMahon called it “unreasonable” for them to rely on those earlier decisions. She said she might reconsider if states can make a stronger case for how their projects continue to address COVID’s impact.

“We’ve seen a lot of receipts and reimbursement requests coming in that just aren’t aligned with what students need in this moment,” a senior department official told The 74. The official asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about the department’s decision. The administration wants to “make sure that funds are still being spent to fix student learning loss.”

The official cited a $1 million window replacement and an order of “glow balls” as examples, but declined to name the district that ordered the balls and offered no additional information on their price or how schools planned to use them. 

The department, however, will pay any invoices that were submitted before Friday at 5 p.m. Most of those are tied to extensions from the second COVID relief package, which included $58 billion in education spending, the official said. The deadline to spend those funds was Monday. 

In total, Congress approved about $200 billion in school relief funds. While states and districts spent the vast majority — — by the end of January, they asked for more time to deal with supply chain delays, labor shortages and the fact that student performance has largely not recovered from the pandemic. McMahon’s action, some experts say, should not have come as a complete shock given by many Republicans that districts failed to make the most of the unprecedented infusion of money. 

But the action leaves states and districts in the lurch, having spent millions of dollars of their own funds and signed contracts with vendors tied to the promise of reimbursement from the education department. 

Some leaders are pleading with McMahon to reconsider.

“This abrupt change in course will slow efforts and, in many cases, grind them to a halt,” Maryland state Superintendent Carey Wright said in a statement. Her state risks losing over $400 million in funding for K-12 schools. The funds, she said, are paying for science of reading materials, teacher training and a variety of facility upgrades. “State and local budgets will be impacted. Maryland students deserve for the federal government to uphold its agreements.” 

McMahon said the extensions offered by both the Biden and Trump administrations were merely “a matter of administrative grace,” and that the department has the authority to hold states to the original spending deadline in the law — Jan. 28. But as with other decisions the department has made to cut off funding Congress already approved, Friday’s announcement is likely to spark legal challenges.

“We are exploring all legal options at this time given the severity of this action,” Joshua Michael, president of the Maryland State Board of Education, told reporters Monday. The funding, he said, is supporting ongoing tutoring programs. “That tutor will probably not be there next week.”

‘Unpaid invoices’

Other states say the department’s decision will have an immediate impact on students. Illinois, for example, is using its remaining relief funds on transportation to school for homeless students, afterschool tutoring and technology for students with disabilities, said Jackie Matthews, spokeswoman for the Illinois State Board of Education. 

Last week, the state was still waiting on a $720,000 reimbursement from the department and had yet to submit another $8 million in expenses. 

“T��� unpaid invoices continue to stack up,” she said.

In Tennessee, education officials received an extension for nearly $131 million for expenditures like tutoring, nursing services and computers, according to state education department spokesman Brian Blackley. Staff members, he said, were preparing to submit a reimbursement request. 

The American Rescue Plan — the third and largest round of funding — also included $800 million earmarked for homeless students. Extensions on those funds are paying for summer learning programs, mental health services and “” who help homeless families with housing, food and transportation needs, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, which advocates for homeless students. 

An released just before former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona left office showed the program was effective at helping districts identify homeless students and reduce chronic absenteeism.

Canceling the extension, Duffield said, “pulls the rug out from underneath school district efforts to stabilize and support homeless children and youth.”

David DeSchryver, senior vice president at Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting firm, said states should not have been caught off guard by the department’s latest move, but emphasized that the “door is still open” for further extensions. 

“This is another invitation for state and local leaders to tell better stories about the impact of federal funding on their schools and communities,” he said. 

‘The people’s bank account’

Districts began asking the department for extensions back in 2022 when supply chain delays and escalating construction costs prohibited them from finishing projects on time.

To get reimbursed, the department required to submit funding requests describing how the expenditures related to the pandemic. The department didn’t ask for purchase orders or contracts, but told states to keep those on hand if needed later. 

The department tightened the process in February, states to submit detailed receipts for every purchase in order to get reimbursed. Then on March 11, McMahon fired all 16 staff members in the office responsible for processing payments.

By that point, state education leaders had grown impatient. On March 15, a Pennsylvania official emailed the department, saying “I’m reaching out again to find out the status of these approvals,” according to a copy of the message shared with The 74.

“It makes me incredibly angry,” said Laura Jimenez, a Biden administration appointee who led the relief payment office until January. “We very carefully administered $200 billion, and they’re completely destroying that with the last couple of billion.”

In a statement Friday, department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said it was “past time for the money to be returned to the people’s bank account” and referred to “numerous documented examples of misuse” of relief funds. She declined to offer examples.

The GOP has consistently criticized how districts used the money, focusing on expenditures that appeared removed from helping students recover lost learning, like . They argue that sharp declines in achievement and spending on what they dismiss as like LGBTQ-inclusive efforts and social-emotional learning offer evidence of misspent funds.��

Georgetown University school finance expert pointed to “eyebrow-raising spending decisions,” like contracts to family members, in a teachers lounge in Montana and six-figure salaries for district leaders in Stockton, California. 

But compared to other COVID aid, like the Paycheck Protection Program — which from theft — there’s been little evidence of actual fraud in school relief funds, Roza said. The department took steps to prevent it. In 2023, the found that the agency had taken “significant actions” to improve monitoring of the funds.��

Even so, researchers largely agree that despite many bright spots, districts missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prioritize academic recovery in the aftermath of the COVID emergency. Tutoring is one example. While most districts offered it — and still are — they didn’t always use methods backed by research, experts say.

Some districts initially demonstrated a lack of urgency and were slow to spend the money, according to Roza created to follow relief funds. Then they had to pick up the pace as deadlines approached. Many went on a hiring spree, quickly adding classroom aides, counselors and other support staff, but showed that those positions weren’t always targeted to schools that needed them most.

“You don’t want to force school systems to spend money more quickly than they are wanting to,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

shows that while the money contributed to significant recovery in math, students continue to lose ground in reading. But as a one-time school board member, he sympathizes with districts that pushed to spread funds out as long as possible. 

“That rush to get a lot of money out the door,” he said, “may have led to some of it not being spent very well.”

President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. Small Business Administration would handle the student loan portfolio for the slated-for-elimination Education Department, and that the Department of Health and Human Services would handle special education services and nutrition programs.

The announcement — which raises myriad questions over the logistics to carry out these transfers of authority — came a day after  a sweeping executive order that directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of the department to the extent she is permitted to by law.

“I do want to say that I’ve decided that the SBA, the Small Business Administration, headed by Kelly Loeffler — terrific person — will handle all of the student loan portfolio,” Trump said Friday morning.

The White House did not provide advance notice of the announcement, which Trump made at the opening of an Oval Office appearance with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The Education Department manages student loans for millions of Americans, with a portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion, according to the White House.

In his����Trump said the federal student aid program is “roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo,” adding that “although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid.”

