Still, she appreciated the reason the Carter administration summoned her father to the nation’s capital. , a prominent researcher who focused on school integration, was part of a team tasked with creating a new cabinet-level education agency. 

was to bring all of the various education programs scattered across multiple departments under one roof.

“I remember the sense of fervor and purpose that surrounded the work that they were doing,” she said. 

Almost 50 years later, Miles leads Education Resource Strategies, an organization that helps districts make sense of regulations tied to department funds. She’s quite familiar with complaints that those rules are confusing and can make spending money difficult, but the grumbling hasn’t changed her view about the department’s original mission. 

“Part of the federal role,” she said, “is to be a safeguard for the nation in the stewardship of those dollars.”

Such requirements are at the center of a long-running debate over the department’s existence. With her most recent announcement that the Treasury Department would , Education Secretary Linda McMahon is reversing history and redistributing her department’s major responsibilities across the federal government. K-12 programs are going to the Labor Department, while the Department of Health and Human Services is expected to absorb special education.

Like President Donald Trump, McMahon dismisses her staff’s oversight functions as unnecessarily burdensome and says parceling out the department’s functions will . Washington should “get out of the way,” she said in January when she granted Iowa a waiver to blend some federal funds into a block grant.

But others say those rules ensure that schools spend the money the way Congress intended. 

“The more flexibility you have, the more you run the risk that people may take advantage of that flexibility,” said Vic Klatt, who worked at the department during George H.W. Bush’s administration and then spent several years working on education policy for House Republicans. 

‘Just very loose’

During a , McMahon defended her actions and described the Education Department as a mere “pass-through” agency for funds Congress appropriates. Before the department was established, programs like Title I for low-income students and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act “were handled very well,” she said.  

But that wasn’t what civil rights advocates found when they took an extensive look at how districts spent the funds. An often-cited example from their report was how the Claiborne Parish schools in Louisiana used Title I funds, meant to improve achievement among educationally “deprived children,” to build two Olympic-sized swimming pools at Black schools.

A school in Oakland, California, used the money for an exercise program to “prevent heart trouble” and increase the “flow of blood to the brain,” the report found. When parents asked if the funds might be better used to teach their kids to read, school officials told them that the P.E. program would improve the students’ reading skills.

“It was just very loose,” said Nora Gordon, a Georgetown University professor who has written extensively about the history of Title I. “They weren’t breaking the law at the time, but they were violating the spirit of the law.”

Title I was meant to be supplemental. Districts had to “sign an assurance” that they wouldn’t cut their own spending when they received Title I funds, the report said, but there were no penalties for doing so. Audits uncovered numerous examples of districts using Title I to pay for general expenses that should have been covered with state and local funds, like building classrooms and stocking libraries with books at Black schools. 

When Congress amended the Elementary and Secondary Education Act , members wrote a “supplement, not supplant” provision into the law — three words that have generated immense confusion through the years. The rule has prompted countless “guidance” documents that can be equally confusing and spawned a cottage industry of consultants and lawyers who advise districts how to avoid mistakes.��

The department, for example, presumes that districts are supplanting if they used state or local funds to cover an expense in the previous year or if they’re spending federal funds on something the state mandates, like teacher training in the science of reading. 

Some argue that the department has gone so overboard with requirements for documentation that states and districts worry more about compliance than whether the students those programs are meant to help are making any progress. 

In 2006, an Office of the Inspector General review found almost 588 requirements related to the No Child Left Behind Act — so many that a manual describing states’ and districts’ responsibilities only included about 60% of them. The Inspector General questioned whether all those rules were necessary.��

“Sure, there is flexibility in how you spend federal dollars,” said JoLynn Berge, deputy superintendent and chief financial officer at the Northshore School District near Seattle. “But you really have to be this high-level expert to understand how to comply with the rules.”

Lucky for Northshore, she is. She previously oversaw district finances for the Seattle Public Schools and before that, worked for the Washington state superintendent’s office, where she monitored districts’ use of federal dollars. She sees value in the push for flexible block grants instead of holding funds for different programs “in these little buckets,” each with their own rules. 

“You have to trust that people are going to do things right,” she said. There will always be “bad actors,” she said. “But that’s what you have auditors for.”

For some district leaders, procurement rules — those governing how districts purchase everything from tutoring services to software programs — are a common frustration. To use federal funds, like those for kids with disabilities, a district has to conduct a bidding process.

But that timeline can stretch out for weeks and cause delays in students getting the help they need, said Jay Toland, chief financial officer for the Cumberland, North Carolina, district.

“Sometimes we might have to do something on the fly with exceptional children,” he said, like hiring a speech pathologist. ”We’re still providing those services; we just have to find another funding source.”

‘R������-�����������’

According to McMahon, states and districts should have more say over how they spend federal dollars. During the extended government shutdown last fall, her team took to social media to mock the department’s oversight role.

“We might be away from our desks attending strategic assessments, creating more red tape and doing nothing to improve student outcomes,” said the post, signed “bureaucratically yours.”&�Բ�����;

But the Education Department isn’t the only agency that asks districts to complete tedious administrative tasks, and many of those will stay in place whether the department exists or not. 

The requirement that school staff document they spend on a federal grant, for example, comes from the Office of Management and Budget. 

States are known for layering their own rules on top of the federal guidelines. Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer for the Detroit schools, previously worked in California and Louisiana, but called Michigan “the most restrictive place” he’s worked when it comes to spending federal dollars. 

“They must approve all travel and conferences in advance. They approve service vendors and materials,” he said. “At this point, we know what they will and won’t approve, so we don’t try to do anything creative.”

The public also has expectations for how districts spend that money. 

The law requires districts to spend Title I in schools with poverty rates of 75% or higher, and they can direct funds to schools with much lower poverty rates if they have some left over. Berge, in the Northshore district, described it as “peanut buttering” the funds around to keep everyone happy. Legally, leaders could concentrate that money in just the poorest schools, but pushback from the community would be intense. 

“The federal government doesn’t prohibit you from doing that. You’re just dealing with local politics,” said Marguerite Roza, who directs the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University and advises districts nationwide on budget and spending issues. 

With achievement gaps wider since the pandemic, and low-performing students continuing to lose ground, she challenges districts to rethink how they spend Title I. But district officials, she said, are a “risk-averse” group and tend to stick with spending plans that state officials and auditors have signed off on in the past. 

In conversation with a group of districts last fall, she proposed that they use all of their Title I funds to pay non-teaching staff members, like instructional coaches and assistant principals, to work as tutors for low-income students. One leader from a midsized Midwestern district said the idea wouldn’t work because Title I instructors must be certified teachers. Roza reminded her that tutoring isn’t core instruction. 

“So this was actually a non-issue,” she said. 

California provides another example of how districts can get locked into misconceptions about what’s allowed. In 2012, advocates for arts education found that districts were reluctant to use Title I funds for the arts even though the U.S. Department of Education encouraged it. A “culture of ‘fear of reprisal’ seemed to permeate the Title I world,” . 

It took a letter from the state education department and extra assurance from a federal official to convince districts it was OK. Klatt, the retired Congressional staffer, is among those who predict that even if some federal rules disappear, district leaders will likely still manage those funds like nothing has changed.

“It’s hard to break that mold,” he said.

But there’s another reason, experts say, why those spending federal dollars might not be able to tell much difference between this administration and those that came before. Other than granting the Iowa waiver, which observers say was not a significant change, McMahon has mostly reiterated what the law already allows. 

In January, she released a letter highlighting the way schools can use Title I funds for improvements (on the books since 1978) and blend federal grants with state and local funds (added in 1994). She’s made similar announcements about “existing” flexibilities related to , transferred to the Labor Department last year. 

If anything, Klatt doesn’t buy McMahon’s argument that moving K-12 programs there is a way to lighten the bureaucratic load. After all, it’s the agency that enforces strict rules related to and . 

“Almost everybody at the Labor Department,” he said, “is involved in some kind of regulatory activity.”&�Բ�����;

Ironically, the announcement comes as the administration is aggressively inserting itself in state and local education decision-making through a little-known administrative process. 

A General Services Administration that would require almost all applicants for federal funds to certify compliance with federal laws, executive orders and regulations — including non-discrimination laws — would also mandate adherence to the administration’s interpretation of what is discriminatory. In doing so, the announcement suggests that the Trump administration is interested not just in enforcing the law, but in discouraging efforts to increase diversity in education and beyond. 

The document treats “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” initiatives as potentially discriminatory, including, for example, statements used by many employers to encourage applicants from various backgrounds. It rejects what the administration calls “cultural competence” requirements, potentially imperiling teaching practices that connect instruction to students’ backgrounds. And it would likely ban questions asking applicants to describe how they have overcome obstacles, as colleges are increasingly doing in the wake of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action in admissions. States and school districts found in violation of the proposed requirements would be subject to funding reductions, civil liability or even criminal prosecution — stark consequences for refusing to conform to administration policy. 

The GSA’s proposal flies in the face of studies showing that teacher diversity benefits all students.

demonstrates that student and teacher diversity in schools and colleges helps Black, Hispanic and other traditionally underserved students achieve in school and beyond. As FutureEd noted in a , when students of color have teachers of color, attendance, academic achievement and college enrollment increase and disciplinary infractions decline. 

The research has an important bearing on the performance of the nation’s schools, given that students of color comprise more than 50% of public-school enrollment nationally, while nearly 80% of teachers in the country’s schools are white.

White students also benefit from having teachers of color. In a of four East Coast school districts, white students who studied under a teacher of color reported working harder and being more confident in their abilities than those who did not. Among the potential reasons for the greater engagement: Teachers of color were more likely to believe that student intelligence is malleable rather than fixed and to address student misbehavior in ways that didn’t damage classroom climate.

For their part, teachers value diversity in their ranks. In a national survey of K-12 teachers conducted for by the RAND Corp., 81% of participants said it is “important or extremely important” for students of color to be taught by teachers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, and 79% said it is “important or extremely important” to have colleagues of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Of course, subject matter expertise and effective teaching experience should be paramount in hiring decisions. And anyone who receives federal funds should comply with non-discrimination law. But the GSA announcement would put at risk diversity initiatives that are valuable in schools and would seemingly pass legal muster. 

It’s the latest administration move against diversity in education. Weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, the Department of Education canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants awarded under the previous administration that had already been distributed and sought in part to increase educator diversity. 

Then, the department issued a that sought to eliminate DEI programs in school districts and institutions of higher education. It was subsequently struck down by the courts, and the department of Education dropped its appeal in January, only weeks before GSA’s proposal was released. This suggests that the administration is trying to achieve through administrative means what it failed to accomplish with last year’s letter. 

If the Trump administration wants to ensure appropriate enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in education, it has the tools to do so through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Unfortunately, the administration last year downsized OCR dramatically, leading a federal court to the reinstatement of hundreds of staffers so the agency could fulfill its duties. And staffing levels at the EEOC are down more than since the end of fiscal year .

The resulting cutback in civil rights enforcement under the Trump administration has been dramatic. As of December, OCR had , compared with 16,500 at the end of the Biden administration. 

Rather than staffing the federal government to enforce civil rights laws, the administration seems to be trying to weaken diversity efforts in schools by intimidating state and local educators with the threat of lost funding, criminal prosecution or civil liability into preemptively complying with its priorities, as it with its Dear Colleague Letter last year. 

But that tactic not only contradicts research on the value of educator diversity; it takes authority over teaching and learning out of the hands of the very leaders McMahon says she wants to empower. 

For Rachael Garnick, a former first grade teacher, the results were a reminder of how tough it’s been for schools to recover from historic declines in learning since the pandemic. 

“The literacy scores are still abysmal and we should be displeased,” said Garnick, who heads the Pennsylvania Literacy Coalition. Made up of over 70 organizations, the group has pushed and state officials to fund and implement reading reform.

But despite the discouraging statewide results, she also sees districts, like in northeastern Pennsylvania and the Mohawk Area district, northwest of Pittsburgh, “trending in the right direction,” and demonstrating urgency over reading scores. Their attitude, she said, was “the opposite of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Instead, ‘It’s broke; we’ve got to fix it.’ ” 

on pandemic learning loss from NWEA, an assessment company, captured that combination of frustration and hope over the state of academic recovery. About a third of schools have reached pre-COVID performance levels in reading or math, and just 14% have recovered in both subjects. But even some that were hit the hardest, like high-poverty schools, have made impressive gains.

The report was just the latest collection of results pointing to a long road ahead for most schools. Last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress scores showed students in the majority of states losing more ground, but included a few standouts with strong progress, like Louisiana in reading and Alabama in math. And state test scores tell a similar story: few have topped pre-COVID performance.

It’s not like experts didn’t predict a slow recovery. 

“If student performance improvement follows historical prepandemic trends, it could take decades for students to fully catch up,” researchers with McKinsey and Company, a consulting firm, .

Even the nation’s education chief isn’t expecting good news soon. 

“I would like to say that NAEP scores, when they come out again in January 2027, are going to show marked improvement,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a recent K-12 Dive . “I don’t think they are.”

But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, said it’s important to put NWEA data, and all measures of kids’ learning, in context.

“One of the reasons that we’re not seeing recovery and that the results aren’t better is because of what was happening in the decade ,” he said. “There was a slow degradation of academic achievement.”

Resisters and rebounders

Schools that were able to resist further declines during the pandemic are those that are more likely to be back on track, according to NWEA’s data, which represents five million students who took the MAP Growth tests through fall 2024. Such schools make up nearly three quarters of the recovered schools.

The Los Angeles-area is one example. 

Before the pandemic, the high-poverty, majority Latino district was already seeing gains on state assessments. When testing resumed in 2022, reading scores held steady. Math scores caught up the following year, and the district has continued to post gains ever since. 

Superintendent Darin Brawley highlighted a mix of academic routines, like a math problem of the day, weekly quizzes and challenging writing assignments, that the district continued despite the disruption of school closures. Teachers were encouraged to dial back their use of smart boards in the classroom and require students to keep math and language arts journals to improve retention. 

“Everything was being done on the smart board and kids weren’t notating anything,” Brawley said. “Certain things have to be worked out on paper.”

NWEA data also pointed to what the researchers call “rebounder” schools, those that saw significant drops in achievement but have been able to climb their way back. High-poverty schools are among those with impressive gains, but even districts seeing higher-than-ever performance still struggle to close wide achievement gaps.

“We’ve never had scores this high in English language arts or math,” said Buffy Roberts, associate superintendent of the Charleston County schools in South Carolina. “It’s been quite phenomenal.”

She was talking about , which, unlike NWEA and NAEP, aren’t comparable because states don’t all measure proficiency the same. But they can still reflect post-COVID trends if states haven’t changed their tests since 2019. 

South Carolina’s math test has remained constant. Results show that statewide, scores have nearly recovered. It’s a trend that NWEA noted as well, explaining that while schools “lost significant ground,” in math, many made “substantial gains afterward.”

In Charleston, 54% of students in grades three through eight met or exceeded expectations in math last year, up from 48% in 2019 and about 10 percentage points higher than the state average. The district also made the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research’s fully recovered districts in the nation last year.

Roberts pointed to a swift return to in-person instruction and high-dosage tutoring as some of the factors contributing to strong growth. But she said at the outset of the pandemic, leaders “knew there were some vulnerable groups” that would need “structures and support to mitigate some of that learning loss.”

The district’s , she explained, provided extra dollars to schools with high-poverty students even when the schools didn’t qualify for federal Title I funding. The schools used the funds for extra staff to reduce class sizes, incentives to increase attendance and mental health services.

But there’s still a lot of work to do. In fourth grade math, there’s a more than 50 percentage point gap between white and Black students, and students from wealthier families outscore students in poverty by 39 percentage points. 

“We agree that progress must be faster,” the district on Facebook after a conservative community group to the disparities. 

In an analysis of scores, Education Data Center researchers, led by Brown University’s Emily Oster, were hopeful about continued math recovery in 2026. Of the 32 states that have kept the same math test since before COVID, seven met or exceeded 2019 proficiency rates: Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Rhode Island and Tennessee.

But even if they didn’t, they all made some gains. Despite Pennsylvania’s decline in reading, for example, its performance in math is less than a percentage point from reaching the 2019 level. 

But the results in reading were less encouraging. Six out of 28 states have met or surpassed pre-pandemic performance. But several others, like Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon, remain well off that mark. 

Goldhaber, with CALDER, suggested that states haven’t seen improvement on tests because parents trust those scores less than the grades kids bring home on report cards and assignments. 

A recent reiterated that point. In a survey of over 2,000 parents, nearly three quarters said they believe grades more than tests when making decisions about their children’s learning. They’re also less likely to take action, like seeking out tutoring or other help for their child, when grades are good. 

The problem is that because of grade inflation, which was on the rise even before the pandemic, grades are a less accurate measure of how students are really doing. 

The results of that survey were no surprise to Bibb Hubbard, founder and CEO of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that focuses on helping parents understand achievement data. She said she’s been “screaming from the rooftops for 10 years” that parents are about their kids’ performance. 

“Good grades do not equal grade level,” she said. “Parents are deeply engaged, but we can’t afford to leave them on the sidelines relying on grades alone. The stakes are too high.”

In total, 142 former staffers across six government agencies filed last month, arguing that the Trump administration appeared to target specific employees rather than carry out the reductions in an objective way.

