Just over a year ago, IES — the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, charged with deepening America’s understanding of how schools perform and what students learn — was rocked by a wave of layoffs as Education Secretary Linda McMahon her own agency. The education chapter of Project 2025, a policy wish-list assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation, advised that the Institute’s statistical office be moved to the Census Bureau. 

The picture looks somewhat sunnier as winter turns to spring, with Republicans in Congress from significant cuts and . In a recent interview, Lindsey Burke — the author of the Project 2025 recommendations on schooling, now serving as deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the Education Department — referred to IES as of the Education Department.

Most striking of all was the publication last month of by Amber Northern, a prominent education researcher and commentator appointed last year as a special advisor to McMahon. While critical of the Institute for its numerous areas of focus and the sometimes-plodding pace of its data releases, Northern’s overview represents a long-term vision for federal support of research that directly answers the needs of educators. McMahon and Acting IES Director Matthew Soldner , suggesting that its prescriptions would find a receptive audience in the administration.

But some insiders said that any attempt to improve the functions of the Institute would depend on a meaningful rebuilding of its capacity, including a move to restore agency staff to something approximating their numbers before last year’s DOGE cuts. What’s more, some tweaks to IES workings and grantmaking would require changes in law that would be impossible without bipartisan cooperation in Congress. That leaves open the question of whether there remains a constituency for the kind of large-scale, public-sector research endeavors that have long received the backing of both Democrats and Republicans.

Northern declined to comment for this story. But her recommendations — broadly, that IES limit its focus to a smaller number of national education challenges, reorient its work toward the practical concerns of schools, and foster cooperation among states to scale up their most promising policies — amplify some broadly shared views of where federal data collection needs to go. 

Sara Schapiro, executive director of the advocacy coalition , noted that her group’s recent made some of the same points, as did from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Not only are many of those ideas the subject of broad agreement, she added; they can also be implemented at the discretion of the Institute’s leadership, with no input from lawmakers necessary.

“One of the recommendations was a smaller set of research priorities — IES can just do that,” Schapiro said. “They can require better dissemination [of research] from grantees. They can do some of the rapid-cycle grants we’ve called for and this report calls for. And they can also review and change some of the NCES data collections.”&�Բ�����;

Yet any statutory changes would face major headwinds in an era of intense polarization and divided political attention. In 2023, Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders and Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy that would have reauthorized the Education Sciences Reform Act, the law that established IES in 2002. It never received a Senate vote, demonstrating to Schapiro that any legislative efforts would be “extraordinarily hard.”&�Բ�����;

“We weren’t able to get it over the finish line during the Biden administration, with an easier congressional landscape,” she acknowledged.

David Cleary, a former high-level Republican staffer who helped pass major education laws across more than two decades working in Congress, wrote in an email that the most promising potential revamp might lie in the of Trump administration official Jim O’Neill to lead the National Science Foundation. An interagency agreement between NSF and IES could allow the two organizations to pool resources and expertise going forward. (Two such agreements between the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.)

Beyond such administrative wrangling, however, Cleary said the education policy community needed to “buckle down and do hard things well instead of doing easy things poorly.” He cited the recent momentum of state-led literacy initiatives, galvanized partly through their partnership with federally funded research labs, as an example for lawmakers to follow. 

“The challenge is getting staff and members to think a little more dispassionately about what needs to be researched and funded,” Cleary wrote. “Instead of letting every question be asked, every project funded, every idea pursued, we should model after the successful endeavors on the science of reading.”

Veteran research administrator Cara Jackson, who worked at a private research organization that collaborated with IES until losing her job last year, said she agreed with portions of Northern’s critique, noting the long wait times that contractors anticipated when receiving feedback from the Institute’s various offices and stakeholders. She argued that greater transparency in the research process, including a dashboard allowing the public to track the time and money expended on each project, would foster more “mutual accountability” on all sides.

Nevertheless, it was a “strange sequence” to call for reforms after largely dismantling the Institute’s workforce, Jackson continued. Well-intentioned proposals to award funding and release data on a faster timetable would likely falter if not enough employees existed to simply push money out the door to grantees and contractors. 

“There were people there who were already acting on these ideas and could have been doing that all this time,” Jackson observed. “Now you’re going to have to hire people to do it. It takes forever to hire government employees, and we haven’t made the job any more attractive by letting go of all these people.”

Twenty-year-old Mikayla Foreman knows her experience is meaningful. Dealing with homelessness since 18 and currently living in a shelter, Foreman has managed to continue her academic journey, studying for exams this month in hopes of attaining a nursing degree.

But Foreman believes there were intervention points that could’ve prevented her from experiencing homelessness in the first place.

“If someone in school had understood what I was going through, things could’ve been very different,” she said in an interview with Stateline.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

As more cities impose bans, fines or jail time for adults living on the streets, young people who have been homeless say they face unique problems that could have been addressed earlier. Through more than 400 interviews and survey responses, young people across the country recently told researchers how earlier guidance and intervention might have made a difference for them. The research suggests the country is missing its biggest opportunity to prevent youth homelessness — by intervening well before a young person reaches a shelter and years before they are chronically homeless.

The , from Covenant House and the University of California, Berkeley, finds that the pathways into youth homelessness are different from those of adults experiencing temporary or chronic homelessness. A young person coming out to their family, or becoming pregnant, or experiencing untreated trauma can create conflicts that push them into homelessness. A lot of that doesn’t show up in current data.

The survey responses offer the nation’s schools and social services agencies the chance to get ahead of youth homelessness, researchers say, not only by intervening earlier, but also by pinpointing and responding to the diversity of needs among teenagers and young adults who might be close to losing their housing.

Advocates say there are multiple intervention points — in school, in child welfare organizations and inside family dynamics — where the worst outcomes can be avoided. States such as California, Florida, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington have explored some of those intervention points in policies that range from guaranteed income pilot programs to youth-specific rental assistance and campus housing protections.

Hawaii has made its youth drop-in and crisis-diversion program permanent, and Oregon and Washington have expanded rental assistance and education-centered supports for vulnerable youth. Florida now requires colleges to prioritize housing for homeless and foster students.

“With young people, we have opportunities to intervene much further upstream — in schools, in families, in child welfare — before anyone has to spend a single night on the streets. That’s simply not the case with older adults,” said David Howard, former senior vice president for Covenant House and a co-author of the new research, in an interview with Stateline.

“Even at 18, 20 or 24 [years old], young people are still developing,” Howard said. “Their vulnerabilities look very different from middle-aged adults, and the support systems they need are different too.”

One of the key points of intervention for potentially homeless youth is school. Public schools across the country since the COVID-19 pandemic.

And homelessness has many various regional factors outside of individual circumstances, such as climate-driven homelessness. More than 5,100 students in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina became homeless as a result of hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024.

“Homelessness is multifaceted and lots of us slip through the cracks because the system isn’t designed for our reality,” said Foreman, a former Covenant House resident who helped conduct the new research.

Foreman’s insights and lived experience were included in the study, which showed that youth homelessness rarely begins with an eviction or job loss — frequent causes of homelessness among adults.

The top three reasons that young people experience homelessness for the first time, according to respondents, were being kicked out of their family homes, running away, and leaving an unsafe living situation such as one affected by domestic violence. Other instigators included being unable to afford housing, aging out of foster care, being kicked out of or running away from foster care, and moving away from gang violence.

However, respondents also had suggestions for ways government, schools and the community could help or prevent youth homelessness. They suggested youth-specific housing options, identifying and helping at-risk youth in health care settings, providing direct cash assistance and offering conflict resolution support within families.

Among the most common suggestions was to offer services that create long-lasting connections for young people.

“Strong relationships with non-parental adults, including mentors, teachers, service providers, and elders, were identified as especially important when family connections were strained or absent,” the report said.

The surveys and interviews also demonstrated that young people want mental health care tailored to their personal experience, said Benjamin Parry, a lead researcher on the report, speaking during a September webinar hosted by Point Source Youth, a nonprofit that works to end youth homelessness.

The research breaks out responses from a few specific groups — Indigenous, Latino, immigrant, LGBTQ+ people of color and pregnant or parenting youth — to understand their distinct needs, said Parry, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “There’s so much nuance and specificity within these different groups.”

Indigenous youth, for example, often are dealing with the effects of intergenerational trauma and alcoholism that have been projected onto them, Parry said. Those young people have far different needs than pregnant or parenting youth, he noted.

“They are like, ‘I don’t know where my next paycheck’s going to come from, I don’t know how to put food in my baby’s stomach, I don’t have a support network or someone to go to for this advice,’” he said. “That specificity is exactly why we need to understand this better and do better to tailor our approaches and responses.”

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.

Le plus ça change…

The past year marked the beginning — or re-beginning — of a new, old era in American schools: the Trump administration’s second term, which promised an explosion of school choice programs, further rollbacks on controversial content in classrooms, and a radical reduction in the federal government’s intervention in public schools. There was a new sheriff back in town.

To one extent or another, those priorities have all been embraced as predicted. But they were also the K–12 hallmarks of President Trump’s first term, however, the somewhat muddled results of which were largely overwhelmed by the chaos of COVID. Even beyond the pendulum lurches between presidencies, many of the perennial debates over education policy, politics, and governance in the United States seem to carry echoes of the distant past: Will the U.S. Department of Education cease to exist? Too bad we can’t ask Ronald Reagan.

Yet education research shows clearly how the renewed fervor of the second MAGA wave has, in some senses, fulfilled the hopes and anxieties embedded in the first. While educators that fear of immigration authorities could depress school attendance among English learners, multiple studies now persuasively link ICE and Border Patrol operations with rising absenteeism in local schools. Early evidence from states implementing voucher-like programs suggest an enthusiastic uptake among families that could have barely been dreamt of in the 2010s. And the president’s has now gone national, with county-level analyses of MMR shots revealing unmistakable downward movement since 2020. 

Indeed, this fruitful year for social science came even as the White House made good on campaign commitments to liquidate Education Department staff, cancelled dozens of contracts with research firms, and rescinded grants that had been awarded through the National Science Foundation. It remains to be seen to what extent these steps will limit the public’s insight into how schools perform and children learn, but the early signs are foreboding.

For now, though, it’s worth reviewing the empirical insights that taught us the most about education in 2025. Welcome to the year in charts.

ICE

Immigration Enforcement Worsened Absenteeism

The impact of the Trump administration’s clampdown on illegal immigration this year was felt immediately, with the number of detainees held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement between January and August. That aggressive approach is correlated with a meaningful decline in school attendance, according to released by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee.

Studying the aftermath of in California’s Central Valley — initiated a few days before President Trump was inaugurated, using tactics that would by a federal judge — Dee found that student absences increased by 22 percent across five surrounding school districts. Extrapolated across the rest of the school year, he calculated, the reduced attendance would result in over 700,000 lost days of student learning.

Similar trends were observed in on Connecticut and Rhode Island, where absences for English learners increased by 4 percent. Just as striking, showed that Spanish-speaking students at schools that were more exposed to heightened immigration enforcement experienced both lower academic achievement and fewer disciplinary incidents. 

Learning Loss

Districts Still Lag Pre-COVID Achievement

More than a half-decade after the first COVID-19 cases were detected in the United States — today’s high school seniors were just wrapping up the sixth grade when emergency school closures were announced — K–12 learning has not fully recovered in most communities. 

A February report from the , a research consortium dedicated to studying the pandemic’s effects, found that just 6 percent of American elementary and middle schoolers live in school districts where average math or reading levels have returned to the levels seen in 2019. Combining state test scores for 35 million students with results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally administered exam known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the authors estimated that the average American pupil was still a half a grade level behind pre-pandemic achievement in both core subjects.

Even given the enormous federal funding spent to offer catch-up instruction, the prospect of improvement can’t be taken for granted: Scant improvement was seen in student scores between 2022 and 2024, with reading performance actually declining after schools reopened.

“Given all the money that’s been spent, and the fact that students already lost ground between 2019 and 2022, you would have expected that there would be some bounce-back in reading,” Harvard economist Thomas Kane told The 74. “But no, actually.”&�Բ�����;

Academic Achievement

K–12 Learning Was Stagnant Before COVID

The academic damage inflicted by the pandemic has been well chronicled by Kane and others. But a range of voices rose this year from around the K–12 world to critique other sources of the national school stagnation, including and . 

One, Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, circulated this fall charting the trajectory of educational outcomes in the 21st century, arguing that the years preceding 2020 were no golden era of academic achievement. According to his estimates, only one-quarter of the decline in students’ average reading performance since 2013 — often described as the high-water mark of learning, as measured by NAEP — took place during the pandemic itself. What’s more, he continued, the cost of that lost educational growth could number into the many trillions of dollars as time goes by.

It is an assessment largely shared by the equally prominent University of Virginia researcher James Wyckoff, who released looking at similar trends earlier in the year. That study asserts that the roots of learning loss began even earlier than is typically assumed, in the years spanning the Bush-Obama transition, and notes an abundance of potential explanations (including smartphones, Great Recession-related school funding cuts, and the implementation of Common Core standards). 

Readers can expect to see more such forensic examinations of the last few decades. As the shadow of COVID recedes further into memory, policymakers will need to come to grips with the K–12 fundamentals that hurt student performance in the 2010s.

ESA’s

Education Savings Accounts Lift Private School Enrollment — and Tuition

The march of private school choice picked up steam in 2025 as the availability of education savings accounts, which provide families thousands of dollars to use for private tuition or other K–12 expenses. Most were conservative bastions like Idaho, Wyoming, or Tennessee — Texas, in particular, is poised to become the largest school choice marketplace in the country — but New Hampshire also became the first blue state (albeit Republican-led, for the moment) to join the party.

With so much of the country stampeding toward the policy, social scientists are also beginning to understand its effects. In , Tulane University’s Douglas Harris and Gabriel Olivier studied the 11 states that enacted universal ESAs between 2021 and 2024, ultimately discovering that they led to slight bumps in both private school tuition (5–10 percent) and enrollment (3–4 percent) compared with other states. The bump in costs is particularly noteworthy, they argue, given that many private schools already substantially raised their prices during the COVID era.

While that study incorporated data on nearly 60 percent of all U.S. private schools, the RAND Corporation also released at the ESA picture in one state, Arizona. That work also revealed that the switch from income-targeted to universal ESAs led to a 12 percent jump in elementary school tuition; in a pattern that will likely take hold elsewhere, the number of students participating in the program also leapt from 12,000 in 2021 to almost 90,000 in 2024.

