Supporters of the proposal argue that programs like MEGA reflect a broader recognition that states and local communities are often better positioned than Washington to understand the unique challenges facing their schools. Rather than maintaining fragmented federal programs with rigid compliance structures, decentralization efforts seek to give states more authority to innovate, coordinate resources and tailor solutions to regional realities.

The MEGA proposal therefore illustrates both the promise and the responsibility that accompany decentralization. Returning authority to states creates opportunities for more responsive and adaptive governance, but it also places responsibility squarely on state leaders to produce measurable results for children and families.

Decentralization alone does not guarantee success.

For decades, critics of centralized education policy argued that federal mandates often produced bloated compliance systems and procedural requirements disconnected from local realities. Washington became increasingly skilled at regulating inputs while struggling to improve long-term outcomes. 

Yet granting states more autonomy does not automatically produce effective governance.

A state can possess broad authority and still oversee failing schools, collapsing civic trust and stagnant upward mobility. Debates over parental rights, curriculum transparency, school choice and cultural accountability have become central to education politics in many states. Those issues matter. Parents should have meaningful authority over their children’s education, and communities deserve institutions that reflect local needs and values.

But education policy cannot become merely a politics of resistance. It must also become a politics of construction.

The real test of decentralization is whether states can build institutions that work.

Today, educational inequality remains profoundly geographic. In many parts of the country, a child’s ZIP code predicts educational achievement, workforce readiness, family stability and future earnings with alarming consistency. Some communities consistently produce mobility and strong civic outcomes. Others remain trapped in cycles of decline.

This is no longer simply a federal problem. It is increasingly a problem of state capacity.

Too many states spent decades demanding greater autonomy without building the institutional sophistication required to govern effectively once power returned to them. Many accountability systems still operate as relics of the old compliance era. They measure standardized-test averages and graduation statistics while failing to answer the question parents actually care about: Are children prepared to flourish as adults?

Any serious education agenda should focus less on bureaucratic processes and more on long-term human outcomes.

States should begin measuring mobility itself. That means tracking educational opportunity and life outcomes geographically—particularly at the ZIP-code level—and identifying which communities consistently produce upward mobility and which do not.

The purpose of these measures is not to create another compliance regime, but to identify which communities are successfully helping children transition into stable adulthood.

Such systems could include measures such as:

• Early literacy and numeracy rates 
• Chronic absenteeism 
• Access to tutoring, mentoring and after-school programs 
• Participation in career and technical education 
• Youth employment and apprenticeship participation 
• Postsecondary completion 
• Workforce participation 
• Family stability and parental involvement 

Examples of effective state-level reform already exist. Mississippi, once ranked near the bottom nationally in educational performance, has posted significant gains in early literacy after implementing statewide reading reforms, teacher training initiatives and evidence-based intervention strategies. Other states have increasingly aligned community colleges, workforce-development systems and career education with regional labor-market needs.Ìę

These efforts remain uneven, but they demonstrate that state-led governance can produce measurable improvement when institutions are coherent and focused on outcomes.

States should not fear this kind of measurement or experimentation. Properly designed, it strengthens decentralization rather than weakens it. A governor in Wisconsin may understand the needs of manufacturing communities better than federal officials in Washington. Rural Appalachia faces different challenges than suburban Texas. States can align workforce systems, transportation policy, public safety and education in ways national bureaucracies often cannot.

That flexibility is precisely why decentralization matters. But flexibility without accountability becomes little more than fragmentation.

Decentralization is a governing framework, not a substitute for governing.

The central questions are straightforward: Can states build integrated longitudinal data systems that actually track outcomes over time? Can they identify which neighborhoods consistently trap children in educational failure? Can they align K–12 education with workforce demand and civic formation? Can they distinguish between symbolic politics and measurable improvement? 

Those are the priorities that matter now.

Americans increasingly distrust centralized institutions, but distrust alone does not build flourishing communities. Strong families, strong schools and strong civic institutions require operational excellence, not merely political rhetoric.

The country stands at another inflection point in education governance. The argument for returning greater authority to states has gained substantial momentum. The next challenge is proving that states can use that authority wisely.

Decentralization was never meant to be an escape from responsibility. Properly understood, it is a demand for greater responsibility — closer to the people, more responsive to local conditions and ultimately more accountable for results.

If states cannot deliver upward mobility, civic stability and educational competence, then the case for decentralization weakens. But if they can, this may yet become one of the great renewal stories of American public life.

In the past year, major contracts for the federally funded Comprehensive Centers and Regional Educational Laboratories have been canceled, then reinstated. Calling the structure of Comprehensive Centers “duplicative” and “confusing,” the U.S. Department of Education solicited public comment on a redesign. The 2027 budget proposal released by the White House in April zeros out both Comprehensive Centers and RELs entirely.Ìę 

Watching this unfold with concern are state education agencies—the primary recipients of this expertise on how to comply with federal laws and improve education outcomes. We recently interviewed state agency leaders in 14 states to hear about their experience with federal technical assistance: What works? What doesn’t? What can they not afford to lose? Our sample is not nationally representative, and the Department of Education is conducting its own broader need-sensing. But offers a ground-level view that can help inform the choices ahead. 

Leaders most often named three functions of federal technical assistance as valuable and not easily replaced.  

The first: providing specialized expertise to help implement the most effective instructional practices. Smaller agencies, in particular, lack staff experts on topics such as evidence-based literacy instruction or supporting students with dyslexia. They also lack the resources to evaluate whether changes in practice are occurring in schools. “I can count on one hand the number of PhDs we have, and I think it’s two,” one leader told us. “We just don’t have the capacity to dig into the issues that we know we want to.” 

The second was cross-state networking. Technical assistance providers often broker connections between individuals in similar roles across state lines, connections that leaders would not have made on their own. This creates opportunities to learn from one another and exchange promising practices. “It is completely a siloed job out here in our region,” one said, “and having access to [other] people who are doing the work is the biggest benefit.”  

The third was providing authoritative guidance on compliance with federal law that is specific to states’ own systems, staff and rules. This function matters especially in the context of efforts to give more autonomy to states. If states are going to take on greater responsibility for how federal education funds are spent, they will need timely, expert help navigating complex requirements in federal laws — which remain in place even as other aspects of education policy are largely “returned to the states.” 

Given the restructuring and budget proposals, there is real uncertainty about what technical assistance will look like when the dust settles. Leaders we spoke with provided caveats about some of the ideas that have been floated and suggested improvements they would like to see. 

Some expressed frustration with bureaucratic delays in Education Department processes — particularly around selecting providers and initiating new projects. Yet they were still skeptical about the idea of giving each state funds to contract for its own technical assistance. “If I’ve got a million bucks, and I want to build this thing, requests for information go out today, it’s likely the first opportunity that that work begins is probably at least a year out,” one leader said. “This is state procurement; that’s the rule, not the exception.”  

State leaders also worried that direct contracting would fragment the national expertise and cross-state coordination a federal system provides. They preferred centralized systems more responsive to states’ priorities over a mandate to “do it yourself.” 

The ongoing push to hand education functions to other agencies, some leaders cautioned, would result in more complexity, not less. “Instead of having five contacts at ED, we’re going to have two contacts at the Department of Labor
 [another at] Health and Human Services
 [another at] Commerce,” one said. “I don’t actually think it’s going to create more efficiencies.” 

Other state agency leaders wanted the federal government to lead more boldly on evidence-based practices. The Department of Education, one told us, “has never really put their stake in the ground on what is good instruction, what is good assessment, what are good materials.”  

In all, the state leaders we interviewed would welcome reforms that cut red tape and give them more voice in shaping the support they receive. At the same time, they wanted to retain an infrastructure that can deliver specialized research support, cross-state leadership, and state-specific compliance guidance.  

As the decision point nears, their experience offers a roadmap for getting the details right — one grounded in the daily realities of running a state education system.

But one line in the department’s own should give parents and policymakers pause. It says the department “would not establish goals and performance indicators” for the MEGA program. 

If Washington wants to throw a sprawling set of K-12 priorities in one pot, it needs to say how taxpayers are supposed to know whether the meal was worth the bill.

At its heart, MEGA would consolidate programs into a single state formula grant, with at least 25% reserved for literacy and 25% for mathematics.

That matters because the programs include support for teacher development, after-school programs, state assessments, homeless students, rural schools, school safety, magnet schools, civics, arts education and family engagement. 

All are important programs that are being compressed into a budget that sets aside huge chunks for reading and math and leaves less room for everything else. And once those line items disappear into a single grant, the public will have a harder time seeing what states funded, what they skipped and what any of it bought.

That is a strange place to economize, because the federal cost of keeping score is tiny. Public schools spent $818.2 billion in current expenditures in fiscal year 2023, according to the latest . Before any of the proposed cuts take effect, the main federal testing-and-data lines totaled , , and . That is $694.8 million all told, or about 85 cents for every $1,000 schools spend.

And yet that sliver buys some of the most important information in American education. As Robin Lake wrote, the newest were alarming and pandemic recovery remains uneven. Âé¶čŸ«Æ·’s interactive on widening achievement gaps shows lower-performing students falling further behind in nearly every state. These are precisely the kinds of problems that become visible only because the federal government mandated metrics.

To be fair, federal education policy has accumulated layers of programs, rules and paperwork; and there is a legitimate argument for giving states more discretion. But even stronger advocates of local autonomy than I have argued for a truer national yardstick so that flexibility does not become opacity. Simpler funding and clearer public evidence belong together.

The Department’s own documents underscore this contradiction. Under the MEGA proposal, states and districts would still be expected to meet federal reporting requirements under . But the new grant itself would arrive without its own goals or indicators, even as the administration describes it as an “evidence-based” investment in literacy and numeracy. 

Some of the programs being consolidated currently have specific purposes and, in some cases, performance measures of their own. , for instance, are explicitly targeted to literacy and report performance information. Under MEGA, that specificity would give way to a much broader grant with no specified performance indicators.

This is especially hard to justify because the budget would not only merge programs but also hollow out dedicated measurement lines. A federal line for state assessments would even as states are still expected to keep testing and reporting. The budget would cut federal education statistics from and reduce NAEP and the National Assessment Governing Board from . 

MEGA is still only a budget request, and Congress rejected similar cuts last year. But proposals like this matter because they reveal what Washington now considers the tiny slice of education spending focused on accountability as dispensable. Programs such as school safety, rural education, homeless students and family engagement would have to compete inside the unreserved share of MEGA. 

If the administration believes states can do more with fewer federal silos, then it should welcome a short public scorecard showing where the money went and what improved.

That scorecard need not be complicated. Congress could require states to publish their MEGA plans in a common format and report a short, comparable set of outcomes for reading, math, attendance, graduation and subgroup performance. None of that would prevent flexibility. It would simply ensure that outcomes remain visible. No one should have to reverse-engineer state budgets to find out whether a grant marketed as a literacy investment actually strengthened reading outcomes.

The administration says MEGA would move decision-making closer to home. Fine. But if the money moves closer to home, the metrics should move with it. Policymakers and researchers need a short public scorecard and a common reporting template. If MEGA is going to remake federal schooling, it can do what schools ask of children every day. Namely, show your work.