“It’s very clear that this wasn’t a dispassionate, neutral workplace reorganization,” said Jill Siegelbaum, a partner with Sligo Law Group, which brought the lawsuit with Lawyers for Good Government and the D.C. Law Collective. “Individuals were called unpatriotic. They were called lazy. There were all sorts of disparaging statements made about these individuals.”

In her letter to staff put on leave last year, McMahon said the terminations had nothing to do with . But to , she characterized the problem as “bureaucratic bloat” and said that under her leadership, the department had kept “all of the right people, the good people.” President Donald Trump many of the employees cut at the department “don’t work at all” and “never showed up to work.”&�Բ�����;

The action adds to mounting lawsuits over the mass layoffs. brought by Democratic-led states and school districts last year, officials argued that the reductions have left the department without adequate staff to do the work mandated by Congress. Last week, advocates for victims of sexual assault in a letter that the Office for Civil Rights didn’t resolve any complaints of sexual harassment or violence in 2025. Department officials say that the layoffs were necessary to cut red tape and give more control to the states.

In this latest case, the former employees say the administration denied their due process rights. The Education Department did not respond to questions about the case.

Denise Joseph, who lost her position in the Office of Postsecondary Education, found herself at odds with the new administration because of her work on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“I helped people get promotions. I helped protect the people from getting fired. I just mentored a lot of people,” she said. “And I’m a Democrat, and so I don’t think they wanted someone like me.”

She now runs a tutoring service and works part time for Kodely, a company that provides afterschool and summer programs. She also recently launched a campaign for a seat on the Charles County, Maryland, school board. 

Other Education Department plaintiffs include those who worked on special education, data collection, and career and technical education. Like Joseph, they have all filed an appeal to the government’s Merit Systems Protection Board, originally meant to be an independent body. The Trump administration has moved to weaken protections for career staff. According to the , the board has to adopt the government’s reasons for the employee’s dismissal and can no longer seek an outside review by a judge. 

The employees are “faced with the potential harm of having their case heard by a completely captured administrative process,” the complaint says. Plus, the attorneys argue, the board is so overwhelmed because of the layoffs that few appeals have progressed beyond initial steps.

When federal employees are fired “for cause,” the government is required to , like giving them advance notice and allowing them to respond to the reasons for their dismissal. 

Those steps protect the employees before they lose their benefits, Siegelbaum said. But the Education Department and the other agencies — Justice, State, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and USAID — didn’t follow that process. According to the complaint, the agencies also relied on incorrect data when deciding who to cut. For example, Deborah Fisher, who worked for the State Department, had 39 years of federal service, but her layoff notice reflected only about 20 years.

Loyalty question

The administration holds that the president should have more say over the federal workforce and be able to replace staff with those more politically aligned. Those were the goals outlined in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation document that Russell Vought spearheaded before he became director of the Office of Management and Budget.

He introduced a new hiring plan that included the question: “How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?” Unions representing federal employees in November, arguing that the “loyalty question” compels applicants to praise Trump’s policies or risk being punished for giving an honest answer.

In a separate move, the administration issued a that reclassified thousands of jobs across the government as “policymaking positions” without civil service protections. Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal group that has challenged many of Trump’s policies, is over the regulation. 

Some experts say choosing federal employees based on partisanship is disruptive and can ultimately hurt the schools and students the department is meant to serve. Presidents already have to make 4,000 political appointments, and many don’t even stay for the full four years of an administration. The new rule potentially creates thousands more political positions, said Jenny Mattingley, a vice president at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. 

“Every political administration would probably want to see responsiveness to their policies,” she said. “But with all that swirl and chaos, the people who suffer are the Americans on the ground who need those services.”

Policymakers in Washington are starting to pay attention. Last year, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon named “Evidence-Based Literacy” as her No. 1 academic priority. And this month, the House Appropriations Committee held a on the science of reading.

So what role should the federal government play in reading policy?

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as stealing the playbook from the best-performing states. The so-called “” states of Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama,and Louisiana have seen the biggest gains in recent years, and many states have tried to copy them with their own science of reading bills — to of success.

The federal government also has a record of big investments in reading not leading to improved outcomes. That’s at least partly because reading policy is tricky, given all the potential reasons a child may or may not understand the words on the page.

But that doesn’t mean federal leaders are helpless. They just need to find the right levers. Here are five potential ideas:

1. Create a new national reading panel

In 1997, Congress brought together a group of experts to “assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read.” After reviewing thousands of research articles, the group focused on five critical components of reading instruction — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

The document that came out of that work, the , became a foundational text for the field. But it’s now decades old, and researchers know a lot more today than they did back then. It would be useful to have an update and a new consensus document from an esteemed body of experts.

2. Expand the National Assessment of Educational Progress

The NAEP exams have been instrumental in documenting the extent of students’ challenges, but they don’t say much about the underlying reasons why kids are having such reading comprehension problems.

For example, on , 46% of fourth graders couldn’t accurately understand the meaning of the word “conform” in a passage from the book The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. Was it because they didn’t understand the question, didn’t know the meaning of the word “conform” or got misled in some other way?

Reading researchers like Hugh Catts have been raising the that most reading comprehension exams are not well equipped to pinpoint the reasons behind a student’s literacy mistakes. NAEP could take the lead here by introducing other types of assessments that seek to unpack the root causes of reading struggles, and how they might differ across age groups. 

For example, young students might get a phonics check like the one England administers to its 6-year-olds. Older students might benefit from an age-appropriate version of this, as researchers have found that even middle and high school students can struggle with complex words.

3. Give states flexibility on English Language Arts assessments

Building on the point above, the federal government currently requires states to administer their own reading or language arts assessments annually in grades 3 to 8 and once in high school. Right now, the states have all interpreted that requirement to mean that they must give generic reading comprehension tests.

But states could be given flexibility to interpret this differently. Educators might gain better insights into students’ reading challenges if they were tested on discrete skills like decoding, fluency and vocabulary, and comprehension questions were left to specific content areas like social studies and science. Louisiana attempted something like this a few years ago, but the feds could give states much more leniency to pursue this line of inquiry.

4. Nudge states on accountability

Congressional leaders probably don’t have much appetite to rewrite the Every Student Succeeds Act, which requires states to draft goals for student achievement and plans for holding schools accountable. But those original state plans were written nearly a decade ago, and conditions have changed (for the worse) since then. The Department of Education can’t force states to revisit their plans if they don’t want to, but it could signal that it would be open to letting states amend them in light of the declines of the last decade, especially among the lowest-performing students.

5. Empower parents with information

Despite their best intentions, schools are not good at helping students who fall behind in reading catch up. According to the from Amplify’s DIBELS early literacy screener, just 49% of students who start kindergarten well behind in reading get on track by the end of third grade. And the odds get worse every year that schools wait. Last year, among third graders who were far behind at the beginning of the term, just 5% caught up by the end of the year.

Thanks to , parents already have access to their child’s education records, but only if they request them. To bring greater urgency to this issue, Congress could require schools to inform parents when their child is behind in reading and to work with families to develop specific improvement plans.

If reading scores are a crisis, policymakers should treat it accordingly. But they also have to be realistic in accepting that there’s only so much they can do, and that part of the decline in performance can be traced back to the fact that kids aren’t reading for pleasure as often as they used to — and are adults.

So one way to improve literacy scores is for education leaders at all levels to talk about the importance of reading. People who read a lot tend to know more about the world, and people who know more about the world tend to succeed in many aspects of life. That’s not exactly a policy change, but leadership can shape behavior to make knowledge — and reading — cool again. 

But they didn’t do anything to stop it. 

On Monday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon continued down that path, announcing that she’ll hand over school safety and family engagement programs to the as part of her ongoing effort to “break up” federal bureaucracy through interagency agreements.

“By leveraging HHS’s extensive emergency preparedness capabilities, we are creating a stronger foundation for supporting students and strengthening the safety of the school building,” she said in a statement.

The move affects programs under the Office of Safe and Supportive Schools, including grants that help schools respond to traumatic events like school shootings and natural disasters. Full-Service Community Schools, Promise Neighborhoods, family engagement centers and Ready to Learn, which funds educational TV for preschoolers, are also part of that office.

Critics were quick to argue that the secretary is creating more complexity for schools and teachers. “Nothing about this is better for kids,” said Vito Borrello, executive director of the National Association for Family, School and Community Engagement. “It’s inefficient. It’s chaotic.”&�Բ�����;

McMahon began transferring major education programs to other agencies last summer by moving career and technical education programs to the . She has told advocates for students with disabilities that “nothing shall remain” at the department. The Labor Department will also assume responsibility for , including Title I, the department’s largest K-12 program. 

Democrats tried to insert binding language into the appropriations law that would stop McMahon from using these agreements to dismantle the agency. But Republicans balked. In a compromise, lawmakers attached a note calling for biweekly meetings with the department and saying they were worried that what McMahon is doing “will create inefficiencies, result in additional costs to the American taxpayer, and cause delays and administrative challenges.”

At the time, Savannah Newhouse, a spokeswoman for the department, said officials aim to provide “proof of concept that interagency agreements provide the same protections, higher quality outcomes, and even more benefits for students, grantees and other education stakeholders.” The next step, she added, is getting Congress to “codify these partnerships.”

Education advocates were relieved that Congress rejected drastic cuts to education programs proposed by President Donald Trump and House Republicans. But the question is “what happens to the funding and who is administering these programs,” said Emily Merolli, a partner with the Sligo Law Group, and a former member of the department’s general counsel’s office.

A coalition of states and districts over mass layoffs at the department last year and amended their complaint to challenge the interagency agreements as well. But Merolli said the court may ultimately have to look at whether there have been any “downstream harms” from offloading programs to different agencies.

Family advocates

The K-12 programs affected by this latest action have already seen disruption since President Donald Trump took office. 

Last May, the department grant, roughly $23 million that supported educational programming like Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow.  In September, the department canceled grants to five statewide family engagement centers serving six states. The centers each received $1 million annually to support districts in reaching underserved families. 

As with McMahon’s decision to cancel other grants and contracts, the centers were told their work was no longer a priority for this administration, which has aimed to eliminate programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

Borrello decried the decision in his November newsletter, saying that schools can’t support families “without a foundation of relational trust which is cultivated through honoring the diverse cultures and values of the families served. There is nothing controversial about this.”

Then in December, McMahon canceled remaining Full-Service Community Schools grants, totaling $60 million, to 18 grantees. They included two grants, a combined $18.5 million, to ACT Now Illinois, a statewide afterschool provider network. The organization and has been in negotiations with the department over restoring the grants.

To respond to increases in students’ mental health needs, the 2,300-student Herrin school district in southern Illinois used the money to hire a social worker for each of its five schools. 

“We really need somebody to advocate not just for the students, but for the families as well,” said Valerie Clodi, the district’s director of development. 

The district also on school supplies for students, free STEM-focused events for families and expanded career pathways programs. Schools saw drops in chronic absenteeism, Clodi said, and increases in performance among high schoolers on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, an assessment that the state accepts as an indicator of readiness for college. But after next week, the team of five family advocates will be down to one. An assistant who helped families who need housing or other resources also left. 

Clodi said she could see an overlap between HHS and community schools when it comes to focusing on students’ mental health. But “that’s just one pillar” of the model, she said. 

Borrello called the move to HHS “the best worst-case scenario” and better than moving the programs to the Labor Department. But he noted that putting family engagement programs and K-12 under two separate agencies could undermine efforts to get parents more involved in their children’s education.

“This couldn’t come at a worse time,” he said. “Scores are beginning to improve and now we do this.”&�Բ�����;

Their absences were excused, but still contributed to a chronic absenteeism problem that the district, like those across the country, has been trying to solve since the end of the pandemic. Some DeKalb students had as many as 25 visits to the doctor in a school year. Students are considered chronically absent when they have at least 18 absences, about 10% of the year.

“They never would show up in our truancy dashboard because they might be great at turning in doctor’s notes,” said Nicole Carroll, principal at Henagar Junior High School, east of Huntsville. 

Doctors are now more mindful of trying to schedule appointments around school hours, said Jason Mayfield, the district’s instructional supervisor. And it’s one of the reasons Alabama is closer than any other state to reducing chronic absenteeism back to pre-pandemic levels. 

“We really need to take a moon leap on attendance,” state Superintendent last summer.��“We need to see dramatic improvements, especially in our high poverty communities, so that we can get back to where we were before the pandemic and then work to get even better than that.”

Statewide, 12% of students were chronically absent in 2024-25, six percentage points below the peak of 18% in 2022 and just a point higher than it was in 2018-19.

Other states still have a long way to go. 

New Mexico, where some districts to track absenteeism and alert parents when their kids are not in school, made for two straight years. But last year, the rate jumped again from 30% to 33%.��Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia also still have rates above 30%, according to a maintained by the conservative American Enterprise Institute.��

Progress is “all over the map,” said Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy studies. It’s unlikely for states to see large declines in chronic absenteeism like some did after schools fully reopened, but the “danger sign” is that the pace of recovery is slowing, he said. States and districts are tackling the problem in different ways, but Malkus is among those who think the federal government should provide some leadership to keep schools moving in the right direction. 

“They have a powerful megaphone and the nation’s data,” he said. “They should be using both to push this fixable and pervasive issue to the top of the agenda, signaling to states, schools and families that getting kids back to class regularly is a non-negotiable priority for America’s schools.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has voiced support for state efforts to improve reading performance — a top bipartisan goal considering historic drops in national test scores. But she hasn’t given the same attention to the persistent chronic absenteeism crisis. 

With 40 states and the District of Columbia reporting 2025 data so far, the rate stands at 23%, down a percentage point from the year before, but still well above the pre-pandemic level of 15%. A last summer showed that roughly half of urban districts are still battling rates . 

Both have committed to cutting chronic absenteeism in half over a five-year period. States vary in how they count attendance, but rates declined in 12 states participating in the challenge in 2025. In the other five and D.C., chronic absenteeism either increased or remained flat. 

A need for better data

There are emerging signs that chronic absenteeism is on the department’s radar. Its has held eight focus groups on the issue of chronic absenteeism since mid-December. The goal is to “identify and explore innovative strategies to address chronic absenteeism,” said Savannah Newhouse, the department’s press secretary. 

The conversations focused on “root causes” and effective strategies, said Hedy Chang, CEO of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that has brought national awareness to how high daily attendance rates can hide the fact that some students might be accumulating dozens of absences. A member of her team participated in one of the groups.

Malkus isn’t the only expert who would like to see the Trump administration step up. 

“At the end of the day, no instructional strategy or reform effort will work if students aren’t there to benefit from it,” said Bella DiMarco, a senior policy analyst at , a think tank at Georgetown University. 

The federal government, she said, could improve the transparency and quality of data. While most states have posted their 2024-25 numbers, official federal reports are often a year or more behind. “States and districts need timely, actionable attendance data so they can intervene early, not reports that arrive too late to inform decisions.”

The department could in turn encourage states to publish timely absenteeism data, like and already do, said Danyela Egorov, a fellow at the conservative . The secretary could also highlight strategies from districts that have been successful in bringing chronic absenteeism down, Egorov said.

The DeKalb schools in Alabama shifted from a punitive approach focused on truancy to one that encompasses excused absences as well. Leaders moved “early warning” meetings with parents from the courthouse to schools to make them less threatening. 

Their “Flip the Dip” campaign makes liberal use of attendance incentives for students and teachers, like gift cards and a Nintendo Switch. And every nine weeks, schools recognize kids for missing four days or fewer instead of celebrating only perfect attendance.

“That way, they don’t just give up,” said Carroll, Henagar Junior High’s principal. 

Since 2022, the district’s rate has dropped from over 19% to 10%.

‘Get them there first’

Some say actions by the Trump administration are actually hurting educators’ efforts to lower chronic absenteeism, a data point that the to rate school performance.

In terminating government contracts, the department ended work on about��effective ways to reduce chronic absenteeism.����

“The team working on that had already sifted through over 2,000 studies on ways to address chronic absence and narrowed that to about 150 to 200,” said Kevin Gee, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, who was among those on the project. “Had it not been cancelled, the guide would have been made available for districts to use this month.”

Immigration raids are leading parents to keep children home. In California’s Central Valley, enforcement action coincided with in daily absences, especially among young students, according to an analysis by Stanford University researcher Thomas Dee.  

Others point to McMahon’s decision in December to cut off 18 grantees that were still expecting at least two years of federal funding, comprising roughly $60 million, for . The model targets high-poverty areas and uses schools as hubs for a variety of services, from mentoring and mental health support to food banks and housing assistance. Recent research shows the approach has been linked to declines in chronic absenteeism in and . 

The Education Department is in negotiations with who sued over the loss of funds. But others wonder how they’ll keep the work going. 

The Prichard Committee, a Kentucky nonprofit, was still expecting roughly $18 million to serve 40 districts when the department canceled the remainder of its grant. Schools that are part of the initiative have seen decreases in chronic absenteeism of at least 2%, higher than the rate of decline statewide. At Danville High School, southwest of Lexington, the rate fell from 45% in 2023-24 to 32% the next year. 

At Reidland Elementary in McCracken County, the funds paid for family literacy events and backpacks to incoming kindergartners stocked with early reading and math materials.