Digital Distractions

Cell Phone Bans Boost Student Performance

While the ESA wave is still building, the push for phone restrictions in classrooms has exploded to . Thirty-seven states have either passed laws to curb phone usage in K–12 schools or required school districts to adopt their own policies to similar effect. The movement caught fire over the last few years in response to complaints from families and educators that digital devices present a major distraction during the school day.

In investigating the effects of such restrictions in Florida, University of Rochester Professor David Figlio and RAND economist Umut Özek found that bans were associated with slight improvements in standardized test scores (1.1 percentiles, on average, two years after a ban was put in place) that were somewhat larger for male students and those enrolled in middle or high school. A substantial portion of that boost, they write, is attributable to improved attendance resulting from the bans.

Not all of the news was rosy. Male students, and particularly African Americans, also saw elevated rates of disciplinary infractions and suspensions in the wake of a phone ban taking effect, though that trend mostly subsided by the second year following the adoption.

Academic Standards

Exam-Free Admissions Lowered Standards at UC

The late-breaking leader for the most stunning chart of the year came in November, with the release of from the faculty Senate of the University of California San Diego. A working group convened to study the academic preparation of students reported that over 12 percent of incoming freshmen in 2025 could not meet high school math standards — a figure that had increased by a factor of 30 since 2020. An astounding 8 percent of freshmen could not perform to middle school standards in the subject.

While COVID-era learning loss is undoubtedly to blame for some of these developments, the faculty group also cast blame on slumping standards at both the K–12 and higher education levels. Among students channeled into the university’s remedial math course, which was originally designed to teach a tiny fraction of freshmen, roughly one-quarter were admitted with 4.0 GPAs. 

Those deceptive grades became a crucial indicator of student readiness in 2020, when the UC system in admissions decisions. Whatever the chief explanation for these results, one thing is clear: At an internationally recognized college, considerable numbers of students are paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to be taught material they should have mastered years ago.

Workforce

Interest in Teaching Lower Among Men, Non-Whites

A wave of recent research a pronounced decline in the prestige of the teaching profession and the job satisfaction of in-service educators. In , academics from the University of Virginia and Texas A&M put that swoon in particularly stark relief by investigating exactly who expresses interest in becoming a teacher.

Gathering data from 64 million college applications between 2014 and 2025, the authors were able to assess the aspirations and traits of high school seniors who declared an interest in the teaching profession. The group was polarized heavily on lines of sex, with males roughly one-third as interested in the career as females. Black students, similarly, were only about one-third as enthusiastic about teaching as their white counterparts. 

Even more intriguing, the paper leverages the applicants’ college recommendations to get a detailed view of how they were perceived by their high school teachers. Rated on a set of personal characteristics, potential future educators were described as being relatively higher in leadership, integrity, and care for others — but relatively lower in intellectual promise, academic achievement and self-confidence. 

Public Health

Vaccination Rates Are Lower

The politics of public health have also become more divisive of late, particularly in response to pandemic-era public health measures. This year, the ascent of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy — who that childhood vaccines have no relationship to autism — marked a dramatic change in federal policy toward pediatric medicine.

A published in the Journal of the American Medical Association gives reason to think these fractures are leading to real consequences. Using data from 32 states, the authors calculate that vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella have declined significantly since the emergence of COVID. Across roughly 2,000 counties, more than 1,600 reported declines during that period, and only four states (California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York) saw increases in the median vaccination rate at the county level. Around the nation, the average rate fell from 93.92 percent to 91.26 percent; the herd immunity threshold is 95 percent, the authors note.

“I think this is only going to get worse,” one pediatrician and vaccine advocate told The 74. “I think vaccines are under attack.”

Demographics

Enrollment Losses Are Steeper in Wealthier Schools

COVID scrambled the populations of districts across the country, with early estimates showing in total U.S. public school enrollment in the 2020–21 school year. But that exodus was seen in radically different magnitudes depending on school demographics, according to research from Boston University’s Joshua Goodman and Abigail Francis. 

Focusing on data from Massachusetts, that the state’s white and Asian enrollment figures were significantly lower (3.1 percent and 8.1 percent, respectively) by fall of 2024 than pre-pandemic trends would have predicted. Black and Hispanic enrollment, meanwhile, is now actually higher than expected — a major change in racial composition just in the course of a half-decade.

Notably, declines in public school enrollment were at their most extreme in Massachusetts’s wealthiest communities, where families were to private or charter schools that prioritized reopening for in-person instruction: The total number of students who disenrolled from the most affluent districts (those ranked in the top 20 percent of average income) greatly exceeded departing students from districts in the bottom 80 percent. 

Early Learning

Montessori Preschool Beats Other Models

The long-respected Montessori pedagogical model has gained a buzzy cultural prominence of late, as evidenced by for wooden toys in new parent groups. New evidence from the University of Virginia and the American Institutes for Research suggests that all those building blocks are well worth the price tag. 

In a study of roughly 600 students in preschool and kindergarten, the researchers pointed to large benefits from attending one of two-dozen public Montessori programs. Compared with a control group, the Montessori students (randomly selected through an admission lottery) enjoyed sizable advantages in executive function, reading, and short-term memory. What’s more, partly thanks to larger class sizes, the program cost over $13,000 less per child than conventional preschool offerings over a three-year span.

Considering the for this type of schooling, parents can likely expect to see more private Montessori options emerge in the coming years. But the authors conclude that expanding access to public programs “may be a cost-effective way to sustain early learning gains at least through the end of kindergarten.”

Education Polarization

College Majors Shift Students’ Politics

Much of the last two decades of political history have been characterized by “education polarization” — the of voters without college degrees to vote Republican while their more credentialed counterparts favor Democrats. The question is whether that phenomenon is the effect of college itself, or simply the product of ideological self-sorting.

According to , the actual content of college courses plays an important role shifting undergraduates along the partisan spectrum. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of survey responses from undergraduates at 377 colleges, the authors learned that students increase in “liberal” or “far-left” self-identification by seven percentage points between college entry and graduation. That average conceals a great deal of variation, however: Controlling for a swath of variables like pre-college ideology, life goals, and intended major, the data suggests that the act of studying social sciences or humanities makes students four percentage points more likely to consider themselves on the political left relative to those focusing on natural sciences. Majoring in economics or business, meanwhile, decreases that likelihood by six points. While all college students tend to slide leftward in their cultural politics, economic issues like taxation are particularly sensitive to major choice.

In all, the influence of enrolling in social science or humanities coursework over voting preferences is about equal to the effect of growing up in a heavily Democratic congressional district. If all students in left-leaning disciplines switched to business or economics, the paper estimates, education polarization would decline by roughly one-third.

Critical Race Theory

CRT in Classrooms Isn’t a Myth

The debate around critical race theory in schools has raged for much of the last half-decade, with many conservatives alleging that children are bombarded daily with messages derogating American history and Western values. Defenders of public education have responded by calling CRT an obscure sub-discipline of legal education with little purchase for K–12 students.

In January, published in the journal Education Next offered some evidence that CRT — or, at least, some of the key ideas proliferated by its academic theorists — does indeed find its way into high school classrooms. More than one-third of respondents said their teachers characterized the United States as a racist nation “often” or “almost daily,” while similar proportions reported hearing frequent messages about the racist complicity of white people and police officers. At the same time, majorities of pupils also said they’d been taught that the country had made strides toward racial equality since the 1970s.

It is difficult to say with certainty which areas see more of this kind of teaching, or even in what context such statements are made. “I’m sure there are schools where it’s not happening at all,” University of Missouri Professor Brian Kisida told The 74. “I’m also sure that there are schools where it’s happening quite a bit, and it’s really ingrained in the approach that those schools take.”

Three times a week, the young students struggling the most with reading at each of Milwaukee College Prep’s four campuses go to a dedicated classroom, don their headphones, and log into a virtual tutoring session.

For the next 30 minutes, each student gets one-on-one attention from a certified teacher who might ask them about their dog or their baby sister before diving into the lesson.

Virtual tutoring — in this case through a provider called OpenLiteracy — is the only way Milwaukee College Prep could provide so much tutoring for so many children and from such experienced educators, said Erica Badger, director of curriculum and instruction for the 2,000-student charter network.

“We have a hundred kids on at once,” she said. “Being able to have that many adults come into the school building? I can’t even imagine.”

For these reasons and others, virtual tutoring has remained part of the toolbox of American schools long after students returned to in-person classes. It costs less than in-person tutoring, scheduling is more flexible, and providers aren’t limited to hiring in the surrounding community.

But it doesn’t always work smoothly.

Two studies from Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator released Wednesday used natural language processing technologies to review transcripts from tens of thousands of hours of virtual tutoring sessions. Their goal: to better understand exactly what happens between tutors and students in these sessions.

as revealed through tutor comments, such as “You can’t see me? I’m not sure why you can’t see me” or “Sorry. Did you say something? It was hard to hear.”

Researchers found that 19% of available time was lost to disruptions, whether from technological issues, distracted students, or background noise. Time lost to disruptions was even greater when tutors were working with more than one student, especially if one of the students entered the session late.

The with students in one-on-one sessions and in sessions with two students.

Students were randomly assigned to either an individual tutor or to work with the tutor and another student. Tutors spent more time talking overall when they were working with two students, but only about 21% of tutor speech was individualized content instruction, compared with 65% one-on-one sessions. The tutors in the one-on-one sessions also used more phrases associated with motivation and relationship-building.

Both studies involved young students working on early literacy skills.

High-intensity or high-dosage tutoring, generally defined as occurring at least three times a week and for 10 weeks or longer, emerged as one of the most high-profile and effective interventions to address pandemic-related learning loss. .

The new studies shed light on why virtual tutoring in particular has a mixed track record, according to studies. They also suggest ways schools and tutoring providers can make these sessions more effective. That’s especially important now that federal pandemic relief has expired, and schools have less money to spend.

“There are specific features that effective tutoring programs tend to have, but what is actually driving effectiveness is kind of a black box,” said Carly Robinson, a co-author on both papers and director of research at Stanford’s SCALE Initiative, which runs the National Student Support Accelerator.

The emergence of virtual tutoring provides new opportunities to provide answers, because new technology allows audio and video from these sessions to be analyzed at scale, Robinson said. Previous research using similar techniques found, for example, that tutors tend to , unless that student was a girl paired with a higher-performing boy. In those cases, the boy still got more attention.

Robinson said the research findings shouldn’t deter schools from using virtual tutoring or even from using small group sessions. That 81% of tutoring time was productive even when working with very young children is a “positive finding,” Robinson said.

Students experienced more disruptions when they worked in the corner of a classroom than in dedicated tutoring spaces. Small schools experienced more disruptions than large schools did as they added tutoring sessions. And the youngest children, kindergartners, experienced significantly more disruptions than second graders.

Researchers suggest that schools find a quiet dedicated space for children to work if possible; have an adult on hand to handle tech issues; and be realistic about each school’s capacity to host a lot of video calls at once.

The study on one-to-one versus two-to-one tutoring suggests that tutors may need different techniques, including strategies from in-person small group instruction, to ensure both students get the most possible from each session.

OnYourMark Education, the tutoring provider that was involved in that study, has already overhauled its 2:1 tutoring, CEO and founder Mindy Sjoblom said. Some of these changes were subtle, just as having tutors ask a question and then call on a child, so that both students have to pay attention to the question and think about the answer.

The study took place in OnYourMark’s second year of operation. Now in its fourth year, OnYourMark still offers one-to-one tutoring in , but when districts are paying out of pocket, they’re mostly opting for two-to-one sessions, she said. The company has lost some clients who decided they could no longer afford tutoring.

OnYourMark is piloting a program that has students work independently on an adaptive tech platform three days a week and meet with a tutor twice a week. If it’s successful, it would cost about 60% as much as two-to-one tutoring.

“If schools can’t afford to implement it, we’re spinning our wheels,” Sjoblom said.

Thinking beyond a tutoring ‘gold standard’

A lot of research on tutoring points to a “gold standard,” said Liz Cohen, vice president of policy at 50CAN, an advocacy group, and the author of “The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives.” But schools might also be interested in what a silver standard or a bronze standard looks like.

The two new studies help identify trade-offs in a granular way that can shape training and program design, she said.

“It’s really important research because a big part of making tutoring more effective is figuring out how to scale it and make it more affordable,” she said. “That means figuring out how to make the most out of the tutor’s time.”

But Ashley Jochim, a principal at the Center for Reinventing Public Education, said perfecting tutoring programs won’t have much impact if schools don’t also pay attention to their core instruction.

“What does it mean to do high-impact tutoring in a school system where the classroom instruction has not been optimized?” she said. “This is a huge liability. We optimize too much on these design-based studies without thinking about the system as a whole.”

Milwaukee College Prep originally targeted a small group of fourth graders for extra reading help, but Badger said the network school realized that was too late and not enough. A donor approached the school about wanting to fund something that would really move the needle on student outcomes. A gift of $500,000 a year over three years allows the network to provide one-on-one tutoring for 30 minutes a day, three times a week to 200 first and second grade students.

Sarah Scott Frank, CEO of OpenLiteracy, the tutoring provider at Milwaukee College Prep, said she believes strongly in one-to-one tutoring. When students don’t work at the same pace, it can be “crushing” for the slower student, Frank said.

“One kid would be zooming along, and the kids are very perceptive, and they see that, and they think ‘see, I can’t do that,’ and it reinforces that negative identity,” she said.

One-to-one tutoring costs more up front, she said. But she believes it’s more cost effective because it works.

The charter network already had a classroom aide providing small-group instruction in addition to the lead teacher in every classroom. The charter network has also upgraded its literacy curriculum to add more phonics. Tutors and classroom teachers use the same curriculum and can share data easily.

Teachers practice the transition to the tutoring room and do trial runs with the platform so that students can log in smoothly two minutes before the session is supposed to start. An adult is on hand to troubleshoot tech problems. Attendance is measured in minutes.

“It’s not a quiet environment,” Badger acknowledges. “But it’s this hum and excitement of learning.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

When asked about how they paid for what they considered their most important license, 71% said they used their own money while 19% reported tapping into government or private loans and nearly 25% said they received support from their employer. 

Ama Takyi-Laryea, a Pew senior manager who contributed , said up until now, there’s been a gap in knowledge about how individuals are financing this level of skill acquisition, even as the number of people pursuing credentialing is rising dramatically.

“Having data to inform different pathways towards quality credentials — no matter what form it takes — is what’s essential right now,” she said.