‘Everything else’ to HHS

Meanwhile, Trump also said that the Department of Health and Human Services “will be handling special needs and all of the nutrition programs and everything else.”

It is unclear what nutrition programs Trump was referencing, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture manages  and other major nutrition programs.

One of the Education Department’s core functions includes supporting students with special needs. The department is also tasked with carrying out the federal guarantee of a free public education for children with disabilities Congress approved in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.

Trump added that the transfers will “work out very well.”

“Those two elements will be taken out of the Department of Education,” he said Friday. “And then all we have to do is get the students to get guidance from the people that love them and cherish them, including their parents, by the way, who will be totally involved in their education, along with the boards and the governors and the states.”

�հ��ܳ���’s Thursday order also directs McMahon to “return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

SBA, HHS heads welcome extra programs

Asked for clarification on the announcement, a White House spokesperson on Friday referred States Newsroom to comments from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and heads of the Small Business Administration and Health and Human Services Department.

Leavitt noted the move was consistent with �հ��ܳ���’s promise to return education policy decisions to states.

“President Trump is doing everything within his executive authority to dismantle the Department of Education and return education back to the states while safeguarding critical functions for students and families such as student loans, special needs programs, and nutrition programs,” Leavitt said. “T��� President has always said Congress has a role to play in this effort, and we expect them to help the President deliver.”

Loeffler and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said their agencies were prepared to take on the Education Department programs.

“As the government’s largest guarantor of business loans, the SBA stands ready to deploy its resources and expertise on behalf of America’s taxpayers and students,” Loeffler said.

Kennedy, on the  X, said his department was “fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs and overseeing nutrition programs that were run by @usedgov.”

The Education Department directed States Newsroom to McMahon’s , where she said the department was discussing with other federal agencies where its programs may end up, noting she had a “good conversation” with Loeffler and that the two are “going to work on the strategic plan together.” 

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com.

was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of .

For almost three hours, last month in which senators pressed her on everything from to transgender athletes. But none from either party asked her about

That’s a glaring oversight, according to some leaders working to reduce , while others say that fears about the so dominated the hearing that there was little time to question McMahon about the full spectrum of education topics. , it’s unclear how McMahon will address the , but her previous comments on gun control and the White House’s actions on the issue so far suggest to prevention advocates that this administration won’t make it a priority — potentially endangering youth, domestic violence victims and other vulnerable groups.

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“T��� No. 1 concern amongst American families is making sure we have safe classrooms,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, a nonprofit organization working to improve educational outcomes and policies for children and families. “Can we keep our children alive in America’s classrooms? The idea that we would not even ask the next U.S. secretary of education about what she plans to do to keep our classrooms safer is ridiculous.”

Rodrigues, who was in the room during the Senate confirmation hearing in February, said that President Donald �հ��ܳ���’s plans to dismantle the Department of Education make it imperative to know McMahon’s approach to school gun violence. On Tuesday, , nearly half of its staff, heightening concerns about its potential demise. Twenty-one attorneys general in Democratic-led states sued the Trump administration over the layoffs on Thursday, arguing that eliminating the staffers was “illegal and unconstitutional.”

Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and teens, based on data from the Centers for Disease for Control and Prevention, and disproportionately kills youth of color. School shootings have steadily increased over time, with recorded this year, according to the K-12 Shooting Database, which tracks gun violence incidents on campuses.

McMahon should have been asked “how she plans to be able to address these very real and very serious issues without having a U.S. Department of Education that is working with states and working with districts,” Rodrigues said.

The Department of Education did not respond by publication time to The 19th’s request for comment about McMahon’s plans on gun violence.

During her 2017 confirmation hearing, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a Trump nominee, suggested that guns might protect students from grizzly bears, leading to widespread ridicule. Last year, , or Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPO), that allow guns to be confiscated from individuals considered a threat to themselves or others.

ERPO, she wrote, “could easily be used to REMOVE Firearms from Law-Abiding Citizens. Chicago and NYC have some of the strictest ‘gun laws’ in the country and yet they also have some of the highest gun violence. Recently 9 people were killed in 24 hours in Chicago. A pregnant mom was seriously injured and her 11-year-old son who was trying to protect her was killed.”

McMahon argued that it would have been more effective to keep the convicted felon who shot the mother and son in prison than risk removing firearms from individuals without criminal records. Her views appear to align with those of the president, who on directing the attorney general to review all regulations and policies created during President Joe Biden’s administration that purportedly infringe on the public’s rights to bear arms and to devise a plan to counteract such restrictions.

“This administration has made it pretty clear that it is not looking to prioritize gun violence prevention, whether that’s in the nominees that it has put forward, including the education secretary, or the executive order on the Second Amendment that came out of the White House,” said Nina Vinik, founder and president of Project Unloaded, a Gen Z-focused gun violence prevention group. “T��� administration is looking to roll back the progress that’s been made over the last decade or more to reduce gun violence.”

Noah Lumbantobing, former director of communications for March for Our Lives (MFOL), a student-led gun violence prevention organization, said he suspects �հ��ܳ���’s administration will reverse the policies the group supports to retaliate against the Biden administration.

“It’s so clearly about vengeance and not at all about children’s safety, so that’s scary,”��said Lumbantobing, who transitioned out of MFOL on Wednesday to step into a new role in the gun safety movement. “We still don’t know what’s going to be on the chopping block, but we have no doubt that he’s going to undo a lot of the things that we spent a lot of time fighting for, and even more importantly, things that have saved lives.”

In 2024, gun violence incidents on campuses dropped to 331 from 349 the prior year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. Lumbantobing attributes the decrease in shootings to the “common-sense life-saving solutions” the Biden administration adopted. That includes an executive order Biden issued that expanded the definition of a gun dealer since some gun sellers were not only going undetected but also neglecting to perform background checks on customers.

“Now, they do have to do background checks and to act responsibly,” Lumbantobing said. “That’s going to get undone. So there’s a lot of danger here, both in undoing some of the laws and also just selectively not enforcing laws that are on the books. It’s going to kill children, and it’s just for partisan gain.”

He also has concerns about how relaxing gun restrictions will affect victims of domestic violence, a problem the Biden administration addressed, in part, through tougher background checks.

“T��� tightened loopholes for dating partners to not be able to obtain firearms and potentially harm or kill their partners,” Lumbantobing said of the federal law passed in 2022 that provides states with funding to develop red flag laws and other interventions. If the Department of Justice “chooses not to enforce the laws on the books, no one’s looking out for victims of domestic abuse,” he added.

At least 110 domestic violence-related shootings have occurred at schools from 1966 to the present, the K-12 School Shooting Database reports. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act routes resources to intervention programs to reduce gun crimes, but Lumbantobing said he isn’t sure if that will happen under the Trump administration. He does give Trump credit, however, for supporting a ban on bump stocks, gun accessories that essentially turn semi-automatic rifles into automatic weapons. In 2017, during Trump’s first term, a gunman used bump stocks to kill 60 people and wound hundreds of others at a Las Vegas music festival.