The grant also supported a teacher who works one-on-one with kindergartners who are behind in reading and math. But now, the principal will have to find another way to pay for the position. Lisa McKinney, communications director at Prichard, said it’s hard for students to overcome gaps if they’re missing too much school.

“We want everyone to read and write on grade level,” she said. “But you’ve got to get them there first.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta Wednesday as part of an ongoing dispute over whether schools should proactively notify parents if their children change their gender identity.��

The lawsuit comes in response to Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s��a concluding that the state violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and in her words, “egregiously abused its authority by pressuring school officials to withhold information about students’ so-called ‘gender transitions’ from their parents.”�� Her letter cited a 2025 law that prohibits��districts from forcing educators to “out” students against their will.

The agency has threatened to revoke all of the state’s federal education funding, nearly $5 billion annually. But in the filing, Bonta said the department has “failed to demonstrate even a single violation of FERPA,” which gives parents the right to review education records. The potential loss of funding, he wrote, “presents an imminent and irreparable injury to California and infringes upon the state’s substantial interests.”

The Trump administration says California schools violated parents’ rights by pressuring schools to keep students’ gender transitions a secret.

In announced Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education told state officials that they can resolve the dispute by treating any school “gender support plans” as education records available for parents’ inspection and let districts enforce “pro-parental notification approaches.”

“Under Gavin Newsom’s failed leadership, school personnel have even bragged about facilitating ‘gender transitions,’ and shared strategies to target minors and conceal information about children from their own families,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. The department referenced a public records request by a showing that six California districts changed the names or pronouns of 300 students in the 2023-24 school year. The announcement doesn’t spell out what penalties, if any, the state might face if it doesn’t comply.

But most student privacy experts say the department is misinterpreting the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act. While FERPA gives parents the right to inspect their children’s education records, it doesn’t compel districts to notify a parent if their child changes their gender identity at school.

The department launched last March, based on a request from Julie Hamill, a conservative attorney who argued that state policies and guidance amounted to a “scheme” to conceal students’ gender identity from parents. Now an assistant U.S. attorney, Hamill cited a Q&A document, later rescinded, that to consult students before deciding whether to share information on their gender identity, including with their parents. Some districts, she wrote, would change students’ names and pronouns in school databases, but parents would see legal names when they logged in. 

Federal officials also took aim at a California law, passed in 2025, which says districts can’t force educators to “out” students against their will. Liz Sanders, spokeswoman for the California Department of Education, said officials were reviewing the department’s findings and referred The 74 to previous statements. In October, the the new law, known as the SAFETY Act, doesn’t prohibit school staff “from sharing any information with parents” and doesn’t override FERPA. 

The department’s determination further escalates an ongoing, emotional debate between state leaders who say students have a right to privacy and an administration that holds such decisions are the responsibility of parents. Advocates for LGBTQ students and many educators say they’re trying to protect students who might face rejection or abuse at home. But others call such actions “parental exclusion” policies that violate parents’ constitutional rights to direct the upbringing of their children. 

“If a student is contemplating life-altering changes, the least a school can do is notify their parent or guardian,” McMahon .

Lydia McLaughlin, the parent whose experience Hamill cited in the letter to federal officials last January, called the news “bittersweet.” She seeking emails and schoolwork from the Hart Unified High School District, north of Los Angeles, that would demonstrate how school staff were socially transitioning her child from female to male. Administrators initially refused to meet with McLaughlin and cited a that protects trans students’ access to programs, sports and facilities that align with their gender identity. 

McLaughlin never filed a formal FERPA complaint with the Education Department’s Student Privacy Policy Office because she ultimately got the records she was seeking after threatening to sue the district. She told The 74 last year that she believed a lot of the communication between staff members using the student’s preferred male name wasn’t in writing.

Now in college, her child identifies as a girl, “loves feminine clothes again” and has returned to ballet dancing after a five-year break.

“It’s been a long road to this moment,” McLaughlin said. “I only dreamed that there would be some sort of justice for what the school district did.”

FERPA experts disagree with the department’s conclusion. Elana Zeide, a law professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said officials didn’t point to a specific violation in which a parent was denied access to education records. And many districts still follow a legal precedent that doesn’t consider staff emails to be part of a student’s official record. 

“You could not like these policies at all. You can be vehemently opposed to them,” Zeide said. “But that doesn’t mean you can accuse the state of a violation when there aren’t the facts to support it .”

But Lance Christensen, vice president of the conservative California Policy Center, called the department’s announcement. a “big deal.”

“We’re thrilled that the federal government is finally taking federal law seriously and is interested in protecting the natural rights of parents,” he said.

Jorge Reyes Salinas, a spokesman for Equality California, an LGBTQ advocacy group, called the decision “part of a broader, deliberate campaign to attack transgender young people and undermine their ability to learn and thrive in school.”

Cases before the Supreme Court

The department’s demands come as the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether to hear three different cases, including one from California, focused on the same issues.

In a , U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez ruled in December in favor of two teachers from the Escondido Union School District, near San Diego, who said that requiring them to keep a student’s gender identity private violated their Christian faith. Parents later joined the lawsuit against the state. 

Benitez’s broad ruling said that California schools must prominently display wording that says parents “have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence” and that school staff also have a right to “accurately inform” parents. 

Attorney General Rob Bonta appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which blocked the ruling. The teachers are now asking the Supreme Court to overrule the lower court, but the justices have not yet said whether they’ll get involved. Florida, Montana and West Virginia filed a brief in support of the teachers and parents, saying the “Constitution places the burden on states to respect fundamental rights, not on citizens to claw back the right to parent their own children.”

But Bonta told the court that the consequences of compelling the disclosure of gender identity would be “irreversible” for many students. Benitez’s ruling, he said, would leave teachers and other school staff confused about what they can and can’t do.

The high court is also debating whether to hear two other cases in which parents allege that educators supported students’ gender identity changes at school without their knowledge. It takes only four justices to decide whether to hear a case. 

Jeff and January Littlejohn of Florida the Leon County district, alleging that Deeklake Middle School violated their rights by supporting their child’s gender transition from female to male behind their backs. 

Officials said educators were following guidance, which discourages “outing” LGBTQ students..

A federal district court dismissed the case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit also ruled for the school system, saying that educators’ actions did not “shock the conscience,” in a legal sense.

“Defendants did not act with intent to injure,” the court said. “To the contrary, they sought to help the child.”

The First Circuit Court of Appeals issued a in Foote v. Ludlow School Committee. In that case, parents said staff at Baird Middle School in Ludlow, Massachusetts, concealed that their 11 year-old identified as genderqueer at school and was using a new preferred name. 

The three-judge panel wrote that while they sympathized with the parents’ desire for information about their children, the law doesn’t “require governments to assist parents in exercising their fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children.”

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.

The Department of Education granted the state to blend the funds from programs that support teacher quality, English learners, student enrichment and afterschool programs, a move that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said will shift “nearly $8 million and thousands of hours of staff time from bureaucracy to actually putting that expertise and those resources in the classroom.”

During an in western Iowa town of Denison, Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the move a “groundbreaking first step that gives state leaders more control over federal education dollars.”&�Բ�����;

The waiver, however, is not as expansive as what Reynolds, a Republican, originally floated when she announced the request in March. The funding flexibility only applies to the dollars the state manages, not federal funds going to districts, such as money for low-income students. 

Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, an advocacy group — and a former Education Department official — called the consolidation of funds for state activities “unprecedented,” but noted that the state scaled down after conversations with the department. “This is not the seismic shift in federal funding that perhaps was first contemplated in their original draft.”

The department also granted the state an , which releases districts from some requirements tied to federal programs and gives them more time to spend the money. But , both blue and red, already participate in that program.

The Iowa is one of six before the department. , for example, has asked for a similar block grant, while both Indiana and want to make changes to their accountability systems. Once McMahon grants one, it will be “hard to say no to another state that shows up with the same asks,” said Adam Schott, former acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education during the Biden administration.

  with the aim of reducing bureaucracy and giving states and districts more authority over spending has long been a Republican policy goal. Supporters argue that block grants are a more efficient way to address local issues and can reduce staff time spent on paperwork. But skeptics argue that the students whom Congress intended to help through specific programs could be shortchanged as states shift funds to other priorities. 

“I see how this could help to perhaps reduce redundancies, but at what expense?” asked Melissa Peterson, legislative and policy director for the Iowa State Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association. “We do have grave concerns that some of the various student populations may, quite frankly, not receive the services as intended.”&�Բ�����;

Republicans pushed for education block grants almost as soon as Congress established the Department of Education. In 1981, the Reagan administration in the Chapter 2 block grant. But Congress kept cutting funds for the program, and . 

In 1998, the House passed the Dollars to the Classroom Act, another block grant. Conservatives liked the “political symbolism of getting Washington out of what has traditionally been a state role,” said Vic Klatt, who worked at the department during George H.W. Bush’s administration and then spent several years working on education policy for House Republicans. But no one, he said, ever wanted to get rid of the major programs, like Title I for high-poverty schools and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The bill died in the Senate.

‘The data collection burden’

Some school finance experts stress that the Every Student Succeeds Act, the primary education law, already offers a lot of flexibility to combine funds. But Catherine Pozniak, a consultant based in Louisiana who works with states on waiver requests, said agencies and districts still struggle to manage multiple programs. The “grievances” that Iowa and Indiana have expressed are real, she said.

“Flexibilities exist, but they are actually quite difficult to take advantage of,” she said. 

While the department didn’t waive requirements related to data collection and reporting, McMahon wrote in to the state that “the conversations between our staff have been informative and insightful regarding the data collection burden” on states and districts.

Jim Blew, co-founder of the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute, called the announcement a “remarkable breakthrough” and said he hopes all states would try to follow Iowa’s example. “One of the most burdensome parts of dealing with the Education Department is the reporting,” he said. The agency “just needs time to think through how allowing it in one state will impact others, but I’ll bet they are going to make that a priority.”

Schott challenged the argument that reporting how states are using federal funds is a waste of time.

 “One person’s compliance is another person’s accountability, transparency and general prudent treatment of funds,” he said. ​​”The reason you’ve got these discrete funding streams is not to make someone’s life difficult. It’s to make sure that marginalized student groups don’t have to fight and claw for the resources they’re going to need to access a high-quality education.”

In her comments during the event, McKenzie Snow, Iowa’s education chief, talked about using the flexibility to better train teachers to serve the state’s growing English learner population, which has increased by 40% over the past decade, she said. But Hyslop said the state has yet to “make a compelling case” for how the waiver would improve outcomes for those students.

For Snow, block grants are a familiar strategy. She served as an aide to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos during Trump’s first administration. At the time, DeVos proposed  combining 29 programs into a $19.4 billion fund that would give states and districts more authority over how to spend the money. Democrats, who had control of the House at the time, didn’t support the idea, and e in both houses .

As Iowa’s chief, Snow asked the department to in the Perry Community School District following a 2024 at Perry High School that left two dead and six injured.

Schott said most of the waiver requests he received were due to similar tragedies or natural disasters that forced students to miss school. But he always urged states to work with regional education labs or other outside centers to evaluate how the changes they made affect students.

That will be more difficult, Hyslop said, due to the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize and shut down the Education Department.

“The department has fewer staff to monitor right now,” she said. “Understanding the impact of this is going to be really challenging.”&�Բ�����;

“The money’s coming. The money’s not coming. Oh no, we have to shut all of our Head Starts. No we don’t,” she said, describing the ping-ponging state leaders have been through between U.S. Secretary Linda McMahon’s efforts to downsize the department and court rulings reversing her actions. “We’re going through total D.C. chaos right now. Every time you turn right, it says turn left.”

To make sense of those shifts, she turns to Adam Schott, her associate secretary for student support and another top official at the Education Department during the Biden administration. In Washington, he oversaw the distribution of $122 billion in relief funds and was a primary point of contact on school improvement efforts. Having him on her team, Marten said, is like having “phone-a-friend on speed dial.”

Schott is part of an exodus of former experts in federal policy, budgeting and data who have literally gone “back to the states,” to borrow McMahon’s catch-phrase. In her eyes, the state level is where the magic happens, away from the one-size-fits-all ethos of Washington. The irony is that a recent crop of state officials are themselves federal ex-pats who resigned or were displaced by McMahon’s layoffs. The 74 also spoke to former department staff working in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Illinois. Because of the secretary’s efforts to shutter the department, there have never been so many federal staffers looking for work. 

With the future of the federal government’s role in education uncertain, observers say their expertise is more valuable than ever. 

“The people I worked with were there for like 15, 20 years,” said Kiara Nerenberg, a top data expert who resigned from her position with the National Center for Education Statistics just ahead of the mass layoffs in March. “There’s just so much knowledge that’s now looking for a place to land.”

Maryland’s ‘biggest score’ 

Marten’s team in Delaware also includes , who served as acting secretary at the department before McMahon was confirmed and has decades of experience in the federal government. 

Marten called her “the right hand and the left hand” of multiple secretaries, including Democrat Arne Duncan and Republican Betsy DeVos. Carter stepped into the role of acting chief operating officer for Federal Student Aid last year following after a disastrous launch of the redesigned financial aid form. She oversaw corrections that contributed to a this year. Carter resigned in April and is now helping to overhaul Delaware’s outdated school funding formula.

But Marten didn’t get all the talent. Because of its proximity to Washington, Maryland has scooped up several former staffers. Montgomery County even launched targeting displaced federal employees.

Richard Kincaid leads the division of college and career pathways at the Maryland State Department of Education. His “biggest score,” he said, was hiring Nerenberg, the former NCES staffer. One of her responsibilities was making “all of the tens and hundreds of thousands of points on maps that tell you where schools are,” she said. She was part of to identify neighborhood demographics — vital information for programs like Title I for low-income schools and grants for rural areas.��

Now, she gathers data for career and technical education programs, but is also working to better align career-focused education with the needs of local labor markets. Having Nerenberg “catapulted us years ahead,” Kincaid said.��

Others searching for new jobs traveled far outside Washington. 

Tara Lawley spent 17 years with NCES, where she worked on both higher education and K-12 data collection. She was laid off along with over 1,300 other staff at the department in March while her husband, who worked in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, took the “fork in the road” option, a deferred resignation with several months of paid leave.

In August, she found her new position with the Illinois Board of Higher Education, where she’s the managing director of policy, research and fiscal analysis.

“We sold our house, tore our children out of everything they knew, and moved them across the country,” she said.

Her kids, 5 and 8, are doing fine, she said. But the experience reinforced her view that some decisions shouldn’t be left up to the states. 

“How do you take a [special education plan] from one state to another? That’s a challenge that still exists and it’s certainly not going to be solved if you do it state by state,” she said. “If you’re in a state that’s really not doing well in K-12 education and you move to a different state, your kid can be really far behind.”

‘Connective tissue’

Some former staffers have branched out into agencies that focus on more than just education.

Sarah Mehrotra spent two years in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, where she administered pandemic recovery efforts like curbing chronic absenteeism and preventing students from becoming homeless. She left the department in January along with other members of Cardona’s team, but knew she wanted to keep doing similar work.

Now she’s part of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s Office for Children, where she works on an initiative to in specific communities. They include Frederick County’s , where more than 80% of students in two elementary schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood, where a state grant supports a .

When she was with the department, she said officials were “screaming from the rooftops” about ways districts could blend federal dollars with other sources of funding to re-engage students who became disconnected from school during the pandemic. Now, she said, “It’s super helpful to have the federal, state and local perspective” when working with grantees at the community level.

Those with federal experience, she said, can serve as “connective tissue” between states and the Education Department. 

Republicans say there should be fewer ties to Washington, not more. At least one former department official, now at the state level, agrees. McKenzie Snow, Iowa’s education director, worked as an aide to DeVos and held top education positions in New Hampshire and Virginia. 

She’s among those who, like McMahon, say that states are well equipped to manage federal education funds without the department’s strict oversight. Her state was the first to submit to roll federal funds into a block grant.

‘Their own innovation’

McMahon often points to reading gains in Mississippi and Louisiana to argue that the department is unnecessary. 

“The states that are making great progress — it’s through their own innovation,” she said during a recent . “It’s not coming from the Department of Education.”

But not all states have seen the same progress, and many have experienced significant turnover in leadership since the pandemic, which can contribute to disruption across an agency. Just the state chiefs changed in Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oklahoma and Utah, and since the beginning of 2023, more than 30 states have changed superintendents. 

Having staff with some knowledge of federal grants and requirements is a plus right now, said Anna Edwards, co-founder and chief advocacy officer at Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting group. 

“Given the uncertainty at the federal level, having those answers in house within a state is valuable,” she said. “During the shutdown, leaders couldn’t even talk to anyone at the department.”

Elizabeth Ross, who served in the department during the , has worked for three chiefs since joining the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education in 2020. 

“It’s our job to make sure that students don’t feel that transition, that they continue to have access to all of the resources and support,” she said. 

A former third grade teacher in D.C., she led federal efforts to turn around low-performing schools and revamp No Child Left Behind, with its tough testing and accountability requirements, into the more-flexible Every Student Succeeds Act. 

Under Secretary Duncan, the department used stimulus funds as leverage to get states to adopt the Common Core standards and incorporate student test scores into teacher evaluations. The incentives often drew complaints about government overreach, but they also “catalyzed and generated a lot of reform,” she said. 