A third of all adults in the United States have a nondegree credential, Pew found, and of those, 18% also have a college degree.

Michelle Van Noy, director of Rutgers University’s Education and Employment Research Center, said understanding where the money is coming from for certificates and professional licensing sheds light on whether that type of education and training is being properly supported.

“If we see so many people paying on their own, we want to know if this is fair for people who are trying to seek out these pathways,” she said. 

The underlying data for the Pew report comes from the pilot, a survey of 15,734 respondents, ages 16 to 75, administered by the U.S. Census Bureau. For a number of key indicators, this dataset is the only nationally representative source, according to researchers.

Nondegree credential programs are typically designed to train students in specific skills, like dental assisting or computer programming. There is no industry standard definition, yet they differ from associate and bachelor’s degrees in a number of ways: they are often much shorter in duration, ranging from a few weeks to less than a year; they are offered by both accredited and unaccredited schools — as well as businesses, associations and government agencies — and they can expire.

Critical to the cost consideration is the fact that they have historically been ineligible for government aid, though recently passed will mean that starting in July 2026, federal Pell Grants for low- and middle-income students can be applied to select accredited programs.

When asked about their most recent vocational certificate vs. their most important active license, the financial sources shifted: fewer people (about half vs. roughly 70%) said they paid using their own money, about the same amount (20% vs. 19%) reported relying on loans and the number looking to their employer for funds shrunk from nearly 25% to 15%.

“It is concerning that most students pay out of pocket for their sometimes-costly NDCs [nondegree credentials], especially because one study found that over half of these programs’ hourly costs minimum wages across 15 states,” according to the Pew report.

Researchers found that the annual rates at which people recall earning nondegree credentials tripled between 2009 and 2021. During this time, rates in vocational certificate attainment jumped from 0.4% to 1.2% and those earning professional licenses jumped from 0.5% to 1.6%. Researchers noted that these shifts occurred against the backdrop of waning enrollments in traditional college programs.

Nationally, over 1.1 million credentials are available, ranging from big tech certifications to community college programs, yet quality and outcomes are highly mixed, according to by the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. They found that only about 12% of programs lead to significant wage gains for workers beyond what their peers make without the credentials.

And while the top 10% of credentials boost annual earnings by almost $5,000 within a year of completion, the average credential increases earnings by just $1,200, and “many credentials fail to move the needle at all, leaving learners exactly where they started,” according to the report.

“Without better data and transparency, countless Americans risk wasting time and money on credentials that lead nowhere,” the AEI report says.

This variation in quality, paired with a scarcity of reliable data, “leaves people to sort of fend for themselves, “ Rutgers’ Van Noy said. “It points to this larger systematic problem.”&�Բ�����;

While these initial findings provide significant new information and are “the best we have,” Pew’s Takyi-Laryea stressed that they have limitations and should be viewed as a jumping off point for future work. 

She said forthcoming research will look more granularly at payment methods; analyze educational pathways that lead to these programs and the industries they’re in; and look at student perceptions of their programs in terms of both value and quality. 

The goal is to allow students to make better-informed decisions and for states to set guardrails. This is particularly important as state-level investment in these programs has significantly increased, with to short-term credential initiatives.

“I cannot stress enough the need for researchers to fill these data gaps around quality and value for students, for states that are investing heavily in these programs, for employers — even for the providers,” Takyi-Laryea said.

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.”

What she saw in Finland was especially “eye opening” — a recognition of the value of play in a child’s educational journey. The schools she visited enjoyed a 15-minute break for exercise or physical play for every 45 minutes of instruction time.

“I thought, how can I replicate that here? We don’t do enough of it.”

“We’ve really worked hard, especially at the K-5 level, to bring kids outdoors as much as possible,” said Sinha, who in years past has directed funding to develop multiple outdoor classroom spaces across the district’s five elementary school buildings. Educators are encouraged to incorporate movement breaks into snacktime, and they recently fenced the schoolyard around the middle school so that older students can enjoy a recess and be more active.

But when it comes to boosting physical activity, any significant alteration to the daily schedule comes with a cost: precious lost minutes required for core academic classes. 

“I do think if kids had that extra physical activity, we’d need to teach less,” Sinha said. “It’s weird to say, but I think they retain more when they have more opportunities to be active.”

She’s not wrong.

New from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, shows that when students engage in high-intensity interval exercises, they score significantly higher on standardized tests measuring verbal comprehension. In a study of elementary school children aged 9 to 12, researchers examined a type of brain neuroelectrical activity called “error-related negativity,” which occurs when people make a mistake and is associated with reduced focus and performance. What they found is that after acute exercise, the error-related activity decreased significantly.

“We have to be aware of our child’s health, and if we want them to succeed academically and mental health-wise, exercise is something that needs to be in the forefront,” says Eric Drollette, the study’s lead author and a professor at UNC. “Yes, it helps with their physical health, but we can’t forget the brain part of it. The benefits of exercise can be influential in an [educational] environment .”

Drollette had a pretty good idea that the experiment would reveal some type of positive relationship between exercise and academics. After all, research has long borne out the benefits of physical exercise on the mental health and general wellness of adults and children alike. One of Drollette’s own previous involving college students who underwent high-intensity interval training showed improved brain function and cognition. 

But having three children of his own, he knew anecdotally that any type of prolonged high-intensity activity, like running on a treadmill or using other types of exercise equipment, just wasn’t feasible for younger children. Not only, he suspected, would they get bored or lack motivation to complete the exercise, but it also wasn’t a scenario that educators could easily replicate in their own classrooms. 

The goal instead was to design a fitness regimen that would hold student interest and could be performed in the classroom without taking up too much time. What he came up with was a series of stationary exercises – think high knees, jumping jacks, lunges and squats — performed one after another, alternating between 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off for nine minutes total. 

“This is more natural for a kid’s type of exercise,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that if a teacher reads this, or if the public reads this, they can say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s something that’s possible to do in the classroom.’”

What ended up surprising Drollette, he said, was how selective the benefits were for certain academic achievements — most notably, for word recognition and fluency, which include reading and word processing — and much less for math. Another surprising result? The children didn’t realize they were exercising as hard as they actually were, suggesting, Drollette said, that they truly enjoyed the movement break.

The study comes against the backdrop of schools recess and physical education classes in order to prioritize instructional time and boost academic achievement — especially in the wake of the pandemic, which wrought steep learning loss. According to the , children should get four 15-minute recesses every day. While more than of the country’s elementary schools incorporate regularly scheduled recess into each school day, on average students receive just 27 minutes. 

As it stands, only require schools to offer a daily recess, and most districts don’t have a formal recess policy. Since the mid-2000s, up to 40 percent of school districts have reduced or cut recess. Moreover, some districts still allow educators to take away recess as a punishment, which experts say does more harm than good.

While Drollette acknowledges that the main focus of schools is academics — not movement — the practice of shortening recess and physical education, he says, is short sighted. 

“As a nation, we’ve really struggled to recover loss in physical activity since the pandemic,” he says. “If we keep removing physical activity, we may be hampering mental health as well as cognitive function. And then if kids are performing poorly cognitively, they’re not doing well with academics, causing schools to keep pushing academics. And so my approach is that we may need to flip the other direction. We need to focus on physical movement for a better healthy mind in order for kids to do well in school.”

This summer, the Trump administration appeared to recognize as much, issuing an establishing a President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, as well as reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test — the latter of which harkens back to back to the 1950s under President Dwight D. Eisenhower but was phased out in 2013.

“For far too long, the physical and mental health of the American people has been neglected.  Rates of obesity, chronic disease, inactivity, and poor nutrition are at crisis levels, particularly among our children,” the order reads. “These trends weaken our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale.”

It’s unclear what the new regimen will look like, but the original test required students to compete in their schools and nationally by completing circuits of pushups, pullups, situps and the mile run, among other exercises. Notably, the test was retired under the Obama administration in exchange for the “Presidential Youth Fitness Program,” which focused more holistically on student health and less on the competitive test.

Starting this school year, one thing is certain: School district leaders like Sinha and classroom educators will continue to be hard-pressed to inject more time for physical activity into the day due to time requirements for core academic subjects.

“Physical activity is more important than ever before for our students,” she says, noting that students in Finland traditionally score at the top on the international benchmark assessments known as — far above students in the U.S. “It’s always been important, but kids are different today, and they need to be moving their little bodies around.”

New research has found that rural LGBTQ+ teens experience significant challenges in their communities and turn to the internet for support.

The from Hopelab and the looked at what more than 1,200 LGBTQ+ teens faced and compared the experiences of those in rural communities with those of teens in suburban and urban communities. The research found that rural teens are more likely to give and receive support through their online communities and friends than via their in-person relationships.

“The rural young people we’re seeing were reporting having a lot less support in their homes, in their communities, and their schools,” Mike Parent, a principal researcher at Hopelab, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “They weren’t doing too well in terms of feeling supported in the places they were living, though they were feeling supported online.”

However, the research found that rural LGBTQ+ teens had the same sense of pride in who they were as suburban and urban teens.

“The parallel, interesting finding was that we didn’t see differences in their internal sense of pride, which you might kind of expect if they feel all less supported,” he said. “What was surprising, in a very good way, was that indication of resilience or being able to feel a strong sense of their internal selves despite this kind of harsh environment they might be in.”

Researchers recruited young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who identified as LGBTQ+ through targeted ads on social media. After surveying the respondents during August and September of last year, the researchers also followed up some of the surveys with interviews, Parent said.

According to the study, rural teens were more likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to find support online. Of the rural respondents, 56% of rural young people reported receiving support from others online several times a month compared to 51% of urban and suburban respondents, and 76% reported giving support online, compared to 70% of urban and suburban respondents.

Conversely, only 28% of rural respondents reported feeling supported by their schools, compared to 49% of urban and suburban respondents, the study found, and 13% of rural respondents felt supported by their communities, compared to 35% of urban and suburban respondents.

Rural LGBTQ+ young people are significantly more likely to suffer mental health issues because of the lack of support where they live, researchers said. Rural LGBTQ+ young people were more likely to meet the threshold for depression (57% compared to 45%), and more likely to report less flourishing than their suburban/urban counterparts (43% to 52%).

The study found that those LGBTQ+ young people who received support from those they lived with, regardless of where they live, are more likely to report flourishing (50% compared to 35%) and less likely to meet the threshold for depression (52% compared to 63%).

One respondent said the impact of lack of support impacted every aspect of their lives.

“Not being able to be who you truly are around the people that you love most or the communities that you’re in is going to make somebody depressed or give them mental issues,” they said in survey interviews, according to Hopelab. “Because if you can’t be who you are around the people that you love most and people who surround you, you’re not gonna be able to feel the best about your well-being.”

Respondents said connecting with those online communities saved their lives.

“Throughout my entire life, I have been bullied relentlessly. However, when I’m online, I find that it is easier to make friends… I met my best friend through role play [games],” one teen told researchers. “Without it, I wouldn’t be here today. So, in the long run, it’s the friendships I’ve made online that have kept me alive all these years.”

Having support in rural areas, especially, can provide rural LGBTQ+ teens with a feeling of belonging, researchers said.

“Our findings highlight the urgent need for safe, affirming in-person spaces and the importance of including young people in shaping the solutions,” Claudia-Santi F. Fernandes, vice president of research and evaluation at Born This Way Foundation, said in a statement. “If we want to improve outcomes, especially for LGBTQ+ young people in rural communities, their voices–and scientific evidence–must guide the work.”

Parent said the survey respondents stressed the importance of having safe spaces for LGBTQ+ young people to gather in their own communities.

“I think most of the participants recognize that you can’t do a lot to change your family if they’re not supportive,” he said. “What they were saying was that finding ways for schools to be supportive and for communities to be supportive in terms of physical spaces (that allowed them) to express themselves safely (and) having places where they can gather and feel safe, uh, were really important to them.”

Hopelab seeks to address mental health in young people through evidence-based innovation, according to its organizers. The Born This Way Foundation was co-founded by Lady Gaga and her mother, West Virginia native Cynthia Bisset Germanotta.

The organization is focused on ending bullying and building up communities, while using research, programming, grants, and partnerships to engage young people and connect them to mental health resources, according to the foundation’s website.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Except education.

In 2025, most students still learn in a system designed a century ago. Despite pockets of innovation, public education remains largely standardized and slow to adapt — ill-equipped to meet the needs of every learner in a changing world. 

This lag isn’t just a missed opportunity, it’s a threat to our global competitiveness and our young people’s futures. If we want to engage and prepare students for the opportunities and challenges ahead, states must prioritize education R&D to transform education systems: investing in new ideas, testing what works and scaling promising approaches. While the United States consistently on assessments, sitting idle isn’t an option. 

As states navigate a changing federal landscape where they are encouraged to take the reins of their education systems, now is the opportunity to adopt R&D as a top strategic priority. Fortunately, states don’t have to start from scratch. Across the country, leaders are leveraging communities, learning science, and holistic outcomes to lay the foundation for R&D conditions and infrastructure.

In Washington State, the is guiding future policy for high-quality mastery-based learning by transforming student experiences in almost 50 schools across the state. Through rigorous evaluation, Washington is collecting insight into the time and resources required to implement new teaching and learning systems.

Wyoming created the , uniting the governor’s office, education department, universities and school administrators around a shared vision for the future of education. The state’s aims to shift teaching and learning practices toward more student-centered approaches aligned with its Profile of a Graduate. State pilot programs have reached half of Wyoming’s students, and the state has been able to identify and address roadblocks that prevent schools from implementing these practices.

In Virginia, Old Dominion University’s Center for Educational Innovation and Opportunity leads the state’s and collaborates with educators, researchers, and designers to advance Virginia’s mission of transforming education. This work was spurred by a $100 million state investment in developing lab schools to test innovative teaching methods. 

And in Massachusetts, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to examine how technology can be leveraged to support district priorities, including refining the use of specific technologies, centering digital equity and showcasing best practices around technology integration in alignment with district goals.

These efforts show that meaningful R&D in education is not only possible, it’s happening. This starts with a bold vision and an aligned public research agenda, informed by and responsive to communities’ needs. from Education Reimagined, Transcend, and the Alliance for Learning Innovation, outlines steps that states can take to build the infrastructure and conditions to enable system-wide education R&D. These include:

• Create dedicated capacity within SEAs or partner institutions/organizations with staff whose primary responsibility is shepherding this work across systems.
• Empower local leaders to test evidence-based solutions and develop innovative models that improve learner experiences and inform systems transformation.
• Build supporting infrastructure, including strong data systems to inform continuous improvement and innovation networks that connect and leverage the insights educators, researchers, and communities.

