Cardona, a fellow at the , through his speeches and other appearances, continues to tell students their ability to speak more than one language is an enormous asset. Not only can it bring them career success, he says, but it deepens their . 

His praise for the multilingual community runs counter to the current administration’s agenda: President Donald Trump issued an executive order in July designating , a pronouncement that immediately sparked efforts to “minimize non-essential multilingual services (and) redirect resources toward English-language education and assimilation.” 

Trump and his allies also rolled back longstanding that kept federal immigration agents . Children and their parents have been arrested during pickup and drop-off times, causing absenteeism to spike. And the schools and other groups that serve immigrants are scrambling to stay out of the spotlight, curbing outreach in many cases. 

The dismantling of the U.S. Education Department, too, has left the country’s 5 million English learners with little protection or as to their : After a historic round of cuts, the department’s Office of English Language Acquisition, for example, was left with . 

Cardona, who also works to shore up the leadership skills of other educators through his , said he’s hurt by what has happened to the department whose leadership he left in January 2025.

But even amid the chaos, Cardona sees hope. Trump’s power is temporary, he said. Education lasts a lifetime. 

“Despite what we’re hearing from this administration, the opposite is true,” Cardona said, when asked how he would advise multilingual learners today. “Just wait it out. You don’t have to change your stripes to be successful. I didn’t. Having two cultures and two languages is one of your greatest strengths.”

I caught up with Cardona last week and asked him about the future of multilingual learner education in the U.S. The 50-year-old, who began his career teaching fourth grade in his hometown of Meriden, Connecticut and will be a featured lecturer at Harvard, where he recently at the Kennedy School, was candid in his responses.

What are your three biggest concerns about the state of multilingual learner education right now?

That multilingualism is not being valued as a superpower, that the funding for basic support is up in the air and that it continues to be an ancillary afterthought in many of our communities, as opposed to a tool to provide a skill for students that can serve them well in a globally competitive society.

Programs serving multilingual learners are being sidelined. What’s happening here? 

It reminds me of when the Supreme Court made a decision about affirmative action and there was an extrapolation of intent. They said, “Now, we can’t have programs that support students from different backgrounds because that goes against what the Supreme Court said.” And so they extrapolate, they make up what it means for implementation.

It’s analogous to what is happening here. “Well, we’ve got to cut DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) so that means no parent support, no translating documents, no language line. We’re going to cut those things from the budget because we’re not sure that we want to continue to support ESL programs because the new secretary said no DEI, that we can’t favor one group over another.”

They’re extrapolating or blaming up to get away with cutting things that they don’t understand — or agree with in the first place. There is an overprescribing of an intent that was really never there. Part of it is to justify budget cut decisions or because in some places, now it’s not chic to promote multilingualism. So why bother?

There are places in our country — Arizona, for example — where there are . So, they took it further. This is what California went through in the ’90s and 2000s with (a voter-approved measure that required schools to teach immigrant children only in English). And so you have people doing underground work of multilingual education, which is sad, that in 2026 we have people hiding what they’re doing to promote multilingualism when in every other country it’s almost a prerequisite.

Because of what’s happening at the federal level, people have permission now to kind of get rid of some of the programming that we know supports students and families who are learning English — or multilingual programs where students are learning another language.

What is causing some districts and schools to do this? Is it racism or budgetary concerns? 

From my perspective, it’s a little bit of both. “Why are we spending money on these programs when we could spend it on something else?” It’s the low-hanging fruit, and quite frankly, you’re not going to see too many parents of Latino students speaking up at board meetings if they’re worried about being harassed by immigration. Because the browner you are, the more you’re subject to vilification. 

It starts at the top. You’ve got the president , murderers, painting a picture that immigrants are bad people.

To exclude racism would be Pollyannaish on my part, but to think that it’s only that would be minimizing the nuanced realities that many districts face, saying, “If I have to cut, I’m going to cut where I’m going to get the least resistance.”

How does it make you feel to see the Education Department dismantled? 

It hurts because I know the impact it’s going to have on the students furthest from opportunity. The damage that has been done in the last 12 months will take decades to correct. 

Why do you think it will take decades to repair what’s happening to multilingual education? 

I’ll start with the Office for Civil Rights. When you take out the arm of enforcement that ensures students’ civil rights are being protected, accountability is gone. So what does that mean? That it could be the Wild West and no one’s paying attention because we closed seven of the 12 offices whose job it was to make sure students’ civil rights were not being violated. 

When you cut — or threaten to cut — (English Language Acquisition grants) or you run applications for grants through an AI scanner to pick out the words “diversity” or “equity” to make sure you’re not giving grants to those grantees, you’re basically creating a culture of “don’t do this — or else.”&�Բ�����;

And people, in order to get the funding they need to provide the basic needs in their districts, are going to move away from programs that could be viewed as helping address disparities in access and outcomes. 

And what about other moves inside the department? 

I see special education going to HHS (Department of Health and Human Services), and I often say they’re sending it to the least competent Kennedy. So, let’s look at what’s happening there. That department has been downsized as well. When you take 50% of the Office for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and you dismiss half the people and then you take the other half and you send them over to the HHS, where they’ve diminished their staff, and now you’re asking them to do the supervision, oversight and support. When you remove that, you’re left with great variance throughout our country in the ability to provide services, support, and accountability. 

I would argue that the red states, the ones who voted for this administration, are the ones that are going to suffer the most — the rural communities where they only have their local public school. They don’t have other options. 

This administration will only last for a finite amount of time. How might a new administration roll back these changes?  

I have hope in not just the federal government picking up where it left off, but I am very encouraged by my conversations with the multilingual learner community. They’re building alliances that do not rely on the federal government — because they checked out. 

They’re developing a framework. For example, , (an advocacy group for multilingual learners) is led by the same people that fought Proposition 227 30 years ago. They built an alliance back then and they created what’s called the State Seal of Biliteracy. So, when they , they said, “We’re going to acknowledge that if you’re multilingual, you’re going to get a State Seal of Biliteracy, a badge of achievement.” And when I was secretary, all 50 states adopted that seal. 

The pendulum is going to swing back, but the federal government is only going to be one player. I’m counting on these coalitions to accelerate the remediation and innovation around English language development. I see that happening across the country.

If you could speak directly to multilingual learner teachers, what would you say? 

Consider yourself blessed and fortunate that you’re serving at a time when our students need you, where you’re providing that emotional safe harbor. Your words are the ones that they’re going to remember — not what’s being said on CNN or Fox News.

Absenteeism is rampant in the immigrant community. How can schools get these students back in the classroom?

This is not the answer for that question, but the first thing that came to mind is vote. We need to get off our asses and see the impact that this had on our students, and we need to be angry. We need to not allow for this to continue any longer than it needs to.

With regard to the students that are right now home, I struggle to look a parent in the face in a community where they’re being harassed by ICE and say, “Send them to school, don’t worry, they’re 100% safe,” because we know that’s not true.

What I will say to those families is know your rights. And also, know the culture in which you’re sending your children. Is that school protecting your child? Will you have alert calls? Does your district have a practice to prevent schools from becoming hubs of immigration (enforcement) efforts? 

In many parts of our country, we’re not protecting our students from having our schools be the places where these raids are happening. I had a student in my hometown get picked up when he was going to an immigration center to check in, as he was supposed to. He missed graduation because he was following the rules.

What do you make of this moment for us as a nation?��

We’re going through a period right now where a lot of the fundamental principles of democracy are being questioned. It’s a stain on our beautiful country’s history. The pandemic of prejudice that we’re dealing with now is harder to lead through than the pandemic of disease that we went through five years ago. We got through the pandemic of disease because we came together. What’s happening now is this pandemic of hate and prejudice is pulling us apart. But if you look deeper, you see stories of resilience and of the power of unity.

Judge Susan Illston from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said she believes the who sued will be able to prove the government’s actions are unlawful “as shown by the haphazard way in which the [reductions in force] have rolled out” and that they “are intended for the purpose of political retribution.”&�Բ�����;

Illston, who temporarily blocked the layoffs on Oct. 15, said she was moved by some of the written statements from laid-off employees. 

“Although we are here talking about statutes and administrative procedure,” she said, “we are also talking about human lives, and these human lives are being dramatically affected by the activities that we’re discussing.”

Her injunction means the staff must return to work once the government shutdown ends. 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon cut 465 positions, including 132 in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, 137 in the Office for Civil Rights and 121 in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, had no comment on the judge’s ruling and referred The 74 to McMahon’s earlier calling the department “unnecessary.”&�Բ�����;

At Tuesday’s hearing, Michael Velchik, a Department of Justice attorney, argued that the government had the right to lay off employees because Congress hasn’t approved a budget for the current fiscal year.

​​”If you don’t have money coming in, you should be looking for ways to cut costs,” he said.  

But attorney Danielle Leonard, representing the employee unions, disagreed.

“What counsel is arguing is that if Congress lets government funding lapse for one day, the president can fire the entire federal government,” she said. “That is absurd.”

The cuts were the Trump administration’s latest move toward eliminating an agency that it argues should never have existed in the first place. McMahon acknowledges that Congress has the final word on whether the department shuts down, but so far, members have taken no action on a proposal that is likely to fail in the Senate. Two weeks into the government shutdown, the cuts, saying that money was still flowing to the states, and some conservatives argue advocates have overreacted to the layoffs. In a commentary, the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess said the department for a smooth launch of this year’s financial aid form. But even he questioned the latest cuts, calling them “opaque, severe and lacking in any kind of clear justification.”&�Բ�����;

In their complaint, the unions said staff faced “political discrimination,” and even President Donald Trump has called the layoffs an effort to eliminate “Democrat programs.”&�Բ�����;

But in filed Friday, Jacqueline Clay, chief human capital officer at the department, said officials didn’t “target employees based on their political viewpoints,” but considered other factors including a shortage of funds.

‘Risks of harm’

Last week, over 60 organizations asked the Senate education committee to hold an oversight hearing into the administration’s actions, which they said have caused “unnecessary chaos” and “create immediate risks of harm to every qualifying individual with a disability and their family.”&�Բ�����;

On Monday, also called on Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, to reverse the layoffs.

Some worry that gutting the elementary and secondary office could mean a lack of sufficient oversight of Title I, the largest federal education program. The $18 billion fund is intended to support schools serving low-income students, with the level of funding schools receive based on a set of complicated formulas. 

Without federal staff, there’s a greater risk that states might distribute the funds incorrectly, said Victoria Rosenboom, one of the four staff members who handles those Title I calculations each year. McMahon placed all four on administrative leave. 

“Without us to monitor, the states might monitor less themselves,” Rosenboom said. Her team also gathers data from the Census Bureau every year to determine poverty levels. While there’s still someone in the budget office who can allocate the funds, she said, “they don’t do any of the data collection work. The data quality is all done by us.”&�Բ�����;

Others warn of a return to the days when states improperly used Title I funds for construction projects or replaced state dollars with federal funds. 

“There were no limits on the imagination of schools in terms of how they would spend their money, and there were some pretty egregious expenditures,” said Dianne Piche, a former civil rights attorney at the department who is now retired.  

In the early days after the law passed, a from advocates pointed to districts “wasting millions of dollars” on purchases such as a Baptist church building in Detroit, 18 portable swimming pools in Memphis and equipment, including a deep fryer, adding machines and a piano, in one Mississippi county. 

Vought wrote the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a vision for the Trump administration that argued for turning Title I into a block grant. While McMahon’s budget proposal didn’t go that far, she’s currently considering a waiver request from Iowa to roll Title I and other federal funds into a block grant. Indiana submitted a similar proposal, but it excludes Title I. 

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed during the first Trump administration, but the plan then was to “keep the department functioning,” said Rosenboom, who joined the department in 2019. “At that time, there was still some unease about our future, but definitely not to the same degree as with this administration.”

Since January, K-12 education has undergone sweeping policy changes at the federal level. Hundreds of executive orders and the passage of the “” have led to the cutting of thousands of programs and a reduction in federal funding for schools. 

The U.S. Department of Education has been streamlined, Title IX regulations have been rewritten, and federal protections for LGBTQ+ have been scaled back. Immigration enforcement has increased in communities, leaving many students and teachers feeling unsafe on campus.

Fewer college students may be discouraged from pursuing careers in teaching. Yet, aspiring K-12 educators interviewed by EdSource reveal a continued commitment to the profession. 

Despite these challenges — alongside longstanding issues such as low pay, low morale and unruly students and parents — many remain dedicated to ensuring children across the state continue to have opportunities for learning in safe environments. They want to ensure they have access to safe learning spaces that promote growth, a love of learning, and guarantee that their basic needs are met, from dual-language to special education resources.

Determined to push onward

Peter Leonido, a first-generation education and sociology major who graduated from UC San Diego, said that as someone who believes in the success of his students, the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education was a full-circle moment for him. In high school, he was surrounded by mentors and teachers who believed in him. 

He said that what happens at the federal level impacts how students learn in school.

“Education is political because teaching students to be able to read, write and think critically will inherently have them question and challenge the status quo,” Leonido said. “By defunding it, by bashing on it, you create an uneducated generation that is doomed to fight back.”&�Բ�����;

He is pursuing a master’s degree in education at UCLA this fall. Still, he has taught high school and middle school students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, including lower-income and Latino students, in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Leonido said that teaching English and ethnic studies is especially important for students of color and immigrants to understand how to “read between the lines of everything they consume,” whether that’s on social media, local or national news, and even entertainment. This, he said, will “provide them the tools to empower and defend themselves” during President Donald Trump’s second administration. 

Growing up in a Spanish-speaking household, David Beam always recognized the power and complexity of the language. He was inspired to pursue a related degree in college so he could teach Spanish in grade school or high school. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Spanish with a minor in Spanish-English bilingual education from UC Irvine, and is now pursuing a master’s in the university’s teaching and credential program.

“I want to inspire other students to love the language and appreciate the language and grow in the language,” Beam said. 

Beam is focused on combating achievement and opportunity gaps that exist within education. Given Trump’s approach to eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, along with his threat to shut down the federal Department of Education, he said he is frustrated with the widening gaps. 

Tatum White, 22, a Long Beach State alumna who has completed multiple-subject and education specialist credentials, agreed with Beam’s assessment regarding the importance of diversity in classrooms. 