What she didn’t have was frequent contact with teachers and parents directly affected by those programs. Now an assistant superintendent, she spends a lot of time in schools and often runs into teachers in the community who ask about specific curriculum materials.

She has new appreciation for their input. 

“My perspective has shifted, compared to when I was at the federal level, on how important local buy-in is for the success of policies,” she said. “It’s something that I understand in a much, much deeper way.”

While the federal education bureaucracy has room for improvement, this move should alarm anyone — across party lines — who understands the central purpose of Title I: to mitigate the effects of poverty on learning and ensure that every child has a fair chance at a high-quality education.

Title I was not created to build workforce pipelines or meet short-term labor market needs. It was created to address inequities in schooling. Relocating it to the Department of Labor – an agency with little experience in K-12 education, little familiarity with school improvement or academic intervention, and no core mission related to teaching or learning – fundamentally undermines its purpose.

Title I administration relies on specialists who spend their careers understanding the complexities of school improvement, early literacy, bilingual education, assessment, family engagement, data reporting and civil rights enforcement. These professionals interpret federal law, develop guidance that districts depend on, monitor state implementation, help local leaders navigate compliance challenges and support research-based strategies that improve academic outcomes for children in poverty. Their work is rarely visible to the public, but their expertise is vital to the day-to-day functioning of thousands of schools.

When these positions are eliminated or scattered across agencies, the federal government loses not only staff but decades of institutional memory. Labor does not have personnel trained to advise districts on effective reading interventions, to monitor support for English learners, or to help states build equitable accountability systems.

Nor does it have the infrastructure to provide guidance on the complex interdependence of Title I with federal programs governing students with disabilities, teacher training or English learners. That expertise cannot be rebuilt quickly. And the predictable result will be confusion, inconsistency and weaker oversight.

Narrowing the federal role to workforce preparation overlooks the broader civic, academic, social and developmental purposes of schooling. A child’s education is not simply a supply-chain function of the labor market. Title I was created to provide additional resources to schools serving students with the fewest opportunities: resources that fund literacy coaches, paraprofessionals, after-school tutoring, community school coordinators, summer learning programs, bilingual aides and social workers.

These efforts help children succeed academically and thrive as full members of their communities. They cannot be replaced by job-readiness activities, nor should they be justified only through workforce logic.

The students most harmed by this shift live in every corner of the country. In rural communities, Title I dollars support small schools that would otherwise be unable to hire reading specialists or maintain adequate transportation. These schools often have only one or two central-office staff members to manage federal programs. When reporting requirements or compliance expectations shift suddenly to a new agency unfamiliar with school operations, rural districts have little capacity to absorb the confusion. That leaves teachers and students vulnerable.

In suburban districts, Title I is often the lifeline that enables supports for rapidly changing demographics. Many suburban schools now serve increasing numbers of multilingual learners, low-income families and students experiencing housing instability. Title I funds help these districts build systems of early intervention, family engagement and academic support that would otherwise not exist. When federal guidance becomes unclear or inconsistent, these districts struggle to maintain those programs.

Urban districts depend on Title I at an even larger scale. Large-city schools use these funds to support community school models, mental health services, after-school programs, restorative justice initiatives and partnerships with nonprofits. They also rely on clear federal guidance to ensure that high-poverty schools receive their fair allocation of state and local funds in addition to Title I dollars, a safeguard called “supplement, not supplant.” Because Labor lacks the expertise or commitment to enforce this rule, inequities within districts will widen and children in red, purple and blue districts will suffer.

As a child of a low-income, single-parent family, my brother and I benefited directly from Title I funding in the 13 public schools we attended. Title I paid for more teachers, for literacy programs, books in our classrooms, after-school programs, breakfast, free and reduced-price lunch and even band instruments that allowed us to participate until we could afford to purchase our own.

Both of us entered the workforce at young ages, taking part time jobs in middle and high school. Both of us continued to work through college. And both of us have Title I to thank for providing funding and accountability mechanisms to the local districts we attended. Despite the financial instability and numerous moves, public schools and the educators serving in them offered us resources, programs and stability we otherwise would not have experienced.

Those advocating for the elimination of the Education Department insist that because Title I funding will continue, nothing fundamental will change. But funding without coherent and responsible oversight is functionally weaker funding.

Dollars do not implement themselves.

They require an expert federal partner, capable state agencies and local leaders who understand how to use those funds wisely. When the federal partner is replaced by an agency without educational expertise, the quality and equity of implementation deteriorate. That deterioration will disproportionately impact the very communities and families Title I was created to support.

Improving the federal role in education is a worthy goal. Streamlining bureaucracy, clarifying guidance and eliminating redundancies can make federal programs more effective. But dispersing the Education Department’s core functions across agencies that lack expertise is not reform, it’s abandonment. The nation’s commitment to public schooling as the foundation for increasing educational access and economic opportunity is too important to place in the hands of a department ill-equipped to uphold it.

Those resources apparently include the more than 250 OCR employees that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been trying to fire since March. 

Three weeks after Richey was sworn in, the department is telling laid-off staff to report by Dec. 15 to temporarily work through a backlog of civil rights complaints, according to an email sent out Friday. 

In a Monday statement, Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents department staff, said she’s “relieved these public servants are finally being allowed to return to work” and that keeping them sidelined has “wasted more than $40 million in taxpayer funds.” She accused McMahon of playing politics. “Department leadership allowed a massive backlog of civil rights complaints to grow, and now expects these same employees to clean up a crisis entirely of the Department’s own making.”

OCR has complaints to work through. In federal court updates as part of over the cuts, officials said that they were dismissing the majority of the complaints filed since the March layoffs. shows that staff have resolved 165 cases this year, but that’s well below previous years. 

The call back to work is the latest twist in a legal saga that has been a rollercoaster both for OCR employees and families waiting for action on their complaints. In October, a allowed the department to move forward with the layoffs as the lawsuit challenging them continues. Now, with the possibility that they could still ultimately lose their jobs, the attorneys, investigators and other OCR staff members must get back to work. 

“The department will continue to appeal the persistent and unceasing litigation disputes concerning the reductions in force,” Julie Hartman, press secretary for legal affairs, said in a statement. “But in the meantime, it will utilize all employees currently being compensated by American taxpayers.”

‘Drastically reduced staffing’��

The department’s admission that it needs help to carry out its legal obligations is at least the third time officials have recalled staff after eliminating them. In May, a House appropriations subcommittee that she had rehired 74 people. 

“You hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon testified. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.”&�Բ�����;

In August, the department brought back employees, placed on leave in late January. Many had on diversity, equity and inclusion during the first Trump administration, an activity that made them a target for the administration’s aggressive anti-DEI agenda. While the union filed for arbitration to challenge the firings, Madison Biederman, a spokeswoman for the department said the staffers were recalled because “the agency determined they are an asset to the workforce.”&�Բ�����;

Last week’s development is further evidence that “the federal government cannot fulfill its civil rights mandate to students with such drastically reduced staffing,” said Amanda Walsh, deputy director of external affairs for the Victim Rights Law Center, a legal advocacy group that sued over the cuts to OCR. The organization represents victims of sexual assault. “We have not had any movement on our cases nor have we even heard where they’ve been assigned, demonstrating that the caseloads are too big for the reduced staff to manage.”

In March, the department shuttered seven of the 12 OCR regional offices, and during the government shutdown, tried to lay off another 137 OCR staffers. A the layoffs, and the agreement to reopen the government forced the secretary to bring the employees back to work, at least until the end of January.��

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, opened doors that were once firmly shut for students with disabilities.

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the IDEA, we reflect on how far we’ve come, and the work yet to do, to protect students with disabilities.

— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov)

One advocate for students with disabilities, whose cases make up the bulk of OCR’s work, suggested that Richey has contributed to the sense that “things are moving forward.”

Callie Oettinger, who publishes , a blog, highlighted Richey’s recent marking the 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Along with leading OCR, Richey is serving as acting assistant secretary for the office that oversees special education. Both offices, she said in an accompanying video, are “committed to vigorous enforcement.”

“This is not the language of an agency sunsetting a program,” Oettinger wrote. She told The 74 she found Richey’s video “a breath of fresh air, passionate and positive.”&�Բ�����;

The department did not say whether recalling the staff was Richey’s idea. But one current OCR staff member, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retribution, said “she seems interested in us doing our work.”

But it took months for some states to access millions of dollars for career and technical education this year after the Department of Labor , part of the Trump administration’s plan to splinter and ultimately dismantle the Department of Education. The Labor Department’s grant system didn’t recognize state education agencies’ bank accounts. 

“We were in this endless loop of having to re-verify our account number,” said Richard Kincaid, assistant state superintendent of college and career pathways at the Maryland State Department of Education. “It never seemed to take in the system.”

Maryland used state funds to fill the gap while it waited on $22 million in reimbursements. But the glitch, some argue, doesn’t bode well for when the Labor Department begins dispersing funds from Title I, the largest federal education program. The annual budget for Title I is $18 billion, compared to $1.4 billion for , which funds CTE. Title I serves 26 million low-income students, covering salaries, tutoring programs and classroom materials. 

An , obtained by the website Government Executive, underscored the difficulties, calling the shift of CTE a “miniscule” task compared to what lies ahead. “Larger formula grants and competitive grants are going to be much more difficult to migrate,” the document said.

Beyond technical difficulties, educators say the Labor and Education departments have such vastly different missions that they worry about the message the Trump administration is sending by putting K-12 programs in an agency focused on getting jobless adults into the workforce. 

“We’re not talking about how to support a 28-year-old walking into an American job center looking for the next thing,” Kinkaid said. “We’re talking about kids.”&�Բ�����;

The Education Department last week unveiled six interagency agreements with four other federal agencies as part of the Trump administration’s plan to wind down an agency that it argues was unconstitutional to begin with. 

“Let’s make sure that that grant money that’s coming from the federal government is getting in [states’] hands as efficiently as possible,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said during a White House briefing Thursday. “We don’t want teachers having to spend their time and money on regulatory compliance.”&�Բ�����;

But for some state directors like Kinkaid, the result has been frustrating.

The administration, he said, has “asked state CTE programs to essentially fly for the past six months without air traffic control.”

‘Fruitful partnership’

Officials downplayed the initial rough spots, saying the transition of CTE, adult education and family literacy programs to the Labor Department has been relatively smooth. They worked with nine states to resolve the account number problem. During a call with reporters Tuesday, a senior department official said the administration expects a “similar fruitful partnership” when it merges other K-12 programs into the Labor Department.

State leaders, the official promised, would still be able to rely on “the expertise and concierge-level service” they expect. As of Thursday, staff housed in the Labor Department had processed 568 payment requests totaling over $227 million for 40 unique states and territories, according to an email from a Labor official.

But at least one state, Rhode Island, was still hitting roadblocks as of Friday.

“We are receiving error messages indicating that our organization name does not match the name on record,” said Rhode Island Department of Education spokesman Victor Morente. He said he expected the issue to be fixed this week. “This situation underscores the challenges that abrupt changes within federal departments can create.”

Lawmakers heard about the rocky start last week.

“Operationally, it is a muddle,” Braden Goetz told the . He spent 26 years in the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education and now works as a senior policy advisor at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “I don’t understand how the work gets done. When Secretary McMahon makes decisions, does she call the Secretary of Labor and ask her to communicate that down the chain?”

An Education Department spokesperson said staff reached out to all grantees about requesting CTE funds from the new grant system and has yet to hear from five of them. 

“It is common for states to not draw down funds for several months for a variety of state-driven reasons,” the official said. The California, Michigan and Wyoming education departments told The 74 they haven’t had any trouble getting their CTE funds.

‘Bureaucracy will remain’

John Pallasch served as assistant secretary of the Employment and Training Administration, the Labor office to which K-12 programs are moving, during Trump’s first term. He said any hiccups are likely to be temporary and that the Labor Department “is pretty good at grants management.”&�Բ�����;

Some observers said shuffling staff and programs from one agency to another doesn’t go far enough. 

“The Education Department still retains many functions,” Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote in . “So bureaucracy will remain, and the Constitution will continue to be violated.”

From Kinkaid’s perspective in Maryland, states have lost the strong working relationship they had with CTE staff at the Education Department. The team is down from 15 staffers to about five. There’s been “little to no communication since the movement happened,” he said. In addition, a lot of state CTE directors are relatively new and need guidance on how to comply with regulations, said Amy Loyd, former assistant secretary for the CTE and adult education office during the Biden administration.

The Employment and Training Administration manages about $3 to $4 billion in grants annually — a fraction of the $28 billion the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education administers.

In a , Angela Hanks, acting assistant secretary of that division from 2021 to 2022, described moving K-12 programs into the office like “having a frog carry a camel on its back.”

A few of the office’s existing grants focus on youth, but those target teens and young adults who fit “quite a different profile from the students who are served by Title I,” Hanks, now at the left-leaning Century Foundation, told The 74. Job Corps helps 16- to 24-year-olds find employment, while teaches vocational skills for “in-demand industries” like construction and hospitality. 

Loyd, now CEO at All4Ed, an advocacy organization, sees a similar mismatch with moving adult education programs to the Labor Department.

“Many of these older adults came to adult education services to strengthen their own literacy because they … want to be able to help their grandkids with homework,” she said. “They’re 72; they don’t want a workforce credential. They want to be better readers so they can read to their grandkids.”&�Բ�����;

Several of the federal K-12 grants are complicated and depend on calculations year to year to ensure payments to districts are accurate. , for example, requires annual counts of military-connected students who attend schools on or near bases.

“The suggestion that these programs are on autopilot and [the Education Department] just flips a switch to flow the money to states and districts is a fundamental misunderstanding,” said Danny Carlson, who served as deputy assistant secretary of policy and programs in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education during the Biden administration. He’s now executive director of Learning First Alliance, a network that includes administrator associations, teachers unions and the National PTA.

In addition, McMahon tried to lay off 132 of the 185 remaining elementary and secondary employees during the shutdown. A the layoffs, and the agreement to reopen the government forced the secretary to bring the employees back to work, at least until the end of January. But it’s unclear whether she plans to try to terminate them again. 

After 10 months of canceled grants, temporary funding freezes and other disruptions, some district leaders are growing accustomed to the uncertainty. 

“I expect Labor will have a hard time managing Title I allocations for next year, but the administration is trying to do that,” said Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer for the Detroit Public Schools. “They want the system to fail so they can … shift funds to private schools or just give the money back to taxpayers.”

Pallasch, the former assistant labor secretary, said he supports integrating not just CTE, but all education programs into the Labor Department.

“We’re all pulling in the same direction,” he said. “Whether we’re talking K-12, community college or, quite frankly, Harvard and Yale, those are just job training programs. We are training folks to have the skills to be able to function in an organization.”&�Բ�����;

But Kinkaid and fear that the move to the Labor Department takes the field back to a time when some students were “tracked” into vocational courses without rigorous academic content. 

There are growing efforts to expand apprenticeships and other opportunities for students who might not want to go to college. But for decades, Kinkaid said, the CTE field has tried to “shrug off” the stigma that career-focused instruction was only for lower-performing students.

“We may intentionally or unintentionally recreate that old system where low-income students and students of color were funneled into limited, low-mobility job paths,” he said. “This is exactly what the modern CTE system was designed to prevent.”

The Department of Labor will “co-manage” the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education by administering roughly $28 billion in grant funds through an interagency agreement. The Interior Department will take responsibility for Indian education. 

Decisions are still pending on whether to move the offices overseeing civil rights, special education and student loans, but additional agreements move the Office of Postsecondary Education to the Department of Labor and a campus-based child care program to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Federal education officials celebrated the announcement as a key milestone toward fulfilling President Donald Trump’s March executive order to dismantle the department and said state leaders could still expect “concierge-level service.”&�Բ�����;

“At the end of the day, it means more dollars to the classroom, to the grantees, that does not get siphoned off through bureaucracy,” a senior department official said during a background call with reporters. “We think that this really does give states more power to … determine how those dollars are spent and to best best manage them.”

In a subsequent online presentation involving the White House, some education advocates sent thumbs down and sad face emojis as the call concluded.

Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a think tank, said she was concerned that they made no mention of what will happen to the Institute for Education Sciences. The department’s research arm was one of the Department of Government Efficiency’s first targets. It canceled roughly $900 million in grants, and McMahon laid off most of the staff in March.

“If there is any fundamental role for the government to play, it is the collection and reporting of data,” she said. “As for the rest of the plan, it sounds like they have spread these programs so far and wide it will be difficult to put Humpty Dumpty back together again”. 

The administration has plowed ahead with dismantling the department despite McMahon’s frequent acknowledgement that only Congress, which established the agency in 1979, has the power to completely eliminate it. She has the agency’s role, describing it as a “pass-through” for federal funds and used social media to minimize the department’s work. “Makes you wonder…do we really need at all?,” she after the government re-opened.

In October, she finished career and technical programs, adult education and family literacy to the Department of Labor. During the government shutdown, officials said they were “exploring partnerships” with the Department of Health and Human Services to take over special education. In higher education, the department is considering whether to its $1.77 trillion student loan portfolio to private companies. Like other aspects of the president’s plan, it’s unclear whether such moves would be legal.

‘Sudden, chaotic decisions’

Under that created the agency, the secretary can reorganize the department and enter into interagency agreements. 