Most importantly, this work requires fundamental changes in how we approach educational transformation. State leaders can model critical mindset shifts and create cultures of trust and empowerment that embrace calculated risks, diverse evidence, and learner-centered design.

If we care about the future success of our young people, and our competitiveness as a nation, it’s past time to invest in the engine that powers other sectors to evolve and thrive. Learners deserve an education system that leverages R&D to enhance and continuously improve their experiences and outcomes. States must lead the way. 

Districts are asking the right questions. They want proof before investing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in materials, subscriptions, training, and ongoing professional development. And they’re right to demand it. The conversation around literacy has shifted dramatically in recent years. We’ve moved away from a once-universally accepted balanced literacy approach that, frankly, didn’t deliver the results kids needed, toward a science of reading movement that is rooted in decades of research and evidence. 

Today, purchasing a curriculum without proven, evidence-based research is essentially taking someone’s word for it — and in a time where literacy outcomes matter more than ever, that’s a gamble no district can afford. The programs districts adopt must prove they actually work for their students — not just sound good in a sales pitch. Evidence is no longer a “nice-to-have.” It’s the foundation for trust and impact. 

And that’s fair. In fact, that’s what my whole job is about: building and sharing that evidence. But here’s the tricky part. 

The same school systems that request research often lack the capacity to participate in it. 

We’re living in the age of evidence-based everything. ESSA tiers. State-approved lists. Instructional audit checklists. Curriculum reviews. The pressure is real, and research has rightfully taken center stage. 

But here’s the rub. While districts want the receipts, most don’t have the bandwidth or resources to help create them. 

And it’s not because they don’t care. It’s because they’re stretched. Schools are still recovering from pandemic whiplash. Teachers are overloaded. Leaders are managing competing priorities. Just the thought of one more thing can feel like a nonstarter. 

So when we invite a district into a formal research study — even a light-lift, no-cost one — we usually hear some version of: We love the idea, but maybe next year.

When districts say “no” to participating in research, the entire field misses out. We lose opportunities to learn, measure, and improve — not just as curriculum publishing companies, but as an industry that’s trying to do right by students. 

It can seem like only the “big” curriculum companies end up with robust studies, but even they face the same roadblocks as the newcomers or the niche solutions. Getting real-world classrooms to open their doors for data collection is challenging for everyone. Unfortunately, the current landscape essentially creates a “rich get richer” cycle, where companies with existing evidence appear more attractive. At the same time, newer or evolving programs struggle to gather the data needed to prove their impact — regardless of how effective they might be. 

The result? We all end up with a shallow pool of evidence that doesn’t fully reflect what works best for students. And that’s not the kind of ecosystem any of us need. 

In my role at , I’m empathetic to the undeniable challenges across the education system. Administrators, curriculum directors, and educators are juggling more than ever, and participating in a research study can feel like one more ask on a pile of existing asks. 

And I don’t blame them. Traditional curriculum research models are often heavy lifts for districts. They require hours of teacher surveys, multiple layers of classroom observations, endless data pulls, and little to no ongoing support from the vendor. It’s no wonder districts hesitate — they simply don’t have the time, capacity, or trust that their effort will be worth it. 

The research model needs a seismic shift that’s more of a partnership and less of a researcher-subject relationship — a model that’s built to make research doable and beneficial for everyone involved. 

This model should prioritize: 

• A single point of contact to guide the process from start to finish
• Quick touchpoints to help define goals and stay aligned
• Light classroom observations that are short, purposeful, and unobtrusive 
• One short teacher survey that takes minutes, not hours
• Built-in coaching and check-ins so teachers feel confident and supported throughout
• Custom reports schools can actually use, with data that tells their stories 

It’s not just “do this for us.” It’s “let’s do this together.” If we want to raise the bar on curriculum quality, we all must work together — school districts, publishers, and researchers. We need each other to help weed out the ineffective solutions and elevate the proven ones. 

So here’s my ask to any superintendents, curriculum directors, principals, or other education leaders out there: Say yes to research.

Not just as a consumer of evidence, but as a co-creator. It’s an opportunity to tell your school’s story clearly and credibly— grounded in student outcomes. 

The next generation of evidence-based programs won’t come from ivory towers or glossy marketing decks. 

They’ll come from classrooms like yours. 

The renowned education professor at the University of California, Irvine, had spent years studying how the newest technologies can be used to improve English language instruction. His , funded through the National Science Foundation, aimed to create a series of bilingual Spanish-English e-books that would use artificial intelligence to guide young readers through each text and prompt them with questions. 

But in the last week of April, he learned that the supporting grant for the project had been cancelled, issued by NSF’s education division, at the direction of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The of the cuts, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, targeted education studies like those conducted at Irvine’s , which Warschauer directs.

The professor grew more concerned as he considered the possible consequences of DOGE’s moves. He spent the last few years helping design programs that within families of English learners, even on a set of AI-powered videos that measurably improved students’ science knowledge. The results had been impressive. But without federal dollars, they couldn’t realistically be sustained, let alone expanded.

“I could go from having a well-funded research lab — one that supported a lot of graduate students and post-docs, and had a very ambitious research agenda — to pretty much drying up in a few years and needing to lay off everyone working for me,” Warschauer reflected.

His worries have echoed throughout the nation’s sprawling education research infrastructure since February, when the administration severed scores of contracts through the Institute of Education Sciences, the principal knowledge-gathering body within the U.S. Department of Education. Within weeks, further announcements were made of mass layoffs totalling half the department’s manpower, including roughly 90 percent of the IES staff. Questions even arose around the future of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the only coast-to-coast benchmark of student achievement.

Several experts told The 74 that the diminution of both staffing and resources leaves the core functions of K–12 research in doubt. Reduced support for the , an online library promoting evidence-based practices in education, could leave district leaders unequipped to navigate the billion-dollar world of school-based products and services. Deferred updates to long-running data sets to experts investigating key questions like school choice and early literacy. Uncertain employment conditions have already driven established professionals from the field, even while interrupting the early-career trajectories of the next generation of scholars. 

Among the motivations cited for the campaign is the charge that Washington has promoting “woke” ideological content. Warschauer said that while his professional interests resulted partially from his past service as an ESL teacher, he rejected the precepts of critical theory and simply wanted to pursue better learning outcomes for struggling kids.

“My research is about having high standards of education for our poor, our underserved, and those who are not succeeding, and helping them succeed better,” he said. “To me, that’s not a woke agenda; it’s something that, until the last five years, every Republican politician in the country has agreed with.”

The administration has tweaked some aspects of its strategy, bringing in to oversee the future of the department’s research efforts and reviving a portion of the contracts it had halted. But especially following last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which formally authorized the widespread reductions in force while other litigation is being considered, many now believe the end is in sight. 

Cara Jackson served as president of the , one of the foremost professional organizations for education researchers, when the unwinding began. The consortium is now against the administration, alleging that its actions violate laws governing how federal agencies may behave. She fears that, whatever the outcome of that litigation, the attempt to sweep aside decades of systems and collaborations between government, universities, and private actors will severely limit America’s insights into what, and whether, its children are actually learning.

“The entire time IES has existed, it has done a lot to advance the field and the quality of research that is being produced,” she said. “It just feels like we’re going back into the dark ages.”

A retreat from ‘what works’

Jackson’s own life was upended by the events of the last few months. She was laid off in March when her employer, the research and consulting company , significantly scaled back its work in education evaluations. 

Abt is part of the archipelago of private firms that have long partnered with the federal government, many of which saw terminated by IES this winter. The commitments ranged widely in size and focus — from a $430,000 commitment to collect responses to a school crime survey to to implement programs preparing disabled students for success after high school.

Much of Jackson’s time was spent developing the What Works Clearinghouse’s line of , which distill the findings of complex social science into digestible recommendations for classroom teachers and district leaders. have been published since 2007, with several more in the pipeline earlier this year — including proposals for texts on chronic absenteeism and student behavior problems, two of the biggest issues facing schools in the post-COVID era.

Those projects may be indefinitely postponed, if not scuppered entirely, by both the reduction of the Institute’s contracts and harrowing of its workforce. 

“The biggest thing that frustrates me as a taxpayer is that we paid a lot of money for these practice guides to be created, and they’re not going to go into the world now because they got abruptly stopped,” Jackson said. 

Betsy Wolf, a research scientist who was among the throngs of departing IES employees, had been working on a project that attempted to apply the findings from cognitive science to inform STEM teachers. She said she was pessimistic about the prospects of reconstituting the work that had already been done into some future product, especially in the absence of so many staffers.

“We lost computer access, and we couldn’t even email people externally,” Wolf recalled. “As far as I’m aware, the department didn’t get back any of the stuff it paid for. And you couldn’t just get someone in to pick it back up because it may not even exist right now.”

The Clearinghouse is not without critics, including who have argued that its guides don’t offer suggestions in language that teachers can easily understand. that past publications have misinterpreted research findings or classified programs incorrectly. 

But the need for stronger evidence in teaching methods has been highlighted over the past few years by a series of controversies related to shoddy or questionable instruction. Families in San Francisco have a proposal that would delay the teaching of algebra I until the ninth grade to address achievement gaps — a move that , a later analysis found — while districts around the country on reading curricula derived from the discredited “whole language” theory of literacy.

Some observers fret that progress may be threatened in areas where K–12 leaders have used existing research to dramatically improve outcomes. In February, the department eliminated over $300 million in contracts with 10 Regional Education Labs, including one that partnered with Mississippi to lead a dramatic improvement in the state’s persistently low reading performance. [The Trump administration as part of a broader reversal, according to a June legal filing: Though not required by the court, the department announced that it would rehire several dozen employees and restart roughly one-fifth of the contracts that had previously been suspended.]

Elizabeth Tipton is a statistician at Northwestern University who also serves as the director of the , another professional organization the administration over its cuts. If anything, she said, Washington should endeavor to strengthen the powers of agencies like IES to more strictly regulate a marketplace for school materials and technology that often . Without an entity to function in the manner of the Food and Drug Administration, the world of K–12 products resembles that of herbal supplements, she argued.

“I don’t understand how it’s woke, I don’t understand why it’s inefficient, I don’t understand why DOGE would be against it, I just don’t understand the argument,” Tipton said. “It’s actually good for kids to understand what works and to invest in that science.”

Lost data 

As it evaluates various policies and classroom interventions, the government also collects huge troves of data on students’ backgrounds, the kinds of schooling they access, and their success both during and after their time as students. The progress of those long-running data sets, mostly housed within the 158-year-old National Center for Education Statistics, have also been stalled by the events of the last few months.

Rachel Dinkes is the president and CEO of the , the industry group representing private research organizations like Abt Global, the American Institutes for Research, and the Educational Testing Service. In an interview, she sketched out an uncertain future for some of the biggest education research undertakings of the last few decades

“We heard that her plan is to unwind the mission of the Department of Education,” Dinkes said. “That leads to serious questions about where these research programs will turn to.”

A career statistician and research analyst, she ticked off a laundry list of data collections affected by the Trump administration’s cuts. A pilot program to design new student assessments — part of states’ bargain with Washington to enjoy more autonomy after the end of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2015 — was at the center of that was scrapped after more than five years of work. Over $48 million in funding for the latest iteration of the , which examines how college students finance their education, was also tossed; the insights generated by the survey would have very likely informed future legislation on student borrowing and federal aid, Dinkes said.

But perhaps the biggest hit delivered to NCES data came with to the , which has conducted four major, ongoing studies of children from the earliest years of schooling. The latest addition to the initiative was designed to track the progress of the kindergarten class of 2022–23, a cohort that absorbed much of the social and academic stresses of the COVID era. 

“We were about to get a look at students in the first post-pandemic class of kindergartners and see what they can do,” Dinkes said. “You cannot have a story like that in the future if we don’t have that data.”

A spokesman for the department did not respond to a request for comment on the possible effects of Trump’s flurry of cuts. But McMahon has stated publicly that her agency’s dismantling was necessary, pointing to its time in existence as “an era of stagnation and decline in student achievement.” [In fact, long-term scores in math and literacy have been since the department’s creation in 1980, though the learning loss inflicted by COVID erased much of that progress.]

Mark Chin, a professor of education policy at Vanderbilt University, intended to use his school’s access to ECLS files to assess the impact of school choice programs. Much of the current empirical work on charter or voucher policies is built on information gathered by school districts or state education agencies, which typically identify student demographics, special education status, and socioeconomic status. But the federal data incorporates far richer observations on household structure and parent engagement, including live interviews and survey responses with caregivers. 

With the benefit of that perspective, Chin had hoped to offer a more detailed investigation of the possible differences between families who participate in choice schemes versus those who simply attend their district public schools.That work is currently stalled. 

So too, he added, are countless papers constructed through the use of federal resources, which are usually submitted to department staffers for a once-over before they are released in order to assure both quality control and protect student privacy. The mass layoffs in March could prevent some valuable discoveries from finding their way to the public square.

“In order for this research to become public, it needs to be reviewed by IES,” he said. “Given the state of IES’s staffing, that’s basically not feasible. If you’ve got results, but you can’t put them out there, it’s not being seen by policymakers who really need that information.”

‘They’re never coming back’

As spring has turned to summer, a few promising signs have emerged for scholars whose research was affected by the wave of cuts. 

At the end of June, UC Irvine’s Warschauer was notified that his grants from the National Science Foundation . The reversal was achieved filed by six UC professors who alleged that grants previously awarded through the NSF, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Environmental Protection Agency had been unlawfully slashed. A district judge issued an injunction requiring the funds to be restored, though the ruling can be appealed in a higher court.

In an email, Warschauer said he was “thrilled” with the result, while observing that it would almost certainly be harder to gain future support than it was to revive existing grants.

“This doesn’t make me any more optimistic about new grant opportunities — those are easier (and more justifiable) to control than cancelling grants that people already have,” he wrote. “So the bottom line is that the future of educational research is still very much in jeopardy.”

Under McMahon’s leadership, the Department of Education has taken some steps that have the potential to solidify its future support for research. In an interview with The 74’s Greg Toppo, the secretary vowed to keep in place the NAEP exam. A veteran IES staffer the acting commissioner of NCES, and respected researcher Amber Northern was tapped to serve as McMahon’s senior advisor. 

But even with the dust still settling after months of firings, the toll on the department has already been huge. IES’s headcount , while NCES has reportedly been reduced to just three. Last Monday’s Supreme Court ruling allowed the president to implement those layoffs, rejecting a lower court’s motion to block them.