“As someone who really prioritizes inclusion and supportive environments and love and nurturing future minds and nurturing spaces that include everyone, that’s always going to be something that I really strive for and really appreciate in every environment,” White said. “With the current administration and with current happenings around the world, I feel that is being threatened and that is unfair to a lot of people, and especially with identities that occupy the majority of our classrooms.”

‘I feel like I can instill hope in students’

Both Beam and White say these roadblocks will not deter them from becoming teachers.

“I know that I can make more of a difference inside of the classroom and by being an example to students and teaching them,” Beam said. “Of course, it’s difficult to approach those controversial topics [such as DEI], but I really want to teach students to develop that sense of empathy or develop that sense of understanding.”

Similarly, Christine Tran, a recent graduate from San Jose State, witnessed the effects of inequitable education firsthand. Tran, a Bay Area native, said she attended an underfunded middle school and often struggled with English due to a lack of support.  

“Heading into high school, I was not at the same level as my peers,” Tran said. “I felt super behind. There were a lot of times where I felt like maybe I wasn’t smart, or maybe I wasn’t good at English.”&�Բ�����;

It was Tran’s eighth grade English teacher, however, who sparked her passion for both the subject and education. Tran said that her teacher introduced her to new books, and now she has an English degree and is preparing for a teaching career. 

Tran is currently an English teacher at Breakthrough Silicon Valley, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing college access in underserved communities. She attended a similar program in high school. 

“I feel like I’ve always wanted to teach on paper, but now, actually interacting with the kids, teaching them lessons every day, it’s really eye-opening,” she said. “I feel like I have already grown so much [as an educator].”&�Բ�����;

However, she also fears for the safety and future of her students, many of whom are Latino. Many of her students feel defeated and have lost motivation to further their education, she said. 

“I think that teachers are the cornerstone of a student’s success,” Tran said. “I feel like I can instill hope in students.”&�Բ�����;

The hits to education keep coming

On July 14, the U.S. Supreme Court  to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and fire 1,400 members of the department’s staff can move forward.

“We will carry out the reduction in force to promote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a press statement. “As we return education to the states, this Administration will continue to perform all statutory duties while empowering families and teachers by reducing education bureaucracy.”

In addition to the constantly shifting policies, the Trump administration has left California school districts scrambling to fill funding gaps in K-12 classrooms. 

Further, the U.S. Department of Justice is attempting to dismantle decades of protections for undocumented students with the reversal of the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe,  The  held that “denying undocumented children access to free public K-12 education” violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. 

In California, approximately 15% of K-12 school districts and 45% of the state’s student population are in urban areas, according to the , where a majority of the students are not white, a concern Anna Ortiz, the dean of the College of Education at Long Beach State, said is exacerbated by the Trump administration’s continued threats and actions against DEI programs in classrooms. Ortiz worries that progress toward making education more equitable and students feeling represented is falling apart under Trump.

“I think we’re afraid of going backwards because we’ve made a lot of progress in serving students from diverse backgrounds,” Ortiz said. “Whether they have come from immigrant backgrounds or from different cultures, whether they have different languages as their first language at home.”&�Բ�����;

Most of the layoffs in the Department of Education were in the , which handles disability and discrimination cases in school districts. Without this office handling these cases, Erika Hope, a first-year special education high school math teacher, is concerned that the 7.5 million students with disabilities in K-12 could face increased discrimination and abuse.  

“I had a stepbrother who had [an] intellectual disability, and he was secluded and put into a home at a young age. And I hate the idea that that is where we’re heading, where we’re not talking about inclusion of all people into classrooms,” said Hope, who added that she is afraid special education could be privatized and wouldn’t be free for all people.

The joy of teaching

Despite the challenges that future educators face, even in these difficult times for education, the future remains bright. 

Beam said he hopes there will be greater respect for the process within schools, enabling students to graduate as well-informed individuals with the skills to discern different viewpoints and formulate their own opinions. 

“I was not going to let the current challenges that exist in education stop me from achieving or executing this kind of dream,” Beam said. “Or realizing this dream that I have always had for myself.”&�Բ�����;

 Leonido added that he wants to ensure students can be the ones making change.

“Learning the histories and social patterns of social justice movements, the movements of people of color and other marginalized communities, and the political patterns and impacts of U.S. imperialism on national and global politics will plant a seed for this next generation of youth,” Leonido said. “To challenge the status quo, to be proactive and make change in their communities.”&�Բ�����;

For Ortiz, it’s simply a matter of reminding students about their passion for becoming educators, even when things can be difficult. 

“I think the most important thing is to remember why you wanted to be a teacher and always try to channel that purpose and that joy in teaching,” Ortiz said. “As long as you focus on what’s in your classroom and try to let this noise not get you down, then I think you’re going to have a better experience, and you’re going to persist in the profession.”

But she didn’t face the camera alone. 

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

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

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

And she gets results.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Undeniable’ impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What letter?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

The U.S. Department of Education announced yesterday in a that the 2025-26��Free Application for Federal��Student Aid��(FAFSA) will open for a limited set of students and institutions on Oct. 1, and then the department will make the application available to all students on or before Dec. 1.

The department continues to try and ensure students have access to the maximum federal financial aid possible to reach their education goals, according to the release, and leaders are promising both a better product and smoother process.

The “Better FAFSA” launched earlier this year amid multiple glitches and delays, causing enormous stress for students and families who need help paying for college.

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In North Carolina, help for the 2024-25 school year is still available for incoming freshmen, current college students, and adult learners via phone call, email, or in-person. We need you to spread the word as time is running out for college-bound students to complete the FAFSA, with the Aug. 15 priority date looming for those who may qualify for the state’s .

What we know about the 2025-26 FAFSA

According to the , on Oct. 1, the department will invite volunteers to participate in the testing period, and over time will make the form available to an increasing number of participants, starting with hundreds and expanding to tens of thousands of applicants. This process will allow the department to test and resolve issues before making the form available to all students and contributors by Dec. 1.

In the coming weeks, the department will release more information about how this testing period will work.

“Following a challenging 2024-25 FAFSA cycle, the Department listened carefully to the input of students, families, and higher education institutions, made substantial changes to leadership and operations at Federal Student Aid, and is taking a new approach this year that will significantly improve the FAFSA experience,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “Thanks to the partnership of our stakeholders, we’ve developed a better implementation process for 2025-26. I look forward to continuing to work with our partners to ensure this school year’s FAFSA implementation better serves our nation’s students.”

“We’ve heard from students, families, higher education professionals and other stakeholders loud and clear: They want a better, simpler FAFSA process, and they want to know when they can reliably expect it,” said FAFSA Executive Advisor Jeremy Singer. “In close collaboration with partners, Federal Student Aid is confident we will deliver not only a better product, but also a smoother process than last year. One that makes higher education more accessible and within reach for more Americans.”

The department hopes that regular updates during the testing period will boost confidence among students and families, institutions, state agencies, and other partners and stakeholders.

A new, formal request for feedback will be released next week by the department, and it intends to publish a new roadmap with additional tools for students and families, counselors, institutions, and other partners planning for a successful 2025-26 FAFSA season.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

While the matter focused on a student with disabilities, Trump officials appear to have homed in on it because it addressed a separate question central to the administration’s agenda: Do parents have a right to read staff emails about their children?

With the administration accusing districts of hiding students’ gender transitions from parents, experts say their answer is yes. 

“I don’t think there’s any question that they’re going to say [emails] should be available to parents,” said Amelia Vance, president of the nonprofit Public Interest Privacy Center.��

Education Secretary Linda McMahon signaled the department’s intention when she said districts have turned the “concept of privacy on its head to facilitate ideological indoctrination … without parental interference or even involvement.”&�Բ�����;

In a message to the Wisconsin district, a department official acknowledged the issue’s importance to parents, students and school officials and said that districts can expect “guidance or regulations in the foreseeable future.” Contacted Aug. 14, department spokeswoman Madison Biedermann had no updates on timing. 

Enforcing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which gives parents the right to inspect and amend their children’s education records, is a central focus of the administration’s parental rights agenda. The law was enacted 50 years ago, long before the advent of digital records. In the past, courts have sided with districts that argued emails were not education records, while parents say they should be treated just like report cards or schoolwork. Districts are likely to push back on being required to disclose internal messages about students, Vance said. Not only might a search eat up staff time, but “people say stupid things in emails.”

‘Numerous’ requests

Biedermann, the department spokeswoman, would not say why officials revived the 12-year-old complaint.

But in the March letter reminding states of their responsibilities under FERPA, McMahon said “schools are routinely hiding information about the mental and physical health of their students from parents.”

In a sign of its commitment to reshaping FERPA, the department hired Lindsay Burke in June as its deputy chief of staff for policy and programs. The author of the education section of , a vision for Trump’s second term, she contends that FERPA should offer parents the right to sue districts they think have violated their rights. Filing a complaint is currently the only option under the law. She also argues that students shouldn’t be able to change their gender identity at school without a parent’s permission.  

Like many districts faced with similar FERPA requests, Middleton Cross Plains, northwest of Madison, leaned on a that many experts feel is out of step with the digital age. It suggests that communications like email are not part of a student’s official record unless they are printed and physically placed there. 

FERPA was originally intended to target records “stored in file folders and cabinets,” said Andrew Manna, an Indiana attorney who represents districts. “There is no software that I am aware of that can sort through the digital storage of emails, so it is a ‘hide and seek’ approach to trying to find the email specific to a student.”&�Բ�����;

Districts also say that combing through years of emails is too burdensome for staff and is likely to produce irrelevant communication. Vance suggested that argument might be outdated “at this moment in time with what AI is capable of.”

But while there might be more tech tools to conduct searches, there’s no guarantee AI is secure, said Stephanie Jones, an attorney with a firm representing districts in Illinois. 

Searching emails “is both an art and a science,” she said. As an example, a district she represents once had a request for emails related to a student with the last name Fridge. “You wouldn’t believe how many employees try to sell their college kid’s dorm room fridge through district email.”

In the Wisconsin case, Frank Miller, acting director of the Education Department’s privacy office, determined that the district was simply following long-standing legal precedents on FERPA when it declined to provide a parent with staff emails about her child. 

Superintendent Dana Monogue wasn’t in charge when the parent filed the complaint, but said she was pleased with the outcome.

“Like all districts, we receive numerous student record requests each year and this letter will provide useful guidance regarding our obligations,” Monogue said. 

But while he gave the district a pass, Miller had more to say. 

He referenced a second court ruling, from 2009, that often guides the way districts handle requests for emails. In , a federal district court in California said an email about a student is only part of the official record if the district “maintains” it in a central location.

Emails “have a fleeting nature” and “may be sent, received, read and deleted within moments,” the judge said in that case. 

The department, Miller said, rejects the Tulare interpretation, even though it’s been widely adopted by districts. Middleton Cross Plains officials told the parent that it used Infinite Campus, a “third-party, cloud-based” system to store emails, and said that emails that are “simply still on a server” are not education records.

A recent is another sign that the legal landscape could be shifting. The state Supreme Court ruled that emails stored in an online platform are still subject to FERPA.

‘Defies reality’

Jim Wheaton, an associate professor at William and Mary Law School, has little tolerance for districts that turn down parents’ requests for emails.

“Essentially, a school [or] district can simply decide not to physically put something in a file, and important, relevant discussions about a child suddenly fall outside FERPA,” said Wheaton, who runs a law clinic for students who intend to work as special education advocates. “The idea that files continue to be physical paper defies reality.”

As an alternative, some parents file public records requests to obtain emails, but districts often charge hefty fees to cover the staff time involved, and may heavily redact the documents before releasing them. Wheaton said public records laws are not an adequate FERPA substitute.

“I once received a letter asking me to prepay a quarter million dollars before they would do the search,” he said.

In 2024, Tamara Quick, a Virginia mother of five, asked the Spotsylvania school district for emails regarding her ninth-grader. Because of her dyslexia, Brennan attends a private school at the district’s expense.

When Quick learned teachers weren’t following her daughter’s special education plan, she hoped some email exchange between the district and the school might reveal why Brennan wasn’t being challenged in reading and spelling. 

“Any information you have about my kids, I have a right to see,” she said. 

Instead, the district said it had not “maintained” any communications with the girl’s teachers and, therefore, had “no education records responsive” to her request. Quick ultimately took the district to court, saying she couldn’t get the emails through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act either. 

In court records, the district said she never filed a formal request. An attorney for the district said officials “make every effort” to produce the records parents want, but “do not have time for games.”

The district eventually offered to look for emails for Quick and give her a cost estimate. But she didn’t think she should have to pay. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Act, parents have a their children’s records before a meeting to discuss special education services. 

She’s paying anyway. To this date, she’s spent over $30,000 on her case, withdrawing funds from a retirement account.

“Obviously it would have been cheaper for me to say, ‘OK, I’ll pay $2,000 for you to search for these emails,’ but that would be me agreeing that was appropriate,” she said.

‘Very negative things’

Parents may have multiple reasons for requesting staff emails, but McMahon’s March letter about privacy focused primarily on gender issues. Schools, she said, “promote and enable the transitioning of minor children, regardless of their mental state or their vulnerabilities.”

That’s what worried Amber Lavinge, a Maine parent, when she sought emails between staff members in the Great Salt Bay Community School district. It was late 2022 and she had just learned that a school social worker had given her 13-year-old daughter a chest binder to support a gender transition. But the district didn’t provide what she was looking for, said Adam Shelton, an attorney with the libertarian Goldwater Institute, which is handling her against the district. 

“She had a lot of questions and was just trying to understand what was going on,” he said. While the case, pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, doesn’t focus on emails or student records, he said he has a hard time understanding how any form of communication pertaining to a student wouldn’t constitute an education record. “Schools exist for the sole purpose of educating children.”&�Բ�����;

Narrowing down which emails to release might be tricky, but Matt Cohen, a civil rights attorney in Chicago, said there are other reasons why districts avoid it.

“Sometimes teachers or administrators say very negative things about a child or the parents in the email that they’re not saying publicly,” he said. “It helps to establish that there is actual animus or discrimination going on.”

Jones, the other Illinois attorney, agrees that there can be a “reputational cost” for districts if they have to release embarrassing emails. That’s why she advises district staff to avoid “watercooler conversations” in emails — something many more are likely to take seriously if they know parents might read what they write, Jones said. 

“It has to pass the grandma test,” she said. “If you don’t want your grandma reading it, then don’t put it in an email.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Totally atypical’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She urged community members to closely monitor expenditures.