A private meeting between the Senate education committee and Education Secretary Linda McMahon was canceled Wednesday after Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat, invited the press to listen in. “I was unwilling to accept the notion that the discussion of matters of this magnitude, that matter so much to Virginians, could only be behind closed doors,” he told reporters.

He said he was willing to back down if the secretary would commit to appearing before the committee within the next six weeks. In December, Democrats to participate in a hearing to discuss efforts to shut down the Department of Education, but that hasn’t happened. Following passage of the 2026 budget in January, Congress asked to meet regularly with officials for updates on the interagency agreements with other agencies, but Kaine added that he’s unaware if those have taken place.

“In my view,” he said, “the secretary and other leaders have pursued a strategy that is unlawful in taking programs within the Department of Education that are statutory in nature and sort of willy nilly ending them, shrinking them or handing them over to other agencies.”

In , GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the committee, said “Democrats will not dictate the terms of today’s meeting and have lost the chance to speak to the Secretary today.”

McMahon hasn’t appeared before the committee since her confirmation hearing over a year ago. On X, : “It’s disappointing that instead of a productive conversation about the state of our nation’s students and the steps we’re taking at the Department of Education to reverse this trend and break up the bureaucracy, this became about producing another media clip for MSNBC.”

It was only three months ago that Congress the Trump administration’s last attempt to slash education spending and roll an array of programs into a block grant.

From the reception that some members of the Senate Appropriations Committee gave U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Tuesday, it appeared not much has changed. 

Both Republicans and Democrats grilled the secretary over the Trump administration’s plan to cut funding for rural schools and programs that help low-income students enter and complete college. 

Consolidating $220 million for rural education with 16 other programs — including literacy grants, education for homeless students and afterschool programs — into a $2 billion Make Education Great Again grant program would “undermine the goals of helping our K through 12 schools,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the committee, told McMahon. “Protecting rural schools and rural communities has always been one of my top priorities.” 

Throughout the two-hour hearing, McMahon defended the president’s $76.5 billion , saying that although “it is a reduction,” the block grant proposal — a long time goal for conservatives — would give states more say over how to spend federal dollars. The so-called MEGA grant program will prioritize reading and math, McMahon said, and “unleash momentous opportunity for every child to realize their God-given potential.”

The budget would maintain funding for Title I, serving high-poverty schools, at $18.4 million, and boost spending for students with disabilities by over $500 million. 

But the proposal includes a 35% cut to the Office for Civil Rights and eliminates some programs completely. Those include $428 million in services for migrant children and what is known as TRIO, a batch of programs that prepare students for higher education as early as middle school. 

“I oppose the administration’s proposal to 
 eliminate a program that enjoys robust support and has made such a difference in the lives of children,” Collins said, noting that three of her staff members would not have attended college without TRIO.

She was among the six Republicans and six Democrats who sent McMahon earlier this month objecting to how the department has altered two of the TRIO grants to direct students toward the workforce instead of college. 

“College is not the only solution for everyone,” McMahon told the members.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, cited data showing that low-income, high school students who participate in Upward Bound are more than twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than their peers who don’t participate. 

“The stats from these programs are pretty damn impressive,” he said. 

Even Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, who has authored that would eliminate the Education Department, called TRIO a “sensitive area” and urged McMahon to consider the committee’s concerns. 

Other Republicans praised the secretary for continuing efforts to shut down the department in the face of extensive criticism.

“You are so cool, literally and figuratively,” said Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. “They call you names, and you just ignore them.”

‘50 years of progress’

To some Democrats, McMahon has also turned her back on parents who don’t want to see special education offloaded to another agency. The secretary said her team still hasn’t decided what would happen to programs that fall under the Individuals with Disabilities Act. Some might go to the Department of Labor, while others could go to the Department of Health and Human Services, she said.

“I’ve gotten a petition from thousands of parents, educators, advocates who are concerned that will really undermine 50 years of progress in making sure the rights of children and students with disabilities are met,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, ranking member of the committee.

Both Murray and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut clashed with McMahon over the way her staff has handled civil rights enforcement. 

“How do you defend that not a single child in Connecticut got a positive resolution from the Department of Education for their discrimination claims?” Murphy asked her. “Seventy of them had disability claims.”

While he’s not on the committee, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent, released a calling McMahon’s OCR “the least productive in over a decade.” The document notes that the office reached “zero resolution agreements for students facing serious traumatic incidents including sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion, restraint, racial harassment and discriminatory school discipline.”

He cited a January government watchdog report showing that putting OCR staff on paid leave last year, after she tried to fire them, cost taxpayers at least $38 million. 

McMahon insisted that the administration was ramping up efforts to address such complaints and seemed confused that the president calls for a $49 million cut to OCR, bringing the budget to $91 million.

“That’s a floor number,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll have the ability to increase that number.”

She ordered OCR staff on leave to return in December to address a backlog of cases, and is supervisors and attorneys for regional offices. An internal memo, shared with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, shows the regional directors would go to Denver, Seattle and the D.C. offices. But according to an OCR attorney, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, there have been “lots of departures” among those McMahon brought back. 

‘Overdue for a debate’

Some who watched the exchanges between McMahon and the committee Tuesday were struck by the level of bipartisanship over the TRIO program.

“It shows the kind of Congressional support these programs have built up over many years, and the strong constituencies they have behind them,” said Maureen Tracey-Mooney, associate director of FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank. Previously, she led K-12 policy development for the Biden White House.

She added that the programs that McMahon aims to wrap into the MEGA program “focus on the most vulnerable student groups.” 

Those would include students who need after-school care and are currently served by the 21st Century Community Learn Centers program. 

“What do you do once they leave the classroom when they’re so young and they can’t obviously take care of themselves at home?” asked Republican Sen. Shelley Capito of West Virginia.

McMahon responded that it would be up to states to decide whether after-school programs are a priority for them.“We’re certainly overdue for a debate about how to best support our nation’s students,” Tracey-Mooney said. “But I think we are unlikely to see a rigorous engagement in Congress with these ideas through the budget process.”

Last fall, U.S. Department of Education officials that transferring major K-12 programs to the Department of Labor would be “more difficult” than its earlier move of career-and-technical education programs to that agency.

They’re not even going to try this year. 

To the relief of state leaders and education advocates, the department told education chiefs Friday that they would continue to access millions of dollars in Title I and other “formula” grants under the Every Student Succeeds Act through the system that’s already familiar to state staff. 

“We have heard your concerns,” Kirstin Baesler, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, told chiefs on Friday. The pause on handing that responsibility over to the Labor Department means districts won’t need to worry about funds arriving in time to plan for next school year — a situation that caught schools off guard last summer when the administration held up funding for a month.

Sticking with the Education Department’s system, Baesler wrote, would give everyone involved “more time to collaborate on procedures, processes and training to ensure states are set up to successfully receive and draw down formula funds.” 

In recent weeks Education Secretary Linda McMahon and former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez DeRemer have jointly announced four smaller grant competitions related to , school leadership, and charter schools. Those funds will flow through a Labor Department grant platform. But some observers suggest the department’s decision to hang on to its largest K-12 program is an acknowledgement that the transition hasn’t been smooth. Title I serves roughly 25 million students.

“That’s an important milestone to miss and a sign that the partnership has been rocky and poorly executed,” said Braden Goetz, a senior policy adviser at New America, a left-of-center think tank. He previously directed the policy and research team focusing on career, technical and adult education at the Education Department, the first office to be transferred to the Labor Department.

State officials reported numerous complications last year in trying to access CTE funds, like error messages in the system. The Illinois State Department of Education waited several weeks to get its funding and spokeswoman Lindsay Record said communication from the Department of Labor often came “with little notice and without the benefit of the Department of Education’s expertise in overseeing education programs.”  

States don’t want a repeat of that situation when they try to pull down roughly $28 billion in funds this summer. 

Competitive grants, like the ones McMahon and Chavez-DeRemer recently announced, are one thing. But Title I and other formula programs for all states “are a different, and much larger and more essential, responsibility altogether,” said Amy Loyd, president and CEO of All4Ed, an advocacy group. 

The Rhode Island Department of Education was another agency that experienced difficulties using the Labor Department’s system last year. Spokesman Victor Morente said Commissioner AngĂ©lica Infante-Green appreciates Baesler allowing “additional time for preparedness” with the formula funds, but added that “further clarity on how the new interagency plans will be implemented is absolutely necessary to avoid disruption and confusion related to funding concerns.”

Along with state officials, staff within the Education Department “persistently communicated” to leaders that moving to Labor’s grant system “would cause significant problems for states and students,” said Rachel Gittleman, president of the union representing department employees.Ìę

Baesler said she would discuss the matter further with chiefs when she meets with them virtually May 7.

House committee vote

Congress also expressed concerns last year with the batch of “interagency agreements” McMahon has initiated as she works to eliminate the department. Members warned that the actions would “create inefficiencies” and “cause delays and administrative challenges.”

The agreements are illegal according to a group of states and districts that have the dismantling of the department. But on Tuesday, the House education committee took the first step toward writing those agreements into law. 

The Republican majority passed a bill that formally moves adult education programs to the Labor Department. Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, who chairs the committee, said the move makes it easier for adults to “move from basic skills to training to employment within a more coordinated system.”

Goetz disagreed. In , he said taking the program out of the Education Department changes it into “a funnel to low-wage jobs” and turns it over to those without expertise in reading and math.

Even so, aside from Baesler’s Friday announcement, he doesn’t expect the administration to slow down its work to distribute education programs to other agencies. Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation this week, following that she used Labor funds for personal trips and had an affair with an employee, could even accelerate the process, he said.

Savannah Newhouse, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, dismissed the idea that Chavez-DeRemer’s actions got in the way of carrying out President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the department. 

“Suggesting one departure would affect these partnerships misunderstands how they’re structured,” she said. “These partnerships are with agencies best equipped to manage federal education programs without disruption.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just very loose’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘RŸ±Čő°ì-Čč±č±đ°ùČő±đ’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sacramento City Unified and La Mesa-Spring Valley school districts and Taft College in California are among six educational institutions in the U.S. that had civil rights settlements terminated by the U.S. Department of Education on Monday, according to the 

The agreements, negotiated by previous administrations, were meant to uphold protections for transgender students. Now that they have been terminated, the colleges and school districts are no longer obligated to continue measures such as faculty training or allowing students to use the bathrooms, names or pronouns that align with their gender identity, the Associated Press reported.

The termination of the agreements is an effort to enforce President Donald Trump’s executive order that the government recognize only a person’s sex assigned at birth. 

In Sacramento City Unified, that means the district will no longer have to abide by a 2024 settlement that requires it to provide training on Title IX policies to school administrators, teachers guidance counselors and school resource officers, according to the  

The settlement stems from a 2022 complaint by a transgender student who said a teacher refused to use his preferred pronouns and that an administrator also referred to him incorrectly. The Office for Civil Rights, under the Biden administration, agreed with the student and directed the school district to take corrective measures, according to The Bee.

Sacramento City Unified said Monday it “remains committed to the support of our LGBTQ+ students and staff.”