Other legal challenges to prior cuts haven’t made headway yet. In June, a district court judge for an injunction that would have temporarily required the administration to bring back terminated employees and renew canceled contracts. It will take months, if not longer, for the various strands of litigation to be resolved.

In the meantime, human resources appear to be just as imperiled as financial ones. With federal subsidies still largely up in the air, and job prospects for graduates decidedly hazy, several major universities over the next semester. Some departments within Vanderbilt’s prestigious Peabody College of Education and Human Development are taking new doctoral candidates, but Chin’s academic bailiwick of . 

Chin described the PhD students as the “lifeblood” of his program, lamenting the potential damage to the future of the field.

“They support our research projects, they’re coming up with new ideas, they’re presenting their own work,” he said. “Right now, we have some junior scholars in our department who don’t have PhD advisees yet.”

Among current professionals, the outlook is no brighter. The job market is now glutted with laid off researchers from both the public and private sectors, and with little near-term optimism for more funding, many potential employers are leaning more toward cutting existing overhead rather than picking talent up off the sidelines. 

Northwestern’s Tipton said she was aware of multiple professional contacts who had already left the field for better-paying jobs in other industries where their technical skills are highly valued. Each one, she added, should be seen as a voided investment representing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in past doctoral scholarships and research grants. 

“You see someone get a job, and you’re happy that they’re no longer in this terrible situation,” she said. “But now they’re getting jobs in insurance, tech, or random other fields. And you realize that they’re going to get paid more, and they’re never coming back.”

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to move ahead with firing more than 1,300 employees at the U.S. Department of Education as the Trump administration aims to eliminate the federal agency. 

While the states that sued and the government’s lawyers will continue to argue the case in the lower courts, McMahon said the opinion shows that the president “has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization and day-to-day operations of federal agencies.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, dissented with the ruling.

“As Congress mandated, the department plays a vital role in this nation’s education system, safeguarding equal access to learning and channeling billions of dollars to schools and students across the country each year,” Sotomayor wrote. “When the executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.”

When a white teacher at Decatur High School used the , students walked out and marched in protest. But Reyes Le wanted to do more.

Until he graduated from the Atlanta-area school this year, he co-led its equity team. He organized walking tours devoted to Decatur’s history as a thriving community of freed slaves after the Civil War. Stops included a statue of civil rights leader , which replaced a Confederate monument, and a historical marker recognizing the site where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was for driving with an out-of-state license.

But Le feared his efforts would collapse in the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion. An existing state law against “divisive concepts” meant students already had to get parent permission to go on the tour. Then the district threw out two non-discrimination policies April 15. 

“I felt that the work we were doing wouldn’t be approved going into the future,” Le said.

Decatur got snared by the U.S. Department of Education’s to pull millions of dollars in federal funding from states and districts that employed DEI policies. In response, several organizations sued the department, calling its guidance vague and in violation of constitutional provisions that favor local control. Within weeks, three federal judges, including one Trump appointee, Education Secretary Linda McMahon from enforcing the directives, and Decatur promptly .

The reversal offers a glimpse into the courts’ role in thwarting — or at least slowing down — the Trump education juggernaut. States, districts, unions, civil rights groups and parents sued McMahon, and multiple courts the department skirted the law in slashing funding and staff. But some observers say the administration is playing a long game and may view such losses as temporary setbacks.

“The administration’s plan is to push on multiple fronts to test the boundaries of what they can get away with,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “Cut personnel, but if needed, add them back later. What’s gained? Possible intimidation of ‘deep state’ employees and a chance to hire people that will be ‘a better fit.’ ”

A recent example of boundary testing: The administration nearly $7 billion for education the president already approved in March.

But the move is practically lifted from the pages of , the right-wing blueprint for Trump’s second term. In that document, Russ Vought, now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, argues that presidents must “handcuff the bureaucracy” and that the Constitution for the White House to spend everything Congress appropriated.  

The administration blames Democrats for playing the courts. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “radical rogue judges” of getting in the president’s way. 

The end result is often administrative chaos, leaving many districts unable to make routine purchases and displaced staff unsure whether to move on with their lives. 

While the outcome in the lower courts has been mixed, the Supreme Court — which has on much of Trump’s agenda — is expected any day to weigh in on the president’s biggest prize: whether McMahon can permanently cut half the department’s staff. 

In that case, 21 Democratic attorneys general and coalition of districts and unions sued to prevent the administration from taking a giant step toward eliminating the department.

“Everything about defunding and dismantling by the administration is in judicial limbo,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. As a supporter of eliminating the department, he lamented the “If the Supreme Court allows mass layoffs, though, I would expect more energy to return to shrinking the department.”

The odds of that increased last week when the that mass firings at other agencies could remain in effect as the parties argue the case in the lower courts.

While the lawsuits over the Education Department are separate, Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the National Center for Youth Law, said the ruling is “clearly not a good sign.” His case, filed in May, focuses on cuts specifically to the department’s Office for Civil Rights, but the argument is essentially the same: The administration overstepped its authority when it gutted the department without congressional approval.

Solicitor General John Sauer, in to the Supreme Court, said the states had no grounds to sue and called any fears the department couldn’t make do with a smaller staff merely “speculative.”

Even if the Supreme Court rules in McMahon’s favor, its opinion won’t affect previous rulings and other lawsuits in progress against the department.

Here’s where some of those key legal battles stand:

COVID relief funds

McMahon stunned states in late March when she said they would no longer receive more than $2 billion in reimbursements for COVID-related expenses. States would have to make a fresh case for how their costs related to the pandemic, even though the department had already approved extensions for construction projects, summer learning and tutoring. 

On June 3, a federal judge in Maryland from pulling the funds.

Despite the judicial order, not all states have been paid.

The Maryland Department of Education still had more than $400 million to spend. Cherie Duvall-Jones, a spokeswoman, said the agency hasn’t received any reimbursements even though it provided the “necessary documentation and information” federal officials requested. 

The cancellation forced Baltimore City schools to dip into a to avoid disrupting tutoring and summer school programs.

Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, declined to comment on why it had yet to pay Maryland or how much the department has distributed to other states since June.

Mass firings

In the administration’s push to wind down the department, McMahon admits she still needs staff to complete what she calls her “final mission.” On May 21, she told a House appropriations subcommittee that she had rehired 74 people. Biedermann wouldn’t say whether that figure has grown, and referred a reporter to the .

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

The next day, a federal district court her to also reinstate the more than 1,300 employees she fired in March, about half of the department’s workforce. Updating the court on progress, Chief of Staff Rachel Oglesby said in a that she’s still reviewing survey responses from laid off staffers and figuring out where they would work if they return.

But some call the department’s to bring back employees lackluster, perhaps because it’s pinning its hopes on a victory before the Supreme Court. 

“This is a court that’s been fairly aggressive in overturning lower court decisions,” said Smith, with the National Center for Youth Law. 

His group’s lawsuit is one of two challenging cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, which lost nearly 250 staffers and seven regional offices. They argue the cuts have left the department unable to thoroughly investigate complaints. Of the 5,164 civil rights complaints since March, OCR has dismissed 3,625, Oglesby .

In a case brought by the Victim Rights Law Center, a Massachusetts-based advocacy organization, a federal district court McMahon to reinstate OCR employees. 

Even if the case is not reversed on appeal, there’s another potential problem: Not all former staffers are eager to return.

“I have applied for other jobs, but I’d prefer to have certainty about my employment with OCR before making a transition,” said Andy Artz, who was a supervising attorney in OCR’s New York City office until the layoffs. “I feel committed to the mission of the agency and I’d like to be part of maintaining it if reinstated.”

DEI

An aspect of that mission, nurtured under the Biden administration, was to discourage discipline policies that result in higher suspension and expulsion rates for minority students. A warned that discrimination in discipline could have “devastating long-term consequences on students and their future opportunities.”

But according to the department’s , efforts to reduce those gaps or raise achievement among Black and Hispanic students could fall under its definition of “impermissible” DEI practices. Officials demanded that states sign a form certifying compliance with their interpretation of the law. On April 24, three federal courts ruled that for now, the department can’t pull funding from states that didn’t sign. The department also had to temporarily shut down a website designed to gather public complaints about DEI practices. 

The cases, which McMahon has asked the courts to dismiss, will continue through the summer. In court records, the administration’s lawyers say the groups’ arguments are weak and that districts like Decatur simply overreacted. In an example cited in a complaint brought by the NAACP, the Waterloo Community School District in Iowa responded to the federal guidance by of a statewide “read-In” for Black History Month. About 3,500 first graders were expected to participate in the virtual event featuring Black authors and illustrators. 

The department said the move reflected a misunderstanding of the guidance. “Withdrawing all its students from the read-In event appears to have been a drastic overreaction by the school district and disconnected from a plain reading of the … documents,” the department said.

Desegregation 

The administration’s DEI crackdown has left many schools confused about how to teach seminal issues of American history such as the Civil Rights era.

It was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that established “desegregation centers” across the country to help districts implement court-ordered integration. 

In 2022, the Biden administration awarded $33 million in grants to what are now called equity assistance centers. But Trump’s department views such work as inseparable from DEI. When it cancelled funding to the centers, it described them as “woke” and “divisive.”

Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a Clinton appointee, disagreed. He blocked McMahon from pulling roughly $4 million from the Southern Education Foundation, which houses Equity Assistance Center-South and helped finance Brown v. Board of Education over 70 years ago. His order referenced President Dwight Eisenhower and southern judges who took the ruling seriously.

“They could hardly have imagined that some future presidential administration would hinder efforts by organizations like SEF — based on some misguided understanding of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ — to fulfill Brown’s constitutional promise to students across the country to eradicate the practice of racial segregation.”

He said the center is likely to win its argument that canceling the grant was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Raymond Pierce, Southern Education Foundation president and CEO, said when he applied for the grant to run one of the centers, he emphasized its historical significance.

“My family is from Mississippi, so I remember seeing a ‘colored’ entrance sign on the back of the building as we pulled into my mother’s hometown for the holidays,” Pierce said. 

Trump’s Justice Department many of the remaining 130 desegregation orders across the South. Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has said the orders force districts to spend money on monitoring and data collection and that it’s time to “let people off the hook” for past discrimination.

But Eshé Collins, director of Equity Assistance Center-South, said the centers are vital because their services are free to districts.

“Some of these cases haven’t had any movement,” she said. “Districts are like ‘Well, we can’t afford to do this work.’ That’s why the equity assistance center is so key.”

Her center, for example, works with the in Tennessee to recruit more Black teachers and ensure minority students get an equal chance to enroll in advanced classes. The system is still under a desegregation order from 1965, but is on track to meet the terms set by the court next year, Collins said. A week after Friedman issued the injunction in the foundation’s case, Ruth Ryder, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs, told Collins she could once again access funds and her work resumed.

Research

As they entered the Department of Education in early February, one of the first moves made by staffers of the Department of Government Efficiency was to terminate nearly $900 million in research contracts awarded through the Institute for Education Sciences. Three lawsuits say the cuts seriously hinder efforts to conduct high-quality research on schools and students.

Kevin Gee from the University of California, Davis, was among those hit. He was in the middle of producing a practice guide for the nation on chronic absenteeism, which continues to exceed pre-pandemic levels in all states. In a , the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus said the pandemic “took this crisis to unprecedented levels” that “warrant urgent and sustained attention.” Last year’s rate stood at nearly 24% nationally — still well above the 15% before the pandemic.

Gee was eager to fully grasp the impact of the pandemic on K-3 students. Even though young children didn’t experience school closures, many missed out on preschool and have in social and academic skills.

Westat, the contractor for the project, employed 350 staffers to collect data from more than 860 schools and conduct interviews with children about their experiences. But DOGE halted the midstream — after the department had already invested about $44 million of a $100 million contract.

“The data would’ve helped us understand, for the first time, the educational well-being of our nation’s earliest learners on a nationwide scale in the aftermath of the pandemic,” he said. 

The department has no plans to resurrect the project, according to a June . But there are other signs it is walking back some of DOGE’s original cuts. For example, it intends to reissue contracts for regional education labs, which work with districts and states on school improvement. 

“It feels like the legal pressure has succeeded, in the sense that the Department of Education is starting up some of this stuff again,” said Cara Jackson, a past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, which filed one of the lawsuits. “I think … there’s somebody at the department who is going through the legislation and saying, ‘Oh, we actually do need to do this.’ ”

Mental health grants 

Amid the legal machinations, even some Republicans are losing patience with McMahon’s moves to freeze spending Congress already appropriated.  

In April, she terminated $1 billion in mental health grants approved as part of a 2022 law that followed the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The department told grantees, without elaboration, that the funding no longer aligns with the administration’s policy of “prioritizing merit, fairness and excellence in education” and undermines “the students these programs are intended to help.”

The secretary told Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in June that she would the grants, but some schools don’t want to wait. Silver Consolidated Schools in New Mexico, which lost $6 million when the grant was discontinued, sued her on June 20th. Sixteen Democrat-led states filed a second later that month.

The funds, according to , allowed it to hire seven mental health professionals and contract with two outside counseling organizations. With the extra resources, the district saw bullying reports decline by 30% and suspensions drop by a third, according to the district’s complaint. Almost 500 students used a mental health app funded by the grant.

A judge has yet to rule in either case, but Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and other members of a bipartisan task force are that she’ll open a new competition for the funds. 

“These funds were never intended to be a theoretical exercise — they were designed to confront an urgent crisis affecting millions of children,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement. “With youth mental health challenges at an all-time high, any disruption or diversion of resources threatens to reverse hard-won progress and leave communities without critical supports.”

The poll, published by the research firm and the Walton Family Foundation, includes perspectives from 2,232 U.S. public school teachers.

“[The results] reflect a keen understanding on the part of teachers that this is a technology that is here, and it’s here to stay,” said Zach Hrynowski, a Gallup research director. “It’s never going to mean that students are always going to be taught by artificial intelligence and teachers are going to take a backseat. But I do like that they’re testing the waters and seeing how they can start integrating it and augmenting their teaching activities rather than replacing them.”

At least once a month, 37% of educators take advantage of tools to prepare to teach, including creating worksheets, modifying materials to meet student needs, doing administrative work and making assessments, the survey found. Less common uses include grading, providing one-on-one instruction and analyzing student data.

A from the RAND Corp. found the most common AI tools used by teachers include virtual learning platforms, like Google Classroom, and adaptive learning systems, like i-Ready or the Khan Academy. Educators also used chatbots, automated grading tools and lesson plan generators.

