But while some of the cuts are, in his words, “dumb,” and show a lack of experience among the cost-cutters, Schneider has also pushed against many critics’ assertions that the Trump administration will effectively destroy the agency. In his view, the cuts offer an opportunity “to clean out the attic” of old, dusty policies and revitalize essential research functions. Those include the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which he maintains has lost its way and grown prohibitively expensive while in some cases duplicating the work of independent researchers.

A conservative who has held top roles in both of the last two Republican administrations, as well as the most recent Democratic one, he’s the ultimate education insider — Schneider’s conversations often invoke an alphabet soup of government agencies, contractors and think tanks. Yet he’s unusually candid about his time in government, especially now that he is no longer there.

A political scientist by training, Schneider has spent nearly two decades in education research. He served three years as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics under President George W. Bush, then spent a decade as a vice president at the non-profit American Institutes for Research. He returned to government in 2018, appointed by President Trump to lead the Institute of Education Sciences, and stayed on until 2024 under President Biden.

Through it all, he has remained an independent voice even while in office, telling ����Ӱ�� in 2023, for instance, that the reason Biden hadn’t fired him along with other Trump appointees was that education research wasn’t considered important enough for the president to bother. 

Over the course of six years at IES, he tried — mostly unsuccessfully, he admits — to reform the department into “a modern science and statistics agency.” He’s honest about his limitations, saying he “tried really hard to modernize the place” without much success. While Musk and his cost-cutters last month took a chainsaw to IES, he observes, when he led it, “I didn’t even have a scalpel. I had a dull butter knife.”

While many education advocates are decrying Trump’s bid to eliminate the Education Department, Schneider has said carefully breaking it up could actually produce “a more efficient, dynamic and responsive school system — all things the Department of Education has been hard-pressed to do.”

Schneider sat down for a wide-ranging conversation last week with ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo. They discussed the difficulties of reforming what he considers a hidebound agency, the opportunities of starting over and what the future might hold for NAEP, also known as the Nation’s Report Card. 

Now a non-resident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, he is cagey when pressed about returning to IES in a second Trump term. Schneider notes that the deep cuts have left no actual agency to run. “Who wants to go in there and head a 20-person unit?” But leading a revamped IES, he admits, would present “a wonderful challenge.”

At the end of the day, though, he says it remains an open question whether the next step in the Trump administration’s plans is rebuilding or neglect.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: I wanted to start with something you said about Musk’s crew a couple of weeks ago — namely that given your work to reform IES, you were “a little envious” they could “do it all in one day.” Let’s drill down. Is that what you had in mind when you were there? Or did this go further?

Schneider: [Laughs.] Let me try to figure out the best way of putting this. The issue, of course, is that IES was a 23-year-old institution. A lot of stuff got locked in. None of this is surprising: Institutions get locked down and they keep doing the same thing over and over again. I tried hard to change things. It was almost impossible. I tried to get Congress to create ARPA Ed — [National Center for Advanced Development in Education, an agency to develop and scale innovative, cutting-edge practices and tools]. A lot of people worked really hard, but we were never able to get it through Congress.

Whether Congress will ever do anything is a different question. But the fact of the matter is that even though people were in favor of it and we had a lot of political support, we still couldn’t get it across the finish line. Well, now the National Center for Education Research doesn’t exist anymore. There’s one person left there. So whether or not this is naive, we don’t need NCADE anymore. We should rebuild NCER to look like ARPA Ed. We don’t need any legislation for that, because it’s in the purview of the director to do that. That’s an amazing opportunity. We can just create a modern research funding organization with no need for congressional action.

My colleague Kevin Mahnken recently talked to Doug Harris from Tulane. He said IES is “being knocked over by these cuts.” I think beneath a lot of this is people like Doug worried that this administration is simply anti-science. It sounds like you are saying the opposite. Should this give people like Doug a little hope?