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

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

‘Federal overreach’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Called back’

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

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

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

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

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

It’s “the amount of information that’s coming to you all at once,” said Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer for the Detroit schools. On a , he laid out a litany of hardships, including figuring out “what’s true, what’s not. Emergency orders. Budget cuts.”&�Բ�����;

Leaders felt similar uncertainty in the fall of 2020, when the pandemic forced them to scramble to educate, feed and transport students. But this time, as 47 million students return to school in the coming weeks, the source of the unease is the federal government. The Trump administration has already frozen and unfrozen education funds, and seeks to further reduce school spending. Vidito said he’s urging principals in his district to stay calm, but “a lot of the stuff, we can’t control.”

As Education Secretary Linda McMahon to schools across the country to spread her gospel of returning control to the states, leaders say they’re hoping for something simpler: a return to normalcy. 

“What is the next freeze, or what is the next issue that the administration may have with some of the funding that school districts get?” asked Mark Sullivan, superintendent of the Birmingham, Alabama, schools.

At a last month, McMahon offered “no guarantees” that she could prevent the kinds of “communication gaps” that led to previous dustups. Her comments came the same day that the Office for Management and Budget completed its unexpected review of several annual grant programs for schools. Officials said their initial inspection turned up expenditures at odds with Trump’s agenda — offering up, without elaboration, the use of school improvement funds on “a seminar on ‘queer resistance in the arts.’ ” 

But after seven months with Trump in office, some district leaders have grown cynical.

David Law, superintendent of the Minnetonka Public Schools in Minnesota, doubts there ever was a thorough analysis and suggested that the few examples cited were meant as a warning.

“I think the pause was intended to let people know, ‘We don’t like these things, so if you’re doing them, you should be worried,’ ” he said. As they try to prepare for additional shocks to their budget, leaders nationwide, he said, are adjusting to the pendulum swing over diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Under the Biden administration, “we were trying to prove we were caring about kids enough,” he said. “Now we’re trying to prove that we’re not meeting the definition of indoctrination. It’s a bit of a wild ride.”

‘Safe to speak’

For now, Congress Trump’s proposed cuts to K-12 funding. But OMB has still floated of a that would claw back unspent education funds from the current budget before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. Congress’ watchdog agency says that if the administration doesn’t give Congress ample time to approve or reject the cuts, the move would . 

In a , McMahon said funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act will flow with or without the Department of Education. 

But that the administration might cut some special education grants already awarded for research, technology, and teacher and parent training alarm district-level staff.

“A reduction in this funding will create challenges for districts and could lead to the need to re-evaluate essential programs that help to support students eligible for special education services,” said Jessica Saum, a special education coordinator in the Cabot Public School District, outside Little Rock, Arkansas. 

President Donald Trump has said that ensuring schools teach children English is the federal government’s only education-related obligation. But Vidito in Detroit said he’s still bracing for the elimination of funding for English learners. 

Federal officials stating that districts must take “affirmative steps to ensure” that English learners “can meaningfully participate in their educational programs and services.” The move expands on a from Attorney General Pam Bondi saying that despite the president’s executive order declaring English the official language, the government should “minimize non-essential multilingual services” and focus on assimilation.

The unpredictability of this moment has prompted Merica Clinkenbeard, who directs English learner programs for the Springfield, Missouri, district, to remind teachers that the federal money is supplemental: Teachers are responsible for ensuring students become proficient in English with or without it.

Due to the threat of federal funding cuts, she lost three members of her leadership team.

“They felt like perhaps they would not have jobs in this field ever again,” she said. Now she has two positions she can’t fill. “I was telling my husband, ‘This is just like COVID, like everything I’ve known is going away.’ ” 

Districts serving large English learner and immigrant populations are more cautious than most as students return this fall, especially after Immigration Customs and Enforcement officials an 18-year-old Los Angeles student last week while he was walking his dog. Officials said he had overstayed his visa by two years.

The fear of ICE raids has prompted more parents to ask about remote learning, said Sharon Balmer Cartagena, an attorney with Public Counsel, a nonprofit public interest law firm. She’s been holding “family preparedness” workshops for southern California districts, encouraging them to update emergency contact information in case a parent is deported. 

Los Angeles Unified is one district trying to by stationing volunteers, staff and campus police around school zones. But she expects enforcement actions to ramp up with the start of the school year. Even so, she encourages parents to send their children to school in person.

“We saw what happened during COVID with younger kids learning remotely,” she said. Students in the early grades as they would have in a classroom and experienced both academic, social and behavioral setbacks, studies show. Now, many of those students are in middle and high school.

“To have that hit them again would be really detrimental,” Cartagena said. “Some of them are just starting to catch up.”&�Բ�����;

‘Doing it right’

Not all education leaders are dreading the next announcement from Washington. Louisiana Superintendent Cade Brumley welcomed McMahon to Baton Rouge Aug. 11, where she celebrated the state’s rising performance in reading. On the last National Assessment of Educational Progress, the state scored above the national average after trailing the rest of the country for years. 

McMahon also hit Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida last week, three more states that embrace the Trump administration’s plans to reduce federal education oversight. Since her confirmation, she has limited most of her school visits to charter and private schools, to emphasize the administration’s focus on expanding choice. But this tour is giving her more exposure to traditional district schools. 

“Louisiana is doing it right — and they don’t need the federal bureaucracy to make it happen,” McMahon after her visit to Jefferson Terrace Academy in East Baton Rouge. 

But the state did need federal money, specifically the COVID relief funds, Brumley said during the . 

“We were able to use those pandemic dollars around the academic efforts that we knew were best for students,” he said. He agrees with McMahon’s position that fewer strings tied to education funding will lead to stronger results. “We’re just really excited about … not having these excessive restrictions and bureaucratic needs surrounding dollars.”

Educators want assurances that the funding their students count on is stable, said Saum, in the Cabot district. Some students with disabilities require significant hands-on help from staff members. 

“Parents are following along,” she said “They want to know ‘Is my child going to get what they need to be safe and cared for at school?’ ”

With the formal title of “inclusion coordinator,” Saum said she has to be clear about her role at a time when the administration is trying to ban DEI-related programs. 

“It can be so divisive when people don’t really understand we’re talking about children with disabilities,” she said. Others with similar positions, she said, have changed their titles to emphasize “meaningful access.”

If anything, Law, from the Minnetonka district, said the administration’s “critical lens” on schools have forced leaders to be “crystal clear” about their work. During a recent visit to a nursing home, as part of his efforts to connect with members of the community, he said a resident told him, “You should be teaching all these kids English.”

“ ‘I have great news. The only thing we’re teaching these kids is English,’ ” Law said he told him. “There will always be people that say you don’t need to kowtow to certain populations. I’m still going to say public education is all students getting free education.”&�Բ�����;

As is typical, adults demonstrate far more positive attitudes toward the local schools in their own backyards, with over 40% grading them highly. 

Even so, the results may help explain rising support among parents for private school choice. With 12 states now offering universal education savings accounts or tax credits that can be used for tuition or homeschooling, nearly 60% of parents say they would choose a private or religious school for their child if they were offered public funds. That’s up from 56% in 2020. 

The poll figures offer further evidence of a post-pandemic shift toward alternatives to traditional public schools. In Florida, a majority of K-12 students now use , from district magnet programs to homeschooling with state funds. 

“COVID was a key factor in making people more open to choice,” said Douglas Harris, an economics professor at Tulane University and the director of the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. He noted that frequent disparagement from Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have contributed to the public’s souring mood.

“It wasn’t until COVID that he started to really attack public schools, and saw the power of pulling that into his larger culture war,“ Harris said. “Is the message sinking in? No doubt. When politicians relentlessly bash any institution, support for that institution goes down.”

He cautioned against reading too much into the low percentage of Americans giving public schools high marks. Many of the 1,000 poll respondents may not have kids in school. While the average voter might be influenced by politics, public school parents answer questions based on their experiences, he said.

The poll from PDK International, a professional organization for educators, comes as the Trump administration pushes to dramatically reduce the federal government’s role in schools while also pressuring them to drop equity-focused programs. Responses show that Americans agree with the president in some areas, but reject other pieces of his agenda.

Closing the Education Department

Two-thirds of U.S. adults oppose eliminating the Education Department and say such a move would negatively affect students. Support for keeping the agency intact is highest among Democrats, but at least a third of Republicans agree it should stay open. Closing the department is far more popular among men (34% in favor) than women (9%). 

Marc Porter Magee, CEO of 50CAN, a national education advocacy group, said that Americans “just aren’t super inclined” to get rid of programs.

“There is a certain ‘more is better’ kind of a vibe,” he said. Even among parents who opt to put their children in private school, many recognize the federal government’s role in holding states accountable for serving students with the greatest needs. “Protecting kids with disabilities probably polls quite well.”

Along with downsizing the department, which has shrunk to roughly half the size it was when Trump took office, the administration has taken aggressive steps to get schools and universities to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Efforts to force schools to comply with anti-DEI orders are still tied up in court, but Trump recently claimed victory. 

“The beautiful thing is, as you know, we’ve gotten rid of the woke. Woke is gone,” last month. “I think pretty well buried. We’re gonna make sure it’s buried.” 

But that’s not necessarily what Americans want. Over 60% of PDK’s respondents say DEI is important, but there’s a partisan divide. Eighty-nine percent of Democrats support such initiatives, compared with 62% of independents and 22% of Republicans. 

Opponents of equity-related efforts, like , president of the conservative Defending Education group, say some schools have rebranded their DEI efforts to emphasize “belonging.” That term has nearly unanimous support from poll respondents. Ninety-eight percent consider initiatives that make students feel welcome at school to be important or very important — second only to keeping students and teachers safe, at 99%.

Over 90% of Americans say boosting teacher pay should be a high priority, and nearly two-thirds agreed that educators’ salaries are too low. It’s a more pressing issue for Democrats, like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who last month that would set annual teacher pay at a minimum of $60,000. Among Republicans, more than a third, 39%, agreed that teachers don’t earn enough.

Support for AI in schools drops

While it ranks lower than other topics, educating students about artificial intelligence and responsible social media use is a top concern for 84% of adults. The Education Department recently issued brief on AI integration, saying that grant funds can be used for tools that personalize learning, supplement tutoring and help students make post-secondary plans. 

Teachers and students are inundated almost daily with AI tools, like ChatGPT’s new “study mode,” meant to help students solve problems “step by step,” rather than just giving them the answer. Khan Academy offers an AI tutor, and research shows some AI tutoring offers promising results.

But Americans’ enthusiasm about AI’s potential in education has dropped since last year. Less than half of respondents support or strongly support teachers using AI to create lesson plans, down from 62% in 2024. Thirty-eight percent of adults think it’s fine for students to use AI to complete their homework, a drop from 43% last year.

Kyla Johnson-Trammell, who recently stepped down after eight years leading the Oakland Unified School District in California, said she’s not surprised about Americans’ deepening skepticism.

“At the end of the day, learning happens when kids have a relationship with the teacher and when they’re engaged in human connection,” she said. But she also sees value in using AI tools to solve specific dilemmas. A teacher might grade 30 essays, but can then use AI to “look for trends across all those papers, like ‘a majority of your students need help being able to write a clear thesis,’ ” she said. “Technology can do that.”

Most educators who try AI don’t stick with a tool more than seven days during a three-month period, according to an by Stanford University’s Generative AI Education Hub. The report, based on data from 9,000 teachers, showed that the 40% who become regular users lean toward teacher-focused chatbots rather than AI assistance for students.

The of AI for educational purposes comes as more states enact policies to ban cellphone use during the school day. have restrictions in place, and while it focuses on college freshman, a finds increases in academic performance once a ban is enforced.

The public largely supports such policies, the poll found. Forty percent agreed with a full-day ban, while 46% said students should only be able to use their phones during lunch and class breaks. 

Some experts are frustrated by the apparent contradiction. 

“This is what I find so completely surreal about the current moment,” Benjamin Riley, who writes about learning and generative AI, last month. “We can’t even say smartphones are being ‘memory holed’ because the bans in schools are happening quite literally at the same time as various ed-tech hucksters are falling all over themselves to push AI into the classroom. Wake up!”

Porter Magee said he worries about the “downstream” effects of devices on student habits, including trouble focusing and a continued . 

“It feels like we’re swimming against a tough tide,” he said.

Penny Schwinn, in line to serve as second in command of the U.S. Department of Education, has withdrawn from the nomination, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced Thursday.

Instead, the former Tennessee education commissioner will take on a different role for the department.

“I am grateful to Dr. Schwinn for her commitment to serving students, families, and educators across the nation,” McMahon said in a statement. “Penny is a brilliant education mind and I look forward to continuing working with her as my chief strategist to make education great again.”

Schwinn, in a statement, said she gave the decision “thoughtful consideration” and said she will  “remain committed to protecting kids, raising achievement and expanding opportunity  —  my lifelong mission and north star.”

Considered a champion for improving reading outcomes and high-dosage tutoring, Schwinn was among President Donald Trump’s early picks for department posts. Many perceived her as a more bipartisan choice than others joining the administration, but among Tennessee conservatives, many who felt she was too liberal, opposition to her nomination was strong.

The timing of Schwinn’s withdrawal couldn’t be worse, according to some conservatives. 

“Her decision to remove herself from consideration to become deputy secretary hurts students, educators, and the Trump administration,” said Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a think tank. “Secretary McMahon has been charged by Congress and the president with huge tasks under the One Big Beautiful Bill and several urgent executive orders.”

As head of the Education Department, McMahon is striving to turn more authority over education to the states. It’s now unclear who will step into the deputy position and take the lead on the state’s requests for more flexibility over education funding. At least two states, Iowa and Oklahoma, have already submitted requests for block grants, and is currently gathering comments from the public in preparation for a similar proposal. Kirsten Baesler, North Dakota’s long-time education chief, is currently awaiting confirmation to be assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the department. In February, she joined 11 other GOP chiefs in asking McMahon for greater freedom to direct education funds toward state-level needs.

Controversies and questions over Schwinn’s conservative qualifications have followed her for years. Far-right groups, including Moms for Liberty, said her past support for equity initiatives, like hiring more , was evidence that she was not a good fit for an administration determined to eliminate such programs. Others remained angry over Schwinn’s pandemic-era plan to conduct “well-being” . Even though she scrapped the plan, parents and members of the legislature considered it an example of government overreach.