Most teachers who use AI tools say they help improve the quality of their work, according to the Gallup survey. About 61% said they receive better insights about student learning or achievement data, while 57% said the tools help improve their grading and student feedback.

Nearly 60% of teachers agreed that AI improves the accessibility of learning materials for students with disabilities. For example, use text-to-speech devices or translators.

More teachers in the Gallup survey agreed on AI’s risks for students versus its opportunities. Roughly a third said students using AI tools weekly would increase their grades, motivation, preparation for jobs in the future and engagement in class. But 57% said it would decrease students’ independent thinking, and 52% said it would decrease critical thinking. Nearly half said it would decrease student persistence in solving problems, ability to build meaningful relationships and resilience for overcoming challenges.

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Education recommending the creation of standards to govern the use of AI.

“Educators recognize that AI can automatically produce output that is inappropriate or wrong. They are well-aware of ‘teachable moments’ that a human teacher can address but are undetected or misunderstood by AI models,” the report said. “Everyone in education has a responsibility to harness the good to serve educational priorities while also protecting against the dangers that may arise as a result of AI being integrated in ed tech.”

Researchers have found that AI education tools can be incorrect and biased — even scoring academic assignments than for classmates of any other race.

Hrynowski said teachers are seeking guidance from their schools about how they can use AI. While many are getting used to setting boundaries for their students, they don’t know in what capacity they can use AI tools to improve their jobs.

The survey found that 19% of teachers are employed at schools with an AI policy. During the 2024-25 school year, 68% of those surveyed said they didn’t receive training on how to use AI tools. Roughly half of them taught themselves how to use it.

“There aren’t very many buildings or districts that are giving really clear instructions, and we kind of see that hindering the adoption and use among both students and teachers,” Hrynowski said. “We probably need to start looking at having a more systematic approach to laying down the ground rules and establishing where you can, can’t, should or should not, use AI In the classroom.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

At first glance, calls from members of Congress to in might sound like a neutral policy.

One critical inflection point is the completion of Algebra I. It can determine whether students move forward or fall behind, shaping not just their academic trajectory but also their future economic mobility. For students who pass Algebra I — typically in 9^th grade — a door opens to higher-level math, college readiness, and stronger career prospects. For those who don’t, that door can remain closed. In fact, students who fail Algebra I are to drop out of high school than their peers who pass. 

According to the 2024 NAEP scores, were proficient in 8^th grade math. That sobering number underscores the challenge: Students are entering Algebra I already behind, grappling with unfinished learning from prior grades. Without effective intervention, the gap only grows wider.

To better understand how to support students in mastering Algebra I, TNTP and New Classrooms analyzed three years of data from more than 2,000 students who used Teach to One Roadmaps, an online learning platform developed by New Classrooms, alongside their regular Algebra I classroom. 

The findings, detailed in the report, , offer important insights into how students build algebraic understanding over time and which strategies are most effective in helping them succeed.

The study found that students make the most progress when rebuilding foundational knowledge is paired with opportunities to learn new content. That requires focusing on high-leverage, pre-requisite skills rather than trying to fill every gap. Intervention supports like tutoring must be tightly aligned to what students already know and what they are ready to learn next. And instructional coherence is essential. Students need consistent, connected learning experiences — from core instruction to other interventions — to truly accelerate.

The majority of students in the study began knowing only about one-third of the algebra-related concepts and skills from prior grades. But the data also showed that students can catch up — especially when instruction helps them both rebuild key foundations and continue learning new, grade-level material. They don’t need to stop moving forward while trying to recover everything they’ve missed. 

The research found that instruction was significantly more effective when it targeted the key predecessor skills that unlock access to new Algebra I content, rather than attempting to remediate everything. For example, when students are trying to learn “the average rate of change,” the key predecessor skills with the greatest likelihood of ensuring success are the ability to calculate the slope between two points, to construct functions to model a linear relationship, and to determine function rules from tables. When key skills like these are not already mastered, students were found to succeed in only one out of 10 attempts. But when they are explicitly addressed, students’ success rate jumped to 58%.

The takeaway: Students don’t need to catch up on all unfinished learning to move forward. Precision matters more than breadth. Instead of broad, generalized approaches, educators can accelerate learning by focusing on the skills that matter most for unlocking new content and that build on each student’s existing knowledge.

Over the course of a school year, aligning interventions with core instruction also made a measurable difference. This targeted strategy helped students learn nearly twice as many new algebra concepts by year end. That progress mattered: Students who had mastered twice as many concepts were significantly more likely to score proficient on their state’s Algebra I assessment.

These insights point to a larger truth: System-level is essential. Students thrive when their learning experiences—from core instruction to tutoring to other supports—are aligned, purposeful, and grounded in a shared understanding of what success looks like. In Algebra I, for example, instructional coherence ensures that the foundational skills students practice in tutoring or support programs directly connect to what’s being taught in class, so every learning opportunity builds toward mastering key algebra concepts rather than feeling disconnected or repetitive.

If schools are to serve as true engines of opportunity, all parts of the system—curriculum, instruction, and intervention—must work together. That’s especially true when it comes to Algebra I, the gateway course that often determines who accelerates and who stalls out. Coherence isn’t just about what happens in the math classroom; it requires alignment across grade levels, teacher teams, and entire systems.

When selecting intervention solutions, district leaders should ask key questions: How does the platform determine what each student is ready to learn? Does it tailor practice to individual needs? The most effective tools meet students where they are and guide them towards mastery, with a clear focus on skills that unlock Algebra I.

At the state level, much of the recent focus has rightly been on ensuring rigorous classroom curricula. But few states offer clear guidance on what high-quality intervention should look like. This is a missed opportunity. State leaders can leverage existing curriculum review processes to advocate for coherent intervention tools: ones that are aligned to classroom instruction, address unfinished learning, and build towards grade-level content.

Algebra I is more than just a math class. It’s a defining moment in a student’s academic life and a powerful measure of whether the school system is delivering on its promise of opportunity. Right now, too many students are stalling before they ever get a chance to accelerate. But we now have a clearer roadmap for helping them catch up—and keep up. 

The tools are here. The knowledge is here. The opportunity is waiting. Let’s make sure the engine starts.

And yet, we have reached what is perhaps a zenith in Trump-era politics of . The administration’s response to America’s youth crisis has been stunningly consistent: again and again, it has balanced occasional, to do something to address or on the one hand with real and stunningly on the other. 

Perhaps the most direct and comprehensive assault on children is coming through the administration’s war on Head Start. , it’s the federal government’s largest-single investment in early learning, and it . Over its 60 years, Head Start has provided high-quality early learning as well as connecting around and their families to health and dental care, nutrition and housing assistance. 

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump echoed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook in . This was hardly novel: though Head Start has long enjoyed bipartisan support, a subset of , and have spent decades attacking the program. 

While the administration’s chaotic first 100 days of the federal supporting health and well-being, its attacks on Head Start have been uniquely unpredictable. , as Elon Musk and his underlings at the Department of Government Efficiency hacked away at the federal civil service, Head Start providers across the country reported that they were unable to access their normally scheduled federal payments. This posed a particular challenge for Head Start center directors navigating the tight margins that define the early education market; hundreds of early care and learning centers warned that they were at risk of closure. 

Later in the spring, the administration abruptly that offer resources, support and oversight for Head Start providers. 

Several weeks ago, it appeared that the administration was preparing to act more decisively to abandon U.S. kids and families who depend on Head Start. On April 17, the indicating that the Trump administration would erase Head Start funding in its forthcoming budget proposal. Once this hit the news, Head Start supporters to save the program, and the administration . 

While it appears that the administration isn’t (yet) ready to deliver on this promised assault on children’s well-being, it’s worth reminding ourselves just what a stunning mistake it would be to reduce this particular investment in U.S. kids and families. 

Head Start has been studied many times, and the results are broadly positive. Research on it — and other early education programs — finds a relatively consistent pattern:

• Early education programs are reliably good for families and at preparing kids for kindergarten
  
• There’s some waning of positive academic impacts as kids go through K-12
  
• But the long-term impacts of early ed investments are generally positive. 

First, at helping children from historically marginalized communities. Perhaps most importantly in the present political context, early education programs tend to promote better child development outcomes that create cost savings for school budgets. This mostly results from pre-K programs like the likelihood that children will later require special education services or need to repeat a grade. 

For instance, economist Tim Bartik notes that studies show possible of “23 to 86 percent.”   Meanwhile, if a child repeats second (or any) grade, the public pays an additional year of per-pupil funding, and it also delays their entry into the workforce. As such, and keep students on track for college and career is a efficient . Finally, early education programs like Head Start are a boon for working families because get after having a child. 

Most encouraging of all, Head Start appears to create some long-term positive effects. In 2022, the children of Head Start participants garnered benefits like higher high school graduation and college attainment rates, lower rates of teen pregnancy and reduced rates of interaction with the criminal justice system.

For instance, often point to the federal , which gathered data on programs in the early 2000s. It largely found that Head Start had positive initial effects on children’s development, but that these effects “faded out” as kids worked their way into the K–12 education system. But prompted a field of its findings in the 2010s, with concluding that it meaningfully Head Start’s to . 

This begs some critical questions about how the public should measure “success” for Head Start. Begin here: nearly every study of nearly every early education investment shows that these programs are effective at getting kids ready for K–12 schooling. Put simply, pre-K appears to be good at getting kids “pre”-pared for K(indergarten). 

The trouble is, political rhetoric about early education investments has sometimes presented them as an invulnerable “” against all challenges that children may face later in life. This is the wrong way to think about whether early education investments “work,” because it sets an impossible bar for success. Head Start — or pre-K programs more generally — cannot wholly blunt poverty, poor health or the impacts of low-quality K–12 classrooms.

Indeed, even , like those in a recent study of Tennessee’s public pre-K program, indicate a positive path forward for public early education investments. Initial studies of the program garnered headlines. While Tennessee pre-K attendees were than their peers who did not attend the program, pre-K attendees scored worse on a range of metrics by the end of elementary school. 

This is concerning! But a pre-K’s benefits were “most likely to persist until 3rd grade among those students who went on to attend high quality schooling environments and were taught by highly effective teachers.” That is, Tennessee’s pre-K programs succeeded at preparing children for kindergarten, and kids who went from those programs into higher-quality elementary classrooms continued to do better. 

In other words, if Head Start and other pre-K programs are measured as a one-time public investment that will solve all systemic inequities in American schools and society, they will inevitably appear to fail. But if they are measured against their ability to prepare children for elementary schools, it is clear that they are a success. 

Furthermore, this fairer definition of Head Start’s effectiveness would allow policymakers to focus their attention on the necessary work of investing and improving K–12 schools so that they bolster children and families beyond the early years. 

This spring, the National Institutes of Health quietly began terminating programs at scores of colleges that prepared promising undergraduate and graduate students for doctoral degrees in the sciences.

At least 24 University of California and California State University campuses lost training grants that provided their students with annual stipends of approximately $12,000 or more, as well as partial tuition waivers and travel funds to present research at science conferences. The number of affected programs is likely higher, as the NIH would not provide CalMatters a list of all the cancelled grants.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Cal State San Marcos, a campus in north San Diego County with a high number of low-income learners, is losing four training grants worth . One of the grants, now called U-RISE, had been awarded to San Marcos annually . San Marcos students with U-RISE stipends were often able to forgo part-time jobs, which allowed them to concentrate on research and building the skills needed for a doctoral degree.

The cuts add to the hundreds of millions of dollars of grants the agency has cancelled since President Donald Trump .

To find California campuses that lost training grants, CalMatters looked up in the NIH search tool to see if those grants were still active. If the grant’s award number leads to a broken link, that grant is dead, a .

The NIH web pages for the grants CalMatters looked up, including , are no longer accessible. Some campuses, including , , and , have updated their own websites to state that the NIH has ended doctoral pathway grants.

“We’re losing an entire generation of scholars who wouldn’t have otherwise gone down these pathways without these types of programs,” said Richard Armenta, a professor of kinesiology at San Marcos and the associate director of the campus’s Center for Training, Research, and Educational Excellence that operates the training grants.

At San Marcos, 60 students who were admitted into the center lost grants with stipends, partial tuition waivers and money to travel to scientific conferences to present their findings.

From loving biology to wanting a doctoral degree

Before the NIH terminations, Marisa Mendoza, a San Marcos undergraduate, received two training grants. As far back as middle school, Mendoza’s favorite subjects were biology and chemistry.

To save money, she attended Palomar College, a nearby community college where she began to train as a nurse. She chose that major because it would allow her to focus on the science subjects she loved. But soon Mendoza realized she wanted to do research rather than treat patients.

At Palomar, an anatomy professor introduced her to the NIH-funded Bridges to the Baccalaureate, a training grant for community college students to earn a bachelor’s and pursue advanced degrees in science and medicine.

“I didn’t even know what grad school was at the time,” she said. Neither of her parents finished college.

The Bridges program connected her to Cal State San Marcos, where she toured different labs to find the right fit. At the time she was in a microbiology course and found a lab focused on bacteria populations in the nearby coastal enclaves. The lab was putting into practice what she was learning in the abstract. She was hooked.

“It just clicked, like me being able to do this, it came very easily to me, and it was just something that I came to be very passionate about as I was getting more responsibility in the lab,” Mendoza said.

From Palomar she was admitted as a transfer student to San Marcos and more selective campuses, including UCLA and UC San Diego. She chose San Marcos, partly to live at home but also because she loved her lab and wanted to continue her research.

She enrolled at San Marcos last fall and furthered her doctoral journey by receiving the U-RISE grant. It was supposed to fund her for two years. The NIH terminated the grant March 31, stripping funds from 20 students.

For a school like San Marcos, where more than 40% of students are low-income enough to receive federal financial aid called Pell grants, the loss of the NIH training awards is a particular blow to the aspiring scientists.

The current climate of doctoral admissions is “definitely at a point where one needs prior research experience to be able to be competitive for Ph.D. programs,” said Elinne Becket, a professor of biological sciences at Cal State San Marcos where Mendoza and other students hone their research for about 15 hours a week.

San Marcos doesn’t have much money to replace its lost grants, which means current and future San Marcos students will “100%” have a harder time entering a doctoral program, Becket added. “It keeps me up at night.”

Research is ‘a missing piece’

In a typical week in Becket’s lab, Mendoza will drive to a nearby wetland or cove to retrieve water samples — part of an ongoing experiment to investigate how microbial changes in the ecosystem are indications of increased pollution in sea life and plants. Sometimes she’ll wear a wetsuit and wade into waters a meter deep.