“So there’s some hope that we have that he’ll not be as constrained by GOP orthodoxy there, but it’s not looking good,” Lumbantobing said. “He moves with the wind.”

That the Trump administration has chosen not to continue the Office of Gun Violence Prevention established during Biden’s tenure has also worried gun control supporters. Although Trump did not formally eliminate the office, he has yet to hire personnel to maintain it, Lumbantobing said. The office no longer has a functioning website either.

“What’s so dangerous is that we may not notice it today or tomorrow, but in a year, two years, whenever the next mass shooting happens, I think we’ll be able to look and see it’s because Trump stopped enforcing the law,” Lumbantobing said.

The Office of Gun Violence Prevention represented a bipartisan approach to gun safety because it allowed the White House to focus on prevention in a holistic way that drew on government resources but did not require the creation of any new laws, Lumbantobing said.

“How do we fix this … within the constraints that we have? They made massive progress on that,” he said. “Getting rid of that office is a refutation of that very premise, and I think it is a real dangerous one. If you can’t agree with us that children dying is a bad thing, boy, are we in trouble.”

Several states, including California, Massachusetts, Maryland and Wisconsin, have opened — or passed legislation to open — their own offices of gun violence prevention, suggesting that states and not the federal government will take the lead on curbing gun violence prevention during the Trump administration.

“I think we’re going to continue to see a world where gun safety exists in some places and not others,” Lumbantobing said. “That’s not the America that young people deserve.”

Although he would have liked to see senators ask McMahon more questions about school shootings during her confirmation hearing, he said their focus on the potential abolishment of the Department of Education was appropriate. Getting rid of that federal agency would be an attack on gun safety because of the work it does to reduce school shootings.

“T��� Department of Education has a critical role in that work and could have a bigger role,” Lumbantobing said. “Just last year, we worked with Secretary [Miguel] Cardona to do a safe storage campaign to encourage parents. We understand that people are going to own guns. There’s nothing wrong with that if you own a legally obtained firearm. But it’s important that folks store those firearms safely because, otherwise, they show up in places we don’t want, in school shootings, in instances of domestic violence or interpersonal violence, even amongst young people or kids shooting themselves accidentally.”

While March for Our Lives collaborated with Cardona on a safe storage campaign, Lumbantobing does not anticipate engaging in such work with McMahon.

“She has expressed no interest in that,” he said. “We would love to, but she won’t. Trump has come out and said that he wants to be the very best friend possible to the NRA [National Rifle Association], so we know how she’ll approach it, whether she takes an ax to the Department of Education or just starts to unwind some of the pivotal policies that the Department of Ed pushes to keep kids safe.”

�հ��ܳ���’s Cabinet picks are not the only concern of gun violence prevention groups. They also fear the impact of the ’ recent decision that rescinded the federal restriction on 18-to-20-year-olds buying handguns. More than one mass school shooter has fallen into this age group. In 2022, an . Four years before that, a 19-year-old fatally shot 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In 2012, a 20-year-old shooter struck down 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

“For the Fifth Circuit to say that trying to address the scourge of gun violence and its impact on young people with reasonable age restriction on handgun purchases is not permissible under the Second Amendment is potentially a real setback in terms of trying to address youth gun violence in this country” Vinik said.

Without being able to rely on government intervention or cooperation, gun prevention advocates are coming up with their own solutions to address youth gun violence. Project Unloaded, for example, hopes to shift the culture around gun use by providing young people with facts and figures about the drawbacks of firearms, including increased risk of homicide, suicide and accidents.

“When we give them that information in a way that’s really engaging and accessible, they do increase their awareness of what those risks are, and it does lead them, in many cases, to shift away from a desire to use guns in the future,” Vinik said.

Since young people often learn about guns online, particularly on social media or through gaming platforms, Project Unloaded recently launched a campaign called “” that involves a collaboration with about a dozen gamers who are also content creators on Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram. The campaign, Vinik said, aims to instill this message into youth: “Play hard when you’re in a video game, but in real life, at home, in your community, you’re safer without guns.”

The White House on Wednesday said it had “” $175 million in federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania after a transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas, in 2022 won several medals in Division I women’s swimming.

Also on Wednesday, the U.S. Education Department said its Office of Civil Rights had that the state of Maine violated federal Title IX anti-discrimination law after Katie Spencer, a young transgender pole vaulter, won a state championship last month. The department said Maine could jeopardize federal funding if it doesn’t “swiftly and completely” reverse its policies.��

Protests followed after Thomas and Spencer��began competing in women’s competitions and fared better than they previously had in men’s��events.

The moves follow through on a promise Trump made 16 days after his second inauguration, when he issued an threatening to rescind federal funding from schools that let transgender women play on women’s sports teams

As with other aspects of �հ��ܳ���’s presidency, it leaves institutions in the unenviable position of caving before an increasingly aggressive White House — or fighting back in federal court, where many of the legal issues remain unsettled and, in a few cases, have actually favored trans students.

The order’s practical effect: confusion, especially in the roughly half of states that allow transgender athletes to compete in sports consistent with their gender identity. These state laws and policies now face a powerful conservative backlash that sees trans athletes’ participation at every level as patently unfair and itself, and seeks to remove them — and their accomplishments — altogether.

Leading the charge: the education department’s Office of Civil Rights, which has opened more than half a dozen investigations in two months. Along with probes of anti-semitism, trans athletic policies now dominate OCR’s investigative portfolio, despite to the office by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Jackie Gharapour Wernz, a former OCR attorney who now consults for educational institutions, called the new administration’s approach “unprecedented — but it’s not even just unprecedented. It’s so much further beyond precedent that it just feels like we’re in a completely different world at this point.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

‘Fairness and safety’

Penn, �հ��ܳ���’s alma mater, late Wednesday said it had not received any notification or details of the action. But a spokesperson told the that the university “has always followed NCAA and Ivy League policies regarding student participation on athletic teams.”

A spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

As with Maine, several states are finding that adhering to their own laws can invite a federal investigation — and an abrupt cut in aid — from an administration that is comfortable calling out educators who they see as failing to protect young women in sports. 

The complexity in many ways mirrors public perception. Recent , for instance, find that while 56% of Americans support policies that protect trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces, 66% favor laws and policies that require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth. 

“As a parent, I’m concerned about fairness and safety for my girls in sports,” said Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and a mother of four. Allowing “biological males” to compete in women’s events, she said, “undermines the level playing field” that federal regulations were meant to protect, “given the inherent physical advantages men have.”

In 2025, the issue no longer falls entirely along ideological lines. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said transgender athletes playing in women’s sports is “” to female athletes. 

States evenly divided

Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding, but whether that applies to trans students and athletics remains an open question. President Biden in 2022 put forth a sweeping set of changes protecting students against discrimination based not just on sex but on sexual orientation and gender identity, in effect making transgender students a protected class. But the proposal sidestepped the question of athletics, with administration officials at the time saying those regulations would come soon. 