Speaking to reporters, the department official cited the , a 1933 law that she said gives the agency the right to “contract with other federal agencies to procure services.”&�Բ�����;

“Interagency agreements are a frequently used tool of the federal government,” the official said, adding that because the Labor Department already oversees workforce development programs, it’s best positioned to manage funding focused on helping students prepare for the workforce. 

But Emily Merolli, a partner with the Sligo Law Group, and a former member of the department’s general counsel’s office, said the administration’s actions “are not legally supportable.”

The law “absolutely does not grant the secretary the authority to just transfer those actual functions — let alone entire offices — to another agency,” she said. “Dressing this up as a ‘co-management or ‘partnership’ agreement doesn’t make it legal. They’re trying to dress up the pig, but it’s still an illegal pig.”

In a statement, the Council of Chief State School Officers said they seek assurances that the department won’t��miss deadlines and that funding “flows without interruption to support students.”��

But individually, some state education leaders condemned the day’s events.

“This decision is the latest in a long pattern of sudden, chaotic decisions at the federal level that have created widespread anxiety and confusion,” Rhode Island education Commissioner Angélica Infante Green said in a statement.

California state Superintendent Tony Thurmond said, “It is clearly less efficient for state departments of education and local school districts to work with four different federal agencies instead of one.”

Opponents say eliminating the department leaves the most vulnerable students without important protections because other agencies lack expertise to administer complex laws like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.  

Multiple surveys, including one from and another from PDK International, show the public is largely opposed to the idea. But from Yes. Every Kid. Foundation, a school choice advocacy group, found that respondents were more positive when they were told that K-12 funding, like Title I for high-poverty schools, would be preserved. 

Some conservatives say the government should phase out the Title I program along with the department and hand the $18 billion annually over to states for private school choice. 

“The money has been spent for more than 50 years and it hasn’t accomplished much,” said Ray Domanico, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “One of the things we’ve learned is that Washington is not the place to dictate policy.”

A showed that Black students in high-poverty, high-minority schools made greater gains in reading when their schools used Title I to reduce class sizes. When schools used the funds for teacher training, Black and Latino students made greater gains in math. But and are getting larger between high- and low-achieving students.

But Domanico is skeptical that the Republicans will be able to finish the job of eliminating the department. A lot depends on whether the Democrats take control of the House in next year’s midterm elections, and ‘in two years,” he said, “Trump is going to be a lame duck.”��

Others think that advocates are overreacting to the news. Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and a former department official during the second Bush administration, dismissed the announcement as “a nothing burger.”

“They will move some boxes (and people) around,” , “and, if a Democrat wins in 2028, it will be swiftly undone.”

When six Southern public university systems this summer formed a new accreditation agency, the move shook the national evaluation model that higher education has relied on for decades.

The news wasn’t unexpected: It arrived a few months after President Donald Trump issued an in April overhauling the nation’s accreditation system by, among other things, barring accreditors from using college diversity mandates. It also came after U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in May for universities to switch accreditors.

The accreditation process, often bureaucratic, cumbersome and time consuming, is critical to the survival of institutions of higher education. Colleges and their individual departments must undergo outside reviews — usually every few years — to prove that they meet certain educational and financial standards. If a school is not accredited, its students cannot receive federal aid such as Pell grants and student loans.

Some accreditation agencies acknowledge the process needs to evolve. But critics say the Trump administration is reshaping accreditation for political reasons, and risks undermining the legitimacy of the degrees colleges and universities award to students.

Trump said during his campaign that he would wield college accreditation as a “secret weapon” to root out DEI and other “woke” ideas from higher education. He has made good on that pledge.

Over the summer, for example, the administration sent letters to the accreditors of both Columbia and Harvard universities, alleging that the schools had violated federal civil rights law, and thus their accreditation rules, by failing to prevent the harassment of Jewish students after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel.

The administration’s antipathy toward DEI has prompted some accreditors to remove diversity requirements. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, for instance, from its guiding principles earlier this year. Under White House pressure, the American Bar Association this year suspended enforcement of its DEI standards for its accreditation of law schools and has extended that suspension into next year.

But state legislatures laid the groundwork for public university accreditation changes even before Trump returned to the White House.

In 2022, Florida enacted a requiring the state’s public institutions to switch accreditors every cycle — usually every few years — forcing them to move away from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, known as SACSCOC.

North Carolina , with a law prohibiting the 16 universities within the University of North Carolina system and the state’s community colleges from receiving accreditation from the same agency for consecutive cycles.

Then, the consortium of six Southern university systems this summer launched its new accreditation agency, called the Commission for Public Higher Education. The participating states include Florida and North Carolina, along with Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in a news release that the commission will “break the ideological stronghold” that other accreditation agencies have on higher education. Speaking at Florida Atlantic University, he the new organization will “upend the monopoly of the woke accreditation cartels.”

“We care about student achievement; we care about measurable outcomes; we care about efficiency; we care about pursuing truth; we care about preparing our students to be citizens of our republic,” DeSantis said.

Jan Friis, senior vice president for government affairs at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which represents accrediting agencies, said the century-old system is in the midst of its most significant changes since the federal government tied accreditation to student aid after World War II.

“If the student picks a school that’s not accredited by a recognized accreditor, they can’t spend any federal aid there,” Friis said. “Accreditation has become the ‘good housekeeping seal of approval.’”

What’s next for the new accreditor

Dan Harrison, who is leading the startup phase of the Commission for Public Higher Education, described accreditation as “the plumbing of the whole higher ed infrastructure.”

“It’s not dramatic. It’s not meant to be partisan. But it’s critical to how schools function,” said Harrison, who is the University of North Carolina System’s vice president for academic affairs.

Though the founding schools of the new commission are all in the South, Harrison said, he expects accreditation to shift away from the long-standing geography-based model. In the past, universities in the South were accredited by SACSCOC simply because of location. In the future, he said, public universities across the country might instead be grouped together because they share similar governance structures, funding constraints and oversight.

“In 2025, if you were designing accreditation from scratch, you wouldn’t build it around geography,” Harrison said. “Public universities have more in common with each other across states than they do with private or for-profit institutions in their own backyard.”

The Commission for Public Higher Education opened with an initial cohort capped at 10 institutions within the first six states. Harrison said that based on the interest, the group could have accepted 15 to 20.

“I thought we’d be at six or seven. We reached 10 quickly and across a wider range of institutions than expected,” he said. “We already have an applicant outside the founding systems. That’s well ahead of where I thought we would be.”

That early interest, he said, reflects frustration among public institutions around finances. In particular, public universities are mandated to undergo audits from the state, but also feel burdened by audits required by accreditors.

“Public universities already undergo multiple audits and state budget oversight,” he said. “Then accreditation requires them to do the same work again. It feels like reinventing the wheel and it pulls faculty and staff away from teaching and research.”

Harrison estimates it will take five to seven years for the new accreditor to be fully up and running, and that institutions will need to maintain dual accreditation to avoid risking Pell Grants and federal loans.

The commission is busypeer review teams made up primarily of current and former public university leaders such as governing board members, system chancellors, provosts, chief financial officers, deans and faculty. In contrast to regional accreditors, which typically draw reviewers from both public and private institutions, the new commission is prioritizing reviewers from public universities.

“Ultimately, we want to be a true nationwide accreditor,” Harrison said. “Not a regional one. Not a partisan one. Just one that is organized around sector and peer expertise.”

While the creation of a public university accreditor is new, the concept of sector-specific accreditation exists in other parts of higher education, including for two-year colleges.

Mac Powell, president of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, said that tailoring accreditation to a sector can make the peer-review model more meaningful, because reviewers can identify with similar challenges. He said reviewers have been moving away from measuring resources and bureaucratic compliance toward assessing what students actually get out of their education.

“The big shift was moving from counting inputs to asking, ‘Did students actually learn what we said they would learn?’” said Powell, whose organization accredits 138 colleges across Arizona, California, New York and the Pacific.

The most important metric all accreditation models should value is how they transition their students into the workforce, he said.

“Every accreditor today is paying much more attention to retention, persistence, transfer, career outcomes and return on investment,” Powell said. “It’s becoming less about how many books are in the library and more about whether students can find a pathway to the middle class.”

The institution evolves

Stephen Pruitt is in his first year as the president of SACSCOC, the accreditation organization that the half-dozen Southern state university systems just left. Pruitt, a Georgia native, jokes that his “Southern accent and front-porch style” has helped him break down the importance of accreditation to just about anyone.

In simple terms, he said, accreditation is the system that makes college degrees real. But he feels he has to clarify a misconception about the role of accreditation agencies like SACSCOC.

“There’s this myth that I’m sitting in Atlanta deciding if institutions are good or not,” he said. “That’s not how American accreditation works. Your peers evaluate you. People who do the same work you do.”

At the same time, Pruitt isn’t dismissing the concerns that prompted states such as Florida and North Carolina to explore alternatives to SACSCOC. According to Pruitt, institutions have long raised concerns about slow turnaround times, redundant paperwork and standards that have not always adapted quickly to the evolving landscape in higher education.

“Some of the frustration is real. Institutions want less redundancy and more responsiveness. Competition isn’t something we’re afraid of,” he said. “We’re doing a full audit of our processes. We have to be more contemporary. Faster approvals, more flexibility, more transparency. Accreditation shouldn’t just be the stick. It should be the carrot too.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

The U.S. Department of Education is expected to reopen for business Thursday after the in history. Education Secretary Linda McMahon is likely to pick up where she left off 43 days ago, reshaping the federal role in school policy and trying to phase out the agency.

The staff won’t be as small as the Trump administration had hoped. McMahon gutted the offices overseeing special education, K-12 and civil rights at the start of the shutdown, but a federal judge paused the job cuts and the reopening agreement in Congress . The deal to end the shutdown prohibits any additional terminations through Jan. 30, the next deadline for lawmakers to finalize the 2026 federal budget. 

Two more top officials will also soon join McMahon’s team. In October, the Senate confirmed Kimberly Richey to lead the Office for Civil Rights and Kirsten Baesler as assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. Neither could be sworn in during the shutdown. 

Baesler, former North Dakota education chief, is likely to take the lead on considering waiver requests from Indiana and Iowa and managing other “administration-wide priorities, like moving away from ‘DEI’ and increasing the use of AI,” said Julia Martin, director of policy and government affairs with The Bruman Group, a Washington law firm. 

and want the department to distribute federal funds as a block grant with fewer requirements on how to spend them. In September, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds pointed to an to make the case that states can be trusted to manage federal funds without the Education Department.

Margaret Buckton, a school finance expert and the executive director of the Urban Education Network in Iowa, generally supports the state’s plan. She explained that funding from one federal grant is often not “significant enough to move the needle on school improvement.”

But say that the Every Student Succeeds Act, which includes funding for high-poverty schools and several other targeted programs, already allows ample flexibility and warn that blending the money could mean districts won’t spend it the way Congress intended. 

Indiana also wants to change the way it grades school performance by highlighting qualities such as developing students’ work ethic and financial literacy. Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, an advocacy group, said the request is premature because the state is still on its new accountability plan. She questioned whether the new design would still include measures like graduation rates and progress for English learners. 

“There are particular accountability requirements that are really important,” she said, “and have always been really important for the last 20-plus years.”&�Բ�����;

Here are a six other areas that were affected by the budget impasse.

1. Moving special education to HHS

In trying to fulfill her goal to eliminate the department, McMahon has taken steps to transfer oversight of special education programs to the Department of Health and Human Services despite having no authorization from Congress and strong opposition from advocacy groups. 

“The department 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,” spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said in an Oct. 21 statement. “Secretary McMahon is fully committed to protecting the federal funding streams that support our nation’s students with disabilities.”

Opponents of the move say the department is turning its back on students with disabilities.

“This isn’t about handing power to states,” Jacqueline Rodriguez, CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said last week during a call with reporters. “It’s about walking away from our responsibility to children and hoping that no one notices.”&�Բ�����;

For families, the past several months have created confusion over whether their children will continue to receive the services they need, and advocates have discovered broken links and missing documents about civil rights investigations and state monitoring reports on the department’s website. 

“Moving [the department’s] digital infrastructure to another agency could mean months — or years — of lost access to critical records,” Callie Oettinger, an advocate in Virginia, wrote this week in her blog, . 

But some parents say states might be more responsive than the federal government when conflicts with districts arise.

“I feel like if you push the oversight closer to the community, then you can get better results,” said Tricia Ambeau, an Arkansas mother of two whose eighth grader Emma has Down Syndrome and autism. A conservative, she previously served on the board of Disability Rights of Arkansas, but stepped down during the pandemic. State officials, she said, “can make a two-hour drive to a school district and knock on the door and say ‘What’s going on here?’ You’re never going to get that at the federal level.”&�Բ�����;

2. Food stamps

While the Department of Agriculture, not Education, runs the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the shutdown and a court battle over whether the government would distribute full benefits has caused stress and chaos for families with school-age children. 

The end of the shutdown means recipients’ electronic benefit transfer cards should be refilled as normal. 

School districts across the country, like and , increased efforts to distribute food to needy families and served additional meals. encouraged parents to apply for free- and reduced-price lunch if their kids were not already on the program.

“It is important to remember that these families were not given the opportunity to plan and budget for this moment. How do you shop for groceries without knowing how many days or months you need the food to last?” Chastity Lord, president and CEO of the Jeremiah Program, said in a statement. The nonprofit supports 2,000 single mothers across nine cities.

3. Proposed rule change on racial disparities in special education

While the government was closed, the department continued to receive comments on a proposed to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The department wants to lift the requirement that states submit data on racial and other disparities in special education services, including whether students with disabilities disproportionately receive harsher discipline.

In the announcement, the department said the change would “reduce the burden on respondents when completing the annual state application.”

Data shows that Black students are for some special education categories, like intellectual disabilities and behavioral disorders, but underidentified for other services like dyslexia and autism. Students with disabilities are also suspended and expelled at higher rates than other students, government . The department’s recommendation would align with Trump’s that discourages schools from focusing on equity in school discipline and using less-punitive practices like conflict resolution. 

The department received over 100 comments on the proposal, with many opposed to the idea of suspending the requirement. The current rule “ensures transparency and promotes fairness in educational opportunity for all students,” EdTrust, an advocacy organization, wrote in .

Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, has for policies that remove disruptive students from the classroom. 

“But the answer is not to kill the data collection,” he said.

4. Charter school grants

One way that McMahon has promoted the administration’s school choice agenda is by highlighting and increasing spending on charter schools. Weeks before the shutdown, the department awarded $500 million in grants to charter schools, which included an additional $60 million over the current $440 million for the Charter Schools Program.

But just as the funds went out to states, charter networks and schools, the shutdown began, cutting off new grantees’ access to start-up support during a “crucial window,” said Brittnee Baker, communications director for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

In , which received $30 million, the disruption has delayed progress toward launching several new schools and expanding others. But some critics argue that the department is boosting funding for the sector at a time of slowing growth and charter closures. 

“Politics, not need, now drives program expansion,” said a from the Network for Public Education. Diane Ravitch, a former Education Department official during the H.W. Bush administration, co-founded the advocacy organization.

5. Prayer guidance

The shutdown also interrupted work on school prayer guidance that President Donald Trump said the department would issue as part of a on “protecting our religious freedoms.”

Officials last following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Kennedy vs. Bremerton, which held that a Washington school district could not stop a football coach from praying on the 50-yard line after games. 

The document clarified that school employees have a right to personal prayer or other forms of religious expression, like wearing a cross, during school hours, but they cannot “compel, coerce, persuade or encourage students” to participate.

The 2023 guidance has “served to help schools and community members understand their rights and responsibilities under the First Amendment,” said Maggie Siddiqi, senior fellow at the Interfaith Alliance, a nonprofit counteracting the religious right. She worked on the update when she served as director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the department during the Biden administration. 

As the Trump administration appeals to Christian conservatives, it “does not have authority to do away with the First Amendment” through guidance, she said and warned that parents and educators should watch for any language that allows schools to impose “one specific religious view on their entire student body.”&�Բ�����;

As a refresher, AASA, the School Superintendents Association, addressed the topic in its . The issue features a on religion in public schools from the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit focusing on First Amendment rights. With the administration and state leaders often emphasizing Christianity over other faiths and some states passing laws that set aside , the document answers 23 questions about what the law says. 

6. McMahon’s 50-state tour

The secretary still has 40 states to go on her “Returning Education to the States” tour, which kicked off in August. 

While she primarily highlights charters and private schools on her visits, she has hit a few district schools on her route, including in Clinton, Tennessee, and in Bozeman, Montana.

McMahon said she’s gathering examples of promising practices for on issues such as literacy and school discipline, that the department will issue to states. But Cara Jackson, immediate past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, said the department wants to “take credit” for some of the work that was in progress when it canceled funding for research. The association was among the groups that to the Institute for Education Sciences and the termination of regional education labs. The cases are ongoing, but of the contracts were later reinstated.

Proponents of eliminating the department don’t see the point.

“The information might be useful, but it is contradictory to shutting down the U.S. Department of Education,” said Neal McCluskey, director of educational freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Why do it if you don’t think the department should exist at all?”

��ǰ����𳦳پ��Dz�:��An earlier version of this article misstated the number of comments made on a proposed rule change to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which was provided by a government website. The correct number of comments was 100.