More recently, Steve Gill, a conservative commentator in Tennessee, that while she was deputy superintendent of the Texas Education Agency, Schwinn recommended individuals who advocate for comprehensive sex education, including , to advise the state on health curriculum. 

Gill told The 74 he shared his TriStar Daily about her stance on these issues with Tennessee Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, as well as the state’s congressional delegation. Blackburn, who is expected to run for governor next year, was considered a possible no vote for Schwinn.

According to Gill, Blackburn’s office “has been working tirelessly behind the scenes with the White House, Secretary Linda McMahon and Majority Leader [John] Thune to block the confirmation.”

But Madi Biedermann, spokeswoman for the department, said the agency “strongly disagrees with that characterization.”

Blew said it’s unfortunate that politics got in the way, noting that Schwinn’s experience in both blue and red states would have brought valuable expertise to the Ed Department role. In addition to her jobs in Tennessee and Texas, Schwinn founded a charter school in Sacramento and also served in the Delaware Department of Education.

“It’s sad that a handful of demagogues are standing in the way of giving Secretary McMahon the team she needs to succeed,” he said.

Others praised Schwinn’s record of prioritizing the science of reading in Tennessee schools and directing COVID relief funds toward tutoring.

“This is a setback for all who want to see Washington slashing red tape, advancing literacy and fighting for common sense values,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

For some critics, Schwinn’s business ventures since leaving the top spot in Tennessee two years ago raised questions as she waited to appear before the Senate education committee. 

In June, a day ahead of her joint hearing with three other nominees, The 74 reported that shortly after Trump tapped her for the job, she registered a new education consulting business in Florida, New Horizon BluePrint Group, with a longtime colleague. Before Schwinn filed ethics paperwork with the federal government, her sister replaced her as a manager on the business. 

When a reporter from The 74 asked questions about the new project, Donald Fennoy, her colleague and a former superintendent of the Palm Beach County School District, dissolved the business.

Ethics experts say candidates for an administration post often distance themselves from new business entanglements to avoid any appearance of a conflict, but Schwinn has faced accusations of poor judgment before.

While she was in Texas, the state agency signed a $4.4 million in 2017 with a software company where she had a “professional relationship” with a subcontractor, according to a state audit. And in Tennessee, the education agency made an in 2021 , a teacher training organization where her husband was employed at the time. Lawmakers considered the deal a “”

“Ethics was a crucial concern,” said J.C. Bowman, executive director and CEO of Professional Educators of Tennessee, a non-union organization. He was among those who sent letters to the Senate, asking them to remove her from consideration. “Her personal business interests and possible conflicts could potentially influence educational decisions in ways that many found difficult to overlook.”

Clarification: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the role Penny Schwinn will take on in lieu of serving as the deputy education secretary. Schwinn will be taking on an advisory role at the Education Department.

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which argued that districts were spending the money to advance a “radical left-wing agenda,” has completed its review of five different programs totaling $5.5 billion, said Madison Beidermann, spokeswoman for the department. 

The funds support education for English learners and migrant students and pay for staff training and extra instructional positions. The news came a week after the administration released over $1.3 billion for summer and afterschool programs, which was also held up for review.

The department alerted states June 30, one day before they expected to receive the money, that the review was in process, forcing programs to cut staff and end summer programs early. Congress appropriated the funds for this coming school year, and President Donald Trump signed the budget in March. 

The release of the funds, announced just hours before Education Secretary Linda McMahon was scheduled to meet with the nation’s governors in Colorado Springs, Colorado, comes as superintendents nationwide were preparing to eliminate services like literacy and math coaches, according to conducted by AASA, the School Superintendents Association. Half of the 628 chiefs who responded from 43 states said they would have to lay off staff who work with special education students if the funds weren’t released. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten brought the message to attendees at the union’s annual TEACH conference in Washington, D.C. 

“The administration backed down and we are getting the money,” she said to a cheering audience. “Those of you who lobbied yesterday, thank you. Those of you who brought the lawsuit, thank you.”

Attorney generals from 24 blue states and the District of Columbia over the freeze, arguing that the administration’s actions were harming schools. School districts, parents, unions and nonprofits filed a on July 21, saying that OMB has never stood in the way of the department’s practice of releasing the funds in two steps, first on July 1 and the rest on Oct. 1. joined their Democratic colleagues in pressuring the administration to free up the money.

Friday’s announcement doesn’t mean the legal fight is over. In a statement, Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which is handling the second case, said the legal team would “continue to monitor the situation and work in court to ensure the administration fully complies with the law and that these resources reach the schools and students who need them most.”&�Բ�����;

Districts can now start the school year without the shortfall, but that doesn’t mean advocates’ worries are over about future disruptions to funding. The July 1 distribution date is a longstanding practice, not something written into the law. 

Tara Thomas, government affairs manager for AASA, said her organization wants to “have additional conversations” with Congress or the administration to “ensure that this type of uncertainty at the last minute doesn’t happen again. Districts need to continue to rely on stable, timely, reliable federal funding.”

Another fight over education funds could also be ahead. The White House is reportedly preparing another that would target education funding. Thomas said she didn’t know what might be included, but it could be cuts that the Department of Government Efficiency made to grant programs.��

On Friday, Trump signed a , pulling back $9 billion in funds from public television and foreign aid.

It took about 10 minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Monday afternoon for Keith McNamara and over 1,000 employees at the Department of Education to learn they were officially fired. Signed by Jacqueline Clay, chief human capital officer, the email message thanked them for their service and said Aug. 1 would be their final day. 

“Came awful quick after the news dropped,” said McNamara, who worked as a data governance specialist at the department before he was dismissed during mass layoffs in March. 

The department’s speed appeared to confirm just how eager the Trump administration is to hollow out an agency it says never should have been created in the first place. It was “a shame,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement, that the court had to handle a lawsuit over “reforms” she said voters elected President Donald Trump to deliver. The ruling, she , brings the administration “one step closer to returning education to the states.”

But her words landed like a gut punch to employees who have been on paid leave for months, many of whom viewed the job as a personal mission to open up educational opportunities and protect students’ civil rights. 

“Some people said they cried [as] soon as they saw the [ruling],” said Denise Joseph, a former management and program analyst in the Office of Postsecondary Education.

She was among the first to be placed on administrative leave in January during the initial wave of Department of Government Efficiency cuts. Now, she plans to move on with securing a new job. But her thoughts Monday were with colleagues who had hoped to be reinstated. “It’s not a good day for them, and it’s not a good day for education and our country.”

Elimination of the department is a prize conservatives have been chasing since it opened in 1979. Former President Ronald Reagan attempted to close it shortly after he took office. But the 1983 report, which warned that American students were falling behind their international peers, spurred a larger federal role in education. 

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, he prefers the federal government to have “a little tiny bit of supervision, but very little, almost nothing” over education. “To make sure they speak English, that’s about all we need,” he said.

Monday’s ruling overturned a lower court injunction temporarily halting the layoffs. For now, the opinion gives the administration the green light to continue downsizing the agency without congressional approval, something experts say Trump has little chance of getting.

Lawmakers in favor of closing the agency can use Monday’s ruling to “build the case that fewer people are needed and functions that are necessary could easily be transferred to other agencies,” said David Cleary, a former Republican education staffer for the Senate and now a principal with The Group, a Washington lobbying firm. 

McMahon wasted no time attempting to make that point. On Tuesday morning, she announced that she would begin transitioning career and technical programs, adult education and family literacy to the Department of Labor. The said the move “marks a major step in shifting management of select [Education Department] programs to partner agencies.”&�Բ�����;

Transferring student aid to the Treasury Department, and special education to Health and Human Services are among the other proposals.

One former education secretary said it’s “incredibly naive” to think that Trump intends to preserve education programs if he manages to offload them to other agencies.

“The goal is not to have other agencies function. The goal is to break government,” said Arne Duncan, who served as secretary during the Obama administration. “You can’t lose the forest for the trees here, unless you’re just trying to hide from reality.”

The public isn’t sold on the idea either. A from EdChoice, which supports Trump’s school choice agenda, showed that less than half of adults and parents with kids in school are in favor of closing the department. 

But conservatives argue the ruling has forced “serious conversation about what the federal role should be and whether it makes sense to have a cabinet-level department,” said Jim Blew, a founder of the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute and a former department official during Trump’s first term.

The court’s decision doesn’t end the case against the department. The challenging the firings, brought by 21 states and a coalition of districts and unions, still has to work its way through the lower courts — a process that could take many months.

“It is still technically possible for the states to prevail,” said Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the National Center for Youth Law. 

‘Sophie’s choices’

The Supreme Court’s action effectively cuts in a department that had just over 4,100 employees when Trump took office. The Office for Civil Rights, the Institute for Education Sciences, the National Center for Education Statistics, which runs the tests known as the Nation’s Report Card, and Federal Student Aid were programs hardest hit by the combination of firings and voluntary departures.

The secretary promises that the department is still handling its “statutory duties,” but there are signs of from the gutted staff. Even before the White House Office of Management and Budget paused nearly $7 billion in federal funds that were due to states July 1, the department for small, rural schools and kept states waiting on news of their Title I allotment for low-income students. Despite a court order, the department still hasn’t processed to states.

While OCR is now updating a website that lists , it sat dormant for several months after Trump took office. Another page with hasn’t been updated since January. In a , Rachel Oglesby, the department’s chief of staff, said of 5,164 civil rights complaints since March, OCR had dismissed 3,625 — signs, advocates say, that the department has fallen behind on its obligations to protect vulnerable students.

The court’s ruling “doesn’t augur well for the department being able to fulfil its mission,” said McNamara, the data specialist.

Others worry about states’ ability to take the driver’s seat on education, especially when the massive tax and spending package the president signed July 4 puts for health care and nutrition programs on their shoulders. 

“They’re going to be making some Sophie’s choices in terms of what gets funded and what doesn’t. Education is going to be on the chopping block,” said National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues. 

Two states, Iowa and Oklahoma, have asked the department to combine their federal funds into a block grant, an idea several other red states also support. McMahon backs the plan and often like Louisiana and Mississippi, which have made strong progress in reading, to suggest that the federal government should get out the way. But Rodrigues noted that it was federally funded research and a regional education lab that helped make those improvements possible.

Maryland state Superintendent Carey Wright, who oversaw the reforms in Mississippi, didn’t just “sprinkle some literacy dust” over schools to raise proficiency rates, she said. Other red states are benefitting from a federal grant that pays for training, assessment and support from higher education to improve students’ performance in reading. 

The parents union focuses much of its advocacy work at the state level, but Rodrigues said federal leadership is still necessary.

“I don’t know how you make progress without a department, without staff, without a Congress that’s willing to enforce federal law,” she said. 

‘Serious conversation’

The court’s decision came a week after it ruled that Trump could proceed with mass firings at other federal agencies. The , for example, began letting more than 1,300 people go last Friday. But that’s a far larger agency, with over 70,000 employees. The Education Department is the federal government’s smallest. 

As is customary on emergency appeals, the court’s conservative majority offered no explanation for overturning the preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, wrote a 19-page dissent.

“The president must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them,” she wrote. “That basic rule undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers.”

Mark Schneider, a former director at the Institute for Education Sciences appointed by Trump during his first term, has long advocated for radically restructuring a federal research program that he argued had grown stodgy and resistant to change. But he wonders what McMahon can accomplish with a decimated staff.

“NCES still exists,” he said, referring to the National Center for Education Statistics. “There are three or four people in it. NCER [the National Center for Education Research] still exists. There’s one person in it. So the question is: What happens to that?”

But, he wonders, “Does the department have a plan?” Given the last few months, he said luring quality people back may prove tricky. “Even if you get any authorization to recruit, it’s going to be difficult,” he said.

A future administration could also rebuild the agency if Congress doesn’t eliminate it, but lawmakers would have to appropriate money for that, noted Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. 

To Duncan, the damage would be hard to undo. 

“It’s an assault on K-12, and it’s an assault on higher education,” he said. “… Higher education has been the goose [that] laid the golden egg for decades in the United States and attracted the best and brightest around the world to come here to learn and to create jobs. We’re shutting all that down.”

The 74 Writers Amanda Geduld and Mark Keierleber contributed to this report.

Clarification: An earlier��version of this story contained wording that may have implied��Title I disbursements to states were late this year. State officials say it was the department’s projected��Title I allocations that came months later than usual.

On Monday, the Trump administration will release $1.3 billion in federal funds for summer and afterschool programs that it’s been holding back since July 1, the Office for Management and Budget  education advocates on Friday. That leaves $5.5 billion for teaching positions and training, migrant programs, English learners and adult education still frozen.

The move comes after����joined Democrats in pressuring OMB Director Russ Vought to release the funds.��Lara Wade, spokeswoman for AASA, told The 74 that��having hundreds of superintendents on Capitol Hill last week meeting with members of Congress also “could have been a motivating force.”

But Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, ranking member of the appropriations committee, said releasing just a portion of the funds isn’t good enough. “Every penny of this funding must flow immediately,” she said in a statement.

On Thursday, she blocked the fast-track consideration of a Trump administration nominee over the issue. Mary Christina Riley, nominated to serve as assistant secretary for legislation and congressional affairs at the Education Department, will now have to get through the education committee before the Senate votes on her confirmation.

Democratic-led states the Trump administration Monday over its freeze of nearly $7 billion in education funds, saying the delay has already “irreparably harmed” critical academic and extracurricular programs. 

For two weeks, the White House Office of Management and Budget has been conducting what it calls a “programmatic review” of funds for English learners, migrant programs, teacher training and afterschool programs — money it claims has been “grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda.”

“President Trump seems comfortable risking the academic success of a generation to further his own misguided political agenda,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in . “But as with so many of his other actions, this funding freeze is blatantly illegal, and we’re confident the court will agree.”

Blue state leaders aren’t the only ones feeling the pinch. In a summer camp for 300 students was cut short, while an Ohio nonprofit says it will have to cancel afterschool programs this fall if the funds aren’t released. 

Georgia state Superintendent called releasing the funds a matter of fiscal responsibility. “In Georgia, we’re getting ready to start the school year, so I call on federal funds to be released so we can ensure the success of our students,” Eric Mackey, the Alabama state superintendent, said he was caught off guard by what he called a Losing the money, he told a local reporter, would be “a real problem for us.”&�Բ�����;

Neither OMB nor the Education Department responded to requests for comment.