They never came, and the Title IX protections for LGBTQ students have been repeatedly struck down by the courts. Biden put forth a draft rule to protect transgender athletes that acknowledged fairness issues but suggested they could be solved on a case-by-case basis. He last December in advance of �հ��ܳ���’s second term.��

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a transgender ban on women’s and girls’ sports, but the Senate a bid to consider it earlier this month, leaving educators in many states to figure it out on their own.

Add to that in federal courts that have upheld the rights of trans athletes, said Wernz, and schools are in “an incredibly tough position,” especially considering �հ��ܳ���’s order. 

State laws are on the subject: 23 states and the District of Columbia allow transgender students to play on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

Five days after �հ��ܳ���’s executive order, , which oversees sports in public and private schools, that it was banning trans athletes from participating in girls’ sports, saying schools needed “clear and consistent direction” on the issue. For more than a decade, the group had allowed trans athletes to play via a waiver if they undertook sex reassignment before puberty or if they did hormone therapy, among other requirements.

The league, which oversees 318 schools and about 177,000 students, said just five students applied for waivers last year.

In addition to Maine and Penn, OCR is investigating state athletic associations in California and Minnesota, where officials have said they’ll continue allowing trans athletes to compete on teams that match their gender identity. On March 3, it announced an into a school district in Washington State that allowed a trans player to compete in basketball last month.

It’s also San Jose State University and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for what it says are violations of Title IX.

Wernz, the former OCR attorney, who worked in both the Obama and Trump administrations, said schools and districts must now decide, “‘Do we comply with the federal courts, or do we comply with the Department of Education?’ Frankly it’s a pretty new situation.” 

‘We’ll see you in court.’

To many, the case of Thomas, the Penn swimmer, has come to epitomize the current complications. In 2022, Thomas, who’d on the men’s team before transitioning in 2019, rose from 554th-ranked in the 200-yard freestyle to fifth. In the 500-yard freestyle, she rose from 65th as a male athlete to first in women’s competition.

While Penn and several teammates supported her during the process, three former Penn swimmers to remove Thomas’ achievements from the record books.

Pennsylvania’s interscholastic athletics governing body recently its policy to recognize �հ��ܳ���’s executive order, but the Philadelphia School District said it’ll ignore the change in favor of its own policy, adopted in 2016, which allows trans athletes to play in sports that match their gender identity. 

While a few experts say that could jeopardize an estimated $216 million in Title I funding, Philadelphia civil rights attorney noted that �հ��ܳ���’s executive order doesn’t carry the weight of law — or supersede Title IX, state law or multiple court decisions that have sided with trans students.

She said Trump “has been purposely sowing a lot of chaos and confusion,” with schools fearful of losing federal funds.

The push to ban trans athletes comes despite the fact that vanishingly small numbers of these students are pushing to play. Shortly after Trump issued the executive order, NCAA President Charlie Baker said the organization would to restrict female athletic competitions solely to student athletes “assigned female at birth.” Several sports associations followed suit, even though Baker last year told Congress that of the more than 500,000 students it represents, fewer than 10 are transgender.

Chris Young, the principal of , a 720-student regional school in Newport, Vt., near the Canadian border, rarely thinks about the topic. He knows that if trans female athletes in Vermont want to play girl’s sports teams, they can. Though he has no trans athletes on his roster, Vermont says treating students differently is illegal. 

In an interview, he recalled several conversations with students asking whether it’s fair that a young person who’s transitioning from male to female could gain a competitive advantage in sports. 

“My response is, ‘No one does this as a choice. It’s who they are, and it’s an incredibly difficult road to go down if you are a transgender athlete,’” he said. “‘No one chooses that because it’s easy, and no one chooses that because they want to win a state championship or set a record. That’s just not how it works.’”

But when trans athletes like Thomas win at nearly any competition, the backlash is often outsized. In Maine, Spencer, the transgender pole vaulter, in mid-February won the Class B state championship in pole vaulting with a jump of 10 feet, 6 inches — more than six inches higher than the next competitor. That led state Rep. Laurel Libby, a Republican, to post on X that in a previous season, as a male athlete, Spencer had in the event.

The issue a few days later, when President Trump got into a televised spat with Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, during a meeting of governors at the White House. With Mills’ colleagues looking on, Trump called her out, asking if she’d comply with his executive order.

Mills said she’s “complying with state and federal laws.” Maine bars discrimination based on gender identity.

Trump responded, “We are the federal law,” and threatened to pull Maine’s federal funding. 

“We’ll see you in court,” she replied.

Later that day, the education department . Days later, the administration released a that all but foretold the outcome, saying it’s “shameful” that Mills “refuses to stand with women and girls.” 

For her part, Mills says no president can withhold funding authorized by Congress “in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will.” 

In a , she added, “Maine may be one of the first states to undergo an investigation by his Administration, but we won’t be the last.”

The Michigan State Board of Education has passed a resolution condemning executive orders and directives by the Trump administration designed to “dismantle public education, weaken civil rights protections, and destabilize the economic security of hardworking families.”

Passed at Tuesday’s meeting of the board, the takes aim at �հ��ܳ���’s orders to “defund the U.S. Department of Education,” which it says will jeopardize education funding for Michigan’s schools, as well as the “futures of low-income, special education, and at-risk students.” The board also challenged other Trump executive orders to, among other things; deprive schools of funding if they don’t eliminate initiatives that advance diversity, equity and inclusion, attack curriculum standards, and prioritize privatization and school vouchers which divert funding away from public schools.

“Some would suggest that we accept these changes without question, but let’s be clear—this type of change is not an evolution of policy, it is a dismantling of opportunity,” said State Board of Education President Dr. Pamela Pugh. “More disheartening is that what some call ‘change’ will be detrimental for our schools and most vulnerable children, our economy, and our communities. Our children are already suffering under years of harmful policies, and this will only push them further behind.”

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The resolution passed along party lines, with all Democratic board members voting in favor. Of the two Republican members, Tom McMillin voted no and Nikki Snyder opted not to vote. Snyder had attempted to add an amendment to the resolution to adopt �հ��ܳ���’s executive order “keeping men out of women’s sports,” but that failed, also along party lines, with McMillin and Snyder providing the only two votes in favor.

Prior to that vote, state school Superintendent Dr. Michael Rice noted that the issue of transgender athletes was not one affecting the vast majority of high school athletes.

“Because we can go really deep into the rabbit hole here, I want to make it clear where we are,” he said, adding that the Michigan High School Athletic Association indicated there were only two transgender girls participating at the high school level, both in cross country.

“T��� board of the MHSAA determined that there were no safety issues in cross country and that there were no competitive disadvantages associated with these two running cross country,” said Rice.

McMillin, however, said that wasn’t the point.