The district won’t decide whether to rescind the policies until it learns whether it will impact its federal funding, according to The Bee. The district faces a $170 million budget deficit and threats of state takeover.

La Mesa-Spring Valley Unified Superintendent David Feliciano told the  that the decision would have no effect on district policies and procedures.

“We remain committed to ensuring a safe and supportive learning environment for all students,” he said.

Iowa’s governor said the approval would result in less time spent on administrative duties, allowing educators to put more resources and time back into the classroom.

Other states have pointed to the of having flexible accountability and assessment systems that reflect local priorities, foster innovation and empower local decision-making, rather than adhering strictly to federal mandates. But some education leaders, such as the , worry that if states ultimately establish 50 distinct accountability and improvement models, students’ access to learning accommodations and opportunities will vary based on where they live and learn. Academic outcomes can depend on the availability of tutoring, advanced coursework and enrichment, special education services, assistive technology and other supports.

As states consider the opportunities that waivers present for greater flexibility in using federal funds, they should consider lessons from the recent past. The pandemic-era Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds were a lifeline for schools, but they also exposed critical gaps in states’ approaches to innovation and evaluation. While ESSER funds enabled rapid response and recovery, the program lacked robust provisions for evaluating which strategies worked and why. As a result, there is limited evidence about which interventions — such as summer school, tutoring or targeted supports — were the most effective. 

For the department and states, the lesson is clear: Rigorous evaluation and continuous improvement must be embedded in the waiver and experimentation process from the start. States should clearly show how their plans connect to better student outcomes, and the department should assist them in these efforts. With more flexible financial strategies in place, states could find new ways to combine funds to reach their goals and learn from one another as they develop innovative approaches. Most importantly, however, states should ensure their investments include research and evaluation components, so they know what works and what does not.

Even as it cedes some control, the department has an important role to play in ensuring the following elements are in place: 

1. Purposeful Experimentation: States should be empowered to innovate, but with the expectation that they will rigorously evaluate new approaches and share what they learn. This will help ensure that successful strategies can be replicated and adapted elsewhere. Existing investments can be used toward these goals. For example, the Regional Educational Laboratories, the Comprehensive Center Network and the Educational Innovation and Research program help schools build their data-using skills and provide guidance on evidence-based practices.
2. Capacity Building: Many states will need expert guidance to design and implement effective reforms. Federal investment should focus on making lasting improvements, not just short-term fixes. The comprehensive network, for example, is a government-funded organization of regional centers that help states design, test and strengthen new ideas and strategies, and guide policymakers, state education agencies and educators in building the skills needed to improve teaching and learning.
3. Collaboration Over Isolation: The government should continue to facilitate collaboration among states, ensuring that innovations and lessons learned are shared widely. This may be done by providing insight on how to launch and sustain new programs and develop continuous improvement strategies, or by strengthening ongoing cross-state work through grants, technical assistance, conferences and national networks that help align standards, share data and improve student outcomes.

States have always been constitutionally responsible for providing public education, though federal policy — since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was enacted in 1965 — has incentivized states to serve disadvantaged students and promoted greater consistency in educational quality nationwide. 

Now, the department is signaling a willingness to let states experiment. But to avoid repeating the missed opportunities of ESSER, federal and state leaders must prioritize evaluation, capacity building and collaboration. Only then can the flexibility presented through these waivers lead to lasting improvements in educational excellence. 

After a , the department’s Office for Civil Rights said the district must create a new division focusing on students with disabilities, improve transportation services for those students, and take steps to better identify and accommodate their needs.

“The district must take immediate action to remedy their violations and protect the rights of current and future students to a free and appropriate public education,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement. 

The proposed resolution agreement also requires the district to train staff, including bus drivers, on any updated policies. If officials don’t agree to the terms, OCR “may initiate enforcement,” the announcement said. 

The district, which said from the outset that it would cooperate with the department, is “carefully reviewing” the findings, a spokesman said, adding that OCR makes important points about providing clear information to parents and getting their children to and from school. 

Neither the department nor the district, however, has made the full results of the investigation available.

With OCR largely focusing its resources on investigating districts that allow students to compete in sports or use bathrooms based on gender identity, the D.C. investigation is one of the few disability-related cases it has launched and completed since President Donald Trump returned to office. A from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which sparked the probe, found that the district has one of highest rates of special education complaints in the nation. An advisory committee to the commission determined that young children in the district were under-identified for special education services or accommodations for disabilities and that parents were often encouraged to file lawsuits in order to get their children help. 

“That obviously favors those who have means, can hire an attorney and know how to get through the system,” said Craig Leen, former vice chair of the advisory committee. A civil rights attorney who served in the Labor Department during Trump’s first term, he also struggled to get services for his daughter. Now a senior at a charter school in the district, she has autism and an intellectual disability.

The bus was often late or didn’t arrive at all, creating disruptions to his daughter’s routine, Leen said. Since the investigation began, he said he’s seen improvements. The bus comes on time, and to keep parents updated, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which oversees transportation for students with disabilities in both DCPS and charter schools in the city, is developing a bus .

The district, according to the spokesman, is working with the state agency to “improve real‑time visibility into bus delays to make certain students do not lose instructional time or access to required services.”

Leen said he’s not concerned about Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s plans to transfer OCR or the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services to another federal agency as she continues efforts to phase out the department. 

“My main concern is that they have a designated agency addressing special education,” he said. 

Many of the advisory committee’s recommendations were based on testimony from Maria Blaeuer, director of programs and outreach with Advocates for Justice and Education, Inc., The organization trains parents and provides to families who haven’t been able to get services for their children.

The organization is “thankful that OCR is paying attention to the many challenges that students with disabilities in the District of Columbia are facing,” Blaeuer said. But she added that it would be premature to comment on the department’s announcement “without access to the actual determination” or until a resolution has been reached.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loyalty question

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

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

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

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

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

But they didn’t do anything to stop it. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family advocates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This would be a mistake.

Students and families cannot afford to wait. Scores on the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress, and, attendance and engagement are all at historic lows, confirming what educators and many families already knew: Student performance and well-being continue to decline. Those learning losses will continue to have profound impacts both on the students themselves and on the nation’s broader economic prosperity. Meanwhile, decades of top-down reform efforts have yielded disappointingly little improvement, despite massive investments and constant policy churn.

State policymakers have a better path forward, one that doesn’t depend on federal direction: creating the conditions for bottom-up innovation to emerge, spread and scale within their own education systems.

As the Hoover Institution’s has documented, the current education infrastructure actively prevents innovation from emerging, spreading and generating measurable improvements in learner outcomes. Years of investment in top-down innovation and reform have yielded many lessons but little actual progress.

A new white paper from the Hoover Institution reveals why this approach matters. “,” synthesizes decades of evidence on education innovation, as well as organizational, network and diffusion theory. By dividing the growth of innovation into three clear phases — start, spread, and sustain — the paper’s framework illustrates clear actions and decision points in which policymakers and education leaders can either help or hinder innovation.  

We know that the most scalable and sustainable improvements emerge from the needs and problems that practitioners define and from the solutions they help develop. Yet, as a finds, it remains “very rare for an innovation to get diffused within a school and it is much rarer that it gets diffused between schools.”

The framework identifies obstacles that prevent good ideas. At the earliest stages where bottom-up ideas might start, rigid bureaucracies foster risk-averse cultures among educators. Decades of emphasis on standardized test scores have conditioned teachers to avoid failure, making new initiatives seem high-risk, low-reward. Many principals preemptively block innovation due to perceived regulatory barriers even though research shows these barriers are often negotiable or misunderstood.

When innovations do emerge, they struggle to spread. Teachers attempting to implement new practices face unfamiliar partnerships with district administrators, intermediaries and policymakers; they receive little preparation or support for managing these relationships. Schools, already overwhelmed with mandates and regulations, lack the basic administrative infrastructure and tools to disseminate ideas effectively. 

Perhaps most critically, the education sector lacks a robust knowledge ecosystem to capture what works, determine when replication is more sensible than adaptation and analyze whether and how an innovation fits in different local contexts.

At the scale phase, accountability systems emphasizing narrow metrics actively discourage ambitious teaching. Policymakers tend to be “failure-avoidant, linear thinkers” while innovations need trial-and-error cycles. The bias toward quick wins denies innovations time to demonstrate impact.

The result? A system where constant informal change happens in classrooms daily, but meaningful and potentially impactful innovations rarely spread beyond individual teachers or schools, and students’ outcomes continue to stagnate or decline.

The good news is state legislatures don’t need permission from Washington to address these barriers. The framework identifies specific policy levers that state lawmakers control:

• Invest in knowledge ecosystems. Bottom-up innovations often fail to expand, not because they don’t work, but because there’s no infrastructure to capture what works, why it works and how to adapt it to new contexts. States should fund networks connecting innovative practitioners, support rapid-cycle evaluation and incentivize “fail-forward” learning. Most knowledge sharing networks are led by intermediaries, such as NASBE and KnowledgeWorks’s,Ìę , in Michigan and NHLI’s. One state example comes from Nevada, where the Department of Education and the Center for the Future of Learning jointly lead the to support pilots, create tools for community engagement, and develop case studies to inform practice.

• Genuinely engage educators in policymaking. Innovations spread when they align with teachers’ values and address immediate classroom needs. Yet teachers are routinely shut out of policy development. States should remove procedural barriers and invest in the time and capacity needed for front-line educators to shape policy, not token teacher advisory councils, but an authentic partnership. Examples such as Georgia’s brings 21 classroom teachers annually into direct engagement with state and federal policymakers; and North Carolina’s has graduated over 800 fellows who continue to influence education policy statewide.Ìę

• Support flexible implementation. Innovations that require strict fidelity struggle to spread; those that offer clear principles with room for local adaptation thrive. State policy should embrace “tight-but-loose” frameworks that maintain core commitments while allowing schools to adapt. Part of this flexibility entails states offering stronger scaffolds for novice teachers while giving more seasoned practitioners greater latitude to exercise professional judgment. Since 2016, has taken this approach for supporting personalized, competency-based change.

• Provide adequate, sustained resources. Unlike businesses, which can attract investment capital, educators must develop their own infrastructure before scaling. Federal funding historically has been scarce and short-term as in the case of the grants. School-level innovators often come to rely  on local or regional education foundations to provide seed funding for new models. In 2015, for example, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation to support innovation efforts across five New England school districts. For over a decade, North Carolina has offered smaller innovation grants as part of its ongoing and New York State offers that develop, implement, and share innovative programs. Generous and sustained support can rarely be counted on, but states can fill this gap by ensuring innovations have the financial runway needed to develop tools, train educators and demonstrate impact over time.

Do we want to spend another session waiting for Washington to solve problems it hasn’t solved in decades? Or are we ready to build infrastructure that enables teachers and school leaders — the people closest to students — to innovate, learn and improve?

The evidence is clear. Bottom-up innovation, when properly supported, can transform education. States have the authority and the tools to create supportive conditions. What they need now is political will. 

Our students can’t wait for federal certainty. State policymakers should give them something better: a system designed to foster, capture and spread the innovations that will actually improve their learning. The framework exists. The session is starting. It’s time for states to lead.