Led by U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, they expressed “profound concern” to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Education Secretary Linda McMahon “about the pattern of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeting K-12 public school students throughout the country.”

They cited the cases of five young New Yorkers — including a 6-year-old Ecuadorian girl who was in August while her brother, , remained in adult Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. Two other siblings, one a K-12 student, were left in New York without their mother.

“ICE’s targeting of not only adults without criminal convictions, but also children and families, negates the administration’s stated policy of going after the ‘worst of the worst’ for deportation proceedings,” they note in signed by eight other New York Democratic U.S. representatives, including Ritchie Torres and Jerrold Nadler.

They demanded to know the total number of students — from kindergarten to college-age — arrested by the Department of Homeland Security since President Donald Trump took office in January. They want to learn how many remain in ICE custody, their average length of stay and what percentage were or are being held alongside their families. 

They further asked how the U.S. government is meeting its legal obligation to educate these children and, more specifically, about the quality and language proficiency of the teaching staff. 

“The Department of Education has the responsibility under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution to ensure that all students have equal access to education,” they wrote. “Please provide copies of curricula, sample lesson plans, and rubrics currently in use at ICE detention facilities, processing sites, and Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters.”

An Education Department spokeswoman said Monday that it will respond to the letter when the government reopens. In a statement to The 74, DHS did not answer any questions about the school-age children detained by its agents, but blamed the media for “attempting to create a climate of fear and smear law enforcement.”

Ocasio-Cortez and Espaillat did not respond to The 74’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for Goldman, whose district encompasses Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, said he “remains extremely committed to holding ICE accountable for terrorizing our schools and communities.”&�Բ�����; 

The U.S. representatives’ worry about the fate of immigrant children echoes concerns being voiced nationally. Advocates say their communities are living in are targeted near school grounds, particularly in and where ICE tactics have been aggressive. 

Alarm over agents’ actions and their apparent lack of accountability was a central theme of the more than 2,700 attended by millions across the country this past weekend. 

Ranking Democratic members of two congressional subcommittees said Monday against ICE agents, citing that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held — including nearly 20 children. 

“There’s no boundaries in this dragnet,” Rebecca Brown, a supervising attorney with Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told The 74 . “Now there’s no ‘off limits.’ Everything is fair game.”

Not only are children and their parents being swept up near school grounds, Brown said the current federal government shutdown is making it increasingly difficult for families — and attorneys — to locate anyone who’s been detained.

“With this administration and with this budget shutdown, it is really hard to get folks on the phone,” she said.

Immigrant advocacy organizations are urging parents to make guardianship plans, including those specific to their child’s schooling. One such group, in response to the massive uptick in enforcement efforts, said for the first time it’s helped some 100 families this year make binding educational plans for their kids in case their parents or guardians are arrested or deported.

“We have not used this in prior years,” said Julie Babayeva, supervising attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group’s LegalHealth Unit. “We are doing this much more now. This is becoming super urgent.”

More than were in government detention in late September, according to a clearinghouse that tracks federal data. More than 71% had no criminal convictions. More than unaccompanied minors were in government custody as of Oct. 20, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is under HHS, oversees their care at some and programs in 24 states and is charged with detainees’ schooling. ORR did not respond to requests for comment.

Undocumented immigrants over 18 are sent to adult holding sites. Dylan Lopez Contreras, 20 and a student at a New York City high school dedicated to older newcomers, is among them. The Bronx resident was arrested in May in a high-profile case and remains in detention as his lawyers denying him asylum and deporting him back to Venezuela.

Contreras’s case was also cited in the letter to Noem and McMahon, with the representatives noting he is being held hundreds of miles away from his family in Pennsylvania at the “Moshannon Valley Processing Center, from which there have been reports of insufficient medical care and use of solitary confinement.”

Conditions at both and have been widely criticized. In addition to concerns about young people’s overall health and safety, at these sites: substandard curriculum and untrained or underqualified staff are among many complaints. 

Just last week, immigrant from Everett, Massachusetts, was arrested after authorities fielded a “credible tip” in which the student was said to have made “a violent threat against another boy within our public school.”&�Բ�����;

His mother, who arrived at the local police station to pick him up, was instead told ICE had already taken him away. The family, from Brazil, has a pending asylum claim. The mother from two different immigration facilities, one in Massachusetts and the other in Virginia. 

“He cried a lot because he had never been away from home or his family,” she said. “He was desperate, saying ICE had taken him.”

Erika Richmond-Walton, a litigation fellow at Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights, said the detention and deportation of young kids “is definitely not protecting or advancing their educational rights. Deporting children contradicts decades of settled law.”&�Բ�����;

And even if the children themselves are not targeted, the removal of their parents is devastating. One California mother is bereft after her husband was detained in late September after dropping off their 8-year-old daughter at school. 

The woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of immigration enforcement, told The 74 she talks with her husband every day through video chat and that she expects him to be deported to their country of origin. She said government officials told her husband they are “waiting for the plane to fill up so they can send it to Colombia.”&�Բ�����;

, said the well-documented damage to school-age children of aggressive deportation extends far beyond increased absenteeism, anxiety and plummeting grades. In a just society, he said, young people learn political norms through what they see.

“When a child watches a federal agent drag a parent from a car line or hauls someone off in front of classmates, they absorb a lived lesson: Power may be exercised arbitrarily, and some lives can be violated in public without accountability,” he said. 

Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, director of the Opportunity To Learn Program and a senior attorney at The Advancement Project, located in Washington, D.C., said immigrants at schools is dubious.  

“I think this administration is tricky when it’s saying we are not sending ICE to schools but are sending ICE after students who are on their way to school — and targeting communities and children no matter where they are or what their age.”

Prior administrations took such circumstances into account, at least to an extent, said Brown of the Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. But early on in his second term, Trump rescinded a longstanding restriction against immigration agents carrying out enforcement actions in so-called sensitive locations, including schools.

“There was some consideration for age and vulnerability,” she said. “We’ve seen an uptick in enforcement around schools. … This is by design: You punish the kids in order to get the parents to comply.”

But she didn’t face the camera alone. 

She was joined by Nicole Neily, a longtime advocate and president of Defending Education. It was Neily’s organization that scoured district websites for evidence of gender plans — what they call “parental exclusion policies.” In a letter to Maine Education Commissioner Pender Makin, McMahon gave Defending Education credit for gathering the documents through public records requests and referenced two conservative websites, and , that published the group’s findings. 

“We’re proud to stand with you and President Trump as you ensure that the law is being followed and that the school districts do not infringe on parents’ rights,” Neily said in the video.

Neily offered similar quotes when the Office for Civil Rights opened investigations into school district equity policies in Chicago and Fairfax, Virginia. In February, Defending Education filed about Chicago’s , which aims to increase the number of Black teachers, improve student behavior and make instruction more culturally relevant. Neily argues the initiative denies other students “educational opportunity because of the color of their skin.”

And she gets results.

On May 22, two days after for the Fairfax investigation, OCR launched a probe into admission criteria at the district’s elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Defending Education argues the district discriminates against white and Asian students. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an argument against the policy in February 2024 and turned down a similar case from Boston in December.

An Education Department spokeswoman told The 74 that officials welcome support from advocates working to protect parents’ and students’ rights. Neily did not respond to questions about the department’s communications strategy.

But she is just one of several activists working with the department to advance the Trump administration’s education agenda. Since February, at least 10 department press releases announcing investigations have featured quotes from advocates representing eight organizations. They all echo the administration’s position and, like the secretary, stake out conclusions before the OCR team has begun investigating.

In July, McMahon announced an investigation into transgender students playing on girls’ sports teams in Oregon. The probe, the press release said, was prompted by a complaint from the America First Policy Institute — the she chaired for four years before she became secretary.

In the release, Jessica Hart Steinmann, the think tank’s executive general counsel, said, “Thanks to Secretary McMahon’s leadership, this investigation is moving forward as a vital step toward restoring equal opportunity in women’s athletics.”

The organization helped set the agenda for Trump’s return to the White House and the president appointed several of its leaders to . At least six former AFPI staffers work at the Education Department. Craig Trainor, who handled litigation at AFPI, has been serving as acting assistant secretary for civil rights, but was confirmed last week to a top position at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The press releases create “a significant pressure point on educational institutions because they’re presumed to have violated the law from the get-go,” said Jackie Wernz, an attorney who worked in the civil rights office during the Obama and first Trump administrations. The department, she said, “has changed from a neutral arbiter of civil rights disputes to an advocacy organization.”

Those who have worked at the department during both Democratic and Republican administrations, including in Trump’s first term, say such tactics could hinder investigators’ ability to gather evidence fairly. 

When OCR opens investigations, it assures subjects that a complaint is just the beginning of the process and doesn’t mean the department has reached a decision. In from 2020, Kimberly Richey, acting assistant secretary for civil rights during Trump’s first term, promised a school district that OCR would act as a “neutral fact-finder.”

“Historically … on both sides of the aisle, the department has been extremely cautious about making public statements about open investigations,” said Jill Siegelbaum, who spent 20 years in the department’s general counsel’s office before she was let go as part of McMahon’s mass layoffs. By including comments from critics, she said, the department risks immediately putting districts “on the defensive.”&�Բ�����;

Richey, who was confirmed last week to once again lead OCR, did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Undeniable’ impact

Administration allies downplayed the significance of the actions, comparing it to former first lady Jill Biden’s decision to host American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and National Education Association President Becky Pringle as the first official when President Joe Biden took office in 2021. A former community college professor, Jill Biden is an NEA member.

Later that same year, parents and advocates in Virginia obtained emails from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing the unions played a decisive role in keeping schools closed during the pandemic. The AFT pushed for language that the CDC ultimately recommended saying the agency could amend its guidance if it detected new variants of the virus. Republicans argue the unions exacerbated declines in students’ learning and mental health. 

“It’s far better for the secretary to engage with Defending Education, which champions parents and students, than with Randi Weingarten’s AFT, a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party’s progressive elite,” said Ginny Gentles, an education and parental rights advocate at the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute. Neily, she added, has had an “undeniable” impact. “Nicki Neily and Defending Education have aggressively challenged the corrupt status quo, amplifying parents’ voices and demanding accountability.”

Catherine Lhamon, who ran OCR during the Obama and Biden administrations, dismissed the comparisons. She likened the warm welcome for the teachers union presidents to a political event. OCR, by contrast, is supposed to be neutral. By opening investigations with accusatory quotations from department officials and their allies, she said, the Trump administration is putting its thumb on the scale. Under Biden, she recalled, investigations frequently led to outcomes that disappointed the advocates who brought them.

“There were lots of cases during my time where the complaints were appalling. Then we’d investigate and find that they weren’t,” she said. “You might think at the beginning of a case you’re going in one direction and then when you investigate, you find you’re going in another. That’s the job of an investigator.”

The actions by the department are among several designed to radically repurpose and drastically downsize a civil rights office that had been focused on “transgender ideology and other progressive causes” and that “muddled the enforcement of laws designed to protect students.” In March, she laid off roughly 250 employees and shuttered seven of 12 regional offices. The moves are still being challenged in court. Over the weekend, after another round of layoffs, one attorney who received notice that she had lost her job said three more offices had been closed.

One former OCR attorney said pairing McMahon’s comments with those from advocates compromises the agency.

“Each administration had their favorite issues and those issues sometimes got priority treatment. But I am unaware of any complainants consistently being put to the head of the line,” said Paul Grossman, who led the San Francisco OCR office for 30 years under both Republican and Democratic administrations. 

Under previous administrations, it wasn’t unusual for the department to consult studies from advocates or think tanks and use their data to make a point, he said. “But individual leaders were not treated like or publicized as celebrities.”

Wernz, who now advises districts and colleges, said the Biden administration may have planted the seeds of the current practice. In some cases, the department under the previous regime issued statements after districts agreed to change policies and practices, but before OCR had completed a full investigation. In her view, some of those press releases were  

“The Biden administration kind of opened the door like a crack to do this,” Wernz said. “And the Trump administration has just kicked the door down.”

A majority of the department’s press releases about OCR work highlight Trump administration priorities, like focusing Title IX on biological sex and eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Many of them include supporting quotes from like-minded advocates, including:

• , executive director of the conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation. She represents drama teacher Stacy Deemar, who filed a complaint against the Evanston-Skokie district in Illinois in 2019. The district, she alleged, racially discriminates against white students and staff through racial affinity groups, training sessions focused on race and “privilege walks.” In the , participants take a step forward or backward based on issues like whether they learned about their own culture in school, have two parents with college degrees or grew up in a poor neighborhood. 
  
  Under former Secretary Miguel Cardona, the department dismissed the complaint. 
  
  “Dr. Deemar has waited patiently for the harms inflicted by the Biden Administration to be rectified,” Hermann said in the release. “For the sake of our children and our country, the time to restore equality and reclaim civil liberties is now.” Deemar previously sued the district in federal court, but a the case last year, ruling that the teacher didn’t experience a hostile environment.

• , executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which opposes “identity-based practices.” she was “thrilled” that OCR opened an investigation into the Tumwater School District in Washington state. The organization complained on behalf of a 15-year-old female basketball player who refused to participate in a game against an opposing team with a transgender player. The Tumwater district, according to the complaint, also investigated the student for bullying and harassment because she spoke out against the student playing. 

• , vice president of the Native American Guardians Association. The North Dakota-based organization opposes New York’s ban on Native American mascots in sports. The group, along with President Trump and McMahon, took the side of Massapequa High School in its dispute with the state over using the name Chiefs. McMahon has since referred the complaint to the Department of Justice. “We call on federal and state leaders to help us defend these dwindling expressions of our presence and contributions,” Black Cloud said in the department’s press release. 

Julie Hartman, a department spokeswoman, defended the inclusion of advocates in press statements. She said the agency “welcomes support from — and has often worked with — outside groups who want to advocate for students and families and help those who believe that their civil rights have been violated.”

The department, she said, has a “responsibility to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not sponsoring practices that violate” federal laws. According to department records, OCR investigated complaints from multiple advocacy organizations under former Secretary Cardona, including Defending Education. 

Under Biden, OCR opened a dozen based on Defending Education’s complaints.

In one 2023 case, the group complained that the Ashland, Oregon, school district offered exclusive, race-based affinity groups for students. When the Office for Civil Rights looked into , the district that the groups are open to all students and OCR closed the case. 

Advocates frequently issue their own press releases about complaints they want OCR to resolve. Some don’t see a problem with McMahon featuring them in official statements as well and say it’s a matter of transparency. 

“These groups often have expertise in specific areas and connections to affected communities that help them spot problems government agencies might miss,” said Harris, with the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.

Quoting advocates “can foster trust by humanizing issues,” said Black Cloud. 

‘What letter?’

In some cases, the advocates commenting are more clued into where an investigation is headed than districts and even OCR itself. 

In one example, the department in March notified the Deerfield Public Schools, north of Chicago, that it was the subject of a probe over complaints about transgender athletes using girls’ locker rooms. The letter came the same day OCR officials issued , said Cathy Kedjidjian, the district’s chief communications officer. The government’s investigation also targets the Illinois Department of Education and the Chicago Public Schools.

“We didn’t know the investigation was coming,” she said.

In the release, Robert Eitel, president and co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, thanked the department for taking steps to ensure “the bad actors comply with Title IX.”&�Բ�����;

Deerfield officials, Kedjidjian said, have since “responded in full” to OCR’s questions. In an to the community, the district denied allegations that middle school girls had to change in a locker room with a trans girl present.

Jim Blew, who worked at the department during the first Trump administration and now leads the think tank with Eitel, said they “won’t be commenting for this story.”

Another announcement caught OCR’s attorneys off guard. On , a release stated that the department sent letters to 60 colleges and universities warning them to protect Jewish students on campus during antisemitic protests. 

“We found out from the same press release that you all did,” the attorney who was laid off over the weekend told The 74. She asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. When the letters went out, she said OCR attorneys received “confused and angry emails [from universities], like ‘What’s this letter?’ And we go, ‘What letter?’ ”

Actions like that, she said, can damage the “trust and goodwill” that investigators work to create with K-12 and higher education officials. 

“We’re the ones doing the face-to-face with the recipients [of those letters],” she said. With the closure of 10 regional OCR offices, as part of the administration’s plan to eliminate the agency, the staff is trying to reassure districts and give them “a sense that ‘We are still neutral, we will handle this case.’ ”

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. 

Responding to lawsuits filed after the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, canceled more than 100 key research contracts in February, the department in June said it planned to reinstate 20 of the contracts. And a lawsuit will give a short reprieve to 10 federally funded . The department is also asking the public for guidance on how it can modernize the Institute of Education Sciences, its research, evaluation and statistics arm. 

“They’re not saying in any explicit way, but you see this ‘build-back,’” said a longtime assessment professional familiar with IES, who asked not to be named to preserve professional relationships.

The department likely realized that, despite the DOGE cuts, IES still had a lot of congressionally mandated work to do. “I think there were some ‘Oh shit!’ moments, but nobody would say that, because they’re not going to criticize DOGE or the president.”

, executive director of the American Educational Research Association, called the developments “cautiously encouraging,” noting also that NCES plans updates to several surveys and administrative data collections. And it’s releasing existing surveys such as , which analyze data each year from all U.S. colleges and universities that receive federal financial aid.

