More than two months after the federal government terminated dozens of grants for programs aiming to grow the educator workforce, some recipients of those funds still don’t know whether they’ll ever see their money again, and what they’ll do if they don’t.
Two separate lawsuits have challenged the Trump administration’s February decision to terminate close to 140 Department of Education grants for teacher colleges, school districts, and education-focused nonprofits. In both cases, federal judges have offered temporary relief to the plaintiffs by ordering reinstatement of their federal money.
But both legal challenges are limited in scope, which means court orders in either direction only apply to some recipients—and a U.S. Supreme Court order last week ended the temporary relief one group of plaintiffs had from the funding termination.
Dozens of other grantees, meanwhile, have slipped through the cracks, with no organization representing them in court, and no improvement in the prospects for getting their federal money back since it abruptly disappeared in February.
The sudden loss of federal funds has scrambled efforts to supply highly qualified teachers at a time when districts in recent years have increasingly moved to fill vacant positions with teachers certified on an emergency basis.
The Missouri-based nonprofit Southwest Center for Education Excellence, for instance, won a five-year, $4.2 million federal grant in 2024 for a program that offers living stipends to paraprofessionals seeking teaching degrees at area universities while employed by local districts.
The status of that grant hasn’t changed since the department terminated it in February, because the Southwest Center isn’t in one of the eight states or three membership associations that have sued for grant reinstatement.
Roughly three dozen recipients of the now-terminated federal grants appear to be in the same situation as the Southwest Center, according to an Education Week analysis of the grant recipients listed on the Education Department website.
Melissa Massey, the Southwest Center’s executive director, contacted the Missouri state attorney general and the state education department in hopes that they would sue on the nonprofit’s behalf as eight Democratic attorneys general did. But both agencies told Education Week they’re not pursuing a lawsuit.
“I want to fight it bad,” Massey said of the termination.
But for now, she has few options. The U.S. Department of Education told recipients of the terminated grants it would consider appeal letters to reinstate individual awards, but hasn’t shared a timeline or criteria for considering them.
Massey’s team has filed its appeal but hadn’t heard back as of early April.
Jill Flanders, executive director of the Virginia-based nonprofit Center for Educational Improvement, said she had a conversation shortly after the grant terminations with a nonprofit advocacy group that was considering a lawsuit of its own.
But that lawsuit never materialized. As a result, the remainder of her grant for a program to help school leaders cultivate compassionate and culturally responsive environments is terminated, with no relief in sight.
“We sit here in limbo, knowing full well that everything that occurred was illegal, but yet there’s no one representing us,” Flanders said.
Lawsuits challenged some grant terminations, but some grantees were left out
President Donald Trump’s administration in early February canceled more than 100 grants the U.S. of Department of Education awarded between 2021 and 2024 under three congressionally mandated programs: Seeking Effective Educator Development (SEED); Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP); and Teacher and School Leader (TSL) Incentive.
The department excised 104 of the 109 active TQP and SEED grants, said Rachel Oglesby, chief of staff for the education secretary, in a March 12 court filing.
Department officials flagged the grants for termination if they “included objectionable material associated with DEI, such as cultural responsiveness, systemic privilege, racial justice, social justice, and anti-racism,” Oglesby wrote. She cites phrases from grant applications including “bias training,” “social-emotional learning,” “cultural competence,” and “racial and ethnic autobiography.”
Affected recipients received an email in the first two weeks of February that said their grant “no longer effectuates Department priorities” related to rooting out diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Among the programs that lost grant funding were efforts to recruit and retain teachers for rural schools, special education services, schools in low-income areas, elementary schools, and charter schools.
Two lawsuits sprung up within a month to challenge the terminations: one over TQP and SEED grant terminations from eight Democratic state attorneys general, and one over TQP, SEED, and TSL terminations from three membership organizations that represent teacher-preparation programs.
A judge on March 10 ordered a two-week reinstatement of more than 40 TQP and SEED grants in the eight states—California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Wisconsin. Following appeals from the Trump administration, that decision has since wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which voted 5-4 on April 4 to void the judge’s order and allow the terminations to proceed until the case plays out in U.S. district court.
In the other case, meanwhile, a different judge on March 17 issued a preliminary injunction that required reinstatement of more than 70 TQP, SEED, and TSL grants while the case plays out, which could take years.
As of April 10, that injunction is still in effect. But that victory only applied to grant recipients who are current members of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education or the National Center for Teacher Residencies, regardless of what state they’re in. Plus, the Trump administration has appealed the decision.
Most Teacher and School Leader Incentive grantees remain in limbo
Turning the tap back on for recipients of the Teacher and School Leadership Incentive grants, if it happens, isn’t going to be straightforward.