Over $120 billion in federal were expiring, leaving school leaders and tutoring providers uncertain whether programs would continue. The incoming administration was focused on slashing Department of Education spending, not issuing new grants. 

“We didn’t know if this administration would put anything into education,” said Loeb, a Stanford University professor who . “We were worried that all of the experimentation that had been going on and that access to tutoring would drop precipitously.” 

That didn’t happen.

When researchers, district leaders and tutoring providers convened earlier this month in Washington, it was clear that worries over tutoring being nothing more than a pandemic fad had turned to optimism. A growing number of states expect districts to integrate tutoring into the school day and have committed funding and staff to make it happen. Several require tutoring for students scoring below grade level and are vetting providers so districts don’t have to. And in a recent round of literacy , totaling $256 million, federal education officials signaled that access to tutoring should be a fixture in the nation’s schools. 

“High-dosage tutoring has evolved from a concept into a proven, evidence-based strategy and then into a reality for thousands of students in thousands of schools,” Kirsten Baesler, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, told attendees at the annual Accelerate conference. “It is a foundational strategy for improving student outcomes.” 

Even before the new federal grants were announced, a by Loeb’s team showed that nearly half of all states either offer tutoring grants or use their school finance formula to help districts pay for programs. 

Arkansas, which she described as “strategic and ambitious,” is one example. Its 2023 LEARNS Act created two tutoring programs.

One provides grants to . To measure the return on investment, the state’s now flags whether a student receives tutoring during the school day.

“If policymakers want results, they have to invest in the structures to get those results,” Amy Counts, director of curriculum projects at the state education agency, said during one of the Accelerate sessions. 

Another Arkansas initiative up to $1,500 to spend on tutoring if their children don’t meet reading standards. Initially, teachers weren’t fond of the idea that families received the extra money instead of schools.

“They didn’t push the program because of that. But we said, ‘If you help parents use that program, that benefits you,’ ” Counts said. The other challenge, she said. was that some parents of struggling readers wouldn’t spend the money “because they’ve never had to engage in securing services for their child.”

To Accelerate President Nakia Towns, the federal grants represent an important shift. 

“Look Mama, we made it,” she told attendees.

Accelerate received one of those 24 grants to work with the Oklahoma State Department of Education. They’ll test how factors like group size, the frequency of sessions and whether tutoring is delivered virtually or in person affects results. 

Seven of the awards went directly to state education agencies that are working to scale up tutoring programs, especially in rural areas. Loeb’s team, for example, will evaluate Arkansas’ efforts to , a virtual program. The study will also compare results when tutors are college students versus trained educators.

‘Important step forward’

Accelerate has launched some of that state-level activity through its , and this legislative session, CEO Kevin Huffman is tracking 12 tutoring-related bills in eight states. They include:

• A that would require high-impact tutoring for students with a reading or math “deficiency.”

• A to establish a competitive grant program for tutoring.

• An that would require for students scoring at the lowest levels in math and reading. The Senate passed the bill, but it’s still pending before a House education committee.

• A that would expand an existing program for elementary students through eighth grade.

“All of this feels like an important step forward,” Huffman told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. At the conference, he said “momentum is different” because states aren’t supporting tutoring just because they have one-time federal dollars to spend.

One policy expert recently questioned whether tutoring has produced “too little bang for too much buck.” In , Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said he hasn’t been able to “muster much enthusiasm” for tutoring and suggested that it has been an insufficient way to address the “disastrous aftermath of COVID-era school closures.”

Loeb agreed that while pandemic relief funds allowed states and districts to test different models, those early examples didn’t always produce gains. Some states and districts moved too fast, and implementation challenges, like infrequent sessions and high turnover of tutors, hindered students’ progress. Research shows that a mismatch between the material tutors cover and the curriculum in students’ regular classes can also contribute to poor results.

“Some of it worked, and some of it didn’t,” Loeb said. 

But during this month’s event, Antoinette Mitchell, state superintendent for the District of Columbia, said investments in tutoring have paid off. Her office, which oversees both the District of Columbia Public Schools and charters, contracts with CitySchools Collaborative, a nonprofit, to manage tutoring logistics. It handles scheduling and finds space for tutoring sessions so principals don’t have to. 

, more than 42% of DCPS students scored at the highest levels in reading, exceeding pre-pandemic results. In math, the percentage of students meeting expectations grew by over 4 percentage points, the largest jump since 2015. With one of the federal grants, CitySchools Collaborative will expand its work into Maryland and Virginia. 

More recent research findings, about the importance of offering tutoring and , have also allowed districts to learn from past mistakes. 

“You can actually do this at a decent scale,” Loeb said, “and give students this personalized attention.”

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

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

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

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

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

Other states still have a long way to go. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

A need for better data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Get them there first’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the Trump administration decimated the Education Department’s civil rights office last year, thousands of students waiting for relief from alleged racial and sexual discrimination in schools were left to languish. 

It turns out the move to sideline half of the Office for Civil Rights staff , according to a new report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. Nearly a year later, the Education Department still can’t say whether it saved a dime. 

GAO estimates the decision to place civil rights staffers on paid administrative leave, while simultaneously shuttering most of its regional offices, cost upwards of $38 million for the salaries and benefits of staffers who were kept home. 

“Other costs,” the government watchdog noted, “are unknown.” 

Without a full accounting of costs and savings, the watchdog concluded, the the shakeup improved efficiency, saved money or better served students — the very reasons used to justify the cuts in the first place. 

In the news

The latest in Trump’s immigration crackdown: Minnesota school districts and the state’s teachers union filed a lawsuit demanding reinstatement of a longstanding policy against immigration enforcement activities near schools and other “sensitive locations.” | 

• A Minnesota 11-year-old and her mother will be reunited with their family after being held for nearly a month in a Texas detention center after getting picked up by immigration agents on their way to school. | 
  
• The horrifying truth behind the immigration arrest of 5-year-old Liam Ramos: It wasn’t an accident. | 
  
  • The Columbia Heights school district where Liam is enrolled closed for a day this week after officials received a “racially and politically motivated” bomb threat. | 
    
• ‘None of this is OK’: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz demanded in a letter that the federal government disclose how many of the state’s children have been detained as part of the immigration enforcement surge — and pleaded for agents to stay away from schools and bus stops. | 
  
• Cities could be compelled to cooperate with federal immigration officials in order to access federal funds for investigations into internet crimes against children, a lawsuit alleges. | 

Big Tech in the spotlight: As TikTok and Snap settle lawsuits centered on the damaging effects of social media on children, Meta and YouTube are gearing up for closely watched trials. The tech companies face allegations the apps were designed to keep kids hooked despite known harms to their well-being. | 

• Amazon reported hundreds of thousands of photos of child sexual abuse in its artificial intelligence training data — but the company’s refusal to say where it came from could hinder police efforts to track down perpetrators. |  
  
• As Democrat- and Republican-led states pass rules designed to protect children from the potential harms of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, an executive order by President Donald Trump gives the attorney general authority to sue states with consumer protection laws that stand in the way of the country’s “global AI dominance.” | 
  
• The head of the Federal Trade Commission came out as a strong proponent of contentious online age-verification rules, arguing “it offers a way to unleash American innovation without compromising the health and well-being of America’s most important resource: its children.” | 

A North Carolina woman faces criminal charges after she allegedly kicked a pregnant school resource officer in the stomach while refusing to leave her child’s elementary school. | 

‘It’s evil’: The National Institutes of Health failed to protect genetic data of more than 20,000 U.S. children from misuse by a fringe group of researchers who used the records to claim intellectual superiority of white people over other races. | 

Two Florida teenagers accused of plotting to kill a classmate will be charged as adults with attempted premeditated murder. | 

ICYMI @The74

Emotional Support

Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Eamonn Fitzmaurice and his son Ellis  to offer a few treats and scratches. “I’m a dog person,” Eamonn tells me, “but the cats were cute.”

When he declared in March 2025 that he wanted the Education Department “closed immediately,” it wasn’t just a sound bite. It was a promise. A promise to dismantle the one system meant to protect the children this country has always underserved: Black children. The ink on the Emancipation Proclamation might be old, but the mindset that fought it never really went away. It just put on another suit.

After emancipation, freed Black families built schools with their own hands. They hired teachers, scraped together funds and insisted that their children would learn to read even if they had to do so in secret. The backlash was swift and violent. White mobs , , and state lawmakers passed inequitable that kept Black students in crumbling classrooms with hand-me-down, tattered books.

By 1980, after decades of states proving they couldn’t or wouldn’t by Black and poor students, the federal government stepped in. President Jimmy Carter created the Education Department to make sure that every child, no matter where they lived or what color they were, had a fair shot at learning.

I think of my grandson, an autistic Black boy with an individualized education plan who depends on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and other federal programs. Without these protections and funding that come from the federal level, the system will fail children like him. States don’t have an excellent track record of protecting students with disabilities, especially Black boys. When we remove federal oversight, we aren’t saving money. We’re sacrificing children.

As a former public school teacher, I’ve seen firsthand what happens when education depends on ZIP codes rather than fairness: Wealthy, mostly white districts keep thriving. Meanwhile, schools that serve Black and brown kids are stuck under leaking ceilings, flipping through worn-out books older than their teachers.

And yet here we are in 2025, watching the federal government try to hand over the keys to the states. Thousands of education workers are out of work, civil rights offices are closed, and the Trump administration appointees have completely gutted oversight.

They’ve shut down seven of the 12 regional offices for the department’s Office for Civil Rights and attempted to lay off employees, only to try to bring back some of those workers. All this chaos means fewer investigations into discrimination, fewer checks on racist discipline policies and fewer protections for Black children who are already suspended and expelled at rates than their white peers.

Now we are supposed to trust states to do the right thing? The same states shouting “local control” are banning DEI programs, censoring Black history and whitewashing textbooks. AP African American Studies. Texas once approved a curriculum that called enslaved people “.” Local control isn’t reform. It’s cultural erasure disguised as policy.

Black children are the first to feel the sting. To this day, our kids attend schools with fewer resources, larger class sizes and outdated materials. Federal programs like Title I and IDEA keep those schools alive. Without them, special education funding dries up, class sizes balloon and talented teachers walk away. Take them away, and you widen that gap on purpose.

When you strip education from federal protection, you don’t get freedom, you get chaos. You get 50 different versions of what a child is worth, determined by 50 governors with 50 different agendas. We’ve seen this movie before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cases before the Supreme Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education Secretary Linda McMahon withdrew the department’s appeal in a federal lawsuit that challenged warning schools against efforts to “preference certain racial groups.” 

In April, she asked states to agreeing to the administration’s view of non-discrimination laws or risk losing federal funds. In , Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher, a district judge for the District of Maryland, called both the letter and the certification requirement “substantively improper.” 

“The administration is entitled to express its viewpoints and to promulgate policies aligned with those viewpoints,” she wrote. “But it must do so within the procedural bounds Congress has outlined. And it may not do so at the expense of constitutional rights.”

Other litigation over the letter and the certification is ongoing.

