When Vianey secured a full ride to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to pursue her dream of becoming a teacher, it felt like a door had opened to her: full financial support so she could do something for her community, and become the teacher she had always wanted in school.
But midway through her freshman year, she and 15 other students found out the federal grant funding Project RAÍCES, their teacher-training program, was among those terminated by the U.S. Department of Education in recent weeks, propelled by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
With no federal right to education in the U.S. Constitution, providing K-12 education is mostly a state and local responsibility in the United States. But in the name of trimming the Education Department’s bottom line and stopping federal funding of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, DOGE’s cuts have interrupted many of the limited federal efforts that directly help states and schools find solutions to problems so they can do a better job of educating students—and some of those cuts have seemingly gone against some of the stated education policy priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration.
DOGE has canceled funding for numerous federal surveys that supply the nation with data on children and schools, and help the federal government figure out how to distribute money; research projects aimed at determining which educational strategies are most effective; organizations that help school districts and state education agencies learn from each other; and teacher-training programs that seek to bolster the number of people entering the profession.
Press releases from the Education Department and social media posts from DOGE have framed the cuts as saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and called spending on the initiatives “wasteful” and “divisive.” But in reality, DOGE has slashed only a sliver of the department’s overall spending—including money earmarked for functions that have enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. Congress in recent years has appropriated roughly $80 billion in annual discretionary funds to the Education Department, out of more than $6.7 trillion across the federal government.
Even so, the aftershocks are being felt immediately.
Education experts worry about what will be lost in the years to come, as data that shape policy and programming become stale. Participants in the affected projects question whether DOGE’s efforts are achieving their stated goal of efficiency.
“The researchers doing this work firsthand definitely acknowledge that there are ways we can improve education research. We want to work with this administration and address some of the challenges that exist,” said Rachel Dinkes, president and CEO of Knowledge Alliance, a coalition of education organizations involved in research efforts nationwide.
But, she said, “halting some of this essential work and progress with no action plan for improvement is going to be hugely detrimental.”
Now Vianey, the aspiring teacher in Nebraska, is among hundreds of college students nationwide who now may not be able to complete their education and enter the K-12 workforce. (She asked that Education Week not use her last name for privacy reasons.)
“Being a teacher was truly the biggest goal I’ve ever had. I have never wanted anything more,” she said. “I’m gonna do anything possible to be a teacher, even if that means taking a semester off of college so I can work and get the money for it.”
In a statement to Education Week, Education Department spokesperson Savannah Newhouse said, “America’s students are falling dangerously behind in math and reading” and that the federal agency has “for years been frivolously spending taxpayer dollars on priorities that do nothing to help our students learn, such as DEI training in teacher prep programs and ‘Equity Assistance Centers.’
“Under President Trump, the department is aggressively auditing our spending to ensure maximum impact for students and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” she said.
Cutting dozens of contracts at once is unprecedented, experts say
The 45-year-old Education Department oversees the allocation of billions of dollars in annual funding appropriated by Congress to supplement K-12 school budgets nationwide. The agency’s K-12 focus has largely been on helping schools serve groups of students who require costlier services, enforcing civil rights laws at schools and colleges, and carrying out shifting presidential priorities on accountability and academic improvement.
Some of the projects and efforts that have been halted were set to produce insights that could help schools and governments work more efficiently in the future. Affected federal data collection efforts include national tabulations of student loan debt, crime in schools, and K-12 student enrollment and characteristics.
“The thing you need to have access to in order to move policies to more efficient structures, to figure out what types of schools and programs are more efficient to operate, is high-quality research and data,” said Bruce Baker, an education professor at the University of Miami who has relied on federal data during his decades-long career analyzing school finance.
Data-gathering and funding research are arguably the “most noncontroversial thing that the U.S. Department of Education has done since its beginning,” said Andy Smarick, who served as a deputy assistant secretary at the Education Department in former President George W. Bush’s administration.
Some cuts have contradicted the Trump administration’s stated priorities, such as the slashed research funding for studies on career and technical education, which presumptive Education Secretary Linda McMahon has emphasized. DOGE axed the first congressionally mandated national survey of CTE programs in a decade and a similar national evaluation of $1 billion in literacy instruction grants Congress funded in the early 2010s.
“I think sometimes research seems really abstract—maybe it doesn’t seem as closely connected to work that the policymakers maybe see happening in their states or in their districts or on the ground,” said Alisha Hyslop, chief policy, research and content officer for the Association for Career and Technical Education. “We’ll be definitely working to lift up the connections between these more abstract research pieces or surveys or studies and how that can positively impact programs.”
DOGE, limited in what it can trim without running into bigger legal problems, has slashed around the edges, cutting more than 100 contracts funded by the Education Department.
The first round of contracts canceled were worth $900 million in total, according to DOGE, though some researchers have parsed the finer details to estimate far smaller amounts of actual savings. The Education Department said the teacher-training grants it terminated totaled $600 million, but the Trump administration has not released a detailed rundown of savings. The agency said two other rounds of contracts canceled—for entities running regional research and technical assistance centers—totaled another nearly $600 million, though the department hasn’t detailed what portion of that amount it actually saved.