The lawsuit dropped the same day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the administration can proceed with firing roughly half of the Education Department’s staff, further adding to the chaos districts have felt since January. The delay has been one more jolt from an administration that’s been quick to withdraw funding that the Republican-led Congress already approved. These particular funds are part of the fiscal year 2025 budget that President Donald Trump signed in March. 

“We were looking really good, and then you get something like this,” said Gordon Klasna, executive director of secondary education for the Billings Public Schools, Montana’s largest district. ���’s wondering how to pay for the nine teachers who keep elementary class sizes capped at 22 students. Without them, classes would grow to 28 students, which, Klansa said, “can be substantial when you have lots of kids who are behind.”

With a new resettlement office that opened last year, the city has seen an influx of refugees. The roughly $30,000 the district normally receives for English learners helps pay for curriculum and translation services — not just for immigrants, but also for Native American students and families, some of whom still speak an indigenous language at home. 

‘No idea it was coming’

shared similar stories on Capitol Hill last week during an to Washington, where many members of Congress said they were also blindsided by the freeze.

“The offices I visited with had no idea it was coming and were wondering what other people had heard,” said David Law, superintendent of the Minnetonka Public Schools in Minnesota and president of AASA, the School Superintendents Association.

Their stories prompted Democrats in both the and to put more pressure on OMB Director Russ Vought and Education Secretary Linda McMahon to free up the funds. In a letter, senators said they were “shocked by the continued lack of respect for states and local schools evidenced by this latest action.”

OMB pointed to a few examples of programs it alleged conflict with the administration’s priorities, including one in Washington state that it said “used funds to direct illegal immigrants toward scholarships intended for American students.”&�Բ�����;

Sammi Payne, a management analyst with the Washington state education department, said officials aren’t sure which program OMB is referring to, but it could be the . Established in 1972, the program, which under both Democratic and Republican administrations, provides counseling, tutoring and housing assistance to migrant students during their first year of college.

“Our management and implementation of this funding is consistent with the law,” Superintendent Chris Reykdal said in a statement. “American prosperity has always been a function of embracing immigrants and lifting up those who need additional support to access education and opportunity.”&�Բ�����;

‘Can’t write enough grants’

A few states have stepped in to provide short-term support during the pause. Just as an Alabama nonprofit was about to cancel an afterschool program for this fall, the state education department provided some funds left over from the previous year. 

“Our programs are the only option for our children and our working families,” said Andrea Bridges, executive director of the , which serves a rural, high-poverty community about 30 minutes outside Huntsville. Federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers funds support services at three schools. “I can’t write enough grants to come up with $700,000. I could do babysitting, but that’s not what these programs are.”&�Բ�����;

Students in the program receive academic support, work on a lot of STEM projects and learn to play musical instruments. But they also focus on college and workforce readiness. She’s watched the graduation rate climb from about 64%, when the nonprofit launched the program 25 years ago, to over 90%. 

“When I say these funds are essential, that’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “It changes the socioeconomic status of the whole community. Everybody wins when kids graduate from high school.”

Verlena Stewart, director of Community Building Institute in Middleton, Ohio, north of Cincinnati, also relies on federal funds to run afterschool and summer learning programs. She was about to shut the summer camp down two weeks early when the Middleton city manager called her and said, “Come pick up a check for $60,000,” she said.

That will get the camp for about 100 students through July 25 and means kids will still get to go on field trips to a movie and Jungle Jim’s, a massive international market and shopping destination. But if the funds aren’t reinstated, the nonprofit won’t be able to offer its afterschool program this fall. 

The center, she said, would keep its doors open for “less formal recreation,” but would have to recruit volunteers to help students with reading and math. 

‘Unfunded mandate’

The White House may no longer want to fund education for English learners and migrant students, but districts are still legally obligated to provide language support, whether they have the funds or not, said Tara Thomas, government affairs manager, for AASA. The requires states to report students’ progress toward mastering English as well as their performance in math, reading and science.

“By cutting off these funds, you’re just expanding the unfunded mandate on schools,” Thomas said. Districts, she said, factored the federal money into their budgets months ago.

In Wyoming, Chase Christensen, superintendent and principal of the one-school Sheridan County School District, was expecting more than $15,000 to give teachers a second year of training in a new math curriculum. Now, he may have to find another way to pay the consultants providing the training.

He doesn’t want to drop non-academic programs either. He was about to shut down a jiu jitsu program that costs about $20,000. But students love it, and he thinks it builds confidence and “sticktoitiveness” that helps them academically.

“It’s just amazing watching kindergarteners do their takedowns. It’s the only time in my career that I’ve had kids get black eyes at school, and I’m not getting calls from their parents about what happened,” he said. “I’m going to do everything I can to keep it going.”

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 funds, which states normally can access by July 1, pay for staff salaries, teacher training, curriculum materials and other essential expenses. That means states and districts will likely have to cut those functions or find other ways to pay for them. The delay, for example, threatens over $1.3 billion in funding for 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which goes to schools, libraries and nonprofits that provide tutoring and enrichment programs. 

“We will very quickly see more children and youth unsupervised and at risk, more academic failures, more hungry kids, more chronic absenteeism, higher dropout rates, more parents forced out of their jobs,” said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance, an advocacy organization. 

The possible cancellation of additional federal funds for schools adds to the upheaval created by the elimination of existing grants and contracts amid Trump’s ongoing efforts to shut down the department. His proposed fiscal 2026 budget would also shrink over $6.5 billion for 18 programs into a $2 billion block grant. Last week, Education Secretary Linda McMahon assured members of the that special education funding and Title I grants for high-poverty schools would be “level funded,” according to a recording of the meeting shared with The 74. But she never mentioned the fate of the other programs, and state leaders didn’t ask.

Trump officials based Monday’s move on “the change in administrations,” even though the president the budget on March 15. The department, the note said, has not yet made decisions about “awards for this upcoming academic year” and remains committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the president’s priorities.”&�Բ�����;

If the administration follows through with clawing back the funds, the move is certain to spark another lawsuit. Federal courts have mitigated the effects of previous cuts. McMahon, for example, tried to rescind over $2 billion in remaining COVID relief funds until 15 states and the District of Columbia . 

Last week, in response, she told all states with remaining funds that to avoid “uniformity and fairness problems,” they could once again submit receipts for reimbursement.

A seldomly used law, the , allows the administration to withhold funds that Congress appropriates, but the president has to first seek lawmakers’ approval, which he didn’t do in this case. Last week, Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told senators that officials were to hold on to funds intended for some agencies, but both Democrats and Republicans appeared skeptical. 

In a statement Tuesday, Washington Sen. Patty Murray, ranking Democrat on the appropriations committee, said the freeze will impact students in every ZIP code.

“President Trump and Russ Vought need to stop sabotaging our students’ futures and get these resources out the door,” she said. “Local school districts can’t afford to wait out lengthy court proceedings to get the federal funding they’re owed — nor can they make up the shortfall, especially not at the drop of a pin.”

Some advocates called on the Senate to delay final confirmation of Trump’s education department nominees, including Penny Schwinn as deputy education secretary and Kimberly Richey to lead the Office for Civil Rights, until the funds are released. 

The organizations, including All4Ed, EdTrust, Educators for Excellence and the National Center for Learning Disabilities, the department’s move as “a potential violation of federal law and a direct threat to the educational opportunities of our nation’s most vulnerable students.”

In addition to the funding for afterschool programs, states are waiting on over $2 billion to recruit and train teachers, especially for high-needs schools; almost $900 million to support English learners; and $376 million for migrant education programs.

Gustavo Balderas, president of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, and superintendent of the Beaverton, Oregon, district, said districts nationwide would feel the pinch.

“Districts are already stretched financially and this will be another unanticipated reduction to America’s public school system,” he said. “With school starting in a few weeks, budgets will have to be restructured and some staff positions will have to be reduced.”&�Բ�����; 

Districts may also lose their chance to spend federal funds on such programs in the future, if they find another way to pick up costs this year. The “supplement, not supplant” rule in the Every Student Succeeds Act holds that if a district used state or local funds for a program, then they don’t need federal dollars to cover it, explained Matt Colwell, who previously oversaw federal programs for the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

“The law severely limits what they can do once they lock into paying for it with state funds,” he said. He also wondered whether staff reductions played a role in holding up the funds. “‘We are looking into it’ could be a way around saying, ‘We fired all the people that actually take care of this.’ ”

The committee also voted to move the nomination of Kimberly Richey to lead the Office for Civil Rights. A conservative civil rights lawyer, Richey served in the second Bush and first Trump administrations.

The votes for both nominees fell along strict party lines, 12 to 11. 

“These nominees are crucial to enacting President Trump’s pro-America agenda,” Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, who chairs the committee, said in a statement.

With the Senate focused on passing President Donald Trump’s tax bill and roughly 200 nominations awaiting a vote, it could be several weeks before both are confirmed.

Schwinn would oversee K-12 policy. During a June confirmation hearing, she expressed support for a more hands-off approach from Washington while also strengthening reading instruction based on science.

A week after the hearing, she participated in at a Nashville charter school with Education Secretary Linda McMahon to promote one of the Trump administration’s top priorities — school choice. The visit came as the department has increased funding for charters while proposing over $4 billion in cuts to other programs. 

If confirmed, Richey would take over a civil rights office with a much leaner staff following mass firings in March and recommendations from McMahon for further reductions. She vowed to continue the department’s actions against schools that permit antisemitic demonstrations and allow trans students to use facilities or compete in sports consistent with their gender identity. 

Those views have drawn opposition to her nomination from civil rights groups that advocate for LGBTQ students. In advance of Thursday’s vote, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, along with 45 other organizations, sent senators saying Richey “has not demonstrated a willingness and ability to enforce civil rights law and protect all students in our country from discrimination.”

Some hope she’ll prioritize disability complaints. As acting assistant secretary for civil rights during the pandemic, she into districts that failed to provide students with disabilities services written into their individual education programs.  

“She was responsive during the first Trump term and pushed through the COVID complaints,” said Callie Oettinger, a special education advocate in Fairfax County, Virginia.

‘She has Linda McMahon’s ear’

While Richey’s track record fits squarely within the Trump administration’s ultra-conservative agenda, many education insiders view Schwinn as a moderate who largely avoided culture war clashes while holding schools and students accountable for progress in reading. 

Unlike McMahon, Schwinn has always worked in education. The California native founded a charter school in Sacramento in 2011 and held top positions in Delaware and Texas before Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee appointed her commissioner in 2019. 

“Penny has the strongest literacy chops of any state supe I’ve known, and she has Linda McMahon’s ear and trust,” said Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. 

But tends to follow her. Under her leadership in Tennessee, was higher than normal. Conservatives who calling on senators not to confirm Schwinn argue that she holds progressive views on educational equity and proposed an unpopular effort to conduct “well-being” checks on students during the pandemic. 

Others question her judgement, pointing to incidents in which and directed no-bid contracts to companies where Schwinn had personal connections, including her husband, Paul Schwinn.

But those complaints didn’t sway Republicans on the committee, and Pondiscio dismissed the backlash to Schwinn as “B.S.” In a February commentary, he that her “conservative critics want a culture warrior, not an administrator focused on competent governance and delivering results.”

���’s who hope her confirmation brings more attention to core education issues.
“If you see the secretary spending her time on curriculum and instruction,” he said, “that will be Penny’s thumbprint.”

While scrolling through Instagram, the mother noticed her child’s friends also called the teen Toby. So she began digging for further evidence of something she had started to suspect — that the ninth grader, with the school’s support, was transitioning from female to male.

“I’m like ‘Hey, you can’t deny it anymore’ ” said Lydia, who did not want to use her last name out of a desire to protect her child, now 17.

The school’s principal, following guidance that allows students to decide whether to inform parents of their gender identity, refused to meet with her. But she found clues elsewhere — an alternate ID card with the name Toby stuffed in a backpack, and emails between district staff discussing which name to use in the yearbook.

Over time, she discovered her child’s transition was an open secret at school — one kept by staff, administrators, a district equity officer, the superintendent, even the president of the local teachers union.

“They were strategizing against me,” Lydia said.

Her experience now lies at the center of a major push by the U.S. Department of Education to clamp down on policies that allow schools to conceal changes in students’ gender identity from parents.  

In a March press release announcing an investigation into , Education Secretary Linda McMahon said teachers and counselors should stay out of “consequential decisions” about children’s sexual identities. Officials are probing similar allegations in and .

In an unprecedented move, the department is threatening to pull millions of dollars in federal education funding from all three states. 

But it’s putting all schools on notice. In , federal officials warned states and districts that their support of student “gender plans” had become a “priority concern.” For educators, the message was as stunning as its rationale. The department is relying on a novel, and according to some critics, incorrect, interpretation of a 50-year-old student privacy law known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.

The law is typically used to safeguard student records and allow parents to inspect them. But it doesn’t compel schools to inform parents how their children identify in the classroom. If schools link a record to a student, “the parent has a right of access to it if they request it,” said LeRoy Rooker, who oversaw compliance with FERPA at the Education Department for over 20 years. But “the school doesn’t have to be proactive and call and say ‘Hey, we did this.’ ”

Department leaders appear to be stretching the reach of the law in an attempt to bolster conservative arguments that schools are meddling in deeply personal decisions that should be left to parents. In response to the Washington investigation, state Superintendent Chris Reykdal said in a statement that his state is the “latest target in the administration’s dangerous war against individuals who are transgender” and that officials are twisting student privacy laws “to undermine the health, safety and well-being of students.”&�Բ�����;

To Julie Hamill, a Los Angeles-area attorney who to investigate, Lydia’s story demonstrates that a law designed to keep parents informed is now working against them.

”The parents are in the dark,” said Hamill of the conservative California Justice Center. “Parents will not know student records are being withheld unless they’ve somehow discovered it on their own.”

In tackling the role of schools in student gender transitions, the department is dipping into one of the more emotionally fraught issues in the culture war, one that President Donald Trump campaigned on and weaponized once he was back in the White House. 

In one of his first , Trump said, without evidence, that schools are “steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation.” In March, who reversed their gendering processes. She criticized the “lengths schools would go to in order to hide this information from parents.”

To many experts, the administration’s scrutiny is out of proportion to the scope of the issue. In the overwhelming majority of cases, schools and students are just navigating preferred names and pronouns, and even those situations are infrequent. Multiple estimate that about 3% of teens are transgender. Far fewer are likely to approach school officials with a request for a name or pronoun change, said Brian Dittmeier, the director of public policy at GLSEN, which advocates for LGBTQ students.

Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California Association of School Counselors, said it is “rare” for school officials to discuss transitioning with students, and that her group’s members say the only gender plans they’ve completed were done at the request of parents. 

At the same time, most Americans agree that schools should get parents’ permission before changing a child’s pronouns in school records. Polls in and found that roughly three-quarters of adults support mandatory parental notification.

‘This is not real’

Lydia’s story exemplifies that loss of trust in the system.

The artist and former ballerina she thought of as her daughter began identifying as transgender upon entering Academy of the Canyons, a public high school in Santa Clarita, an upscale suburb of Los Angeles. Homeschooled since kindergarten, the teen wanted to pursue art and take advantage of options in their district. The school is located on a college campus where students can attend post-secondary classes while earning their high school diplomas.

“I thought it would be a good opportunity,” Lydia said.

In the fall of 2021, while cleaning the ninth grader’s bedroom, Lydia flipped through some art journals. But instead of schoolwork, she found disturbing sketches of bloody body parts and notes about wanting a chest binder, top surgery and a new name. 

“Shocked and scared” that her child might be suicidal, her thoughts turned immediately to a friend of her son’s who’d recently taken his own life, apparently without warning. 

“No suicide notes. No threats,” she recalled. “The ones that never use it as a weapon are the ones that follow through.”

She began searching for answers online. Initially, she only found sites about supporting a child’s transition  — advice she rejected.

Unlike many parents in her shoes, she’s neither conservative nor religious. In fact, she quipped, an outsider might have assumed she was  “the poster mom for transitioning my kid.”

She described her own parents — a Black father and a Jewish mother — as “hippie artists” who raised her to be a “free thinker” without religion. Lydia’s mother changed her name to Michael in the 1960s because it was easier to make it in the art world with a man’s name. A lifelong Democrat, Lydia voted against a ban on gay marriage when it was on the state ballot in 2008.

But when it came time to have kids of her own, she embraced more conservative values, wanting to “protect their childhood.”

Speaking as a liberal, Lydia said, “I really should have been like ‘Yeah, sure, explore your transgenderism.’” But instead, she did the opposite, taking a hard line against the shift. “I said ‘ I love you, but I’m not affirming you. This is not real.’ ” 

That view belies a that some children can identify differently as young as 3 or 4. Other research shows children can experience due to gender dysphoria — feeling that their sex was misassigned at birth — starting at age 7. 

In attempting to explain what was happening with her child, Lydia turned to a controversial theory of researcher Lisa Littman. In a , the former Brown University scientist described the rise in rapid onset gender dysphoria among  as a “contagion” driven by peer pressure and social media.

“I did what every parent did during the pandemic — let their kid be online way too much,” Lydia said. 

Littman’s research methods from her own university and the broader research community because she based her conclusions largely on reports from self-selecting parents recruited from online forums that were unsupportive, or at least skeptical, of gender transition. They included , which labels itself as “a community of people who question the medicalization of gender-atypical youth.”&�Բ�����;

Littman later published an amended of the paper, responding to the controversy and clarifying that the behavior she observed did not amount to a formal diagnosis. Her work, however, continues to drive trans-inclusive policies in school and the views of the Trump administration — and Lydia.

“There is no such thing as a trans child,” Lydia said. 

‘A lot of weight’

It is a debate where the voices of kids directly affected are often absent. J.J. Koechell, a Wisconsin 20-year-old, transitioned in sixth grade after a suicide attempt. He now advocates for other LGBTQ students he says are “entitled to some privacy and consent.”

“They’re trying to figure things out and they don’t want to get it wrong. To disappoint parents is a lot of weight on a struggling youth.”

He watched the school district he attended, Kettle-Moraine, and “safe spaces.” In 2023, as the result of , leaders stopped allowing staff to refer to students by different names and pronouns without parents’ permission. Some staff members over the controversy, including a librarian Koechell trusted. Koechell dropped out and is now finishing high school online.

“My teachers were all I had at school. I didn’t have any friends,” he said. “Coming out was a matter of life and death for me. My identity wasn’t and still isn’t optional.”&�Բ�����;

Protecting students like Koechell is the purpose of a new California law — , also known as the “SAFETY Act.” It prohibits schools from requiring staff to disclose a child’s gender identity to their parents. 

In announcing the Department of Education’s investigation of the state, Secretary McMahon said the law “appears to conflict with FERPA.”��But GLSEN’s Dittmeier highlighted that the legislation still requires schools to comply with the federal privacy law — and honor parents’ requests for records.��

One department staffer is worried where the investigation could lead. 

“This is irregular, based on our history — to take up an allegation [with] no official complaint, but one that is motivated by an attorney group that is bending the department’s ear about something,” said an employee familiar with the case who asked to speak anonymously to protect his job. He said the administration’s goal is to pressure states and districts into rescinding policies that allow students to decide when to go public with their gender identity. “This will result in districts adopting forced outing and will result in harming children.”

‘Life-altering decisions’

In , the was raging long before the current controversy. 

, police removed state Superintendent Tony Thurmond from a meeting in the Chino Valley Unified School District after a tense exchange with board members over the district’s parental notification policy. He warned the board that their policy could “put our students at risk because they may not be in homes where they can be safe.” The state later against the district as well as others that passed similar measures. 

Continuing its battle with Thurmond, Chino Valley is now the state over the SAFETY Act, saying that minors are “too young to make life-altering decisions” without their parents. 

National data show that of trans and nonbinary students say their home is gender-affirming. found that transgender adolescents assigned female at birth were more likely than other teens to report being psychologically traumatized by parents or other adults in the home. 

“There have been kids whose parents have physically abused them and kicked them out of the house when this information is disclosed,” said Amelia Vance, president of the Public Interest Privacy Center and an expert on student privacy. 

Even before California passed the SAFETY Act, the state education agency and the urged schools to get students’ permission before informing parents about changes in their gender identity.  When officials at Hart Unified High School District refused to meet with Lydia, they cited a that protects trans students’ access to programs, sports and facilities that align with their gender identity. 

On the advice of an advocacy group, Lydia initially filed a public records request in search of a “secret social transition” plan she believed Academy of the Canyons maintained. She also asked for communications between her child and teachers using the “non-birth name.”

The district turned her down.

Contacted by The 74, Hart Unified spokeswoman Debbie Dunn declined to answer questions about the investigation or Lydia’s experience, but said officials would “continue to follow the laws and procedures applicable to the district.”

In January 2023, Lydia spoke at a school board meeting about being shut out by the district. Her story caught the attention of Board Member Joe Messina, a conservative radio talk show host.

“She came up to the podium one night and she was crying,” he said. “She looked at the superintendent and said, ‘I’ve reached out to you. You’ve not called me back’. She looked to the trustee who handles her area and she said, ‘I’ve left you four messages. You’ve never called me back.’ ”

Messina and Lydia talked after the meeting, and he connected her with the Pacific Justice Institute, a right-leaning law firm.

He noted that the issue transcended their political differences. “Lydia’s a lifelong Democrat, and I’m an outspoken Republican,” Messina said. “For her and I to come together — the rest of the world would say, ‘What’s wrong with you people?’” 

Even with advocates on her side, Lydia continued to face obstacles. For months, the Academy of the Canyons declined to release an autobiographical English essay written by her child under the name Toby.

The district finally turned it over on advice from their lawyers. The essay revealed the child’s trepidation about coming out to Lydia. The piece recounted a moment before the pandemic, when the student, then 11, broached the subject of being queer. Lydia said her child was first exposed to LGBTQ issues while participating in a homeschool theater group. 

“The weather was overcast, and we were driving home from theater rehearsal,” the then-10th grader wrote. “Once again summoning all my courage, I mentioned to her that one of my friends had confided in me about their attraction to girls, and that I too might be queer. Unfortunately, my mom’s immediate response was dismissive and critical.”

As parent-child confrontations often go, Lydia remembers it differently. She said she treated the declaration as a teachable moment.

“We talked about what that word meant,” she said, “and why I felt she had time as she grew up to really know what sexual orientation she would be.”

In a memo, the district’s lawyers also named the elephant in the room — that officials had been withholding the essay out of a desire to shield the child’s shifting gender identity.

“In general, parents have the statutory right to review a student’s classwork/homework,” the memo stated. “This issue becomes clouded … if the classwork could reveal a student’s gender identity/expression.”

Despite refusing to accept that her child was transgender, Lydia said she tried to stay connected. In 2023, they attended over a dozen concerts together, seeing Hozier, Bastille and Penelope Scott — experiences that Lydia called “part of the healing process.” The two went on a long-promised trip to Europe, during which Lydia gave her child an ultimatum: stop identifying as a boy or go back to being homeschooled. That fall, the school agreed to honor Lydia’s wishes to cease social transitioning, but her child still resisted, asking teachers to continue using the name Toby.  

This time, the district let Lydia know. 

Lydia did not make her child available for an interview, saying “she isn’t ready to tell her side of the story.”

Nearly two years later, she says her child, who graduated from high school last week, “wants to put it all behind her.” While the teen identifies as a girl, the changes have been subtle. There are days when she dresses in what her mom called “oversized, ugly boy shirts” and others when she does her makeup and wears more feminine clothes. Recently, she switched back to her birth name on all of her social media accounts.

“I get a little choked up,” Lydia said, “but that’s pretty huge.”&�Բ�����;

PROTECT Kids

The story might have ended there, but Lydia’s two-minute plea to the Hart school board, across social media, reached other parent rights advocates just as Trump renewed his campaign for the White House. When the president took office, Hamill, with the California Justice Center, seized the opportunity to file a complaint with an administration guided by , the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the president’s second term.

Requiring schools to notify parents if a student changes their gender identity, which already do, is one of the tenets of the plan. Heritage expert Lindsey Burke, who joined the department Friday, also wants Congress to give FERPA more teeth by allowing parents to sue under the law. Currently, parents can only file a grievance with their state or the Education Department’s privacy office — for years. 

Privacy laws “are a core part of [the administration’s] arguments for how parental rights need to be respected and strengthened,” said Vance, the privacy expert. But the potential for lawsuits under FERPA, she added “would be extremely messy and expensive for schools.”&�Բ�����;

In April, the House education committee advanced a bill —  the — that would require elementary and middle schools to secure parental consent before students change their pronouns or preferred names or use different bathrooms or locker rooms. 

The committee debate demonstrated the deep divisions over gender identity and how schools should accommodate LGBTQ students. Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat who is gay, offered a personal story.

“When I came out to my parents, it was at a time, place and manner of my own choosing,” he said. “I would not have wanted anyone else to make that decision for me.”

To Hamill, gender transition is much more than “coming out” because it can lead to physical changes that later regret. Research shows that figure is , a fraction of those who undergo surgery. Even so, she said California’s policies add up to an elaborate “concealment scheme” that pits children against their parents. 

“If you suspect the parents are abusive and they’re going to harm the child, you have to report that to [child protective services],” she said. “But the government cannot by default assume that every parent is harmful and is going to reject and hurt their children.”

Though Democrats probed where she stands on President Donald Trump’s plan to shutter the department, the former Tennessee education commissioner appeared to answer questions to their satisfaction. 

Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire homed in on the administration’s move to end grants to train and hire K-12 school mental health professionals — part of a that passed with bipartisan support. 

“Do you think that what the department did helps or hurts the communities that were counting on the funding that they were promised?” she asked. “If confirmed, do you commit to reigning in the chaos and operational failures that we are seeing at the department?” 

Schwinn said the department will open a new competition for those grants and promised to “have an efficient, effective and outcomes-oriented department.”

She voiced support for Trump’s ultimate goal to eliminate the department and repeatedly said states and local communities are in the best position to make decisions about education. As a charter school founder who served in the Delaware and Texas education agencies before leading Tennessee’s for four years, Schwinn has a reputation for working . She pushed for and using pandemic relief funds to implement a statewide tutoring program. A vote on her confirmation is expected in the coming days.

“What we need to do is ensure that we’ve created a system that is going to drive outcomes,” she told GOP Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana. “That is not going to happen from the federal government, whether there’s a Department of Education or not.”

At the same time, Schwinn implied that there is a role for the department in ensuring states intervene in their lowest-performing schools. 

“There must be a commitment to ensuring that our most struggling schools improve because our students deserve that,” she said.  

A from the Government Accountability Office found that less than half of states are meeting those requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Schwinn’s tenure in Tennessee, for example, included overseeing a state turnaround effort known as the Achievement School District. Considering it a failure, the state legislature and will try another approach. 

“There’s real tension there,” Thomas Toch, director of FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, told The 74. “Will the Trump administration make a meaningful commitment to school improvement? Or will [Education Secretary Linda] McMahon and her team dodge that responsibility in the name of local control?”

Some observers have called Schwinn a smart pick for her focus on and her attempts to avoid some of the more divisive culture war debates of the post-pandemic era. But to others she has a troubled track record that includes contracts with vendors that gave the of interest. On Wednesday, The 74 reported that after Trump nominated her, she registered a new business in Florida with a longtime colleague. While the venture was ultimately dissolved, Schwinn’s sister replaced her as a manager a few weeks before the nominee submitted her financial disclosure documents. 

Some parent groups have vehemently opposed her nomination, viewing her as more left-leaning than most Trump nominees. 

“It amazes me that President Trump would consider Penny Schwinn conservative,” said Tiffany Boyd, a homeschool advocate who opposed Schwinn’s plan to conduct well-being checks on students during the pandemic. Schwinn nixed the idea after strong backlash. Boyd also cited a that focused, in part, on attracting more teachers of color — efforts that the department now says push “illegal diversity, equity and inclusion.”

But none of that surfaced during the hearing. Even Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has the “left’s indoctrination of students,” opted to skip direct questions to Schwinn and said he would submit them in writing. 

The committee interviewed Schwinn as part of a panel, along with Kimberly Richey, Trump’s choice to lead the Office for Civil Rights, and two Department of Labor nominees. In that format, the senators focused on issues most important to them — for example, Chairman Bill Cassidy emphasized better serving students with dyslexia.

“As the Department of Education streamlines educational funding, how can we ensure that resources are there to identify and address an issue, specifically speaking of dyslexia?” he asked.