The department’s tough anti-DEI stance drew a broad mix of reactions. Some Republican state education chiefs welcomed the letter, with Ryan Walters, former Oklahoma superintendent, posting a video of himself signing the form. Blue states refused to sign, while at the district level,  the actions largely sparked confusion over whether they could still hold events related to Black History Month or teach about racism. One Georgia school board and then reinstated it when the court blocked the letter.

The lawsuit, led by American Federation of Teachers, is one of four related to the letter or the threat to withhold funds. The National Education Association, 19 Democratic-led states and the NAACP also challenged the department’s actions. But the department didn’t initially fare well in court. On the same day in late April, Gallagher suspended the letter while two other federal judges blocked enforcement of the certification form.

“With the stroke of a pen, the administration tried to take a hatchet to 60 years of civil rights laws that were meant to create educational opportunity for all kids,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “It took a union to stand in the stead of kids and educators who feared retribution from the government.”

The department did not respond to a request for comment, but its decision in the AFT case doesn’t put the issue to rest.

In the NEA case, the judge has not issued a final ruling, but an remains in place.  The department filed a motion to dismiss the NAACP case last summer, but the court has not yet ruled. The , meanwhile, is set for trial in June. 

While the department was unable to pressure schools through a “dear colleague” letter, it has continued to launch civil rights investigations into districts with diversity and equity initiatives, like Black Student Success Plan. 

Even some conservatives criticized the agency’s use of non-binding guidance to implement policy.

“There are good reasons to be concerned about the capricious use of dear colleague letters. Many of us have been warning about the problems for 15 years now, dating back to Obama’s first term,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Seeing the administration instead rely on the machinery of the Office for Civil Rights is probably a good thing, as that should ensure that this is less about federal diktats than about investigations into specific complaints.”

One year ago today, Trump took the oath of office for a second time and set it all in motion. 

Through executive orders, layoffs and canceled contracts, he and McMahon carried out a frontal assault on a federal agency Congress created in 1979, the U.S. Department of Education.

The nation has experienced “some of the most rapid and likely consequential changes in education policy,” since the mid-1960s, when lawmakers passed the Civil Rights Act and the law creating Title I funding for children in poverty, said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University. Under President George W. Bush, the No Child Left Behind Act further deepened Washington’s involvement in schools.

But those initiatives used the strength of the federal government to expand educational opportunities for poor and minority students, Henig said, while this administration is turning away from a focus on equity.

The gameplan hasn’t always gone smoothly. On three occasions, McMahon has called back staff she fired. The department has frozen and unfrozen funds for programs like afterschool care and suspended long-running research projects. To those who have lost their jobs or seen their civil rights complaints ignored, it’s been a . Others who believe in McMahon’s “” to make the department obsolete say the pain is necessary.

“I realize it has sometimes been messy, but that’s inevitable when the federal role has been built up by special interests over six decades,” said Jim Blew, an Education Department official during Trump’s first term and the co-founder of the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute. McMahon, he said, is “reversing that history by relinquishing power.”

The agenda is somewhat paradoxical. McMahon Washington bureaucrats should get out of the way so education can be “closest to the child.” But the administration has tried to exert more control over districts that resist Trump’s orders. The Office for Civil Rights has launched multiple investigations, threatened to pull funding from states and districts with gender-inclusive policies and curbed efforts to improve achievement among minority students.

Blue states, teachers unions and advocacy groups have fought back in court. A notes more than 20 active cases over the administration’s anti-DEI mandates and eight related to dismantling the department. Several more lawsuits challenge canceled grants and contracts.

Trump’s crackdown on immigration has been one of the more tangible ways the disruption in D.C. has filtered down to local districts. Some children are afraid to come to school or wait for the bus, while high school students have been swept up in immigration raids. 

Interruptions in funding made it hard for states and districts to plan ahead. But some experts say the long-term financial impact of the Trump 2.0 shake-up may be minimal. Superintendents are more concerned about declining enrollment than which federal department is distributing their money, said Marguerite Roza, the director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. 

“The second grader still goes to school. The teacher is still there. The district budget looks pretty much identical to what it did before,” she said. 

In addition to firing staff, McMahon is moving the department’s major functions to other agencies. But the transition of career and technical education programs to the Labor Department has not been without complications, and that program represents just a fraction of the $18 billion budget for Title I, making some state leaders wary of what will come this year.

“If this is some form of experimental policymaking, I know of no parent who wants their child to be used in an experiment,” Eric Davis, chair of the North Carolina State Board of Education, said at a meeting. “This self-inflicted disruption runs counter to the many decades in which the Department of Education was instrumental in improving the education and academic achievement of millions of Americans.”

Here are eight areas where the Trump administration has radically recast the federal role in education in its first 12 months:

The rapidly shrinking Education Department

Eliminating the Department of Education has been a goal of Republicans since President Ronald Reagan first took office in 1981.

They’re closer than ever to reaching it. The agency is now less than it was a year ago as the administration aims to drastically reduce education’s federal footprint.

In addition to the more than 1,300 jobs she cut in March, McMahon slashed 450 positions during the seven-week government shutdown in the fall. Congress and a federal judge forced her to reinstate them. But the moratorium on those layoffs runs out Jan. 30, and some who were targeted by that action expect she’ll try to terminate them again. 

“We’ve never seen an administration so actively hostile to career civil servants,” said one current employee who asked to remain anonymous to protect her job. With more than a decade at the agency, she’s among those who have been reassigned to handle basic tasks. Some with “20-plus years of professional experience are doing things like scheduling rooms.” 

McMahon and others who back the administration’s goal of abolishing the agency say those staffers won’t be missed. But blue states are challenging the layoffs in court, saying the department performs essential functions, from increasing opportunities for disadvantaged students and protecting civil rights to gathering on the state of the nation’s schools. 

As she continues to transfer jobs to other agencies, McMahon will hear from early next month on plans to move services for American Indian and other Native students to the Department of the Interior. Advocates are battling to keep her from moving oversight of special education as well, but at a meeting in December, McMahon maintained, “Nothing shall remain,” said Jennifer Coco, the interim executive director of the Center for Learner Equity, who attended the meeting.

Unless Congress makes those moves stick through legislation, a future administration could reverse them. It’s also unclear whether attempts to reduce staff and rearrange federal oversight “will pass court muster with the many legal challenges underway,” said Patrick McGuinn, a political science and education professor at Drew University in New Jersey.

The year culminated with an event in a small Iowa town in which McMahon granted the state more flexibility to spend $9 million in federal funds. It’s a preview of how the administration wants to distribute all federal education funds, “through no-strings-attached block grants,” said Blew, of the Defense of Freedom Institute.

The department is expected to grant more waivers, and whether Democratic or Republican, most state and local education chiefs are relieved that McMahon wants to reduce paperwork, Blew said. Gustavo Balderas, superintendent of the Beaverton, Oregon, schools, agreed.

“I don’t think you’re going to find a superintendent who’s going to say, ‘Give me more reporting,’ ” he said. 

But some found the news from Iowa underwhelming.

“After all of last year’s public posturing and back-and-forth, it felt like weak sauce,” said Dale Chu, a consultant who focuses on assessment and accountability. It was a “symbolic win for Iowa,” he said, “but the jury’s out as to whether it ultimately makes a difference on student outcomes.”

— Linda Jacobson

Immigration

While the drama unfolds in Washington, Trump’s immigration enforcement actions have hit closer to home. He rolled back longstanding that kept federal immigration agents off school grounds, making K-12 campuses fair game. And despite the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that it is not targeting students or schools, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers have been on or near K-12 campuses across the country ever since, arresting and deporting parents and kids — often at drop-off and pick-up times.

A federal-agent inspired melee at a Minneapolis high school earlier this month — hours after an ICE agent fatally shot an unarmed motorist nearby — prompted a two-day districtwide shutdown. Absenteeism has skyrocketed in heavily patrolled areas throughout the country, and many families have chosen to . Others have joined a nationwide resistance movement.

“Since January 2025, the administration has blanketed communities with ICE agents, which — predictably — has only brought chaos, cruelty and violence to our schools,” said Alejandra VĂĄzquez Baur, a fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “And we anticipate this is just the beginning. This year, education leaders will need to be even more bold to defend their students and the sanctity of the learning environment.”

In some cases, schools and other groups that serve undocumented students have gone underground, scrubbing their locations off their websites and using secure messaging to communicate, fearing any attention from the Trump administration could jeopardize their funding or tax status.

The gutting of the Education Department has left the nation’s 5 million English learners with little oversight — or as to their . The president, who has espoused an English-only agenda, at one point sought to to support these students.

Undocumented immigrants, banned from Head Start, career and technical education programs and adult education last year, have received a temporary reprieve as related lawsuits are decided. Some states, including Florida and Texas, have rescinded in-state college tuition for those here illegally, keeping education — the reason so many immigrants cite for coming to America — out of reach. 

— Jo Napolitano

Students with disabilities 

As the department shrinks, education leaders are especially concerned over how McMahon plans to adhere to the many congressional mandates for oversight of disability services for children in schools.

In December, she told advocates that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Labor Department would most likely be tasked with oversight going forward. That pronouncement means continued uncertainty for schools, said Coco, of the Center for Learner Equity. 

“There is a sense of fear and chaos in schools,” she said. “They’re already operating on razor-thin margins. What they can neither handle nor sustain is more delays. Or the notion that federal reporting is now getting spread across multiple agencies with multiple streams of paperwork.” 

McMahon said she hoped eventually to let states seek waivers freeing them from guidelines on how funding meant for children with disabilities is to be spent, and how school systems will be held accountable for meeting those children’s needs. Adding to the uncertainty: In October, numerous department staffers with the hard-to-acquire expertise needed to oversee services for students with profound disabilities and particular needs were fired. 

Once the on those mass layoffs lifts at the end of this month, advocates hope they won’t be terminated again.

“There is a real disconnect between what’s mandated in law and what’s happening,” said Coco. “People are anxious the other shoe is going to drop.” 

— Beth Hawkins

Civil rights

No area of education policy has been upended more by the Trump administration than civil rights. McMahon gutted the office dedicated to resolving discrimination complaints and has focused its remaining resources on fighting antisemitism and restricting transgender students’ access to women’s sports and bathrooms. 

The department has of racism against Black students, advocates say, even as it an investigation into the Green Bay, Wisconsin, school district for allegedly denying tutoring services to a . Meanwhile, the department is tied up in litigation with and that allow trans students to compete on teams and use facilities consistent with their gender identity. 

Conservatives cheered McMahon’s aggressive posture.

“Parents are overjoyed,” Nicole Neily, president of the advocacy group Defending Education, said on in February, after the Office for Civil Rights launched an investigation into Denver Public Schools for creating . “For this to be a priority of the administration, I think, really sets the tone from the top down.”

But others say the move has left victims of discrimination, bullying or sexual assault without a place to turn. 

The department closed seven of 12 regional OCR offices, including Boston’s, which was handling a complaint against a Massachusetts district where a teacher held a involving two Black fifth graders in 2024. 

The district placed the teacher on leave, but “more should have been done for these children, including assemblies to educate all teachers and children on the horrific impact of slavery,” said Marcie Lipsitt, a Michigan-based advocate who filed the complaint. “It’s been radio silence since.”