As of right now, we have no indication except every once in a while some words bubble out: “Oh, we are going to rebuild IES. We are looking for a future direction for IES.” But there is no concrete plan. So the proof is going to happen in the next several months. If the department says, “Yes, we are redoing NCER, we are redoing NCES,” which are the two biggest units that are most in need of repair, and they announce plans to rebuild them in a modern way, then we’re fine. But if nothing ever happens and we end up with three people at NCES and one person at NCER, we’ve got a problem.

You have no sense one way or another?

You probably hear the same things I do. I have no concrete information about any plans to rebuild. I hear rumors. But until concrete plans are announced and actions are undertaken, then we should maintain a healthy skepticism. That said, I still believe that if this administration wants to modernize IES, they have an opportunity that no one’s ever had before — since 2002.

Since they created it.

Congress created IES in 2002, and it was a brand new, innovative organization that radically changed the way education research was done. Well, 23 years later, that opportunity repeats itself. So my hope, and maybe this is naive, is that we grab that opportunity. We know a lot more about education research. We know a lot more about modern statistical data collections — and we learned a lot from NCES. For example, the lack of timeliness hurt them endlessly. So now it’s like an open field. Let’s build a better edifice now than what we had a year ago.

Let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of this vision. One of the first shocks to the system we got was in February when DOGE canceled all those federal contracts. And one of the hardest hit was AIR, where you spent 10 years. I wonder to what extent your views have been shaped by being an insider there. Is this a sector that needs a shock to the system?

There are at least two parts of that question. So there’s the question of the quality of the work. AIR does good work. I don’t think there’s any question. The big contract houses are capable of doing quite good work. However, people are really pissed off about the overhead rate [also known as indirect costs covering expenses] that these contract houses and universities charge. The overhead rate is just too high. When I was at IES after the pandemic, AIR got rid of their building on Thomas Jefferson St. [in affluent Georgetown] — a huge, expensive building. Many, many people ended up working at home, and the rest went with much less — and much cheaper — office space.

So after AIR shed that big office space, I called up [Contracts and Acquisition Management], the contracts management people in the department, and I said, “You know, the overhead is based on many factors, but office space and parking are major components. They’ve reduced the cost of their offices — they didn’t get rid of them, but they downsized and went to cheaper places. So let’s renegotiate their overhead rate.” [He imitates CAM officers]: “No, no, no, no, no, no.” I couldn’t get CAM to even consider reducing the overhead rate to reflect the lower cost.

Just to be clear: You couldn’t get the department to lower the cost?

The department had to reopen the negotiations. And they would not. I’m not sure what the right word is. It’s laziness, corruption. This was wrong. Why were we paying such high overhead rates when their costs went down? And you know as well as I do that many, many, many organizations got rid of office space and reduced their costs. So why wasn’t CAM renegotiating overhead rates? I never was able to get a good answer. 

But that’s a department problem, not an AIR or Mathematica problem.

Yes and no. Clearly the department had within its authority to reopen those negotiations. But the problem, of course, is that the agencies end up getting captured by the people they’re supposed to regulate, the people they’re supposed to monitor. [Test developer] ETS and NAEP are an even clearer example: How much money went to ETS to do things that they weren’t capable of doing? 

Such as?

Such as building the platform for NAEP. The software. This is not firsthand, so it could be hearsay, but the people from DOGE looked at the platform that ETS had built for NAEP, and they just said, “What is this? This is not the way modern software is built.” And I believe that’s because we used ETS, which is a testing company, not a tech company, to build the platform. And again, that has to do with the overly close relationship between NCES and ETS.

This is not just an Ed and contractor issue. We know this exists in other places besides education: the close relationship between the contractors and the agencies that are supposed to be supervising them. This is a well-known problem. The companies capture the government agency. [Editors Note: Asked to respond to Schneider’s comments, Christine Betaneli, an associate vice president at ETS, released the following statement Tuesday: “ETS delivers nearly 50 million tests every year across the US and around the world on robust technology platforms. We have consistently delivered innovations on NAEP suited to the specific requests of NCES. We’re incredibly proud of the unmatched quality we have provided to the American people in supporting the Nation’s Report Card. We will continue to innovate on behalf of America’s teachers, parents and children who rely on this critical data to improve access to quality education nationwide.”]