“I don’t care if there’s one or two or none right now or whenever, but we’re talking about in the future,” he said. “This is very simple. You either support boys playing against girls in girls’ sports, or you don’t.”

Board member, and former state Sen. Marshall Bullock (D-Detroit), objected to the amendment even being added, saying it was not germane to a resolution condemning the defunding of public education.

“I get the political play. You guys can play that all day. I’m good at it, but it’s almost insulting to add it because the resolution is about everyone, not just specifically women, not just specifically the disabled,” he said. “This resolution is about the executive orders that infringe upon the rights of everyone.”

Despite the open display of partisanship, Pugh said the resolution had a broader purpose.

“We refuse to stand by while students lose access to funding for their education and while our democracy is dismantled piece by piece,” said Dr. Pugh. “This is not about partisanship—this is about right and wrong. And history is watching. Will we stand up, or will we surrender to these attacks on our schools and families?”

Just hours after the resolution passed, it was after 600 voluntarily took buyouts, reducing the department’s workforce to roughly half the number in place when President Donald Trump took office.

Also passed Tuesday was a resolution in support of all elementary school children having music instruction while in school. According to the resolution, Michigan is currently one of only six states and Washington, D.C. that does not require music instruction in elementary school.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.

Congratulations and welcome to a place we once knew well. You face any number of tough challenges on behalf of American students, parents, educators and taxpayers, as well as the administration you serve, but your “Department’s Final Mission” shows that you’re well prepared to meet them. We particularly admire your commitment to making American education “the greatest in the world.”

But how will we — and you, and our fellow Americans — know how rapidly we’re getting there? By now, you’re probably aware that the single most important activity of the department you lead is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known to some as NAEP and to many as the Nation’s Report Card.

That’s the primary gauge by which we know how American education is doing, both nationally and in the states to which you rightly seek to restore its control.

Almost four decades ago — during Ronald Reagan’s second term — it was our job to modernize that key barometer of student achievement. Five years after A Nation at Risk told Americans that their education system was far from the world’s greatest, state leaders — governors especially — craved better data on the performance of their students and schools. And they were right. At the time, they had no sure way of monitoring that performance.

That was one of our challenges, back in the day. Advised by a blue-ribbon study group led by outgoing Tennessee governor (and future U.S. senator) Lamar Alexander, and with congressional cooperation spearheaded by the late Ted Kennedy, in 1988 we proposed what became a bipartisan transformation of an occasional government-sponsored test into a regular and systematic appraisal of student achievement in core academic subjects, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (part of your Institute for Education Sciences) and overseen by an independent group of state and local leaders, plus educators and the general public. (One of your responsibilities is appointing several terrific people each year to terms on the 26-member National Assessment Governing Board.) 

That 1988 overhaul made three big changes:

• Creation of that independent board to ensure the data’s integrity, accuracy and utility;
  
• Inauguration of state-level reporting of student achievement in grades 4, 8 and 12, i.e. at  the ends of elementary, middle and high school; and
  
• Authorization for the board to set standards — known as achievement levels — by which to know whether that achievement is satisfactory.

Much else was happening in U.S. education at the time: School choice was gaining traction. States were setting their own academic standards and administering their own assessments. Graduation requirements were rising as the economy modernized and its human capital needs increased. 

As these and other reforms gathered speed, NAEP became the country’s most trusted barometer of what was (and wasn’t) working. You alluded to NAEP data during your confirmation hearing. President Donald Trump deploys it when referencing the shortcomings of U.S. schools. For example, his Jan. 29 executive order on school choice began this way: “According to this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 70% of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72% were below proficient in math.”

Everybody relies on NAEP data, and its governing board’s standards have become the criteria by which states gauge whether their own standards are rigorous enough. Just the other day, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s board of education used them to benchmark Virginia’s tougher expectations for students and .

Reading and math were, and remain, at the heart of NAEP, but today it also tests civics, U.S. history, science and other core subjects — exactly as listed in your speech.

But NAEP is not perfect. It needs another careful modernization. It should make far better use of technology, including artificial intelligence. It should be nimbler and more efficient. The procedures by which its contractors are engaged need overhauling. (The Education Department’s whole procurement process needs that, too — faster, more competitive, more efficient, less expensive!)

Yet NAEP also needs to do more. Today, for instance, it gives state leaders their results only in grades 4 and 8, not at the end of high school. It doesn’t test civics and history nearly often enough, and never in 12^th grade, even though most systematic study of those subjects occurs in high school. (It probably tests fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math too often — the result of a different federal law.) 

Doing more shouldn’t cost any more. Within NAEP’s current budget — approaching $200 million, a drop in the department’s murky fiscal ocean — much more data should be gettable by making new contracts tighter and technology smarter, squeezing more analysis from NAEP’s vast trove and having staffers put shoulders to the wheel. (Former IES director Mark Schneider has the .)  But making this happen will take strong executive leadership, an agile, hardworking governing board and your own oversight. You may decide it’s time for another blue-ribbon group to take a close look at NAEP and recommend how to modernize it again without losing its vital ability to monitor changes over time in student achievement.

Yes, this is all sort of wonky. NAEP results get used all the time, but it’s far down in the bureaucracy and doesn’t make much noise. Nobody in Congress (as far as we know) pays it much attention. Yet it remains — we believe — the single most important activity of your department. Which, frankly, is why it needs your watchful attention! 

We wish you well in your new role. Please let us know if we can help in any way.

Sincerely, 

William J. Bennett, U.S. Secretary of Education (1985-88)

Chester E. Finn Jr., Assistant Secretary for Research & Improvement and Counselor to the Secretary (1985-88) 

But the comment from the hearing that stung the most was McMahon’s promise to “invest in teachers.” I didn’t need to look at the teachers sitting next to me to see their frustration. McMahon has expressed strong alignment with �հ��ܳ���’s education agenda, which promises many things — from diverting public dollars to private schools and micromanaging or outright prohibiting workforce diversity initiatives — though investing in teachers is not one of them. If she is sincerely interested in what teachers need to be successful, she should ask them — which she does not appear to have done.

A new survey of 1,000 teachers conducted by Educators for Excellence, the nonpartisan, teacher-led organization I co-founded in 2011, asked teachers about their values, classroom needs and policy views. It the Trump administration has pursued or enacted in its first weeks in power. From incendiary and legally dubious Executive Orders that meddle directly in classrooms by attempting to interfere in curricular decisionmaking to regulatory changes that strip LGBTQ+ students of federal protection against discrimination, this agenda is not what America’s educators want for their students.

If McMahon were interested in supporting teachers, she’d know that 92% of them favor federal funding for Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which provide crucial aid to help teachers serve low-income students and children with disabilities. If she’d take the time to meet with educators and listen to their perspectives, she’d know that a mere 16% support using public dollars for private schools and that 79% favor collecting student achievement data, which is necessary for building the evidence base on which types of teaching and school leadership work best.