McMahon brought back more than 250 laid-off OCR employees in December, but some think their job now is closing complaints rather than investigating. Lipsitt said five that she filed on behalf of students with disabilities have been dismissed in the past month. Sandra Hodgin, CEO of Title IX Consulting Group, said when she asked OCR about cases she was working on, she was told ‘We’re no longer looking at those.’ “

McMahon hasn’t said where she would move OCR if she continues to offload offices to other federal agencies. One calls for the Department of Justice’s civil rights division to absorb it, but Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the National Center for Youth Law and a former DOJ official, sees ahead.

“There’s no staff there, either,” he said.

— Linda Jacobson

LGBTQ and DEI issues

Trump’s policies have affected local school staff as well. His executive orders against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and environmental justice-related work resulted in the elimination of more than $1.5 billion in “divisive” and researching educator effectiveness and retention. In many diverse school systems, the loss of funding meant the immediate shuttering of programs that were graduating large numbers of new educators of color.  

Under the guise of outlawing “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology,” the orders also called for limiting LGBTQ students’ rights and eliminating classroom materials referencing slavery, Native American history and sexual harassment and abuse. U.S. law specifically prohibits federal interference in schools’ choice of classroom topics and materials.

The Department of Education followed up with guidance saying race-conscious policies or initiatives are considered illegal discrimination. Federal officials did not appeal a court order declaring the letter unlawful.   

With 2026 marking the nation’s 250th anniversary, it’s likely the administration will become more deliberate about trying to reshape history curricula, said Andre Perry, a senior Brookings fellow. 

“The first year was about dismantling policy structures,” he said. “The second year will be about putting in place things they deem important. [And] schools are going to have to do a lot of these things.”    

The White House also made good last year on Trump’s campaign promise to curtail the rights of transgender students, issuing an order declaring “sex as an immutable binary biological classification.” The administration then demanded that several states stop letting transgender students play sports, and . Last week, OCR launched into 14 school districts, along with three colleges and the state of Hawaii, over those policies.

“The breadth and scope of what this administration did in just one year was pretty astonishing,” said Naomi Goldberg, executive director of the Movement Advancement Project. “What’s really critical to recognize is how much of it is outside of what agencies typically can do without legislation from Congress, and so much of it violates established case law.”

In 2025, more than 700 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in states throughout the country — but just 90 were enacted, according to the organization’s .

That relatively low legislative success rate may be one reason the groups behind the push appear to be focusing on state-level ballot measures in 2026, said Goldberg. Measures curtailing trans youth access to medical care and sports will potentially go before voters in Colorado, Maine, Missouri and Washington. 

— Beth Hawkins

Head Start

Head Start, the federally funded preschool program, hasn’t been immune to funding disruptions and the administration’s anti-DEI agenda. Officials initially a temporary federal funding freeze. The move led to confusion and closures and served as a warning shot: The early education and support program for low-income children and their families would become a target of Trump’s second term.

Over the next 12 months, the administration continued to delay funding, shuttered five regional offices, fired scores of employees and issued a number of rule changes leading to an ongoing lawsuit. Of particular concern: A ban on any practices perceived to be DEI-related and an unprecedented edict barring enrollment to thousands of kids based on their immigration status. During the prolonged government shutdown, roughly 10,000 kids across 22 programs lost access to services.

Causing further alarm was a  â€” ultimately scrapped — that zeroed out funding for Head Start.

Providers got some relief through court orders pausing some policies, but they say the program’s future under Trump remains precarious. The right-wing Project 2025 playbook, by the president, calls for Head Start’s elimination. Program foes argue that its $12.2 billion budget is bloated, local centers have been caught up in scandal and Head Start does not produce .

Last year was meant to be a 60th anniversary celebration of the War on Poverty-era program, which has reached more than and their families since its inception. Instead, Head Start has weathered the administration’s “death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach,” said Katie Hamm, deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under former President Joe Biden.

She worries that in the coming year, “the attacks on Head Start will continue,” pointing to a number of already-delayed January grants and ramped-up child care fraud investigations in Minnesota and other states. 

— Amanda Geduld

Research

Others are concerned about losing valuable education data and statistics that guide efforts to improve schools. 

In February, with the Department of Government Efficiency’s help, officials canceled dozens of contracts through the Institute for Education Sciences, effectively shutting down the department’s primary knowledge-gathering agency. The following month brought the news that nearly 90% of IES’s workforce had been terminated. 

A year later, plans to restore that research infrastructure are still murky.

The impact on the world of K–12 research was swift, with major federal contractors and dozens of scholars the return of funds and jobs. Dan Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington and frequent recipient of federal research support, said that while he believes the department’s data collection needed to be brought up to date, the “tearing down of the institution” had made improvement harder.

“Best-case scenario, this has been incredibly disruptive,” he said. “Even if you’re not facing cuts, and your project hasn’t just disappeared, there’s a lot of uncertainty about the future of this work.”

After the barrage of withdrawn funding and reductions in force, Washington issued conflicting messages about the future of IES, with Congress proposing the budget for the organization that the White House requested. Researcher Amber Northern was also to help guide a modernization process, suggesting that the razing may be complete.

Mark Schneider, who led IES during the Biden and first Trump administrations and has become one of the agency’s most prominent critics, said that while it was easy to void contracts, the true challenge for Trump’s team would be to design a modern system for K–12 research and development. No plan was yet in evidence, he added.  

“My biggest disappointment is not that DOGE and the department cleaned out the detritus at IES, it’s that there’s no evidence that they thought enough about how to rebuild,” Schneider remarked. “That, to me, is the loss.”

— Kevin Mahnken

School choice

To the administration, the best judges of school quality are parents. That’s their chief reason for advancing a bold .  

In July, Trump signed the first national tax credit scholarship program into law, a “” that school choice advocates have long sought. Because it’s intended to reach students in public schools as well, even prominent Democrats like former Education Secretary Arne Duncan have gotten behind it and urged governors in blue states to participate.

The Educational Choice for Children Act, which kicks in next year, gives taxpayers a $1,700 dollar-for-dollar tax credit when they donate to a nonprofit that awards scholarships. It’s unlike education savings accounts, which allow parents to use state dollars for tuition or homeschooling expenses. 

But depending on taxpayers to fund the program means scholarship groups will need to recruit multiple donors just to cover private school tuition for one student, said Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, an advocacy organization.

“That is a lot of donors and outreach and accounting,” he said. Overall, he gives the administration “an incomplete” on its school choice agenda, adding that the Treasury Department’s upcoming regulations tied to the program “will matter a great deal.”

Choice advocates don’t want governors to add their own rules, while others want strict accountability on how the funds are spent. Further details of how the program will layer on top of existing private school choice programs will emerge in the coming months. But Norton Rainey, CEO of ACE Scholarships, an organization already operating in multiple states, said the tax credit scholarships will ideally complement state-funded ESAs.

“For families,” he said, “the experience should feel additive rather than confusing.”

If the program primarily serves students already in private schools and opens doors to tutoring and afterschool programs for public school kids, it might not be to public education that some fear. 

“However, it is also possible that this program may prompt a portion of public school students to seek enrollment in private schools,” said Kristin Blagg, a researcher at the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank. If that’s the case, she said, states could see “substantial public school enrollment declines.”

The administration’s support of private school choice is one way it has aligned itself with Christian conservatives who want religious schools to maintain their admission criteria even if they accept public funds. Many religious schools don’t accept LGBTQ students, children with disabilities or those from a different faith.

But that’s not the only way Trump is trying to blur the line between church and state. He supported Oklahoma Catholics in their failed effort to open the nation’s first religious charter school. The religious right, a key faction of the MAGA movement, has been working to inject the Bible into K-12 public curriculum in several states, and the president announced in September that the Education Department would issue guidance on , which some experts expect to emphasize Christianity.

In mid-May, McMahon supported Trump’s school choice agenda by announcing an additional $60 million for charters, funds from programs like family engagement centers and educational TV for preschoolers.

She often showcases private and charter schools in her tour stops across the country, like the with a classical model she visited in March.

“School choice,” afterwards, “is crucial for students and parents to access learning environments that best fit their needs.” 

— Linda Jacobson

There is no shortage of credentials in the U.S. labor market. There is a shortage of matched skills and reliable pathways. Job openings remain despite cooling in some places. Even so, a persistent share of young adults are , signaling weak attachment to both employment and further training.

This gap is not a 2025 phenomenon. For decades, policymakers have invested in education while assuming that labor market integration would follow. The evidence suggests otherwise. The impacts of education by field, institution and completion status; and many credentials deliver little labor market value relative to their cost. Treating enrollment and completion as success metrics has obscured whether programs actually improve employment and earnings.

CTE was intended to create clearer routes into work. The shows positive effects on several high school outcomes, limited and uneven evidence on postsecondary and earnings outcomes, and large gaps in what has been rigorously evaluated.

Many CTE programs are well intentioned and well funded, yet weakly connected to labor demand. Program offerings frequently lag local employer needs. Credentials are not always portable across firms or regions. Accountability focuses on compliance and participation rather than job placement and earnings. Students complete programs without clear signals about whether those credentials will translate into work. Employers remain skeptical of what certificates represent.

These outcomes are not accidental. They reflect governance. The Department of Education was designed to administer grants, regulate institutions and ensure access. These are necessary functions, but they are not sufficient for building labor market pathways. Education agencies are not structured to continuously track employer demand, validate occupational skill standards or adjust programs based on employment outcomes. 

By contrast, the Department of Labor already operates systems that define success in labor market terms, including placement, earnings and retention under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.

Shifting CTE administration toward Labor aligns authority with objective. To ensure that this move is not just symbolic, policy should be governed by institutions that measure and manage those outcomes. The lesson for CTE is not ideological. It is operational. Here are three design choices.

First, employer leadership must be real, not advisory in name only. Employers should hold decision-making authority over occupational standards, credential validation and program relevance, with transparent governance and conflict of interest rules. Without employer control and input into the curriculum, pathways drift toward provider convenience.

Second, funding must be tied to outcomes that matter. Completion alone is insufficient. Programs should be evaluated on job placement, earnings, retention and progression, adjusted for local labor markets. Chronic underperformance should lead to canceling or revising programs.

Third, the system must allow for competition among multiple providers. Community colleges, employer consortia, nonprofits, high-schools and high quality private providers should operate on equal footing — even if they pursue the goals differently. 

Of course, pathway rules should be periodically reviewed and reauthorized, and the Labor Department is well-suited to provide review. Labor markets change faster than education systems. Sunset provisions force adaptation and prevent regulatory accumulation that freezes outdated models in place.

Critics often argue that tighter alignment with labor markets narrows education and reduces flexibility. The evidence suggests the opposite. The current system narrows options by steering students toward with uncertain payoffs while offering limited transparency about outcomes. expand choice by allowing students to compare pathways based on real consequences rather than marketing or tradition.

A well-designed pathway system does not lock individuals into a single occupation. It creates stackable credentials, portable skills and bridges to further education. It treats employment not as the endpoint of learning but as a core component of it.

The on education governance offers a cautionary lesson: Incentives matter. Systems respond to what is measured and rewarded. When accountability emphasizes inputs and compliance, organizations optimize for those metrics, even when outcomes suffer. 