Schwinn touted Tennessee’s move to include “characteristics of dyslexia” as a disability category in its state education funding formula and ramp up screening of students’ early reading skills. The federal government, she said, could do a better job of guiding states on this issue and sharing lessons from states that have posted the greatest gains in literacy, like and Louisiana.

Some advocates are eager to have an educator who prioritized reading instruction at the department. 

“We love her track record of improving student outcomes in Tennessee and talking a bit more technically about literacy and the science of reading — which we think having leadership on the federal level around is going to be key,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Foundation. 

But she stressed that it was , now at risk under the Trump administration, that informed those improvements.

“The research and the funding for all these ‘state miracles,’ ” she said, “come from regional and federal efforts — which I think a lot of folks are forgetting.”&�Բ�����;

The business venture never got off the ground, but the arrangement could raise ethical issues for Schwinn as she heads before the Senate education committee for confirmation Thursday.

The colleague with whom she co-founded the business, Donald Fennoy, told The 74 in an interview that the enterprise, named New Horizon BluePrint Group, was intended to combine their expertise as education leaders. Fennoy, the former superintendent of the Palm Beach County School District, was to consult with districts, while Schwinn, who has experience in Delaware, Texas and most recently as Tennessee’s education commissioner, would focus on state leadership. The pair have known each other for a decade, Fennoy said, meeting when they were part of the 2015-16 class of the Broad Academy, an education leadership program.

But the business does not appear among financial ties outlined in mandatory disclosure documents Schwinn submitted to the Office of Government Ethics on March 24. One reason could be that three weeks earlier, Schwinn’s sister, , replaced her as manager of the business, according to state documents. Sully, a former assistant principal at a Texas charter school, has far less educational experience than Schwinn or Fennoy.

On Friday, as The 74 began asking Schwinn and the department questions about the venture, Fennoy dissolved the company, documents show, listing “business never started” as the reason.

“Right when we were securing the name, she got a phone call,” Fennoy told The 74, referring to the nomination. The plan, he said, was to bring in at least one more leader with district experience and build a team to do work “nationally and internationally.”

On Jan. 18, Trump announced his pick of Schwinn to be the department’s deputy secretary, citing her “strong record of delivering results for children and families.” The LLC wasn’t registered until Feb. 18. 

But pressed for details about why Schwinn registered the business after her nomination, Fennoy appeared confused about the timeline. “This is on what day?” he asked in response to a reporter’s question. He did not respond to additional questions sent by email.

Contacted by The 74, Schwinn referred the matter to the Education Department. Madison Bidermann, a department spokesman, declined to address why Schwinn moved forward with a business venture after her nomination and said the nominee “​​worked with the relevant ethics officials and resolved any conflicts.”

Sully did not respond to attempts to contact her over email.

The Florida LLC would have been just one of Schwinn’s many business interests, detailed in the disclosure filed with the federal government. She stated in May that if confirmed, she would divest or resign her positions at multiple companies. 

Historically, potential business conflicts could raise red flags for senators vetting a potential nominee. As deputy secretary, Schwinn would be tasked with overseeing federal policy and a vast network of K-12 programs — the same policy and programs that districts might seek help from a consulting firm to navigate. 

She would also enter the department at a crisis point, as Education Secretary Linda McMahon drastically cuts staff and cancels funding to reach Trump’s goal of eliminating the department. The proposed 2026 budget slashes over $4 billion from K-12 programs, raising concerns that officials won’t be able to carry out their congressionally mandated duties 

‘This administration is unique’

The period between nomination and confirmation is typically a time when candidates distance themselves from financial entanglements and potential conflicts of interest. 

“Once you’re nominated, the typical rule of thumb would be that you kind of slow down,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, interim vice president for policy and government affairs at the Project On Government Oversight, a nonprofit focused on government accountability. “You probably wouldn’t establish a new LLC, for example” 

But Schwinn is not a typical nominee, and this is not a typical administration.

Trump reportedly held an exclusive dinner on May 22 for investors in his , a form of cryptocurrency. As president, he of his business empire. In the midst of negotiations with over punishing U.S. tariffs, for example, the country approved the development of Trump hotels and golf courses. Previous reporting revealed that FBI Director Kash Patel from a Chinese “fast fashion” company, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s wife in companies that contract with that department.

It’s not unusual for administrations to run into trouble with officials who have close ties to the industries they oversee, Hedtler-Gaudette said. In 2022, his group filed a complaint about a in charge of digital services who had investments in the tech industry.

“But this administration is unique,” he said, “and just doesn’t seem to take any of that into consideration.”

Schwinn is also an unusual choice. She has fans among GOP moderates and Democrats. The former and earned respect for toward academic recovery in Tennessee and implementing far-reaching instruction. 

For a Trump nominee, she has also faced a high degree of conservative ire. Some of that is due to her past support for the kind of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives the Trump administration wants to eliminate from schools, like . But accusations of conflicts of interest and other ethical lapses have followed her for years.

They include a $4.4 million that the Texas Education Agency signed in 2017 with SPEDx, a Georgia software startup, despite what a state audit called Schwinn’s “professional relationship” with a subcontractor for the company. At the time, she was a deputy superintendent of the state agency.

Critics also point to an in 2021 that the Tennessee Department of Education signed with TNTP, a teacher training organization where her husband was employed at the time. The state’s procurement office approved the contract and Schwinn agreed to distance herself from the project, but some lawmakers still considered the deal a “”

“ ‘Drain the swamp’ is a phrase coined by President Trump, signifying the removal of corruption and special interests from government,” said J.C. Bowman, executive director of Professional Educators of Tennessee, a non-union association. “Many conservatives oppose Penny Schwinn’s nomination as deputy secretary of education, believing she embodies the interests they want to eliminate from the agency.”&�Բ�����;

Others say she left the state better off. She pushed requirements that districts screen students for reading difficulties and use a phonics-based curriculum. After the state passed a in 2021, roughly 30,000 teachers received in the science of reading. The investments paid off. Tennessee was among the first to see test scores bounce back after the pandemic. Results from show students continue to make gains. 

To many education advocates, she represents the best chance to shift the national department’s focus away from culture war issues and toward bipartisan priorities like improving literacy and maintaining accountability. 

“I certainly wholeheartedly hope she gets approved, and think members on both sides would be gratified by her performance in office,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. 

Yet dozens of have sent senators letters outlining why they think she’s wrong for the job. They list, for example, her affiliation with Chiefs for Change, made up of left-leaning district and state officials, and cite about her support for they say has elements of critical race theory, which holds that racism in America is systemic.  

Several that Ruby Bridges’ children’s book about being the first Black child to integrate a white elementary school referenced “a large crowd of angry white people.” a first grade book about seahorses was inappropriate because it explains how males carry the eggs.

While never implemented, her plan to conduct “well-being” home visits during the pandemic parents who consider it an example of government overreach.

If the committee advances Schwinn’s nomination, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican who is running for governor, is expected to vote against her, multiple sources told The 74. 

“She’s a Democrat, through and through,” said Elizabeth Story, legislative chair for the Tennessee chapter of Moms for Liberty, the conservative advocacy group that opposes progressive ideas in school about race, sex and gender. “We need President Trump to withdraw her.”

Just after her nomination, she met with anti-DEI activist Chris Rufo in an apparent effort to reassure the Trump administration she would be a good fit. According to on X, she promised to “shut down the terrible programs at the Department of Education, fight critical race theory, gender cultism, and DEI in America’s schools, and support new initiatives on school choice and classical education.”

If she loses the support of some conservatives, she may have to lean on Democrats to secure her nomination.

To Leslie Finger, an assistant political science professor at the University of North Texas, that would be an appropriate finale to a nomination that has veered far from the typical Trump playbook.

“In many ways, she seems opposed to the Trump administration’s education agenda,” she said. “One might think it was meant to show that they want to reach across the aisle on education issues, since she would be supported by bipartisan education reform types. But when has the Trump administration taken actions to signal bipartisanship?”

Since leaving her post as Tennessee commissioner, Schwinn has invested in and been involved with companies at the forefront of education, her disclosure forms show. Those include , an AI reading curriculum program; , a vendor that manages education savings accounts in multiple states; and , an online curriculum and assessment company. She’s also a board member for Really Great Reading, a literacy program used in , and a consultant for , a lobbying firm.

Blake Harris, former communications director for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, founded BHA, where Schwinn served as chief operating officer until February. Two other LLCs she owns would cease operations, she wrote in a letter to the Education Department. 

John Pelissero, a government ethics expert at Santa Clara University in California, said her financial ties deserve a closer look.

“What she puts down on her disclosure form for her confirmation is always kind of an important starting point for how transparent she will be,” he said. “Scrutiny should be given to whether she has the capacity to demonstrate that she’ll act in the public interest.”&�Բ�����;

‘A pragmatist’

Schwinn isn’t the first Trump nominee to face opposition from Republicans. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former majority leader from Kentucky, Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary But those objections focused more on the nominees’ qualifications, said Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of education and political science at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Conservatives’ concerns about Schwinn, “seem like more of a test — or critique — of her loyalty to the new Republican culture war coalition,” he said. “She’s as moderate as it gets. She’s a pragmatist who in no way pushes far-left progressive policies.”&�Բ�����;

Under McMahon, the department required states to sign a certification saying they wouldn’t implement DEI programs. The Office for Civil Rights has also prioritized investigations into state and district policies allowing transgender students to in school sports. 

Not all parental rights advocates are opposed to her nomination. 

Moms for America, founded in 2004, is a conservative, Christian organization that shares many of the same values as Moms for Liberty. Last year, the group presented Trump with its .

The organization, however, said Schwinn would make “an excellent choice” for deputy secretary, citing her “extensive experience as an educator, innovator and state leader.”

As the department’s number two, she would oversee K-12 initiatives, which McMahon has said will prioritize the science of reading, school choice and giving states more control over education. 

“She has a proven ability to improve student outcomes, champion school choice, and navigate crises like the pandemic,” the organization said in a statement to The 74. “We stand by her candidacy for nomination as deputy education secretary and wish her the best in that role.”&�Բ�����;

Disclosure: According to financial disclosure documents filed with the Office of Government Ethics, Penny Schwinn earned $250,000 as a consultant and adviser to the Walton Family Foundation. The foundation provides financial support to The 74.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her tenure encompassed President Donald Trump’s first term, a time when staff still addressed the “full range of complaints”  — from racial and gender discrimination to schools denying services to students with disabilities.

But to Simons, the Justice Department’s recent dismissal of a — at a time when continues — is a sign that the current administration has turned its back on students who don’t receive an equal education. It’s why she left the Educational Opportunities Section at the DOJ after 14 years  in April. 

“The administration has been very clear that resources are going to be allocated to certain identified priorities,” she said — primarily keeping trans students out of women’s sports and punishing universities it accuses of tolerating anti-semitism. But that agenda, she said, “is leaving a lot of parents and kids with nowhere to turn.”&�Բ�����;

Now she aims to be part of a solution. She’s lending her expertise to a new initiative intended to give families another way to resolve their concerns — the . 

The National Center for Youth Law, a 50-year-old nonprofit, will launch the project on Friday to help families with complaints that the DOJ or the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department either won’t acknowledge or no longer has the capacity to investigate. Simons will co-chair the fund’s advisory council.

Announced in advance of Saturday’s 71st anniversary of the Brown v. Board decision ending segregation, the effort will include a fellowship program for former OCR attorneys who lost their positions when the Trump administration gutted the agency and closed seven regional offices in March. The goal is to capitalize on the “brain drain” caused by the elimination of nearly 250 OCR staffers and connect families with pro bono attorneys who can conduct investigations and bring lawsuits to resolve their concerns.

“I have zero confidence in [the department’s] ability to administer the system effectively,” said Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the center. “I think most parents who are looking at what’s happening probably would reach the same conclusion.”&�Բ�����;

As it shifts attention away from discrimination against LGBTQ students and racial minorities, OCR has left thousands of complaints untouched and dismissed many others. Trump’s 2026 calls for an additional 35% cut to the office as the administration pushes to eliminate the department.

The center, along with parents and special education advocates, over the firings, and asked the District of Columbia federal court to . A hearing is set for May 20. 

Andy Artz was a supervising attorney in OCR’s New York City office until March 11, when the department placed him and hundreds of other department staffers on leave and locked them out of their computer systems. He was in the middle of helping a student who had been denied access to a senior trip because of multiple disabilities and close to reaching a resolution for a victim of sexual assault by a classmate. 

“I found the work really meaningful,” said Artz, who hopes to work with the fund. “OCR was able to do a great job helping school districts and universities understand their obligations.”

To the new administration, however, OCR perpetuated discrimination by focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion and harmed women by extending Title IX protections to transgender students.

“Let me be clear: it is a new day in America,” Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said when the department announced into a gender-neutral bathroom in Denver schools. “Under President Trump, OCR will not tolerate discrimination of any kind.”

Even if the court blocks the job cuts, it’s unclear whether attorneys would be allowed to return to cases that don’t align with the administration’s priorities. Smith still sees a need for the new project.

His team will work with local NAACP chapters, bar associations and other community organizations to get the word out about the OCR alternative, Smith said.

In addition to seeking attorneys who will represent students pro bono, the fund hopes to attract some of the talent forced to leave the federal government by offering four- to six-month fellowships. Attorneys will receive a $12,500 stipend and non-attorneys will receive $9,000. Depending on funding, Smith expects up to 10 fellows in the first round.��

‘Top-performing personnel’

When Trump was inaugurated, OCR had over 12,000 open cases, . But the database hasn’t been updated since before the new administration took over. According to Julie Hartman, a department spokeswoman, OCR continues to “evaluate all legitimate complaints” and has initiated over 200 disability-related investigations and dozens related to Title IX and anti-discrimination laws. 

“OCR’s staff is composed of top-performing personnel with years of experience enforcing federal civil rights laws who work vigorously to protect all Americans’ civil rights,” she said. 

She declined to comment on the fund specifically, but said the department “welcomes support from — and has often worked with — outside groups who want to advocate for students and families and help those who believe that their civil rights have been violated.”

Factoring in staff reductions and those who left voluntarily, Artz estimates that only about a third of OCR’s staff remains out of the over 560 attorneys, supervisors and other employees who worked there last fall.

As a former deputy assistant attorney general during the Obama administration, Smith doesn’t solely blame Trump for OCR being “terribly backlogged.”&�Բ�����;

“It was a system that often was a black hole for families,” he said. “What does it mean to have an Office for Civil Rights that’s actually responsive to families and to young people?”