The next day she’ll extract the DNA from bacteria in her samples and load those into a sequencing machine. The sequencer, which resembles a small dishwasher, packs millions or billions of pieces of DNA onto a single chip that’s then run through a supercomputer a former graduate student built.

“Once I found research, it was like a missing piece,” Mendoza, a Pell grant recipient, said through tears during an interview at Cal State Marcos. Research brought her joy and consumed her life “in the best way,” she added. “It’s really unfortunate that people who are so deserving of these opportunities don’t get to have these opportunities.”

The origins of the San Marcos training center date back to 2002. Through it, more than 160 students have either earned or are currently pursuing doctoral degrees at a U.S. university.

The grant terminations have been emotionally wrenching. “There had been so many tears in my household that my husband got me a puppy,” said Denise Garcia, the director of the center and a professor of biological sciences.

Garcia recalls that in March she was checking a digital chat group on Slack with many other directors of U-RISE grants when suddenly the message board lit up with updates that their grants were gone. At least 63 schools across the country , NIH data show.

In the past four years of its U-RISE grant the center has reported to the NIH that 83% of its students entered a doctoral program. That exceeds the campus’s grant goal, which was .

Mendoza is grateful: She was one of two students to win a campus scholarship that’ll defray much, but not all, of the costs of attending school after losing her NIH award. That, plus a job at a pharmacy on weekends, may provide enough money to complete her bachelor’s next year.

Others are unsure how they’ll afford college while maintaining a focus on research in the next school year.

“You work so hard to put yourself in a position where you don’t have to worry, and then that’s taken away from you,” said Camila Valderrama-Martínez, a first-year graduate student at San Marcos who also earned her bachelor’s there and works in the same lab as Mendoza. She was in her first year of receiving the Bridges to the Doctorate grant meant for students in master’s programs who want to pursue a biomedical-focused doctoral degree. The grant came with a stipend of $26,000 annually for two years plus a tuition waiver of 60% and money to attend conferences.

She can get a job, but that “takes away time from my research and my time in lab and focusing on my studies and my thesis.” She relies solely on federal financial aid to pay for school and a place to live. Getting loans, often anathema for students, seems like her only recourse. “It’s either that or not finish my degree,” she said.

Terminated NIH grants in detail

These grant cancellations are separate at the NIH since Trump took office in January, including multi-million-dollar grants for vaccine and disease research. They’re also on top of an NIH plan to dramatically reduce how much universities receive from the agency to pay for maintaining labs, other infrastructure and labor costs that are essential for campus research. California’s attorney general led by Democrats in suing the Trump administration to halt and reverse those cuts.

In San Marcos’ case, the latest U-RISE grant lasted all five years, but it wasn’t renewed for funding, even though the application received a high score from an NIH grant committee.

Armenta, the associate director at the Cal State San Marcos training center, recalled that his NIH program officer said that though nothing is certain, he and his team should be “cautiously optimistic that you would be funded again given your score.” That was in January. Weeks later, NIH discontinued the program.

He and Garcia shared the cancellation letters they received from NIH. Most made vague references to changes in NIH’s priorities. However, one letter for a specific grant program cited a common reason why the agency has been cancelling funding: “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research programs related to Diversity (sic), equity, and inclusion.”

That’s a departure from the agency’s emphasis on developing a diverse national cadre of scientists. As recently as February, “there are many benefits that flow from a diverse scientific workforce.”

Future of doctoral programs unclear

Josue Navarrete graduated this spring from Cal State San Marcos with a degree in computer science. Unlike the other students interviewed for this story, Navarrete, who uses they/them pronouns, was able to complete both years of their NIH training grant and worked in Becket’s lab.

But because of the uncertain climate as the Trump administration attempts to slash funding, Vanderbilt University, which placed Navarrete on a waitlist for a doctoral program, ultimately denied them admission because the university program had to shrink its incoming class, they said. Later, Navarrete met a professor from Vanderbilt at a conference who agreed to review their application. The professor said in any other year, Navarrete would have been admitted.

The setback was heartbreaking.

“I’m gripping so hard to stay in research,” Navarrete said. With doctoral plans delayed, they received a job offer from Epic, a large medical software company, but turned it down. “They wanted me to be handling website design and mobile applications, and that’s cool. It’s not for me.”

Valderrama-Martinez cited Navarrete’s story as she wondered whether doctoral programs at universities will have space for her next year. “I doubt in a year things are going to be better,” she said.

She still looks forward to submitting her applications.

So does Mendoza. She wants to study microbiology — the research bug that bit her initially and brought her to San Marcos. Eventually she hopes to land at a private biotech firm and work in drug development.

“Of course I’m gonna get a Ph.D., because that just means I get to do research,” she said.

This article was and was republished under the license.

Out-of-school programs — enrichment programs that occur after school or during the summer — offer structured environments where students engage in meaningful activities, build relationships and develop essential life skills. They often serve as a bridge between school, home and the community, and for kids from low-income families, high-quality out-of-school programs can play an outsized role in their development.

“This idea that society should put all development and learning into this institution called school is problematic. In today’s world it doesn’t make sense,” says Tom Akiva, professor at the University of Pittsburgh whose research focuses on out-of-school learning. “The school setting has many of the standard areas we think of as learning: science, math, reading. But a lot of important learning happens in out-of-school time. Things like social skills, leadership, and a lot of interest development.”

A from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine examines the impact and effectiveness of these programs, offering the major take-away that they’re far more important than policymakers and parents likely realize. Yet gaps in access, funding limitations in the current political climate and workforce challenges hinder their potential impact.

“Eighty percent of waking hours are spent in informal learning, or out-of-school learning,” says Akiva, who helped author the report. “From a developmental psychology perspective, you’re learning in every environment you’re in. So lots of really important life learning happens outside.”

The 347-page report is the first comprehensive examination of out-of-school programs in more than two decades, and comes at a moment when the ecosystem is more diverse in its offerings than ever. These range from play-based experiences for younger students that boost social skills, imagination and creativity — and operate more like child care than anything — to more specialized experiences for older students, like a chess club, karate program or pottery class. Sports and theater programs offer important opportunities for team-building, while academic enrichment programs can help students who are behind catch up.

that well-designed, high-quality programs enhance academic motivation and increase school attendance, effectively promoting long-term educational success. And while it’s no wonder that tens of millions of families are eager to enroll their children, many are locked out.  

In 2020, 24.6 million children wanted to enroll in out-of-school programs but ran headfirst into roadblocks such as high costs and transportation challenges, the latest available data show. A whopping 11 million children from low-income families were unable to participate in out-of-school programs, perhaps unsurprisingly suggesting barriers to access are not evenly distributed.

“For a lot of kids from affluent backgrounds, it’s kind of just an understood opportunity,” says Deborah Moroney, vice president of American Institutes for Research and chair of the National Academies committee that oversaw the research and production of the report. “But there’s a real opportunity gap for young people who come from marginalized communities and identities in terms of inclusion. There is a supply of out-of-school time opportunities that are subsidized or offered at a reduced cost, but it is not meeting the demand for the young people who can’t otherwise pay.”

Much of that is due to a fractured funding system, which has improved and grown significantly compared to two decades ago, but remains poorly coordinated and unreliable and has not kept pace with the growth in demand. The report goes so far as to call the existence of out-of-school programs “precarious,” noting that they exist “at the whim of one foundation board meeting or election.”

“The field has evolved, the funding has increased and things have formalized in terms of quality and experiences that participants have access to, but it’s still not meeting the demand,” Moroney says. “Funding stability still isn’t there, and that’s causing major problems for the organizers.”&�Բ�����;

As it stands, the main federal funding stream for out-of-school programs is the $1.3 billion 21st Century Community Learning Centers grants — though it’s unclear whether that funding will exist in the coming years as the Trump administration pursues funding cuts and consolidating existing programs into flexible block grants. Other than California’s long-standing matching grant to fund programs for its residents, only a handful of other states invest significantly, including Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Underscoring just how fragile many of these programs are, the U.S. Education Department’s decision to halt pandemic aid reimbursement extensions is already hitting summer and afterschool programs. The Maryland Out of School Time Network estimates that Baltimore will lose roughly 12,000 seats for summer opportunities this year as a result.

The report recommends that the out-of-school programs be coordinated centrally and woven into the nation’s safety net, instead of its piecemeal state of affairs — a proposal that seems unlikely given the current fiscal environment. 

To be sure, the financing of the system is also tethered to the competency and quality of the workforce, which, much like the child care sector, is beset by a host of challenges: low wages, high turnover, job-related stress and no real cohesion or organization of the profession.

“This is a workforce that historically has come from the communities in which they’re serving,” says Moroney. “They have a great passion for the work, but it’s an unrecognized workforce. They are, traditionally, a low-wage workforce. They want to stay in the field, but there’s not the same kind of career pipelines and trajectories that there might be in some other fields.”&�Բ�����;

Given that the workforce plays an outsized role in the effective operation of out-of-school programs, Moroney says that it’s imperative for states and districts to figure out ways to elevate it, including how to recruit and retain workers. The report concludes that professional development, competitive salaries and career pathways can enhance workforce stability and improve program quality — though, again, policy experts say it’s difficult in the current fiscal environment, to imagine a scenario where those are priorities. 

“I think if we were to invest in the workforce, we would see changes throughout the education ecosystem,” agrees Akiva. “If we figure out how to support this workforce better — because they’re really doing important, invisible work in society — then I think we would see positive change radiating out.”

As never before, scientists have access to experimental methods and machines that enable them to understand the neural mechanisms occurring as babies become children and learn to navigate their environment. With every scientific discovery, wonder deepens. The following stories offer a glimpse into some of the extraordinary research at the heart of these discoveries.  

When you see a baby gazing on the world, you might imagine a little sponge passively soaking up information, but what’s actually going on is sophisticated computational wizardry that outpaces any known machine. Millisecond by millisecond, the baby is sorting multiple data feeds and running statistics to analyze the environment. “No computer, no matter how sophisticated, can do what a baby can do in listening to language input and deriving the words, grammar and the sound contrasts that create language,” says language expert Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at the University of Washington. 

After babies grasp the basics of “mama,” “dada” and ”baba,” and understand that they can summon important people and items with a word or two, they soon move on to two key words in human development: ”What’s that?” Babies occupy a world of wonder, and their senses are bombarded with new information at every turn. From their first moments, human infants are driven by the desire to find out. Their investigations are fueled by the same mechanisms that scientists use to develop theories. Babies are exploring their world in ways that are exquisitely intelligent, sensitive and scientific.

Adults are encouraged to get sufficient exercise to support their brain health. As it turns out, cardiovascular health appears to equate to better cognitive function for children as well, with benefits observable as early as 4 years old. Scientists found that preschool children with higher cardiorespiratory fitness scored higher on tasks related to general intellectual ability as well as in their use of expressive language. They performed better on computerized tasks requiring attention and multitasking and showed the potential for faster processing speeds and greater resource allocation in their brains as they performed the tasks.

Fascinating research tells us that the baby isn’t the only one growing and changing when an infant is born. The intense caregiving required for newborns causes observable changes in the brain of the caregiver: They develop “parenting brain.” Those changes aren’t limited to the biological parents, they occur in the brains of everyone intimately involved in caring for the baby. It’s not just that some people are hardwired to be a parent, people become parents by how — and the degree to which — they respond to the child they’re caring for: The act of caregiving, not simply the act of giving birth, calibrates the brain.

Babies are born with brain connections for functions such as hearing, sight and movement. The white-matter pathways associated with language are also present at birth but continue to develop over the years. Scientists have found that these neural connections don’t simply grow, they are cultivated by their environments, and research shows that early interactive language experiences uniquely contribute to the brain development associated with long-term language and cognitive ability. The more back and forth between babies and parents, the greater the growth of the brain in areas critical to the child’s ability to learn language and build vocabulary — effects that carry through early childhood and predict cognitive and linguistic ability into adolescence.

Can you tell fact from fiction online? In a digital world, few questions are more important or more challenging.

Roughly a mile away, the demographics at Billingsville, another K-5, sat in stark contrast. Located in the Grier Heights neighborhood — an old farming community founded by a former slave — Billingsville was a high-poverty school serving an all-Black student population.

“We operated in silos that I never understood as a principal,” Hash said.

Portable classrooms on Cotswold’s overcrowded campus were evidence of the school’s popularity, while Billingsville occupied a brand new building with room to spare.

In 2018, the two schools became part of a unique experiment that was unlike any student assignment plan families had ever been part of. The schools would merge, but instead of moving into one building, the early grades would occupy Billingsville, and Cotswold would serve grades 3 through 5. 

Almost immediately, under the new arrangement, Billingsville went from having one white student to being 40% white, Hash said. Both schools now offer the rigorous IB program and have a more racially and socioeconomically balanced population. Across both schools, less than half of the students live in poverty, 41% students are Black, about 17% are Hispanic and 34% are white. 

“Our school looks like the world. Our school looks like Charlotte,” Hash said. 

The student assignment method, called a pairing, is not new. In fact, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district employed the same design in the 1970s following a that required the district to desegregate. But the model has been underutilized as an integration strategy, experts say. 

Now, shows that such mergers could reduce racial and ethnic isolation by as much as 60% in 200 large school districts nationwide. At the same time, the method would increase parents’ commute to school by only a few minutes — not a small matter for families managing busy drop-off and pick-up schedules.

“What we’re trying to do … is highlight how student assignment policy changes might help produce environments that can reduce the concentration of different forms of disadvantage,” said Nabeel Gillani, an assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and the lead researcher on the project. “Disadvantage can prevent young people and their families from reaching their potential.”

Under a , schools are no longer permitted to consider race when pursuing integration goals. But blending schools with different socioeconomic profiles can still result in more racially diverse schools. In a moment when leaders of the ruling party in Washington want to “” and argue that “,” Gillani urges districts not to back off efforts to create more integrated schools. He said he hopes that the Trump administration’s warnings against any emphasis on racial diversity “will light a stronger fire under more districts” to consider pairing, “instead of scaring them away.”

Along with the research paper, released Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ Nexus journal, Gillani and doctoral student Madison Landry created an that shows how pairing, and sometimes tripling, would change school demographics in communities across the country. 

For example, in Plano, Texas, 26% of the students at Shepard Elementary are non-white, according to 2022 data, while 83% of students at Sigler, about six minutes away, are non-white. 