While TSL is mentioned in the lawsuit filed by the teacher-prep organizations on March 4, the states’ lawsuit only covers the TQP and SEED programs.
Likewise, the court order to reinstate TSL grants only applies to grantees that are members of the three teacher-prep organizations named as plaintiffs in the original lawsuit—AACTE and its Maryland affiliate, as well as NCTR.
But most TSL grant recipients aren’t members of those groups. Almost all of the 29 districts and organizations awarded three-year TSL grants in 2023 are either individual school districts or nonprofits like the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching that help develop programs for a cluster of districts.
Three school districts—Laurens in South Carolina, Osborne in Arizona, and Wake County in North Carolina—confirmed to Education Week that, even after court orders to reinstate some TSL grants, their federal funds haven’t returned, and they haven’t heard from the Education Department about their awards.
Some TSL grant recipients have used the funds to form partnerships with local universities that are AACTE members. Wake County, for instance, received a TSL grant to implement a performance-based compensation system to recruit and retain qualified educators at high-need schools along with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC-Greensboro.
But the AACTE lawsuit doesn’t cover this grant. A spokesperson for Wake County told Education Week that there had been “no communication” from the Education Department on when, or if, these grants may be reinstated.
Ed Hermes, a board member at the Osborn school district in Phoenix, said the loss of the TSL money was “devastating” because it disrupted the district’s ability to pay five teacher-leaders who support newer teachers. Over a three-year period, the money was also supposed to pay out performance-based incentives to teachers.
Grant recipients have refuted the Education Department’s claims that they were using their TSL awards to promote DEI. Instead, they argued the grant was meant to reward teachers based purely on merit. Shutting off this source of funds will make it harder for districts to train and retain high-performing teachers, they said.
“We are still upset,” Hermes wrote in an email. “We have lost the grant and will lose the positions funded by the grant at the end of the school year if it is not turned back on. We will also lose the performance pay that we have promised our teachers unless the grant is turned back on.”
NIET, the nonprofit that helps school districts develop teacher-training programs, has filed an appeal with the Education Department on behalf of three Arizona districts, including Osborne, to challenge the agency’s assertion that the TSL grants promoted DEI efforts, or any recruitment efforts based on race.
TSL grantees, in the meantime, have little recourse to get their grants reinstated. Beyond asking questions of a diminished Education Department, they also have no way of knowing if the appeal process is even moving forward.
Programs are now dealing with layoffs, cancellations, and an uncertain future
Grant terminations have had immediate and significant consequences for programs, whether they have hope for getting their money restored or not.
Projects to evaluate the success of new initiatives won’t proceed, imperiling efforts to secure future funding for similar pursuits. Program employees were forced to choose between finding new jobs or continuing their work in a voluntary capacity.
In some cases, future educators themselves saw their career paths disappear overnight.
Out of 32 current participants in Massey’s program in Missouri, 30 decided to keep pursuing their teaching degrees while using their own funds to cover the loss of the federal stipend. But the remaining two students, both single parents, had no choice but to drop out and abandon their path to a teaching career.
Watching the students decide whether to continue was brutal, Massey said.
“There were just a lot of tears. I just can’t even describe what that meeting looked like,” Massey said. “It was horrific.”
The terminations have dramatically disrupted the activities of even the grant recipients that, at least temporarily, saw funding restored as a result of the lawsuits.
A program based at the University of South Carolina Beaufort that was aiming to create new pathways for teachers in math, science, and early childhood had to lay off three employees, including the project director overseeing the grant’s daily operations, an alumni coach who oversaw a mentoring program for current participants, and one of two recruiters who helped bring candidates into the program.
“That’s their livelihood cut short immediately: no severance, no benefits, and no warning,” said Bruce Marlowe, a professor and chair of the education department at the university.
Three instructors whose salaries were funded with the federal grant kept their jobs only because Marlowe convinced the university’s financial office to cover their salaries for the remainder of the year, he said.
As soon as Marlowe could pull down reinstated federal funds, he began the process of rehiring the employees he’d laid off weeks earlier—a complex ordeal involving staffers from human resources and the provost’s office on both his campus and the flagship university.
But even if the money sticks around for the foreseeable future, the disruption will continue. Two of the three instructors who get paid with grant money will move next fall to new positions within the university.
That will leave Marlowe with two open spots to fill—but with all the uncertainty, it might not be easy to find people and assure them they’ll be gainfully employed.
“It could well be that I hire them this summer to teach a full load of courses, only to learn that the grant has been terminated again,” he said.
2025-04-10 20:45:25
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