“On a scale of 1 to 10 — where IES was at 10 prior to the DOGE cuts and 1 a month ago — we would place it at 3 or 4 today,” said Chavous. 

But she added that “severe staff shortages” at the department “continue to threaten data quality and research progress. We remain deeply concerned about the long-term impacts of these cuts on researchers and others who rely on federally collected and supported data.”

Despite the Trump administration’s promise to shutter the Education Department, it seems to be looking for ways to keep its research activities moving forward. Last month, the administration published a , seeking public input on how it can modernize IES. That effort will stop temporarily during the current government shutdown.

The department has also brought in , a longtime Washington, D.C., education researcher, to take on the task of reforming IES. Northern, on leave from the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is expected to remain at the department until December. While her remit lasts just six months, it is giving researchers hope that having one of their own advising McMahon will yield positive results.

“I am more hopeful than I was three months ago that there will be some reinvention, rather than a death, of federal education research,” said a scholar at a top nonprofit research organization with several long-term federal contracts. “To me, it seems just absurd that the federal government would say, ‘We’re getting out of the realm of doing education research,’ because education is so fundamental to the future of the country.”

In interviews, several researchers and policy experts said they’re similarly optimistic, but most requested to remain anonymous, fearing that speaking out could jeopardize future funding and relationships with administration officials.

Of Northern, one researcher said she’s “very much someone who believes in empirical evidence. So I could not think of a better person to be advising the Trump administration on the future of IES.”

Mike Petrilli, Fordham’s president and , said he was pleased that McMahon would turn to her for guidance. “I always felt it was a good sign that they wanted somebody like Amber,” he said, viewing it as “an indication that they did want to rebuild” IES, not get rid of it.

Petrilli, who has on occasion of Trump since his first election in 2016, said he’s optimistic that “the people, the political appointees now at the Department of Education, understand the importance of research and evaluation and statistics.” But Musk’s DOGE operation, he said, was “able to do great damage, terrible damage, before anybody had a chance to stop them.”

Another person who works closely with researchers in the field, who asked not to be identified, said they have been assured by top administration officials that “There’s a lot that’s going to come back online — it’s just going to come back online in different ways that some of the field will be ready for, and other parts of the field will not be ready for.” The source said the department is looking into performance- and outcomes-based contracting, a more flexible system that lets agencies more clearly. 

Administration officials, meanwhile, have acknowledged “the chaos of the first six months,” which they don’t want to repeat, the source said. They’re in the process of shifting to “a different sort of phase where we want to see results for this money that we’re spending.”

In a statement, U.S. Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said the Trump Administration “is committed to supporting a national education research entity that delivers usable, high-quality data and resources for educators, researchers, and other stakeholders. This has been clear in the Secretary’s repeated commitments to protect NAEP. NCES and IES were in desperate need of reform.”

McMahon in May told congressional lawmakers she had rehired “” of the approximately 2,000 department employees who were laid off last winter, though a department spokesperson disputed this.

Several people said they were surprised and heartened that IES last month began for eight — and possibly more — high-level assessment jobs at the National Center for Education Statistics, for work on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

But several experts said there’s a lot of work to do if the administration genuinely wants to rebuild its research infrastructure, given DOGE’s deep cuts last winter, when the ad hoc agency trimmed the NCES staff from about 100 employees to three. 

“It’s hard to be too optimistic, given the limited resources that NCES has in particular,” said , a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who studies state higher education finance and the financial viability of higher education. 

Kelchen said the administration’s own priorities could make McMahon’s work more challenging, noting that an Aug. 7 executive order by President Trump forces NCES to undertake a massive that will collect data on admissions practices going back five years by race, sex and test scores, among other indicators. 

The order alleges that race-based admissions practices “are not only unfair, but also threaten our national security and well-being.”&�Բ�����;

The survey, said Kelchen, is “a massive data collection effort — and it’s hard to see how it ends up being successful, especially retroactively.”

Poor NAEP results

Several people said recent poor student results on NAEP have likely catalyzed much of the strong support for IES.

“They knew the NAEP results were going to be bad, and they got these NAEP job descriptions up quickly,” said one observer.

Several others agreed, but just as many said the recent poor results bring a new urgency to reshaping NAEP so that its next generation of tests are both high-quality and relevant to educators.

“NAEP is falling further and further behind in terms of the gold standard, which it hasn’t been for some time,” said a former IES official. “But what is the plan? What’s the vision? NAEP just confirms bad news all the time. So what are we going to have in terms of policies to correct it?” 

Another person familiar with NAEP predicted that even with NCES’s smaller staff, next year’s tests “will likely go off O.K.,” but that many reporting functions, such as score reports broken out by states, have been cut to shrink costs, making the results less useful. “It’s one thing to collect the data — it’s another thing to report it in a way that people can use.”&�Բ�����;

This person said NAEP is well-known for robust reporting platforms such as its , but IES has already said it will end future district-level reporting for 8th-grade history and science tests, among others. “If we’re short-handed there, then people will say, ‘What’s the value of NAEP?’”

Looking ahead, this person worries that cuts to functions like the , an extensive database on public K-12 education, and other efforts could compromise the actual tests after 2026. “If we don’t have good sampling and weighting, then NAEP is just a test. It’s not the Nation’s Report Card, because we need all those data to be able to make it a truly national picture.”

The ‘education improvement industrial complex’

A prime example of the changes taking place is the expected reinstatement of the 10 regional education labs, or RELs, which were funded to the tune of $336 million, but were closed in February after the department alleged, without offering much evidence, that a review “wasteful and ideologically driven spending.” It noted, for instance, that a lab based in Ohio had been advising schools there to undertake “equity audits.”

But educators nationwide have rallied to the labs’ defense, noting that in 2019 the REL Southeast, based at Florida State University, helped the state of Mississippi improve reading results so much that its fourth-graders rose from 49th in the nation to 29th — the so-called “Mississippi Miracle.”&�Բ�����;

The 10 labs will now be able to begin the process of restarting their work for the remainder of the federal contract, the department revealed in a in June. 

A researcher who works with school districts to design programs said the centers could be reconceived to be more helpful to teachers: “There’s so much money. And if you think about what the products were, it’s hard in all cases to imagine that amount of money was yielding such exceptional change in the educational system that we need to keep going exactly as-is.”

This person noted that outfits like the RELs often benefit from the support of an “education improvement industrial complex” that lobbies for continued funding. The DOGE cuts, this person said, badly undercut that support system.

At the same time, a few observers said IES more broadly should continue, no matter what the fate of the Education Department in this administration. 

“I believe firmly that there should be an Institute for Education Sciences, even if it is configured differently,” said , senior director of the University of Chicago Education Lab. “Perhaps unsurprisingly, I believe in the power of R & D — and I think we need it more than ever, given declining test scores and the implications that has for our international competitiveness.”

Achievement is dropping across the board on NAEP scores, she noted. “So we have to start investing in this area if we’re going to make progress.”

For his part, Kelchen, the Tennessee scholar, said the disruptions of the administration’s first nine months haven’t taken too much of a toll on his work. Aside from an IES grant proposal that simply never got reviewed, he conducts research without federal assistance and without using federal restricted use data, which typically contains confidential information that isn’t publicly released. Accessing it requires an . 

But he said the chaos is changing his classroom: Last spring, he taught a graduate course and remembered, “Half the nights we met for class, there was some big announcement coming out of the Department of Education that affected higher ed finance,” disrupting what he thought the class would talk about. In one case, he said, a Feb. 10 discussion of higher ed expenditures was cut short by the news of DOGE’s IES grant cuts “breaking halfway through class.”

More broadly, Kelchen said the uncertainty is making everyone at the university uneasy. “It’s an interesting time to be an academic department head, just given that enrollment’s uncertain, funding’s uncertain,” he said. “We could have normal international student enrollment in a year. We could have zero. We just don’t know about anything.”

He began opening monthly board meetings with a Christian prayer, released a about protecting children from transgender students, and at odds with his agenda. The next two and a half years were marked by a steady stream of edicts, incendiary statements and disruptions that included , funding delays and conflicts with .

“Every seven days you could expect something coming. It was almost like clockwork,” said Robert Franklin, a former associate superintendent of Tulsa Tech, a district that offers career and technical education programs. 

As Walters leaves his post as state superintendent to head the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a national anti-union organization, Oklahomans say his turbulent administration offered a preview of the Trump administration’s “” approach to overhauling education. Despite about educators “closest to the child” knowing what’s best in the classroom, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, like Walters, has embraced an aggressive, top-down approach that frequently targets teachers for an assortment of perceived ills, from equity policies to protecting the rights of LGBTQ students.

In February, an Oklahoma City called his state a “testing ground for Project 2025,” the conservative Heritage Foundation’s 920-page strategy document that federal agencies are closely following. In the same way Walters welcomed like David Barton and Dennis Prager to influence a rewrite of the state’s social studies standards, the Trump administration has assembled dozens of conservative leaders and organizations to shape a for the nation’s 250th birthday.

In both cases, improving schools took a backseat to a singular — some might say, relentless — focus on the culture war. Walters’ grip on the state’s schools was “a microcosm of what we’re now facing at the federal level,” said the Rev. Shannon Fleck, executive director of Faithful America, an online community that seeks to counteract Christian nationalism. 

In Oklahoma, where she led an interfaith network, educators grew fearful for their jobs as Walters teamed up with , who created , to monitor teachers’ social media. In Washington, McMahon laid off 1,300 staffers and officials told districts nationwide that they would lose federal funds if they didn’t eliminate programs aimed at closing racial achievement gaps. 

To some right-leaning groups, Walters was a champion for parental rights whose “courage” deserves respect. “He showed that it’s possible to push back against the machine,” a supporter on Facebook. 

In part due to his use of to get himself on conservative media, Walters’ actions drew attention far outside his state. But the visibility also made him fodder for . Stephen Colbert called out the Oklahoma chief’s mandate that every classroom have a Bible and teachers incorporate scriptures into their lessons.

“Our kids have to understand the role the Bible played in influencing American history,” Walters said in a video from behind his desk last year after spending on 500 Trump-endorsed Bibles for AP Government courses. “It’s very clear that the radical left has driven the Bible out of the classroom. We will not stop until we’ve brought the Bible back to every classroom in the state.”

For Oklahoma superintendents, the mandate was no joke. 

“Most of my colleagues across the state are in the front row at their local church every Sunday, and here’s this guy forcing the Bible on them,” said Craig McVay, who retired in 2022 as superintendent of the El Reno district, outside Oklahoma City, and is now for state superintendent. 

accused Walters of trying to local curriculum, noting that students were already allowed to bring their own Bibles to school. “Especially in the smaller communities of this state, it’s very difficult to stand up against Jesus, and that’s what he forced them to do.”

He largely failed.

Most districts have no plans to change current practices, while both the and the blocked Walters’ plan to purchase 55,000 Bibles.

Trump hasn’t conditioned federal funds on Bible reading in public schools, but the federal department is expected to issue new guidance on what he called “total protection” for . Some worry the administration will over other religions in violation of the First Amendment. 

‘Trumpier than Trump’

After Trump’s November victory, Walters created a special committee to help the state comply with the president’s education agenda. In a letter to parents, he called Trump “a fearless champion of efforts to eliminate the federal bureaucracy that has shut local communities and parents out of the decisions that impact their students’ educations.” Some speculated that Walters, who did not return calls or texts to comment for this article, was for a job in Trump’s cabinet, particularly the one the president ultimately gave to McMahon. 

His frequent social media posts continue to voice unwavering support for Trump on issues such as , , and even .

Leslie Finger, an assistant professor of political science at the University of North Texas, said she wondered if Walters’ strategy toward achieving “political prominence” was to be “Trumpier than Trump.”&�Բ�����;

She pointed, for example, to Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor and Trump ally who that former President Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020. She sued, unsuccessfully, to overturn a gubernatorial election she lost to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in 2022 and still denies she lost her in 2024.

But while Trump chose Lake to lead, and , the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America, Walters never got the nod. To Derek Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina, that’s surprising.

“His brazenness seems to be a character trait the administration values, which begs the question of why he stayed in Oklahoma,” Black said. It’s “somewhat likely,” he added, that Walters “lacked the insider network to get a position high enough to suit him.”

Once Trump was re-elected, Walters advanced policies that seemed to stay one step ahead of his hero. He pushed through that expect students to “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results,” even though ruled there was no evidence that the Biden campaign “stole” the election. , the standards present the “full and true context of our nation’s founding and of the principles that made and continue to make America great and exceptional.” The Oklahoma Supreme Court the state from implementing them after parents, teachers and faith leaders sued, arguing the standards require teaching from the Bible. 

Over 1,300 miles away, the Trump administration is undergoing a similar overhaul of the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., to replace “ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” Exhibits, , focus too much on “how bad slavery was” and offer “nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

In line with Trump’s immigration policy, Walters to round up undocumented students at school and instructed districts to collect parents’ citizenship status when they enrolled their children. The state legislature opposed the plan.

The federal government has attempted to bar undocumented children from attending Head Start and issued that prohibits students, including those in high school, from receiving tuition assistance for career and technical education.

‘Christian patriot’

To Black, the law professor, Walters was “so far out of bounds” that he “cared even less about rules …than the current administration.”

He required teachers from New York and California, seeking to work in Oklahoma, to take a to screen out “woke” applicants — a move said would discourage efforts to recruit teachers. But as with Trump, his boundary pushing endeared him to Christian nationalists, who maintain a strong foothold in Oklahoma. One group, the Tulsa-based City Elders, considers Walters a “Christian patriot” who worked to advance their mission of “establishing the kingdom of God” on earth and infusing government with Christian principles.  

“This is a war for the souls of our kids,” Walters in 2022. “The brilliance of our founders and the acknowledgement of almighty God — that’s where our blessings come from. That’s where our rights came from … and the left wants us to take that out of schools.”

Last August, when GOP lawmakers called for investigations into Walters’ management of state education funds, members of the group school board meetings and were the first to sign up to speak. 

City Elders hosted him again at a gala in March, but , organized by groups that oppose Christian nationalism, gathered outside the Tulsa-area conference center. Some waved signs that said “Impeach Walters,” calling him a “danger” to education.

A month later, he came face-to-face with critics during a “town hall” event organized by the Turning Point USA chapter at Oklahoma State University, considered one of the colleges in the country. Co-founder Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated Sept 10 in Utah, founded the organization to mobilize college students around conservative ideas and encourage open debate.

But Walters couldn’t finish his sentences amid the angry chants about his and his following the death of a nonbinary student last year. He called Nex Benedict’s death, later determined to be a suicide, a tragedy. But he also used the moment to voice opposition to schools that allowed students to use facilities that don’t align with their sex assigned at birth. His administration, he said, would not “lie to students” about being able to change their gender. 

At the time, he was still a potential candidate for governor. In June, suggested that while Walters trailed frontrunner Attorney General Gentner Drummond by 27 percentage points, a path to the Republican nomination wasn’t impossible. Some question why a politician with Walters’ ambition would walk away for a new position with an uncertain future. He was also eligible to run again for state superintendent.

“It’s pretty rare for someone to resign [during] their first term in a position when they’ve got another one available,” , a civics and voting rights advocate, said on a �ճ�ܰ����岹��.��

While Walters and were once close, observers say the superintendent had no chance of getting the . They had a series of on issues ranging from Walters’ attempt to take over the Tulsa schools to his support for immigration raids at school. Walters’ allegiance to Trump may have worked against him, said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus of education and political science at Teachers College, Columbia University. 

“There’s an odd lack of symmetry in the politics around Trump,” he said. “Crossing him is close to political suicide for Republicans, but trying to read from his script does not confer equal and proportionate success.”&�Բ�����; 

When McMahon visited the state in August, she a charter school tour with the governor’s office, not Walters — a move widely viewed as a political snub. 

In a farewell letter to parents, he counted eliminating “woke indoctrination” and teacher recruitment efforts among his accomplishments. He that 151 special education teachers, including 34 from out of state, would receive signing bonuses of $20,000. It was Kirk’s death, he r, that inspired him to take the job at the Teacher Freedom Alliance and that “national leaders” recruited him for the position.

“We have to have more people step up on the national stage to protect this country’s values,” he said. “We’ve got to get rid of the teachers unions.”&�Բ�����;

In typical outsized fashion, Walters didn’t just pay his respects to Kirk. He mandated that schools hold a moment of silence on Sept. 16 at noon — at a time when students would be eating lunch or enjoying recess. 

He followed up with a declaration that all Oklahoma high schools would open a Turning Point USA club, even though leaves those decisions up to local school boards.

To Franklin, who took opposite sides with Walters on issues like Christian charter schools, the moment was telling. The former Tulsa Tech official said it underscored why Walters, despite the backing of right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation and Moms for Liberty, might struggle outside of��Oklahoma.

As Walters assumes a new national position, Franklin said that unlike Kirk, the former chief never sparked a “groundswell of ‘Oh my God, we need to listen to this guy,’ ” Kirk’s organization had over 900 college chapters prior to his death and has since to establish thousands more. His campus appearances could draw thousands.

“The Charlie Kirk phenomenon only strikes every once in a while, and I don’t think Walters has that kind of following.”

U.S. eighth graders are less prepared to be the scientists of tomorrow than they were before the pandemic. 