Pairing the two schools would more than double the percentage of students of color at Shepard and decrease the percentage at Sigler to 52.9%, bringing both closer to the districtwide figure of 65%.

‘A desired racial balance’

Across the country, data shows that schools have grown increasingly divided by race, ethnicity and family income. A from the U.S. Government Accountability Office showed that more than a third of students attended schools in 2020-21 where 75% or more students were of a single race or ethnicity. , however, shows that students who attend integrated schools have higher test scores and lower dropout rates. 

In 2017, Billingsville earned a D rating from the state. Now the combined Billingsville-Cotswold earns a C, but also met its academic growth target, a measure that captures progress from year to year. 

Such results are one reason why the Biden administration in 2023 took steps to encourage districts to implement strategies like pairing. The U.S. Department of Education awarded $14 million to states, districts and charter networks working to create more integrated schools. 

Gillani has advised one of the recipients, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina, as it develops a redistricting plan. While the plans don’t involve pairing, leaders are still redrawing boundaries with an eye toward reducing socioeconomic isolation across the district. 

Other recipients included a Rhode Island charter network, the Oakland Unified School District in California and the Maryland Department of Education.

A department spokeswoman said she had no information about whether the program would continue, but one advocate for school integration doubts it, considering the administration’s opposition to diversity efforts. 

“I think it’s unlikely that they would run another competition for that grant under this administration,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. 

In fact, the department’s Feb. 14 “” letter warned districts against taking steps to “achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”&�Բ�����;

But “socioeconomic diversity has its own independent value,” said Richard Kahlenberg, director of housing policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “There is a wealth of research to suggest that students benefit from attending a mixed-income school … even if there is zero impact on racial diversity.”

The Supreme Court has also upheld race-neutral policies. Within the past year, the court has declined to hear two cases, one from Boston and one from Fairfax County, Virginia, that challenged efforts to create more diversity in highly selective schools.

“The judiciary will almost surely uphold socioeconomic integration plans at the end of the day,” Kahlenberg said. 

Even though the federal grant program was small, Potter said she hopes the efforts would offer “some important proof points” for how to encourage integration at a time when many districts are considering mergers because of declining enrollment. 

“There really is a chance to have a win-win situation when it’s structured right,” she said, “and when there’s community engagement to work through these hard conversations.”

‘Why are they changing everything?’

One benefit of pairing — over a typical redistricting plan that reassigns students to new schools — is that it doesn’t split up peers from the same grade level. They might relocate to a different building, but they stay with their friends.

That doesn’t make it easy, however. Families often have multiple children in the same elementary school and arrange afterschool programs and child care around that location. 

“Our first reaction was ‘Oh gosh, why are they changing everything?’ ” said Brantley Alvey, whose oldest daughter, now in seventh grade, went through the merger.  Her youngest is in fifth grade at the school. “When we bought our house, we said ‘We love that our kids are going to walk to elementary school for six years.’ ”

Parents also had questions over how the makeup of their children’s classrooms would change after the merger.

“Would they be the only child of color or would they be the only child that wasn’t of color?” Hash recalled. “Those were real conversations that we had to tackle.”

To help parents manage morning and afternoon routines, the schools have staggered bell schedules. The district also spent the entire 2017-18 school year preparing families for the change. Hash organized campus beautification days and concerts to help families from the two schools get to know each other. She said she had to view the merger of communities not just from an instructional and management perspective, but with a “micro-political lens.”

“You have to lean in with how we’re alike versus how we’re different,” she said. “This is a model that can be replicated across the United States, not just in Charlotte.”

Hash is the principal for both campuses, dividing her time between the two. Because of the pairing, Alvey said, the school has benefited from more resources — like two full-time art teachers, and more playground equipment and library books. For parent leaders, however, organizing carnivals and other family events has often been “labor intensive,” she said. “We’re constantly feeling like we have to duplicate our efforts on two different campuses.”&�Բ�����;

While the positives, she said, have outweighed the negatives, the one-school, two-campus model won’t be in place much longer. will eventually bring all K-5 students together in a newly built Cotswold, while the Billingsville site becomes a district Montessori school. Grier Heights families will be able to choose which school they want their children to attend.

Still, Alvey said the pairing has benefited her children and helped to break down barriers between the two neighborhoods — especially since both schools feed into the same middle and high school.

“It’s not just low-income kids that benefit from diversity; it’s the higher income kids as well,” she said. “We want our kids to be comfortable with people from different backgrounds and different cultures. That’s only going to better prepare them to be good citizens of the world.”

The solution seems straightforward. Give families with children living in poverty more money. Right?

According to Anna Thom, an economist and researcher for the  (PN3), it’s not quite that simple. Based in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, PN3 comprises a team of researchers and nonpartisan policy experts who work directly with state leaders, providing data to help the policymakers make sense of complex topics.

To that end, Thom led PN3’s in-depth analysis of how direct monetary payments, known as cash transfers, impact certain conditions that affect young children’s cognitive, emotional and social development. Published in October 2024, the  shows that these financial infusions positively impact three policy goals: increasing household resources, improving child development and improving parent and child health. Beyond reducing child poverty, the research also suggests that cash transfers can reduce racial disparities in these key areas. 

But as far as prescriptions for exactly how to approach distributing those infusions of cash, there’s no clear guidance. 

“It’s really complex,” Thom says. “We found clear evidence that cash transfers are effective, but how much (cash), the optimal frequency or whether transfers are most beneficial when they target specific groups — that’s less clear.

“What’s exciting is that the research is clear that these cash transfers are helpful,” she says, “and the big concerns that they might disincentivize employment or contribute to inflation were not substantiated in our evidence review.”

Cash transfer programs can take many forms, such as tax credits or , but uniformly, their goal is to prevent or mitigate poverty. The research is clear that money — or the lack thereof — influences the well-being and development of young children. According to the National Institutes of Health, a growing body of evidence indicates that  affects physiological and neurobiological development and the stress of unremitting scarcity is likely “central to poverty-related gaps in academic achievement and the well-documented lifelong effects of poverty on physical and mental health.”&�Բ�����;

Types of Cash Transfers

Though the vocabulary of cash transfers is evolving, the center offers these definitions:

Most of the world’s developed economies provide some form of child allowance — an unconditional cash transfer targeted to all individuals or families with children — the U.S. does not (other than the temporary modifications to the federal Child Tax Credit through the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021.) 

A  of approaches to addressing childhood poverty, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2019, reported that analyses of data from the 36 countries comprising the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) at the time (today there are 38) found that child poverty and food insecurity is more prevalent in the U.S. than in the majority of OECD countries. The study suggested that employing some of the other developed countries’ effective solutions — including some version of a universal child allowance — could help alleviate U.S. childhood poverty and food insecurity.

“Broadly, we recommend increasing investments in families with children, particularly low-income families,” the report states.

Findings From the Evidence Review

PN3’s recent evidence review looked extensively at various programs that put money directly in the hands of families, from studies of unconditional cash transfer (UCT) programs in Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas, to existing dividend-based unconditional cash transfers, to child allowance pilot programs throughout the U.S. Two of the largest and most data-rich programs the researchers studied were the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Payments, neither of which was intended to be an anti-poverty program but each of which have measurably reduced poverty among their constituents.

In 2021, in what amounted to the first and so far, only nationwide case study of the impact of cash transfers, the Biden administration temporarily expanded the federal child tax credit (CTC) through the American Rescue Plan Act. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the expansion lifted . For Black and Latino children,  shrank more compared to the decline in rates for white children. The temporary cash infusion also had notable benefits on , again with a greater difference observed with Black families. An additional $100 per child per month reduced depression symptoms in all low-income parents, with Black parents seeing nearly twice the reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms as other subgroups.

 found that the monthly cash difference of $313 per month led to some changes in infant brain activity, with infants whose mothers received $333 monthly showing higher “fast-brain” activity compared to babies of mothers receiving $20 monthly. The brain’s mid- and high-frequency bands are associated with cognitive skills, which indicates that cash transfers may improve development of these skills, though more research is needed to draw a direct link.

One of the most important takeaways from the center’s review, Thom says, is the power of policy to impact individual lives. Policies such as tax credits, cash transfers, paid family leave and Early Head Start programs illustrate the power of state policy decisions to affect not only an individual child’s life but ripple into communities and lift the wider economy, she says.

According to an  at Washington University in St. Louis, child poverty in the U.S. costs up to $1.03 trillion a year in loss of economic productivity, increased health and crime costs, homelessness and maltreatment. Cash transfer policies seem like a bargain in comparison by helping mitigate social challenges and reduce government spending in health and human services. 

“The return on investment is so high,” Thom says. “Investing in young children actually strengthens our economy. We do all this spending later in life (on health and crime costs, etc.) but when we invest in this early childhood space from zero to 3, that sets children up for lifelong success in school, in life, with their health and so on.”

“Even if you don’t necessarily care about individual children, families and their potential or whether they’re thriving,” she adds, “there is a fiscal argument to be made. We’re going to pay one way or the other.”

Further Research

Thom says the center plans to continue studying the state child tax credits that are cropping up throughout the U.S. in the wake of the temporary expansion of the federal credit in 2021, which Congress failed to renew at the end of that year. The programs haven’t been implemented enough to provide sufficient data yet, and many of the states are not evaluating their programs with the rigor the PN3 center requires to make a firm conclusion about their effectiveness. Nonetheless, the programs are “super promising,” she says and the researchers are looking forward to diving into that data. 

Fourth-grade teacher Megan Lovins would study the county’s curriculum guides each year to piece together the best science lessons possible. But in 2021, bulky, blue crates arrived at her classroom door in Hudson Elementary — and a new way to teach science practically fell in her lap.

Her district had agreed to participate in to study the impact of new curriculum and professional development on student achievement.

A Newton’s cradle to demonstrate physics. Empty tin cans to help illustrate static electricity. Measuring cups, tape, rulers and more. As Lovins emptied the crates, she realized she had all the equipment needed to teach tangible science activities.

“I am a hands-on teacher, so I fell in love with it instantly,” she said.

The materials were part of a five-year randomized controlled study by the that launched in the 2019-20 school year. With a $4.5 million federal grant, the center provided its own high-quality science curriculum and professional development to 37 schools in North and South Carolina to study how combining the two impacted test scores.

Researchers found that pairing the curriculum, “Smithsonian Science for the Classroom,” with high-quality professional development improved students’ science, math and reading test scores. The study also showed positive results in science for students who are typically underrepresented in STEM fields, such as girls and children of color.

“There’s no other randomized controlled trial study that’s done this in elementary school using these standards,” said Carol O’Donnell, the center’s director. “So this is a big deal for the field.”

The trial followed 1,600 students in third through fifth grades over the course of three academic years. Of the 37 schools, 19 were classified as “treatment” and given the Smithsonian curriculum and professional development, while 18 were assigned to a comparison group and continued like normal without any intervention.

Amy D’Amico, director of professional services for the Smithsonian center, said the pandemic made it more difficult to get schools on board. In a world that was changing daily, superintendents were being asked to say yes to hefty commitment — with no guarantee they would receive the new curriculum.

“Typically, people want to be in the intervention group,” D’Amico said. “And we’re asking people to sign on for five years, not knowing what the next week or month was going to look like.”

Lovins said that at first, she was hesitant about participating in the study. The main focus in her fourth grade classroom was to keep her students healthy during the pandemic.

“When school did go back in session, we were in session every other day with half of our students for a long period of time. That mental toll made it challenging to pick up a new curriculum,” she said. “But I’m a huge fan now.”

Many of the schools selected were rural and high-needs, with large numbers of students who were low-income, had Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) or were classified as English learners. In Caldwell County Schools, a district of nearly 11,000 students 70 miles northwest of Charlotte, eight schools participated in the trial, including Hudson Elementary.

Because of COVID-19, the treatment schools didn’t begin to receive professional development until spring 2021. At that point, teachers learned how to implement the curriculum by going through lessons as if they were students. 

D’Amico said the professional learning was uncomfortable at first for some of the elementary teachers, because many didn’t have a science background. 

“We had to get in and get dirty and use our hands and learn those lessons,” Lovins said. “It’s amazing how many adults are scared of science — scared to teach science, because you’re afraid you’re going to say something wrong — so to be able to get in and use your hands to learn how to teach it made the teachers feel a lot more comfortable about implementing the curriculum in the classroom.”

The Smithsonian science curriculum was phenomena-driven, meaning students actively investigate and try to explain real-world events. They collect data, ask questions, experiment with materials and draw conclusions as part of hands-on activities.

In one elementary school lesson, students observed changes in the night sky to figure out how Earth’s orbit around the sun influences which constellations are visible throughout the year. 

“If students ask questions about the world around them, you will get students to improve their interest (and) their self-confidence,” O’Donnell said. 

Lovins said she noticed over time that as her students used the Smithsonian lessons, they were able to retain information much more easily because they were using their hands to learn abstract concepts. She also saw a lot more joy while teaching science in the classroom. 

“They would say, ‘When’s our next science class?’ ” Lovins said. “They were begging for the next lesson because they were having so much fun with the hands-on (activities).”

The University of Memphis Center for Research and Educational Policy evaluated the trial, testing students before and after the study while conducting classroom observations. The researchers evaluated the students’ science achievement with the (SAT10) while assessing reading and math achievement on state tests.

At the end of the study last year, students in the treatment group showed statistically significant gains in science relative to the comparison group. Overall, the comparison group ranked in the 50th percentile while the treatment group ranked in the 57th percentile in science on the SAT10.

Girls and students of color scored 7 points higher in science than children of the same demographic in comparison schools, while low-income students scored 6 percentile points higher and children with IEPs scored 15 points higher than comparison students with the same demographics.

Students in the treatment group also scored 4 points higher in reading and 6 points higher in math on their state assessments than those in the comparison group, the researchers found. 

The results suggest that student achievement in reading and math can improve through science instruction that uses real-world problems, where students have to “read, write, argue from evidence and make calculations,” according to the study’s

But it’s not just the curriculum; O’Donnell said it’s important to implement the professional development piece along with it. “Because you would never give teachers just the curriculum — the intervention is the curriculum with aligned professional learning,” she said. “That’s our expectation in the field — that teachers get the support and the development of expertise they need, as well as the materials.”

Lovins said teachers at her school are relearning Smithsonian curriculum this year to continue to implement it next fall. 

“It’s so good and it needs to be in every classroom,” Lovins said. “It’s a great program. I hope it stays around.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A ‘Man-Made Disaster’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I just don’t want more asterisk years’

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

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

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

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

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

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