The Trump administration has already shown it is at odds with each of these positions and many others held by the professionals who fill the nation’s classrooms. Its agenda, which McMahon was presumably hand-picked to carry out, not only ignores the will of teachers — it also represents a radical shift away from decades of bipartisan agreement on core pillars of public education.

Twenty-three years ago, President George W. Bush signed into law No Child Left Behind, which expanded the federal government’s role in public education. Although the law was far from perfect, it sought to ensure that our public dollars were having the intended impact and drew on a longstanding bedrock of conservative social policy: accountability. When President Barack Obama refashioned No Child Left Behind into the Every Student Succeeds Act, he maintained the focus on accountability, which Democrats agreed was vital to improving the quality of America’s public schools.

Now, accountability is on the chopping block. Trump has already gutted the nation’s top education research agency, the Institute of Education Sciences, which collects data and reports on how well states are educating students. And, on Feb. 19, a key NAEP assessment was canceled, foreclosing on the collection of longitudinal data that goes back over 50 years. Without reliable information about student achievement and school funding, schools will be left to navigate blind, relying on unproven, lower-quality curricula and tools. This will weaken learning standards and stall academic progress at a time when we should be closing achievement gaps, not widening them.

As with many policy matters, there are political differences on key education issues like school choice, how to best fund schools, and the right measures to hold schools and districts accountable. The same is true among teachers: In hundreds of surveys and countless conversations with educators over the past decade, I’ve encountered wide-ranging views on everything from layoffs, evaluations and school choice to, most recently, artificial intelligence. While 45% of educators nationally think AI shows promise, 50% have concerns. This lack of consensus is what makes teachers’ alignment against �հ��ܳ���’s education agenda all the more striking — though not surprising.

No matter where they live, educators now face the likelihood that crucial funding will be stripped from their classrooms. If Trump cuts Title I funding, for example, Alabama schools will lose an estimated $300 million. Mississippi’s education budget would shrink by 25% if Trump cut the state’s federal funding. It’s no wonder that teachers across the country, whatever their politics happen to be, fiercely oppose the president’s crusade to dismantle a department that exists to strengthen their ability to do their jobs.

America asks a lot of its teachers, whose overall satisfaction has . If the nation’s leaders in Washington want them to stay in the classroom and deliver the outstanding education that America’s kids need, the first thing those leaders – and that includes the new education secretary – better do is listen to them. 

She ensured that all K-3 teachers were trained in the “Science of Reading” and hired literacy coaches at schools that had the highest percentage of low-achievers. 

To guide the effort, Wright turned to the , based at Florida State University, one of nationwide. Little-known even among many educators, the labs, created by Congress in 1965, work with states and school districts to implement research-based practices.​

By 2019, Wright and her colleagues had pulled off what is now known as the “Mississippi Miracle,” with students in this deep red state making greater literacy gains than in any other. Fourth-graders in Mississippi rose from 49th in the nation to 29th — adjusting for demographics, it now ranks near the top of the U.S. in both fourth-grade reading and math, behind just Florida and Texas, according to the .

“T���y were huge partners with us,” Wright said of the lab in an interview this week. “It’s just this amazing group of researchers and content-area specialists.” 

But that distinction wasn’t enough to save the Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast — or the nine other RELs, as they’re called. On Thursday, the U.S. Education Department announced that it had $336 million in contracts with the labs, saying auditors had uncovered “wasteful and ideologically driven spending not in the interest of students and taxpayers.”

It cited one lab’s work advising schools in Ohio to undertake “equity audits,” but provided no other examples.

The move has left researchers and literacy advocates shaking their heads. A director at a top research firm with many federal contracts, who asked not to be identified to avoid retaliation, said she got the sense from the sudden, broad cuts that “no one went in and took a really careful look at where the RELs were being helpful.”

While some lab projects likely haven’t led to improvements in practices or student outcomes, she’s doubtful that department officials even pored over such data. “Someone decided that this whole program needed to go.”

An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Since the centers are mandated by Congress, the department has said it will offer contracts to new bidders, but several observers said they were skeptical of this claim.

Understanding early literacy

While Mississippi’s 2013 law mandated that Wright implement research-supported teaching, as state superintendent “you can’t really be in every classroom making sure that’s happening,” said Rachel Dinkes, CEO of the , an advocacy group that pushes for evidence-based policy.

That’s where the lab came in: It developed tools that allowed Wright to gather data about what was actually happening in classrooms, tell lawmakers about its effectiveness and ask for more money to continue the work.

It focused primarily on helping teachers learn about the Science of Reading, implementing a survey that evaluated their knowledge of early literacy skills — as well as instructions for literacy coaches to observe classrooms. 

Together, these allowed Wright to track teachers’ engagement with students and identify where teachers needed improvement.

“T���y helped us develop resources that our teachers could use, that our leaders could use,” Wright said. “If there was something that we wanted to have evaluated programmatically, they would come in and evaluate that for us to inform our decision making. I mean, I can’t say enough about how important they were.”

Wright also implemented tough reforms that weren’t always popular, such as a policy of retaining students in third grade as a “last resort.” In 2019, third-graders, or more than one in four, failed the state’s literacy promotion test, also known as the “third-grade reading gate.”

In a 2023 op-ed in The 74, Wright and co-author Kymyona Burk, a senior policy fellow for early literacy at , said previous research is clear that students who aren’t reading at grade level when they enter fourth grade “are not prepared for a critical transition — reading to learn — and have dramatically lower odds of succeeding in school or even graduating.”

A from the lab found that teachers’ understanding of early literacy skills rose substantially, from the 48th percentile of teachers to the 59th. In schools that Wright targeted for extra help, average teacher ratings on instructional quality also rose, from the 31st percentile to the 58th. 

The lab also connected Mississippi educators to others in the region, Wright said, offering “a chance for us to learn from each other, share what we were doing — share strategy, share resources and kind of help each other grow.”

Though Wright hesitated to credit REL Southeast for this achievement, several observers have noted of late that states in the Deep South now in improved literacy. In this year’s NAEP report, released last month, four Southern states — Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina — turned in the largest gains in fourth-grade reading from 2019 to 2024. All four are member states of REL Southeast.

In all, Wright said, she worked with lab personnel for nine years, until she left Mississippi in 2022. She called them “a group of expert partners” ready to help and beloved by her staff, who relied upon them heavily. 

“Imagine having content experts at your beck and call for no charge,” she said. “T���y were really, I thought, just gems of somebody’s creation.”

Losing the labs, Wright said, is “a huge disappointment” for states focused on evidence- and research-based practices. “To not have a reliable partner is a real loss for a state chief.”

The move to zero out funding for the labs may also stand in opposition to a few priorities of the Trump administration itself. In a 74 op-ed last July, Wright, along with Penny Schwinn, a former Tennessee education commissioner, praised RELs as centers that stand ready “to generate and apply evidence to improve student outcomes,” even if too few leaders take advantage of them. 

Schwinn now awaits Senate confirmation as deputy secretary of education.