The federal transition to Labor creates a rare policy opening. It acknowledges that education policy cannot substitute for labor market policy when the objective is work. Whether that acknowledgment leads to better outcomes depends on follow through. Structure matters. Incentives matter. Governance matters.

If CTE continues to be governed as education with different labels, results will not change. If it is governed as labor market infrastructure, it can finally function as intended.

At a time when local schools are facing shrinking enrollment and talks of closure, Hawaiian immersion programs are bucking the trend. 

Enrollment in schools that teach primarily in Ê»Ćlelo HawaiÊ»i — collectively known as Kaiapuni schools — has increased by 68% over the past decade, with the number of campuses run by the state education department growing from 14 to 26. But students tend to have fewer immersion options in middle and high school, and the pool of qualified teachers isn’t keeping up with families’ growing demand.

Recruiting qualified teachers is one of the largest barriers to expanding Kaiapuni programs, Office of Hawaiian Education Director Kau‘i Sang said in a recent education board meeting. The Department of Education needs to find a balance between adding more classrooms to meet families’ needs and hiring enough teachers to support existing Kaiapuni schools, she said. 

DOE plans on opening two new Kaiapuni programs at Haleʻiwa Elementary on Oʻahu and Kalanianaʻole Elementary on the Big Island.

“We cannot open classrooms unless we have qualified staff,” Sang said. 

Currently, DOE has three unfilled Kaiapuni teacher positions, Communications Director Nanea Ching said in an emailed statement. The department also employs 25 unlicensed Kaiapuni educators who still need to fulfill their teacher training requirements, she said. 

But the number of additional teachers needed to fully staff Kaiapuni schools could be closer to 100, said Kananinohea MākaÊ»imoku, an associate professor at the University of HawaiÊ»i Hilo’s College of Hawaiian Language. Some Kaiapuni teachers are taking on larger-than-average class sizes because of staffing shortages, she said, meaning the annual vacancy rates underestimate the number of educators schools need. 

DOE will need 165 more Kaiapuni teachers in the next decade to fully staff its classrooms and meet families’ growing demand, according to ʻAha Kauleo, an advisory group of Hawaiian language schools and organizations. The projection doesn’t account for a large group of teachers who are expected to retire in the coming years, Mākaʻimoku said.

Last year, UH Mānoa and Hilo produced a total of 12 licensed Kaiapuni teachers.

It’s difficult to find candidates who are both fluent in Hawaiian and interested in teaching, MākaÊ»imoku said, especially because Hawaiian language speakers are in high demand in many careers. But a lack of teachers doesn’t mean schools should stop expanding Kaiapuni programs, she said, especially when the movement has so much family support and momentum. 

‘No Option But To Leave Their Home District’

The HawaiÊ»i Supreme Court has  that the education department has a constitutional duty to provide families with access to Hawaiian immersion education. Two lawsuits  argued that DOE has fallen short of this responsibility by creating unique barriers for immersion families, such as waitlists for enrollment and limited immersion programs in some school districts.

One of the lawsuits was dropped over the summer, but the second remains active. 

Currently, families are pushing for more immersion options in Pearl City, which has no middle or high school for Kaiapuni students. Children can attend the Kaiapuni program at Waiau Elementary until the sixth grade but then need to transfer to immersion programs in Kapolei or Honolulu for middle school or switch to an English-language program.

 to add Kaiapuni programs at Highlands Intermediate and Pearl City High School received more than 100 signatures over the past three weeks. 

“Our keiki start their educational journey in Hawaiian immersion programs, but upon reaching intermediate and high school levels, they find themselves with no option but to leave their home district,” parent Chloe Puaʻena Vierra-Villanueva said in written testimony to the Board of Education.

The department is planning to add more grade levels to existing Kaiapuni schools next year and provide families with more information on how to enroll in immersion programs, Sang said. Her office also plans on tracking the number of open seats and waitlists across the state to determine which communities have the greatest demand for Kaiapuni classrooms. 

Since 2020, the state has also offered a $8,000 salary bonus to Kaiapuni teachers to attract more people to classroom positions. 

Kahea Faria, an assistant specialist at UH Mānoa’s College of Education and a Kaiapuni parent, said she would like to see more DOE campuses solely dedicated to serving immersion students across all grade levels. Creating environments where Hawaiian is the only spoken language is critical to students’ development, she said, and could possibly encourage more kids to pursue teaching careers in Kaiapuni schools. 

“Right now, with a growing number of students, they have very limited opportunities to grow their language abilities,” Faria said. 

The state also needs to look beyond Kaiapuni graduates to expand the potential pool of immersion teachers, MākaÊ»imoku said. For example, she said, offering more Hawaiian language classes to families and community members could encourage more people to earn their Kaiapuni teaching credentials. 

“That’s definitely a conversation that all communities in HawaiÊ»i should have,” she said. 

This story was originally published on Honolulu Civil Beat.

Department of Education to give more than $208 million in grants for school mental health services

The U.S. Department of Education has awarded more than $208 million to 65 recipients to increase the number of school-based mental health service providers in high-need school districts,

The department began reframing its grant priorities for Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration and School-Based Mental Health programs in July, the release says. Those priorities were approved in September after a period of public feedback.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for Âé¶čŸ«Æ· Newsletter

Those new priorities included changes to the eligibility requirements. Under the new requirements, grant funding could only be sent to state or local educational agencies who would partner with higher education institutions. This change, the press release said, puts state and local school leaders “in the driver’s seat” to decide how to address students’ needs.

The priorities also included “increas(ing) the number of credentialed school psychologists” and “building necessary capacity and local support to ensure the provision of intensive mental health services beyond the life of the grant.”

According to the department, the latest round of grants will reduce the ratios of students to school psychologists and improve the delivery of mental health interventions in rural and high-need areas. Half of the recipients, which will together receive more than $120 million, serve rural communities, the release said.

The grants also aim to support the recruitment and retention of school-based mental health service providers and sustain this workforce.

The release says this announcement came after the department discontinued more than 200 school-based mental health grants in April.

Those grants “prioritized the racial characteristics of providers and divisive ideologies instead of focusing on competent provision of proven mental health interventions for students,” the release says. Some of these decisions have been “set aside,” the department said, due to legal challenges by 16 Democratic attorneys general.

According to , the N.C. Department of Public Instruction received $4.8 million under the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program for the current fiscal year.

The grant abstract says this project “will increase access to mental health services by deploying licensed school psychologists and clinicians across all partner divisions; build workforce capacity through university partnerships, regional internships, and ‘grow-your-own’ training pipelines; implement a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) that integrates early identification, targeted intervention, and crisis-level care; provide outreach and telehealth access; and develop long-term sustainability through Medicaid billing systems and cost-sharing agreements among LEAs.”

Ashe County Schools also received a grant under the program for the current fiscal year, of approximately $2.8 million.

According to Ashe County Schools “will build on the success preparing SMH (school mental health) providers to support two rural Appalachian school districts in Alleghany and Ashe counties. In addition to training school psychology students, they will provide training to build staff capacity to collaborate with school psychologists to support youth referrals to early intervention or intensive services.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The data collection burden’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here at Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, we chronicled the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and its cuts to crucial department staffing, education research and funding. We wrote about immigration crackdowns that spurred concerned families to keep children home from school (or leave the country altogether), significant changes in vaccination recommendations, efforts to remove crucial protections for students and a broader push for school choice and religious instruction in schools, among other things. And we did much more than just cover that news; our team dug further to help explain what these changes mean to school districts, teachers, parents and – most importantly – children. 

At the same time, other storylines were playing out. A big one was literacy. Testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress painted a dismal picture of America’s children’s ability to read. But there were some encouraging signs, especially in the South. Separately, our team created an interactive database that compares literacy versus poverty rates in 10,000 districts and 42,000 schools to discover where educators are beating the odds. (We will be continuing to feature these Bright Spots in the new year.)

We also took a close look at teacher pay, special education and the challenges teachers and parents face as they grapple with the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. And, with the launch of our zero2eight vertical, we expanded our coverage to include the crucial issues facing early child care and education. 

It has been a busy year and this list only scratches the surface of the great work the team at Âé¶čŸ«Æ· produced. We hope you take the time to read (and share) these memorable and impactful stories.

The Justice, the Professor and the Friendship That Could Rattle a Pivotal Religious Charter School Case

By Linda Jacobson

Long before the case over an Oklahoma Catholic charter school reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Nicole Stelle Garnett and Amy Coney Barrett were close friends and neighbors. Some observers say that friendship is the reason Justice Barrett recused herself from what could be the most significant ruling to affect schools in decades, writes Linda Jacobson in one of Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s most widely read (and shared) stories of the year, co-published with The Guardian. Barrett’s recusal ultimately led to a rare tie in the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Related

Why Are So Few Kids Reading for Pleasure?

By Greg Toppo

Over the past two generations, the proportion of young people who “never or hardly ever” read for fun has quadrupled. What’s going on? Digital distraction and social networking seem likely culprits, but it might not be that simple. Could young people be reading less because they got lousy reading instruction? Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Greg Toppo explores young people’s changing relationship with books, showing that the problem is complex and may require a deep commitment to doing things differently.

Related

Kept in the Dark: Meet the Hired Guns Who Make Sure School Cyberattacks Stay Hidden

By Mark Keierleber

As schools nationwide face an onslaught of cyberattacks, education leaders have employed a pervasive pattern of obfuscation that leaves the real victims in the dark, Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Mark Keierleber reveals in an investigation copublished with WIRED. His in-depth analysis chronicles more than 300 school cyberattacks since 2020 and exposes the degree to which educators provide false assurances to students, parents and staff about the security of their sensitive information. Meanwhile, consultants and lawyers steer “privileged investigations,” which keep key details hidden from the public. 

Related

Bright Spots: These Schools Are Beating the Odds in Teaching Kids to Read

Analysis by Chad Aldeman; Interactive by Eamonn Fitzmaurice

Early reading is highly predictive of later-life outcomes, and there’s often a strong correlation between a school’s poverty level and its reading proficiency rate. But around the country, exceptional schools are beating the odds. Contributor Chad Aldeman and Âé¶čŸ«Æ·’s art and technology director Eamonn Fitzmaurice crunched the numbers for 10,000 districts, 42,000 schools and 3 million kids to find the schools that are best at teaching kids to read, and plotted the results on an interactive map, allowing you to discover whether your school is a Bright Spot. 

Related: 

‘Going for Blood’: With Half of Its Staff Cut, Many Wonder How Ed Dept. Will Function

By Linda Jacobson, Amanda Geduld and Mark Keierleber

One of the biggest education stories of 2025 documented efforts to dismantle the Department of Education under the Trump administration. In March, a nighttime purge of Ed Department staff left deep cuts to programs long critical to its mission, from investigating complaints of student discrimination to measuring academic performance. At the time, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the elimination of more than 1,300 employees, meaning that, along with buyouts and early retirements, the department would be reduced to roughly half the size it was when President Donald Trump took office just eight weeks earlier. 