For Callie Oettinger, a Fairfax County, Virginia, parent and special education advocate, getting OCR to act has yielded mixed results. She has seen complaints linger for years as well as recent steps by the new administration to act on disability cases. 

OCR still hasn’t completed a probe into her 2019 complaint that the Fairfax district denied transportation to students with disabilities who needed extra time to complete the PSAT. At the same time, she’s noticed an uptick in OCR investigations on more recent issues. Since early April, officials have responded to two complaints she’s involved in, one filed in December and another in March.

“It’s not clear why they’re starting where they’re starting,” she said. “Things are definitely moving forward, but they’re not doing themselves a favor by keeping their website so outdated.”&�Բ�����;

Others are looking elsewhere for relief. 

In Delaware’s Cape Henlopen School District, Louise Michaud Ngido, an English language teacher, said she’s heard nothing about that schools have failed to provide English learners with adequate support. Students new to the country, she said, don’t receive specific English development classes and staff members don’t provide translation services or interpreters for parents. The district denied any discrimination.

Under Cardona, OCR opened an investigation last October, but Ngido has heard nothing since. She said she hopes Delaware will be “more proactive” and investigate complaints that OCR won’t.

Department of Justice priorities

At least to eliminate the education department would shift OCR’s workload to the DOJ. But the education staff there has always been a fraction of the size of OCR’s. Simon’s former office once had 40 attorneys. Now, she said, it has six. 

The agency’s priorities have also changed. 

In with the Epoch Times, a conservative media outlet, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said her agenda includes doing “some law enforcement” against hospitals conducting gender-affirming surgeries, elevating parental rights and dismissing school district consent decrees over desegregation. 

The DOJ said in a that it ended its “probing federal oversight” of integration efforts in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish schools because the district was spending “precious local resources” to meet past administration’s demands for data on issues such as hiring and discipline. 

In the interview, Dhillon said the department wants to “let people off the hook” if they corrected past discrimination. Consent decrees, in which a district pays a court-appointed monitor for ongoing oversight, are “a powerful tool” and appropriate when there’s been severe corruption or racism, she said. “What’s not appropriate is to maintain these rent-seeking financial arrangements …  beyond their normal life cycle.”

But Simons, the former DOJ section chief, said Black students are still disciplined at higher rates than their white peers and are more likely to attend “crumbling” schools. that racial and socioeconomic isolation has steadily increased since the 1980s.

“Segregation persists; inequality persists,” she said. 

Working with universities to collect and preserve existing data is another one of the fund’s goals. The administration, Smith said, might point to a declining number of OCR complaints as evidence of fewer problems in schools, when, in fact, it’s a byproduct of fewer investigations. 

“We want to be able to counter that narrative by showing that just because people aren’t going to OCR doesn’t mean that there aren’t real concerns and real issues of discrimination in our schools,” he said. 

‘The aid of legal counsel’

Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked at the department during the Obama and first Trump administrations, said it’s important for nonprofits like the center to “step up,” but cautioned that outside efforts have limitations.

“Without a robust federal civil rights arm, civil rights in this country are not going to be enforced,” she said. 

States don’t have the same expertise and resources, she said, and it’s unclear who would enforce any changes.

But Smith countered that the bulk of what OCR investigators do is negotiate solutions between families and district staff. 

“Having parents and children do that with the aid of legal counsel,” he said, “will yield far better results and outcomes than if they try to navigate those systems on their own.”

The consequences are real and immediate. Many districts are struggling to plan effectively for the upcoming school year amid the uncertainty. Meanwhile, the 7.5 million students served under IDEA — 15% of the U.S.  student population — continue to face stark disparities: achievement gaps of more than 40 points on national assessments, twice the suspension rates, three times higher dropout rates, and dramatically lower college enrollment compared to nondisabled peers. Despite 50 years of federal mandates, the current system still fails these students, raising urgent questions about what could happen if those safeguards erode.

I’m not writing to simply sound another alarm. The reality is that when federal protections unravel, state and local leadership becomes the first line of defense. That responsibility can feel daunting, but it also comes with opportunity. In many places, local leaders are already stepping up, showing that progress is possible even in the face of uncertainty. In a midsize district in Vermont where schools committed to clear expectations, coaching and data-informed practices, the quality of students’ Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) improved on The Ability Challenge’s IEP rubric by 40% in a single year. Better IEPs directly help students because they accurately identify learning needs, set meaningful goals connected to grade-level standards and specify the right supports to help students succeed.

Leaders of this district and others who are moving forward aren’t starting from scratch. They are drawing on what decades of research have made clear: that students with disabilities thrive when they learn alongside their peers in classrooms designed to support all learners. Success means improving processes to create clear pathways and align resources — rethinking how schools group students, measure progress and embrace learning differences. Effective leaders build inclusive systems that ensure compliance while improving outcomes.

Here are a few key steps schools  and districts can take (and states can reinforce) to protect students with disabilities and enhance learning for all students:

Champion inclusive education as a whole-school benefit. consistently shows that focusing on making schools and classrooms more accessible benefits everyone, not just students with learning differences.  Schools that invest in these practices can avoid wasting resources on separate classes or duplicate services and create a more collaborative workplace where teachers feel valued and effective. 

Invest in collaborative models. The most successful schools have a common feature: They maximize the time general and special educators work together to plan instruction and build on each other’s expertise. One D.C. charter school that developed an interdisciplinary team to address behavior issues , shifting teachers’ time from managing individual students’ actions to increasing instruction for everyone.

Redesign schedules to maximize capacity. Planning a school schedule can be a highly intensive process that involves many priorities and moving parts. Fitting them together takes a great deal of attention, and technical tasks like student and staff grouping and scheduling can be overlooked. A Northeastern middle school strategically redesigned its schedule to ensure that special education teachers integrated specialized instruction for students with IEPs within their grade-level reading and math classes. This created more efficient use of teacher time by reducing the need for separate pullout groups, provided all special education instruction required by student IEPs, minimized instances where students missed important content and allowed for weekly planning meetings for each teaching team.

Train leaders to coach for inclusive practice. Many general education teachers  —, by some estimates — report feeling unprepared to teach students with disabilities, not because they don’t care, but because they haven’t been given the tools or time. When instructional leaders provide coaching that addresses how students with learning differences engage with content, achievement improves. In another D.C. charter network where assistant principals were trained to identify and coach all their teachers on learning differences and specialized instruction, achievement gaps between students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers shrank to across grades. 

Develop creative solutions to maximize resources and impact. This could include neighboring school districts sharing costs of speech therapists or behavior specialists, partnerships with local universities or arrangements with third-party providers to train staff on inclusive teaching methods. These partnerships can fill gaps in expertise, provide guidance on implementation and help districts sustain momentum on improvement initiatives.

These examples show what’s possible when schools commit to accessibility for all students. Making this the norm means taking these successful approaches — collaborative teaching teams, strategic scheduling, shared expertise and inclusive classroom practices — and implementing them systematically across entire schools and districts.

While state and local leaders drive immediate change, strong federal protections remain crucial for ensuring consistency and access. History has shown that without federal oversight, vulnerable students face dangerously inconsistent support. Education leaders must both advocate for maintaining robust federal accountability and act boldly at state and local levels. State education leaders, superintendents and district administrators cannot wait — they must set clear priorities, allocate resources strategically and maintain essential services despite uncertainty. 

The cost of inaction is far greater than the investment required for change. While federal policies may shift, the imperative for building educational systems where disability doesn’t determine destiny is critical. The question is whether state and local leaders have the courage.

The Trump administration is not only recommending a $60 million bump in funding for charter schools in next year’s budget, Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Friday announced an immediate increase for the same amount — bringing current spending for 2025 to $500 million.

On Thursday, the Education Department also announced��a new����to help charters share innovative practices more broadly. In a statement, McMahon said the extra funding and new opportunity will “pave the way for more choices, better outcomes, and life-changing opportunities for students and families.”��

Earlier this month, the Trump administration proposed a with a $60 million boost for charter schools — the first increase since 2019. 

But the welcome news for the sector came just two days after the administration took center stage in an Oklahoma case before the U.S. Supreme Court that questions whether charters are private and can therefore explicitly teach religion. Advocates fear the outcome could disrupt education for roughly 4 million charter school students across the country. 

The cognitive dissonance wasn’t lost on Naomi Shelton, CEO of the National Charter Collaborative, which advocates for minority-led charter schools.

The funding increase “signals that this administration sees the value of charters in the broader education landscape. But the progress is tempered by real concerns,” she said. The additional funds won’t matter “if charter schools lose their public identity.”&�Բ�����;

The request comes as GOP leaders in both the and the plan to dedicate hearings this week to accomplishments in the charter sector. Trump is recommending $500 million, a 13.6% increase, for the federal Charter School Program, which provides start-up funds for new schools and helps networks grow. The increase stands in sharp contrast to the $12 billion in proposed cuts to other education programs that Education Secretary Linda McMahon said are “not driving improved student outcomes.”

Charter schools, according to the budget summary, have “a proven track record of improving students’ academic achievement and giving parents more choice in the education of their children.” After four years of what one conservative called a “” on the sector during the Biden administration, charter advocates are celebrating the change in tone. 

“It is a proof point that the president and his administration believe in charter schools and the need for them,” said Caroline Roemer, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools. 

In her two months in office, McMahon has also promoted charters by visiting at least eight of them in New York, Florida, Nevada and Arizona. They include a that rejects diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a school with a in Miami. She has not yet visited any traditional district schools.

“A great wrap in Florida today at Pineapple Cove Classical Academy — another student-centered charter school that is seeing real results,” she on X after touring three charters and a private Jewish school. 

Her predecessor, Miguel Cardona, a former principal and state chief from Connecticut, championed traditional schools. Despite longtime support for charters , Cardona recommended a to the Charter Schools Program and sought to clamp down on charters’ ability to lure students away from district schools. 

In 2022, the department issued a controversial package of new rules that called on charter schools to partner with districts, increase racial and socioeconomic diversity and report any business dealings with for-profit companies. 

The administration said the changes would increase accountability and transparency in an industry that has experienced some . Some critics consider the federal program an example of the waste, fraud and abuse that Trump and Elon Musk aim to eliminate. 

Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, pointed to a 2022 report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General finding that between 2013 and 2016, states and charter operators that received program funds opened or expanded just half of the schools they planned. 

“Hundreds of millions have gone to schools that never opened or closed even before their grants ended,” Burris said. “If the President is serious about eliminating waste and fraud, the CSP is a good place to start.”

But charter advocates say there are too many restrictions on how to use the funds. They can’t, for example, spend the money on facility costs, which Roemer called “one of our toughest barriers to break through.”

Shelton added that in some states, charter authorizers are more likely to favor large networks of schools over independent operators.

“The funding may never reach the communities that need it most,” she said. 

Cardona’s revisions to the program, they argued, made it even harder for standalone charters and small networks in urban communities predominantly serving Black and Hispanic students to secure grant funds.

Their advocacy led the department to retreat from some of the rules. But what remained was still “onerous, burdensome” said Jed Wallace, who blogs about charter school issues. Grantees, for example, still had to submit a “needs analysis” and explain how their school would impact the diversity of district schools. Then in January, the department issued applications for funding just before the presidential transition, which Wallace called “” from the Biden administration. 

In February, Trump’s education department not only withdrew the application, but the remaining Biden-era requirements. On May 8, the department reopened the application window for two grants — one for and another for . A separate application for charter management organizations is yet to come. The department is expected to judge submissions based on whether they fit the Trump administration’s agenda. That would mean, for example, charter schools couldn’t spend grant funds on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. 

Starlee Coleman, CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the department also took a lot of the organization’s recommendations, like allowing states to seek waivers from some of the federal rules. 

“When you wrap it all up, they’re making some really helpful moves on charter policy,” she said. 

A ‘precarious’ situation

But the same administration that plans to streamline and accelerate the grant application process argued before the Supreme Court that the federal program itself violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause because it requires schools to be nonsectarian.  

Oklahoma’s St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which aims to become the first religious charter school in the nation, says because of its Catholic faith, it would not extend the same civil rights to students with disabilities or LGBTQ students that they would receive in public schools. During , Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson explored how that argument would impact the Charter Schools Program.

“The portion of the federal law that indicates that to qualify as a charter school you have to be nonsectarian in your programs — you’re saying there is a constitutional problem with that or at least there has to be a free exercise exception?” she asked U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer. “Is that right?”

Sauer answered, “Exactly.”

That means if the court allows religious charter schools, they could discriminate in admissions and hiring decisions even while receiving public funds.

“The most obvious group to be targeted would be LGBTQ+ students and students with unpopular religious, or non-religious, beliefs,” said Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of California, Boulder. But he thinks some religious schools would also turn away students with gay parents, pregnant teens or students with single moms. 

The St. Isidore case puts charters in a “precarious” situation, he said. A ruling in favor of the Catholic school could further erode support for charter schools in blue states where they have enjoyed “political goodwill” among Democrats. “It’s easy to understand why national advocates for charter schools would be worried.”&�Բ�����;

Democratic-controlled legislatures could use a ruling in favor of St. Isidore to repeal their charter laws, experts say. In red states with vouchers, Welner added, there wouldn’t be much to distinguish religious charter schools from other faith-based private schools serving students with state funds.

States could amend legislation to bring charters under more government control.

“But that might be a tough pill to swallow for charter advocates who have long lobbied for more and more deregulation,” Welner said.

Charter leaders’ concerns aren’t limited to the case. Myrna Castrejón, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, called this moment “a mixed bag.”

While she’s pleased with the prospect of more money and hopes it comes with greater flexibility, she’s just as disappointed with some of Trump’s proposed cuts as other . After all, under current state laws, charter schools are public and receive the same per-pupil funding as district schools.

Trump would eliminate $890 million for English learners and more than $1.5 billion to better prepare low-income and minority students for college. In a statement, McMahon said the proposal “reflects funding levels for an agency that is responsibly winding down.”

The budget preview also states that the administration would roll 18 K-12 programs into a single $2 billion grant “designed to reduce [the agency’s] influence on schools and students and reduce bureaucracy.”

While the administration said it would “preserve” Title I for low-income students, the recommended consolidation would result in a $4.5 billion reduction for schools. “There is no way we are shielded from those changes,” Castrejón said. “We ultimately serve exactly the same kids.”