Driven by community needs

Last week’s move has thrown several major research organizations into turmoil. 

In a statement, Jannelle Kubinec, CEO of the research group , which runs two RELs, said the cancellation halts a project in Alaska to support student mental health, one in Nevada that addresses chronic absenteeism, another in Oregon that works to strengthen literacy instruction and one in Utah to address early-career teacher attrition.

The research organization , which runs two RELs, said cancellation of the contracts shuts down support for “a wide range of evidence-based work” requested by state and local education leaders, including a project helping teachers in Nebraska improve differentiated math instruction, one helping teachers in New Jersey use evidence-based practices for writing instruction, and one in Maryland that helps educators prepare high school students with disabilities to transition to adult life.

Mathematica also said its labs have worked with South Dakota and Wyoming to combat teacher shortages in rural districts via apprenticeships.

Dinkes noted another instance in which a REL had a huge impact: In Michigan, state leaders turned to their regional lab to find out why so many certified teachers were no longer teaching. It undertook a survey of 60,000 teachers and that they wanted, among other things, higher salaries, better promotion opportunities and more access to full-time jobs. They also wanted smaller class sizes and student loans, as well as easier, less costly ways to renew their certification.

The state tweaked laws affecting several of these factors and expanded the number of certified teachers who opted to teach. 

Several observers noted that the RELs are, in a sense, a response to long standing GOP complaints about federal education policy’s top-down focus: They actually help local educators apply research to problems they themselves identify as crucial.

“T��� REL work is driven by the state’s or the community’s needs,” said Dinkes. “It is not directed by the Hill.”

Many states don’t have the research capability to undertake big projects like remaking literacy on their own, said Sara Schapiro, executive director of the , a coalition of non-profit, private and philanthropic organizations that advocate for more R&D investment. “T��� RELs were really set up as the infrastructure to help them do that.”

She said the labs “are a really good example of this notion of returning responsibility of different functions to the states,” where local leaders can drive a research agenda. 

Several people with knowledge of the situation also said it’s ironic that the RELs would get caught up in a battle over DEI and “woke” ideology, since much of their equity work is driven by states and school districts “seeing disparities and outcomes for their students,” said the research director who asked not to be named. “T���y’re trying to figure out how they can best address those disparities, and so they’ve come to the REL team with requests for help in that area.”

Dinkes, the Knowledge Alliance CEO, said the impact of the labs’ work is “not abstract — it has a direct impact on schools, communities and what parents know.” She said the way the federal contracts were severed, in the fourth year of a five-year cycle, in most cases, “derails years of work” that was having a direct impact on students. 

Wright, who now leads Maryland schools, was until last week planning to partner with the about essentially recreating the literacy and math work she did in Mississippi. 

Reached by phone after a legislative hearing in Annapolis, Wright said she had just begun developing a relationship with the Mid-Atlantic lab, led by Mathematica, when word of the cancelled contracts came down. 

“We were thinking, ‘This is great. We can establish another partnership with another REL.’ But that is not going to be the case now. It’s a real shame.”

The 12-11 vote fell along party lines, with the Republican chairman of the committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, calling McMahon “the partner this committee needs to improve the nation’s education system.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an Independent who is the committee’s ranking member, said he liked McMahon personally. “I respect the work she has done in building a large and successful business.” But he said no matter who the education secretary is, “he or she will not have the power” to make consequential decisions. A small group of people in The White House, he said, will be “calling the shots.”

Sanders was referring to massive cuts at the department by auditors deputized by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Along with other Democrats, Sanders criticized White House plans to dismantle the U.S. Education Department, which he said “provides vital resources for 26 million kids who live in high-poverty school districts. These are the kids who most need our help.”

During her confirmation hearing last week, McMahon said she supported dismantling the department, but admitted that the administration needs congressional support to do it. 

“We’d like to do this right,” she told the committee. “We’d like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with.”

Sanders on Thursday said that was misguided. “Is it a perfect entity?” he said. “No. Is it bureaucratic? Yes. Can we reform it? Yes. Should we abolish it? No.”

Likewise, Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, said he’d vote no on McMahon’s nomination for that reason. “I can’t vote for somebody who will willfully engage in the destruction of the very agency she wants to lead. That is disqualifying.”

McMahon’s nomination proceeds as the administration sends decidedly mixed signals on its education agenda. President Trump has nominated two experienced, well-regarded educators — North Dakota state Superintendent Kirsten Baesler and former Tennessee education chief Penny Schwinn — as top lieutenants to McMahon, even as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency decimates the department’s research arm, slashing millions of dollars in contracts in search of waste, fraud and abuse. At a press conference last week, Trump called the department “a con job.” 

McMahon, for her part, has said she supports DOGE’s work, saying, “It is worthwhile to take a look at the programs before money goes out the door.” 

While she’s expected to easily earn confirmation in the Republican-controlled Senate, with support among conservative groups, McMahon faces opposition from education and civil rights groups that more broadly oppose the White House education cuts. 

The conservative group last week said Trump was smart to nominate McMahon to lead the department “in what we hope is a short tenure” as she works to shutter it.

Conservative commentator Rick Hess McMahon’s WWE experience gives her the right background for the top job: “Considering that it’s an agency that’s long been plagued by low morale and accused of being too chummy with the unions and the college cartel,” he wrote, “there’s a strong case that what’s needed is an outsider with a strong managerial track record.”

By contrast, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights on Wednesday urged lawmakers to reject her nomination, saying in a co-signed by more than 240 groups that she’s “unprepared and unqualified” to lead the agency. Her confirmation would be “disastrous for students, their families, and educators,” the group said. 

Worth more than $3 billion

One of 13 billionaires tapped to lead �հ��ܳ���’s administration, McMahon has held tightly to �հ��ܳ���’s key education priorities: advancing private school choice, preventing trans students from competing in sports consistent with their gender identity and fighting antisemitism. 

McMahon’s confirmation has taken longer to schedule than those of most other cabinet nominees as the education committee waited for her to complete ethics paperwork detailing vast financial assets and ties to far-right organizations. Her net worth totals more than $3 billion.

As a board member of Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs the president’s Truth Social platform, she earns $18,400 quarterly. Politico reported that she also received stock in the company worth more than $800,000 in late January. McMahon is also on the advisory council for the Daily Caller, a conservative media outlet that has given her favorable coverage. 

If confirmed, McMahon has promised to step down from her board positions, forfeit any shares in Truth Social that she doesn’t yet fully own and divest from those that she does within three months. She also earns interest income from education-related municipal bonds that fund school construction across the country and has pledged to divest from those as well.

A vote before the full Senate has yet to be scheduled.

In the fall, the group won a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1.5 million to teach elementary and middle-schoolers about climate-related issues in the U.S. Gulf Coast. The eagerly anticipated award came through NSF’s program.

But when she checked her NSF funding dashboard, the balance was $1.