How do you prevent that from happening in the next iteration of this department? Is it just by bringing in totally new people? Is it by changing the contours of the contracts? Is it by doing things totally differently?

There are a couple of things. First of all, there’s a serious cultural issue. That’s clear. I will tell you another story, and this will give you some more depth to how bad this can be. When I first showed up at IES, we brought in [consulting firm] McKinsey & Co. to do an analysis of how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. They went around and interviewed people — staffers, program officers — to try to get some idea of what was going on. And remember, this is an outside consulting company we hired. They interviewed one of the program officers who said to this outside consultant, “I’m never giving up this contract. You will have to pry it out of my dead hands.” I mean, that’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s also illegal. This is a long-term project officer who admitted to an outside person that they had been totally captured, totally in bed with the contract shop. That a veteran project officer would say this to an outside consultant says there’s something really, really wrong.

So the culture is a problem. Is the scope of what the department does a problem as well? 

Yeah. 

Is a breakup necessary to change the culture?

Do we need to break up IES and move all these pieces around? If the goal is to shrink the department, or make the department go away, then we have to find homes for these activities. But when I wrote that last summer, I was not envisioning the disappearance of 90% of the workforce.

I believe if we don’t get congressional approval to end the department, it’s going to be around. But I keep thinking about both NCES and NCER, the two largest units, and there’s now an open field. I’ve always had problems with NCES. As a major federal statistical agency, like many other federal statistical agencies, they just kept falling further and further behind. But we can now imagine, we can actually execute, rebuilding NCES as a modern, lean and mean statistical agency.

For example, the state longitudinal data systems. I’ve written about a different vision of how to build that. The [Trial Urban District Assessments, NAEP tests given in 27 urban school systems] are incredibly expensive. Nobody can tell me how much they cost. I’ve asked many, many times how much they are, and the fact of the matter is, we don’t need them anymore, because we have other ways of getting estimates for these large cities. I’m talking about Tom Kane and Sean Reardon [who have developed an detailing achievement nationwide]. They compute the exact same statistics that TUDA does.

So that actually leads me to my next question: What is your vision for something like NAEP? Can a lot of it go away?

For me, the most important thing about NAEP is the state-by-state comparisons. They’re important because governors hold the keys to so much education reform, and they care about the comparisons. When NAEP came out several months ago, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, they all cared about these things. Virginia had a 50-minute release event with the governor, [Virginia Education Secretary] Aimee Guidera and the Superintendent of Schools [Lisa Coons]. That’s three of the heaviest hitters in the world of education, all lined up, talking about the importance of the state-by-state comparisons and what they were doing to address Virginia’s on NAEP. 

That alone is an amazing demonstration of the power of the state-by-state comparisons. Do we need a $185 million-a-year NAEP to generate the trend line and the state-by-state comparisons? 

I’ll give you another example: There are at least three different sub-domains in NAEP math. I’ve never seen anybody talk about those sub-scores. How much does that cost? Why do we keep doing it? We just need to bring some sanity to what we’ve built over 50 years that have grown up over time, the cost of those things, the backwardness of many of those things, and say, “Hey, we don’t have to keep doing this.” And part of the reason we don’t have to keep doing this — I mean, it’s a sad thing to say — is because the people in NCES who were committed to this are gone. 

I don’t want to leave that point without addressing institutional memory and knowledge. A lot of the people who are gone know how these things work. Getting rid of those people might have changed the culture, but it also might have hollowed out the agency’s ability to get the next NAEP report out. Does that keep you up at night? 