Related

Before Special Ed, There Was the School-to-Asylum Pipeline. This Lawsuit Helped End It 

By Beth Hawkins 

In 1971, parents of children confined in a notorious state “school” for disabled people tapped a young lawyer willing to take pie-in-the-sky cases to court. They had no idea the attorney’s brother was locked up there. The settlement he won went on to form the basis for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, guaranteeing children with disabilities the right to an education. Through incredible narratives and archival photos, Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Beth Hawkins lays out the improbable backstory of how the law – now 50 years old – came to be and how its fate is now uncertain. 

Related 

As Immigrant Students Flee in Fear of ICE Raids, Teachers Offer Heartfelt Gifts

By Jo Napolitano

A soccer ball covered in signatures from classmates. A handwritten letter telling a child of their worth. A T-shirt bearing a school emblem meant to remind a former student how much they were loved in a place they once called home. Teachers handed out these mementos after hearing their students planned to leave the country to avoid being deported. “It’s nothing big, but [a signed T-shirt] was a treasure to him to have the physical signatures of his dearest friends and teachers to take with him,” one Philadelphia teacher told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Jo Napolitano. 

Related 

RFK Jr. Could Pull Many Levers to Hinder Childhood Immunization as HHS Head

By Amanda Geduld

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a conspiracy theorist who “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” — was tapped by President Donald Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, with vast influence over vaccine research, funding and rhetoric. Prior to his confirmation, Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Amanda Geduld spoke with experts who called the child health implications “dire” and predicted a fresh round in the school culture wars over mandatory vaccines for students. One law professor pointed out that school boards “can’t change the policies, but they might say, ‘We don’t support these policies. Not in our school district. No way, no how.’”

Related:

Many Young Adults Barely Literate, Yet Earned a High School Diploma

By Jessika Harkay

The numbers are staggering: One in four young adults in the U.S. is functionally illiterate – yet more than half earned high school diplomas. In 2023, a total of about five million young adults could understand the basic meaning of short texts but could not analyze long reading materials, according to an analysis by the American Institute of Research. At the same time, the share of young adults earning diplomas increased significantly. “We know that over 20% of (young adults) that get their high school diploma do not have the skills commensurate with that,” Sharon Bonney, chief executive officer of the Coalition on Adult Basic Education, a national adult education nonprofit, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Jessika Harkay. “So, when we have this ‘’ agenda, but people can’t read, write, speak the language or do math, they can’t get good jobs and better jobs. They can’t be skilled up.”  

Related 

The South Surges Academically in Alternative View of National Exam

By Kevin Mahnken

According to an analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a raft of mostly Southern states — Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and others — can boast the highest math and English scores anywhere in the country. There’s just one catch, Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Kevin Mahnken explained. That new educational hierarchy is only visible when researchers adjust for the demographics in each state. In other words, after accounting for the uneven distribution of low-income and minority families, special-needs students, and English learners, the nation’s K–12 hierarchy looks wildly different. 

Related

School Spending Is Up. Teacher Pay Isn’t. See What’s Happening in 8,900 Districts

Analysis by Chad Aldeman; Interactive by Eamonn Fitzmaurice

In districts nationwide, school spending has skyrocketed — in Los Angeles, for example, it’s up 108% from 2002 to 2022. But L.A’s teachers have seen a meager 5% salary increase during that time. In fact, teacher salaries nationally have hovered around an inflation-adjusted $70,000 for decades, lagging behind not only per-pupil spending, but earnings of other college-educated workers. Contributor Chad Aldeman and Âé¶čŸ«Æ·’s art and technology director, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, document this disconnect in a series of interactive charts. See what’s happening in nearly 8,900 districts.

Related

Another AI Side Effect: Erosion of Student-Teacher Trust

By Greg Toppo

As AI colonizes school assignments, a small but growing body of research suggests it’s eroding trust between teachers and students. It’s making school more transactional and forcing teachers to rely on unreliable AI detectors that create mutual suspicion. Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Greg Toppo explains how that dynamic is damaging student-teacher relationships, with students feeling surveilled and teachers losing faith in student work. Experts suggest returning to the fundamentals: handwritten assignments, in-class work, blue-book essays and addressing root causes of cheating through better course design and intrinsic motivation.

Related 

For Students With Disabilities, Suspension Not Just a Matter of Race and Gender — But Geography

By Amanda Geduld 

An exclusive analysis by Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Amanda Geduld of federal data revealed stark disparities among students already subject to disproportionate punishment in school — not only by race and gender but also geography. Some 15% of special education students in South Carolina faced out-of-school suspensions for up to 10 days in the 2022-2023 school year — nearly twice the national average and more than any other state in the nation. Meanwhile, students with the same disabilities were the least likely to be excluded from school if they lived in California or Vermont.

Shut Out: High School Students Learn About Careers — But Can’t Try One That Pays 

By Patrick O’Donnell

Schools and businesses have prioritized teaching students about careers they might pursue, but they rarely take the next step and let students try them. Though career days, job shadowing and field trips to businesses are common, fewer than 5% of students have a chance at an internship or apprenticeship while in high school. “We still have a long way to go to provide more opportunity for young people,” career training advocate Julie Lammers told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Patrick O’Donnell.

Related

For Decades, the Feds Were the Last, Best Hope for Special Ed Kids. What Happens Now?

By Lauren Wagner and Beth Hawkins 

When it wrote the laws protecting children with disabilities, Congress tried to make it simple for parents to act when schools weren’t delivering. But the paths for complaining have never been as easy — or effective — as intended. Now, the threat of federal intervention, the ultimate backstop, is collapsing. Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Lauren Wagner and Beth Hawkins crunched the numbers and found big disparities in how complaints get resolved. 

Related: 

The Massachusetts Teen Who Held PowerSchool Ransom Was a ‘Sophisticated’ Cybercriminal, Prosecutors Say

By Mark Keierleber

When Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Mark Keierleber knocked on Matthew Lane’s door in August, the 19-year-old college student seemed an unlikely figure to have pulled off what’s considered the largest exposure of private student data in history. Lane was known as a soft-spoken gamer and skilled computer programmer, but open-source reporting, threat intelligence research and a federal sentencing memo show him to be a “sophisticated” cybercriminal. After pleading guilty to the 2024 PowerSchool hack, Lane was sentenced to four years in federal prison and $4 million in restitution.

Related:

30 Years Without a Real Raise: New York’s Early Intervention Pay Crisis

By Sarah Carr

Emily Lengen has been a special education teacher for the New York State Early Intervention Program since the 1990s. She loves her work, but is distraught about remaining in what might be the only profession in New York that hasn’t gotten a real raise in three decades. “As a 30-year veteran with a master’s degree, I am working twice as hard as when I started in early intervention, and making less now,” Lengen tells  zero2eight’s Carr.

Related

Some 15 Years After Disastrous Debut, Common Core Math Endures in Many States

By Jo Napolitano 

The once-derided standards have proven their staying power, with many states holding onto the original version or some close iteration, Âé¶čŸ«Æ·’s Jo Napolitano reports. Despite early complaints from teachers and parents and fierce political opposition from the left and the right, Common Core math has withstood three presidents and more recent revamps to state curriculum. And while critics say it failed to boost student achievement — math scores have dropped nationally since it was adopted in 2010 —  advocates say it did something far more important: provide an on-ramp to algebra. 

Related 

No Idea Too Radical: Inside New Orleans’ Dramatic K-12 Turnaround After Katrina 

By Beth Hawkins 

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina forced the wholesale reboot of New Orleans schools — by most measures, among the worst in the country in 2005. Two decades later, education researchers and the city’s civic leaders have released comprehensive data outlining what worked to get rapid academic growth for kids, how preschoolers and college students are doing and where racial inequities persist. Beth Hawkins uses highlights from the research to tell the story of the singular reform. You can read (and listen) to our other coverage on the 20th anniversary of Katrina here.    

Related

The California Mom at the Center of Trump’s Crackdown on School Gender Policies

By Linda Jacobson 

A California mother spent three years battling a school district that supported her child’s social transition from female to male. Her story is now at the heart of the Trump administration’s push to clamp down on schools that conceal changes in students’ gender identity from parents. Some say students’ well-being could be at risk if educators are forced to get parents’ permission before using different names and pronouns. But one attorney told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Linda Jacobson that officials can’t “by default assume that every parent 
 is going to reject and hurt their children.” 

Related

Strapped for Cash: Districts OK Union Raises, But Don’t Have the Money to Fund Them

By Lauren Wagner 

Several school districts across the U.S. had to borrow money or renegotiate teacher contracts over the summer after budget shortfalls left them without enough funding to pay for agreed-upon raises, Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Lauren Wagner discovered. Philadelphia Public Schools approved $1.5 billion in borrowing, while districts in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Baltimore County, Maryland, rescinded teacher pay hikes. Chicago Public Schools considered delaying pay bumps in its union contract to address a $734 million deficit. “Contracts are not optional documents,” Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates wrote in a letter to the school board.  

Related

From Screen Time to ‘Green Time’: Going Outside to Support Student Well-Being 

By Jessika Harkay

As cell phone bans are widely underway this year in schools nationwide, there’s a question of what else to do in the effort to aid student mental health and re-engage kids back in the classroom, Âé¶čŸ«Æ·’s Jessika Harkay reports. Some experts believe one next step may be to incorporate outside time into the school day (a.k.a. “green time’) for older students. While some schools have developed full programming, research shows 15 to 30 minutes outside can have big benefits, too.

Related 

How LAUSD School Zones Perpetuate Educational Inequality, Ignoring ‘Redlining’ Past 

By Ben Chapman

School attendance zones are meant to provide Los Angeles families with strong options for their children’s education. But a growing number of critics say the outdated school zones of LAUSD reinforce educational inequality by locking needy students out of a good education. Some of these enrollment zones match racist redlining maps of the 1930s that were used to deny housing loans in Black neighborhoods. “The district doesn’t want to touch those lines, because families overpaid for homes within them,” says local parent and researcher Tim DeRoche

Related:

LifeWise’s Big Red Bus Is Driving Thorny Questions About Church and State

By Linda Jacobson

Lifewise Academy is a fast-growing program that allows students to leave school during the day for religious instruction and is the most visible example of an evangelical Christian movement to require districts to participate. But as LifeWise and similar programs spread, opposition is increasing among those who say releasing students during the day is disruptive and crosses the line between church and state. “It’s insulting,” one former teacher told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·’s Linda Jacobson about watching students miss his class once a week to attend LifeWise.

Related:

With Bees, Drones & Ancient Technology, New Mexico Schools Engage Students to Save Precious Water for the Next Generation

By Beth Hawkins 

This year, the Rio Grande ran dry in Albuquerque — a climate-change fueled event of particular interest to students at a high school a few blocks from the river. Students at Rio Grande High School and three lower-grades schools that share its sustainable agriculture focus live on neighborhood farms. Lessons combining cutting-edge technology and centuries-old conservation techniques are real-life relevant — and key to the region’s survival.

Related

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

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

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

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

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

Maryland’s ‘biggest score’ 

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

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

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

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

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

Others searching for new jobs traveled far outside Washington. 

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

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

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

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

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

‘Connective tissue’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Their own innovation’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She has new appreciation for their input. 

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