Educators and researchers nationwide have been suffering similar shocks as the Trump administration raises a microscope — and in some cases an ax — to billions of dollars in federal research grants and contracts. On Monday, it said it had canceled dozens of Institute of Education Sciences contracts, worth an estimated $881 million and covering nearly the institute’s entire research portfolio, according to several sources. 

Last week, the NSF through billions of dollars in already-awarded grants in search of keywords that imply the researchers address gender ideology, diversity, equity and inclusion — all themes by the administration.

The moves — as well as a broader of all federal aid, which a judge has temporarily reversed — have spread uncertainty, fear and anger through the education research community. 

“It is incredibly exhausting,” said the research director of a national nonprofit with several active NSF grants and contracts. She asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely. “It’s definitely absorbing all of our time right now.” 

Interviews with more than a dozen key stakeholders found that researchers with studies already in the field are being forced to suddenly pause their research, not knowing if or when it will resume. Nearly all spoke only on condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking out publicly could jeopardize future funding.

While the administration has said the moves are an attempt to rein in federal spending that doesn’t comport with its priorities and values, it has offered no explanation for cuts to bedrock, non-political research around topics like math, literacy, school attendance, school quality and student mental health.

“It’s hard to believe this administration is serious about stopping the alarming decline of U.S. student achievement and competitiveness when it puts the kibosh on federally funded research and access to data,” said Robin Lake, director of the at Arizona State University. “How will policy makers and educators know the bright spots to replicate and what practices are harmful? How will parents make informed choices? How will teachers know the best ways to teach math and prepare students for the jobs of the future?”

CRPE currently receives no federal funding, she said, so the recent moves won’t affect it immediately. But its ongoing work tracking pandemic recovery, studying the impact of social media, AI and school choice rely on “a broad national infrastructure of data, subject experts, and rigorous field studies,” Lake said. “T��� broad-based destruction of this infrastructure will affect us all and will cripple our efforts to make American students competitive in the world economy.”

Ulrich Boser, CEO of , a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works in education research, likened the recent moves to remodeling a house to make it more efficient. “Would you just cancel all of your contracts with gas, water, electricity, and then just redo them? It’s not a logical way of doing things. It’s just haphazard.”

An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The Learning Agency, which has contracts to, among other things, provide a that answers questions about IES’s What Works Clearinghouse, this week warning that GOP-backed plans to shut down the Education Department could mean the loss or delay of more than $70 billion in funding for students. 

Boser recalled that the recent debacle with college aid took place simply because the Education Department tried to . “It caused massive delays, most harmful to the kids we care about most.” Now take that dynamic, he said, and imagine what gutting an entire Cabinet-level agency could do. 

The recent NSF moves to review grant language are already having an effect: An academic dean at a leading graduate school of education said researchers at the institution are now reframing new funding proposals “in ways that allow them to ask the questions that they want” without being scrutinized — or eliminated altogether — “based on a ‘Ctrl-F review’ process.” Ctrl-F is a keyboard combination used to quickly search a document for keywords.

“I don’t think there’s an upside to the chaos and uncertainty that is being experienced in real time,” the dean said.

Likewise, the director of a research center that has long focused on K-12 education reform said the new administration has brought turmoil to a community that typically performs “non-ideological, empirical” research on issues like literacy and math.

 “I feel like every day there’s new confusion,” he said, adding that restrictions on DEI could also chill a basic function of education research: studying the results of interventions on diverse student populations — students of different races, ethnic backgrounds, economic levels and geographic locations.

“What ‘DEI’ means is really very ambiguous,” he said. “So if you are studying something and you look at differential outcomes between groups, is that DEI? I don’t know.” 

A ‘Man-Made Disaster’

The federal government funds billions of dollars in research each year for K-12 and higher education, but rarely has it scrutinized practitioners to this extent, said the leader of a nonprofit that advocates for better education research.��

She described conversations with scholars who are operating via grants through NSF, IES and elsewhere who “just have no idea what’s going on — they can’t get through to program officers. Sometimes program officers have been put on administrative leave. It’s just a huge amount of chaos, and overall [it] just creates this chilling effect” for both current grantees and future ones.

“This is a man-made disaster,” she said.

Mike England, an NSF spokesman, said the agency “is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders.” He referred a journalist to an outlining recent executive orders “and their impact on the U.S. National Science Foundation community.”

An Education Department official on Tuesday said any IES contracts required by law will be re-issued for new competition, but Mark Schneider, who served as the agency’s director in �հ��ܳ���’s first term, said in an interview that the current chaos represents an opportunity to “make something good” in the research realm.

“What we should really do is say, ‘We’ve fallen into a rut for decades in the way we go about doing business,’” he said. “‘We are not focused on the highest reward. We’re not focused on mission-critical work.’ ” 

Now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Schneider has already suggested breaking the Education Department up and distributing its work to other agencies. He said the new administration has the opportunity to refocus to provide “data that the nation needs.”

Schneider noted that the National Center for Education Research last year handed out 42 research grants worth well over $100 million. “If we look at those grants, how many of those are really mission-critical?” He predicted that few focus on improving literacy instruction, which recent NAEP results suggest is in crisis.

The department did not release a list of zeroed-out programs, but a document online indicates that they include research covering a wide range of topics including literacy but also math, science, mental health, attendance, English acquisition and others. Also on the chopping block: contracts for The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (), a test given to students every four years in 64 countries and a key indicator of U.S. competitiveness.

‘I just don’t want more asterisk years’

The long-term impact of research pauses could be devastating, said the senior advisor to a research advocacy group — comparable to the interruption of the COVID epidemic, which shut many researchers out of schools for months, diluting the effectiveness of their research and, in some cases, requiring them to insert asterisks for the years when no data was available.

“I just don’t want more asterisk years,” she said. 

Several researchers said an even bigger fear is the prospect of key education, labor and other data sets such as NAEP being made unavailable. While NAEP data collection was unaffected by the recent moves, contracts to analyze the data and report it publicly were canceled, to be offered to new bidders. So far, U.S. Education Department data haven’t been affected, but public health data — including guidance on contraception, a fact sheet about HIV and transgender people; and lessons on building supportive school environments for transgender and nonbinary students — have from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website due to President �հ��ܳ���’s order to strip “gender ideology” from websites and contracts.

Amy O’Hara, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School for Public Policy, cautioned that removing data from public websites would “have a chilling effect on what can be done, what can be measured, what services we deliver to our communities.”

Even if some research funds are restored and researchers can go back to work, O’Hara said, she worries about the uncertainty created at the collegiate graduate school level, as well as for researchers who are early in their careers. “If their funding is disrupted and their access to data is disrupted, they have an incentive to walk away,” she said. “And if they walk away and find other work to do, what is going to be compelling to bring them back?”

CRPE’s Lake put it more bluntly: “I’m a very pragmatic researcher and I believe the feds could do much better in how they fund and support research. But a wholesale end to federal investment in education research feels like a cop-out. The hard but necessary work is making smarter investments.”