Clearly, that’s the horns of a dilemma. But where is the time, where’s the energy, where are the people to rethink this stuff? Part of the problem was that there was not sufficient rethinking. The machine worked. It got out on time. Many problems were solved by just raising more money. I attended NAGB [National Assessment Governing Board] meetings for 10 years. Every time there was a budget presentation, inevitably, the budget was in the red. And so then we have to cut this, and we have to cut that. And it was never like, “What is it that we need to preserve, instead of going to Congress and asking for another $30 million and getting $10 million?” That wasn’t the thought process.

So I went to OMB [the Office of Management and Budget], and asked them to take the appropriation that Congress gave for NAEP and put 10% aside in a separate fund for R&D. I asked Congress to do this, and then OMB, because there was no commitment by the leadership of NCES and NAEP to spend that kind of money on R&D. Instead, it was always, “We need this money for the operations. We need money to do this other task.” As a result, NAEP lost its leading edge. The demands of running the operation are real. But if you never stop to think about what you’re doing, then you’re going to end up behind.

But to many, the way these agencies were trimmed doesn’t seem any smarter. There was a lot of cutting with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel. My sense is that’s going to require a great deal of work just to bring back basic functions. Am I right?

The years that I was at IES, I didn’t even have a scalpel. I had a dull butter knife. There are so many quotes about this: “Breaking things is easy, rebuilding things is hard.” From Hamilton: “Winning is easy, governing is hard.” All of that is true. And it’s just so much easier to just say, “No, no, no, no, no,” than to start rebuilding. Mancur Olson, a brilliant economist, wrote a book called . He had his finger right on the pulse. Over time, what happens is that you start accumulating all these lobbyists and all these interest groups and all this stasis, and it just builds up and builds up and nothing can get done, because you end up with this incredible superstructure of groups and people who are totally vested in the status quo. And he says, every once in a while, you just need to just blow the shit up and rebuild.

There’s a lot of concern about the rebuilding. How do you calm people’s fears that there is no rebuilding coming?

Look, there’s nothing we can do right now except wait and lobby Congress and the department that the rebuild is important. And I hope they know that the rebuild is important. Again, you can just give things away: Give NCES to BLS [the Bureau of Labor and Statistics] etc., but some of that stuff is going to require congressional action. Good luck on that. In some ways, again, we have an open field. Let’s take the opportunity to build that back in a much more modern, efficient way.

It seems like a lot of people, especially on the right, are talking in terms of the department reaching its sell-by date. But if you can change the culture and remove the barnacles, or whatever you want to call them, what’s the point of breaking it up?

As they say, that’s above my pay grade. [Laughs.] I’m writing a whole series of papers about what can be done and I think they’re all reasonable and in the realm of the possible. I have not had any contact with anybody in the department about any of my visions or plans. But there are ways to rebuild this so it looks like a modern science and statistics agency.

Would you like to lead it at some point?

If there’s anything there. [Laughs.] There’s nothing there. What do we have, 20 people left in that whole organization? NAGB is moving into [the Lyndon Baines Johnson Building, the department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.] because it’s pretty much empty. And I assume IES will also end up moving into LBJ, but the fact of the matter is all of these places are ghost towns now.

Before the pandemic, we were trying to argue, incredibly, about creating 10 more desks for the growth of IES. And then, of course, after the pandemic, there was nobody left. Nobody came back to the office. The place was pretty much empty already. And then the executive order had everybody coming back to the office — and then everybody got fired. I don’t know what happened in between “You must be back in the office five days a week,” and “By the way, you’re fired.” I don’t know what it was like. I know from friends it was not a fun place to be.

If I’m reading between the lines correctly here, it sounds like you’d like to lead IES, but you’d like someone to rebuild it first.