Many of the terminated contracts were approaching the end of their grant period, which means much of the allocated money has already been spent and research already conducted.
“I’ve never seen this kind of seemingly indiscriminate cutting,” said Smarick, who is a senior fellow for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy think tank. “It seems like the goal was: cut as many dollars as humanly possible, as quickly as possible, with less thought to what is the long-term impact of this research or the broader question: Does the U.S. Department of Education have a role in continuing this—the funding of research in education?”
School districts are already feeling the effects
Some of the recent cuts have already had direct effects on schools—and others threaten to have effects down the line, including on the pool of future educators at a time when many districts are struggling to overcome persistent shortages of qualified teachers.
The teacher-training cuts have centered on programs seeking to diversify the teacher workforce, expand the pool of educators qualified to work with students with disabilities, equip teachers with the tools to teach in low-income districts, and give paraprofessionals and substitute teachers pathways to becoming full-fledged teachers.
Another now-discontinued research study was already underway, with hundreds of participating high schoolers in several districts. The goal was to figure out the best strategies for helping students with disabilities transition from high school to adulthood.
“This is disappointing news as we were hopeful this study would show beneficial results,” said Jay Dillon, public information officer for the Paulding County district in Georgia, which had eight teachers working with researchers and students until the contract ended abruptly on Feb. 10.
Also among the affected programs was the Supporting Effective Educator Development grant program, aiming to help colleges and universities address the growing phenomenon of localized teacher shortages across the nation.
Scrambling in-progress efforts to improve education won’t help the administration achieve its stated goal of enhancing efficiency, said Kathlene Holmes Campbell, the executive director of the Chicago-based nonprofit National Center for Teacher Residencies.
In 2022, the Education Department awarded $6.3 million in SEED funds to the center to help pay for professional development for mentor teachers working in K-12 classrooms alongside aspiring teachers. The funds also paid for the organization to create toolkits that higher education institutions could use to ensure their teacher residency programs are financially sustainable.
The organization has already invested in much of what that grant was to cover, but now there’s no option to request federal reimbursement for the remainder of the work, and no guidance on whether that will change anytime soon, even if the organization submits an appeal, Campbell said.
“We really want to make sure that people continue to see the teaching field not only as the professionals that they are, but also the impact that they’re making on the future leaders of our country, who are children in schools right now,” Campbell said. “I just don’t think that anyone will win if we have college students sitting in courses right now not sure if they can finish their degree.”
Schools and states are ‘losing a partner’
Some districts will also get less free help from outside experts going forward as a result of the recent cuts.
Funding stopped flowing this month to close to two dozen so-called comprehensive centers and 10 regional education labs—small organizations located across the country that have for the last few decades supported schools and states in efforts to problem-solve, improve instruction, prioritize new initiatives, and invest wisely.
Comprehensive centers helped state education agencies, especially those with limited capacity on staff, understand and follow federal policies like the Every Student Succeeds Act. They also helped states navigate acute or unprecedented challenges—one helped state education departments during the early days of the pandemic survey educators and parents on their biggest concerns, while another developed resources to help when a state welcomes an influx of new migrant students, said Susan Therriault, an education systems and policy fellow at the American Institutes for Research who was overseeing four of the comprehensive centers whose new five-year grant term started last fall.
The work stoppages for the comprehensive centers Therriault oversees affect roughly 75 people’s jobs, including those of some part-time and full-time staff, she said.
“We had just submitted work plans with individual states assessing their needs,” Therriault said. “All the plans we had done with states based on those priorities we had identified have been canceled because of this.”
Regional education labs, meanwhile, had dozens of small-scale projects in the works, according to their websites—touching on improving teacher recruitment and retention in Alaska, coordinating an expansion of mental health services for rural students, and finding strategies to expand access to higher-level math in Tacoma, Wash.
The Regional Education Lab that serves the Pacific Northwest was working with the Washington Rural Alliance, a membership organization of roughly 40 rural school districts, to craft guidance for schools on best practices for offering hybrid and remote instruction without sacrificing the quality of instruction.
The project came about after many rural districts in Washington state saw as many as 20 percent of their enrolled students leave the school system during the pandemic. In some farming communities, parents put their kids to work in the morning before they came inside for online school in the afternoon.
Staffers at the Regional Education Lab visited schools in a handful of districts, spending many hours interviewing staff, observing, and helping shape their technology-enabled programming, said Kevin Jacka, executive director of the alliance.
The team presented the results of their analysis in January, and had just started working with district leaders on possible follow-up efforts, like a stronger focus on reading instruction, when the contract was canceled.
Now the districts will have to forge ahead with blended learning without help from the REL team. And they won’t benefit from REL expertise going forward.
“When you take partners out of the room, you’re taking an opportunity for a school district who’s probably low on funds already, that was going to have an opportunity for a free tool,” Jacka said.
2025-02-28 00:48:22
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