In the first nationwide test of students’ science knowledge since 2019, the percentage of students scoring at the proficient level fell to 29%, down from 33%, and the average score dropped back to levels last seen in 2009, when a new version of the test was introduced, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Students’ confidence in the subject area has also slipped, with 28% saying they “definitely can do various science-related activities,” down from 34%. 

Performance fell across all three categories — physical, life, and earth and space sciences. Less than half of students can identify the major component of living cells, compared to 55% in 2019, and the percentage of students who can identify a characteristic of mammals declined from 72% to 68%. 

It’s not just the decline in skills that concerns science experts, it’s the dramatic decrease in their interest. The share of students saying they enjoy science activities plummeted from 52% to 42%. 

“If you’re not interested, it’s hard to learn,” said Christine Cunningham, senior vice president of STEM learning at the Museum of Science in Boston and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP. Students were also less likely than in 2019 to say they engage in tasks like designing research questions, debating scientific ideas and conducting experiments to explain why something happens. “As someone who works a lot with students or with teachers who do that kind of inquiry, that’s why students get excited.”&�Բ�����;

COVID-era school closures derailed student learning in all areas, but science was hit especially hard as teachers tried to keep kids on track in reading and math. A from the Public Policy Institute of California showed that only about a quarter of districts emphasized science in their recovery efforts. Teachers were more likely to assign free online lessons and let students work at their own pace, compared with a typical school year. Widespread declines in reading performance have also hampered students’ ability to keep up in science at a time when technology is rapidly evolving. 

“Science is such a hands-on experience, and trying to find ways to bring that to different homes was challenging,” said Autumn Rivera, a sixth grade science teacher in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, west of Denver. “Eleven- and 12-year-olds really need a lot of activity.”

She got families involved in “kitchen chemistry,” asked students to and recorded videos of lessons to discuss with students on Zoom. One of their favorite experiments was studying the water cycle by hanging a plastic bag full of water in a sunny window. 

In the spring of 2021, , students had missed out on at least two months of science learning. By 2024, science achievement in third to fifth grade had returned to 2019 levels, but seventh and eighth graders, across all racial groups, saw the most significant declines and were still more than three months behind pre-pandemic performance.

One former education secretary warned against using COVID “as an excuse.” Margaret Spellings, who led the department during George W. Bush’s administration, noted that as with students’ achievement in other subject areas, performance in science did not improve between 2015 and 2019. Average scores for eighth and 12th graders were flat and declined for fourth graders.

A positive trend, Cunningham said, is that more elementary schools have added STEM as part of an elective rotation with art and music. Those classes can be highly engaging, but aren’t always focused on grade-level standards, she said. In addition, regular classroom teachers might scale back science lessons and focus more on reading and math. 

High and low performers

The declines in achievement were not confined to a few student groups. They affected students whether or not they live in the suburbs, come from wealthier homes or have parents who graduated from college. Students without disabilities and who speak English as a first language also scored lower than in 2019. 

But Matt Soldner, acting NCES commissioner, pointed out what he considers the one encouraging sign from the results  — a 6-point increase in scores for English learners. 

“NAEP describes the what, not the why,” he said, “but that’s an interesting subgroup finding.”

As with other NAEP assessments, the science results show a widening gap between students scoring at the highest and lowest levels. Scores for students in the 90th percentile dropped from 196 to 194, but fell further, from 106 to 101, for students at the 10th percentile.  In fact, for students at both the 10th and 25th percentiles, scores are at “historic lows,” said Soldner. “These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted focused action to accelerate student learning.”

Julia Rafal-Baer, co-founder of ILO Group, an education consulting firm, and also a member of the governing board, said access to books likely contributes to the disparities in scores. If science wasn’t a high priority in some schools, “how is it that high-performing kids are still absorbing enough to be able to be high-performing?” she asked.

Many students, Rivera said, lack the reading skills to interpret science texts. 

“I’m having to take a step back and really focus on basic reading … which is not something  that I am technically trained in as a sixth grade teacher,” she said. Like many teachers, she also sees families place less emphasis on consistent attendance and good work habits. “We’re seeing students missing work. We’re not really seeing … emphasis placed on school or on achievement.”

Poor basic math skills are also hindering students’ progress in science, said Cunningham, who designs STEM curriculum materials for schools across the country.

“Teachers are spending more time making sure that the kids are prepared to do some of the things that in the past they may have assumed kids would come equipped to do,” she said. “Could they make a table? Could they make a graph?”

On NAEP, the percentage of students saying they frequently “used tables or graphs to identify relationships between variables” fell from 43% to 39%. Less than a third “used math equations to explain or support scientific conclusions.”

‘Starving ourselves of knowledge’

NAEP will assess students’ reading and math skills again in 2026, but the next won’t take place until 2028, again just for eighth grade. Students will take that includes a stronger emphasis on students applying their knowledge and will incorporate more technology and engineering topics. 

Because so many students — at least a third — score below basic, Cunningham added that the board felt it was important to expand the number of questions targeting students at that level.  

“We need to know more about what that population knows,” she said. The questions, for example, might be simpler and require less reading.

Fourth graders were left out of the 2024 and 2028 science tests for budget reasons, Cunningham said. They’re scheduled to participate again in 2032. But one former governing board member said the absence of data from fourth graders is troubling.

“If there had to be a cut, I understand why we would, but it still raises the question of what we expect in science in early grades,” said Andrew Ho, a testing expert and education professor at Harvard University. “Why are we starving ourselves of knowledge about educational progress outside of [English language arts and math]?”

Staff cuts to NCES of the results, which were expected earlier this summer. 

During a background call with reporters last week, a member of the governing board said the results were “an opportunity for the field to see that these report cards are of the same quality that they have come to expect from the NAEP program.” But an NCES official on the same call said that in light of Education Secretary Linda McMahon firing most of the center’s employees, the department will need “sufficient staff and other resources in place” to conduct the tests next year and plan for 2028.

McMahon reiterated her support for the NAEP program during a .

“If we have an objective measure across all states, like NAEP, then I think that’s the best way to go,” she said. “We will not get away from having NAEP scores and the research that we can all rely on to make sure that we’re doing the right things.”&�Բ�����; 

‘AI-driven world’

Beverly DeVore-Wedding, president of the National Science Teaching Association, still worries that the “current political climate” will diminish the program. 

“I am concerned about them changing the assessment picture and that NAEP could get reduced to only reading and mathematics,” she said. 

The science results also have implications for other aspects of President Donald Trump’s agenda, such as incorporating artificial intelligence into learning. Last week, first lady Melania Trump hosted an event tied to the for students to use AI to address community challenges. 

“It’s not one of those things to be afraid of,” McMahon said at the event. “Let’s embrace it. Let’s develop AI-based solutions to real-world problems.”

Rafal-Baer said the rapid adoption of AI tools just reinforces the importance of science education.

“AI is here and it’s already reshaping how we work, learn and solve problems,” she said.�� “The complexity is only going to accelerate, and we can’t afford to have a scientifically illiterate workforce trying to navigate an AI-driven world.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated whether the 8th grade NAEP science exam gathers supplemental data on students’ home environments or reading habits.

The Fairfax and Arlington school districts in Virginia sued Education Secretary Linda McMahon Friday over her move to classify them as “high-risk” over their transgender policies.

Their complaint noted that the additional oversight of spending came just two days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in a , reaffirmed its ruling in Grimm v. Gloucester County Board of Education, which gives trans students the right to use restrooms that align with their gender identity.��

That decision “remains the law in Northern Virginia as well as the rest of the Circuit,” they wrote.����

In a statement, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michele Reid called the lawsuit a step toward ensuring “that hungry children are fed and that student access to multilingual, special education, and other essential services is not compromised.”

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has tried since 2022 to get the suburban D.C. school districts in his state to end their policies accommodating transgender students.

Last week, the Trump administration offered considerable firepower to his cause when it announced it would require the five districts to justify every dollar they spend in order to receive federal funding. In a stern , Education Secretary Linda McMahon said Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William — the five northernmost districts closest to the nation’s capital  — are “choosing to abide by woke gender ideology in place of federal law.”&�Բ�����;

But even as McMahon placed them on “high-risk” status, their leaders policies that allow students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity, meaning the Republican governor might leave office in January without accomplishing his goal.

Grace Turner Creasy, president of the Virginia Board of Education, said it’s “anyone’s guess” whether the department’s move will change the outcome. District leaders say they are following state law and the most current federal court opinion on the issue. 

The state’s position on the matter might also shift in the next few months with Youngkin ineligible to run again in November. Democrat Abigail Spanberger, who is , hasn’t addressed the controversy, while  Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has , much as Youngkin did in 2021 when he appealed to parents angry over pandemic school closures and “critical race theory.”&�Բ�����;

The department’s action against the Virginia districts is part of an effort by President Donald Trump to force states and districts to comply with his stating that the federal government only recognizes two sexes. Following that move in January, the Education Department said it wouldn’t enforce the Biden-era Title IX rule, which expanded protections for transgender students.

On Thursday, Trump to pull all federal funding from “any California school district that doesn’t adhere to our Transgender policies.” The administration is already suing and on trans students’ participation in women’s sports. 

The conflict with the Virginia districts has been building since February when the department launched a probe into their policies. In July, officials found them in and gave them 10 days to change their rules and “adopt biology-based definitions of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ in all practices and policies relating to Title IX.”

They refused, and with roughly $50 million for low-income students, special education and other programs at risk, last week’s move escalated the dispute to a new level.  

“You’re going to continue to see the Trump administration put … pressure in a variety of ways that affect funding. It feels like all options are on the table,” said W. Scott Lewis, managing partner with TNG Consulting, which trains districts across the country on Title IX. He added that where the Education Department directs its enforcement “may vary by state, depending on gubernatorial and state house control.”

‘Totally atypical’

The penalty is severe, experts said. The high-risk label is usually reserved for districts or states in serious financial trouble. 

In 2006, the Education Department slapped that designation on the for mismanaging money, including federal grants and charter school funds.

In another example, the Michigan Department of Education placed the in high-risk status after a found the district misused over $53 million. The district spent Title I funds, for example, on equipment and building improvements the state didn’t approve, paid vendors more than the amount of their contracts and couldn’t produce invoices and receipts for multiple transactions. The district remained under federal oversight for five years. 

In this case, the added layer of scrutiny isn’t because of suspected mismanagement of the grant funds themselves; it’s an ideological disagreement. David DeSchryver, senior vice president of Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting firm, called the action “totally atypical in terms of scale.”

With the school year just starting, the question is whether any “new hurdles” might slow down the reimbursement process, said Dan Adams, spokesman for the Loudoun County Public Schools. In a statement, the Virginia Department of Education said it “will closely scrutinize any future requests” for funding. 

At least one of the five superintendents, Arlington’s Francisco Durán, told the public at a that he’s prepared to take legal action if the district’s funding is challenged. 

But conservatives view McMahon’s approach as accountability for districts that are defying the president. 

“By refusing to reverse your reckless policies, you are failing our daughters and risking losing millions of dollars in funding,” Earle-Sears said at Arlington’s board meeting. “As governor, I will not stand by while political correctness tramples over science, fairness and safety.”

The district has faced criticism over in which a registered sex offender identifying as a transgender woman used a women’s locker room at Washington Liberty High School. The school’s indoor pool is open to the public after school hours, and Durán said officials were unaware the person was a registered offender. 

Ginny Gentiles, an Arlington parent and a school choice expert at the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute, said the districts are “clinging to activist-drafted policies that allow males to self-ID into female spaces,” but that she hopes officials will listen to those concerned about women’s and girls’ safety.

She urged community members to closely monitor expenditures.

“School board leaders clearly intend to spend taxpayer dollars on inevitable court cases and likely expensive legal fees,” she said. 

Earle-Sears also joined on Wednesday, where district officials threatened to suspend two boys for sexual harassment and sex discrimination. They complained last spring when a student identifying as a trans boy used the locker room to change and videotaped them.

‘Federal overreach’

Some observers say the battle between Washington and its neighboring districts is more than a culture war. Kristen Amundson, a former Democratic state lawmaker and Fairfax County school board member, said the administration is trying to exert control over blue cities. 

“This is not about trans kids; this is about federal overreach,” she said. She cited patrolling Washington and of the Kennedy Center Honors as further examples. “Do you see the pattern here?”

The impasse also comes at a difficult time for the state’s Republicans, which tend to elect governors from the party that’s . Northern Virginia already votes predominantly blue, and residents, Amundson said, are especially angry at Washington. 

“They have seen thousands of parents lose their jobs” because of and “parents snatched off the streets” in , she said. 

For Earle-Sears, a , the debate over trans students is a key campaign issue. In contrast, Spanberger, who has three school-age daughters, has an focused on improving instruction in public schools and addressing teacher shortages. 

Anne Holton, former secretary of education under Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, called the issue a distraction “from the issues that parents really care about,” like employing high-quality teachers and preparing kids well for college or a career. 

For now, districts say they are complying with the . Enacted in 2020, it allows anyone to use facilities that align with their gender identity.  In addition, the Trump administration’s policies, they say, conflict with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s opinion in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board. 

That’s been their position since 2022, when Youngkin issued stating that students must use bathrooms and locker rooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth. A year later, Jason Miyares, the state’s attorney general, that the governor’s rules didn’t violate state or federal anti-discrimination laws. Yet district policies remain unchanged.

In Grimm, the court ruled that the district’s transgender bathroom ban was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 in that case. In its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will hear lawsuits from West Virginia and Idaho that test whether states can ban transgender girls from competing in female sports.

Those cases “will further clarify Title IX’s application,” Arlington’s Durán said at last week’s board meeting. “But in the meantime, our policy will remain in place in alignment with state and federal law, and we are prepared to defend it and our federal funding if challenged.”&�Բ�����;

The department said it will reinstate roughly 25 employees Sept. 8, nearly three months after a federal judge told the department to start the process, and will return another 60 every two weeks until early November. 

The plan comes after the Massachusetts district court judge to throw out a June 18 order requiring the department to put the employees back to work. Department officials are now appealing that ruling.

Sean Ouellette, who represents the families and advocates who sued over the firings at OCR, said he was pleased to see “a commitment” from the department.

“I hope they restore staff on the schedule they laid out, or hopefully faster. We’re not really sure it should take that long,” said Ouellette, a senior attorney with Public Justice. “We’re a little skeptical because this only comes after the court called them out on the delay.”

In another personnel development, the department will begin reinstating employees in late January because their positions were linked, sometimes tenuously, to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs. Many of those targeted were told by their supervisors during the first Trump administration to attend a DEI training. The American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents the department staff, filed for arbitration — a dispute resolution process — rather than bringing a lawsuit.

“Because our local refused to stand down, we have learned that a number of our members placed on DEI leave are being returned to duty,” Sheria Smith, president of Local 252, wrote to employees Tuesday. 

But Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, disputed that arbitration played a role in the decision.

“The agency determined they are an asset to the workforce,” she said.

The action could slow down progress toward President Donald Trump’s pledge to dismantle the Education Department and eliminate any DEI-related activity — central pieces of his agenda that the public doesn’t necessarily support, according to recent PDK Poll results.��

McMahon fired roughly half its OCR staff members March 11 along with over 1,000 other employees. The Victims Rights Law Center, which represents victims of sexual assault, argued that their dismissal in combination with the closure of seven out of 12 regional offices, left the office unable to perform duties mandated by law. 

The department tried to link the OCR firings to a in which the Supreme Court allowed McMahon to let staff go from other divisions within the agency. In both cases, the courts have yet to issue a final decision on whether the firings were legal. Judge agreed with Public Justice, saying that the OCR case presented “distinct factual circumstances,” and “cannot be lumped in with” the other lawsuit. 

The department disagrees. “At bottom, plaintiffs’ lawsuit is an improper programmatic attack on how the department runs OCR,” wrote Michael Bruns, an attorney with the Justice Department.��In the appeal to the U.S. Appeals Court for the First Circuit, he called the lawsuit “crafty pleading.”

For now, however, Joun’s opinion leaves the department with no further options but to bring back the staff. 

OCR, not surprisingly, hasn’t been able to move through cases as quickly as it did prior to the layoffs. Since March 11, the office has resolved 413 complaints, compared to about 200 per month previously, Steven Schaefer, deputy assistant secretary for policy at OCR, wrote in a filing to the court.  

Ouellette, the Public Justice attorney, said having more attorneys and investigators back to work should help OCR make progress on the backlog.

“At least that will get things back to the way they were, which was already strained,” he said.

‘Called back’

Union officials haven’t received any communication from the department specifying which employees are returning or when they will start work, said spokesman Andrew Feldman. But the department did tell some to report to the cafeteria on Monday for a “brief orientation,” according to a notice to employees shared with The 74.

“We have members who have self-reported to us they have been called back,” Feldman said.

One of those is Kissy Chapman-Thaw, an education program specialist and former teacher. She learned secondhand that she would be among those returning Sept. 8, which she said the department’s IT help desk confirmed Wednesday. 

She oversaw budgeting and higher education grants, including COVID relief funds, but she attended the three-day DEI training in 2019, which she thinks likely contributed to her dismissal.   

“For me, as an African American woman, I felt not just educated, but I understood how to be more sensitive to other people in general,” she said. She refused to quit while her job was in limbo. “After a month, I was like, I’m not going anywhere. They’ve got to fire me. I’m just not going to walk away that easily.”