First of all, I’m not answering that question. Many people have asked me if I would go back. But I have a lovely life. I live an eight-minute walk from AEI. AEI is a very generous organization. They’ve never said no to any reasonable request I’ve had, so it’s extremely pleasant, extremely easy. But I spent six years at IES. I tried really hard to modernize the place. For someone who wants to create the next version of IES, there are incredible challenges, but the rewards of doing it would be amazing. But they’ve already eviscerated the unit. Who wants to go in there and head a 20-person unit? But if there is a taste to rebuild IES to look like a modern organization, that’s a wonderful challenge. 

Could what you’re describing just as easily be done privately?

A lot of people are talking about that: How can philanthropy stand up and take over the role that IES used to have? Even the biggest foundations don’t have the kind of money IES had. IES spent over $100 million a year supporting education research, just from NCER. There’s no foundation that has that kind of money, and I’m not even sure if there’s a coalition of foundations that could come up with anywhere near that kind of money for research.

So there’s an indispensable role for research funded by IES or the Department of Education or some part of the federal government. But the return on that investment was not sufficient. I don’t know if part of the suspicion of IES was just a gut-level reaction to “Too big, too big, too big,” and how much of it was, “Hey, we have spent all these billions of dollars over the last 20 years and what have we got to show? We have declining NAEP scores. We don’t have any evidence of increasing achievement, etc, etc.” I’m not sure if the antagonism towards education research was because it wasn’t working or because it’s just that we were anti-science. I truly don’t know.

Years ago, we looked at how many math interventions have any evidence of success. It turned out to be about 15%. This was a very depressing number, until you start looking around at what the success rate is in any science: 10% of clinical trials work, 90% fail. And then of course, we’re learning that even among the 10% that work, there’s an incredible amount of dishonesty, lying, cheating. The “replication crisis” — we’ve glommed onto that term — says there’s a lot of stuff going on in the sciences that are not kosher. So at one level, the antipathy towards the Department of Education is, “This is not a function that the federal government should be involved in. This is all state and local.” O.K., I got that, and I believe a lot of that is true. But even in the most extreme form of federalism, there is a role for government support of research. There is a government role for statistics. And the question then is: How do we focus that to help states and local governments, parents, teachers, students achieve more? A lot of what happened was that that tight focal point just disappeared.  

If I’m translating what you’re saying correctly, you don’t know how we got to this point in terms of the mechanisms of the cuts, and you don’t know what people were thinking. But in a way, you’re saying it’s not really important, because we needed to get this done.

We needed to get this done. A lot of what was done was incredibly important and was needed. There’s no question about it. But we’re going to come back to the same theme over and over again: For six years I had a butter knife, and then these guys show up in a day with a chainsaw and they cleared out all the detritus and all the underbrush. But what do we do now? That’s what matters.

When teens and young adults with disabilities in California’s Poway Unified School District heard about a new opportunity to get extra help planning for life after high school, nearly every eligible student signed up.

The program, known as , aimed to fill a major gap in education research about what kinds of support give students nearing graduation the best shot at living independently, finding work, or continuing their studies.

Students with disabilities finish college at much lower rates than their non-disabled peers, and often struggle to tap into state employment programs for adults with disabilities, said Stacey McCrath-Smith, a director of special education at Poway Unified, which had 135 students participating in the program. So the extra help, which included learning how to track goals on a tool designed for high schoolers with disabilities, was much needed.

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Charting My Path launched earlier this school year in Poway Unified and 12 other school districts. The salaries of 61 school staff nationwide, and the training they received to work with nearly 1,100 high schoolers with disabilities for a year and a half, was paid for by the U.S. Department of Education.

Jessie Damroth’s 17-year-old son Logan, who has autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and other medical needs, had attended classes and met with his mentor through the program at Newton Public Schools in Massachusetts for a month. For the first time, he was talking excitedly about career options in science and what he might study at college.

“He was starting to talk about what his path would look like,” Damroth said. “It was exciting to hear him get really excited about these opportunities. … He needed that extra support to really reinforce that he could do this.”

Then the Trump administration pulled the plug.

Charting My Path was among more than 200 Education Department contracts and grants terminated over the last two weeks by the Trump administration’s U.S. DOGE Service. DOGE has slashed spending it deemed to be wasteful, fraudulent, or in service of that . But in several instances, the decision to cancel contracts affected more than researchers analyzing data in their offices — it affected students.

Many projects, like Charting My Path, involved training teachers in new methods, testing learning materials in actual classrooms, and helping school systems use data more effectively.

“Students were going to learn really how to set goals and track progress themselves, rather than having it be done for them,” McCrath-Smith said. “That is the skill that they will need post-high school when there’s not a teacher around.”

All of that work was abruptly halted — in some cases with nearly finished results that now cannot be distributed.

Every administration is entitled to set its own priorities, and contracts can be canceled or changed, said Steven Fleischman, an education consultant who for many years ran one of the regional research programs that was terminated. He compared it to a homeowner deciding they no longer want a deck as part of their remodel.

But the current approach reminds him more of construction projects started and then abandoned during the Great Recession, in some cases leaving giant holes that sat for years.

“You can walk around and say, ‘Oh, that was a building we never finished because the funds got cut off,’” he said.

DOGE drives cuts to education research contracts, grants

The Education Department has been a prime target of DOGE, the chaotic cost-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to Trump.

So far, , many of which were under the purview of the Institute of Education Sciences, the ostensibly independent research arm of the Education Department. The administration said those cuts, which included multi-year contracts, totaled $881 million. In recent years, the federal government has spent just over $800 million on the entire IES budget.

DOGE has also that conduct research for states and local schools and shuttered four equity assistance centers that help with teacher training. The Trump administration also and that often work to improve instruction for struggling students.

. The Trump administration said the terminated Education Department contracts and grants were worth $2 billion. But some were near completion with most of the money already spent.

An NPR analysis of all of DOGE’s reported savings — though the Education Department is a top contributor.

On Friday, a federal judge issued an injunction that that might violate the anti-DEIA executive order. It’s not clear whether the injunction would prevent more contracts from being canceled “for convenience.”

Mark Schneider, the recent past IES director, . But even many conservative critics have expressed alarm at how wide-ranging and indiscriminate the cuts have been. Congress mandated many of the terminated programs, which also indirectly support state and privately funded research.

The canceled projects include contracts that support maintenance of the Common Core of Data, a major database used by policymakers, researchers, and journalists, as well as work that supports updates to the What Works Clearinghouse, a huge repository of evidence-based practices available to educators for free.

And after promising not to make any cuts to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, the department canceled an upcoming test for 17-year-olds that helps researchers understand long-term trends. On Monday, Peggy Carr, the head of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees NAEP, was .

The Education Department did not respond to questions about who decided which programs to cut and what criteria were used. Nor did the department respond to a specific question about why Charting My Path was eliminated. DOGE records estimate the administration saved $22 million by terminating the program early, less than half the $54 million in the original contract.

The decision has caused .

In Utah, the Canyons School District is trying to reassign the school counselor and three teachers whose salaries were covered by the Charting My Path contract.

The district, which had 88 high schoolers participating in the program, is hoping to keep using the curriculum to boost its usual services, said Kirsten Stewart, a district spokesperson.

Officials in Poway Unified, too, hope schools can use the curriculum and tools to keep up a version of the program. But that will take time and work because the program’s four teachers had to be reassigned to other jobs.

“They dedicated that time and got really important training,” McCrath-Smith said. “We don’t want to see that squandered.”

For Damroth, the loss of parent support meetings through Charting My Path was especially devastating. Logan has a rare genetic mutation that causes him to fall asleep easily during the day, so Damroth wanted help navigating which colleges might be able to offer extra scheduling support.

“I have a million questions about this. Instead of just hearing ‘I don’t know’ I was really looking forward to working with Joe and the program,” she said, referring to Logan’s former mentor. “It’s just heartbreaking. I feel like this wasn’t well thought out. … My child wants to do things in life, but he needs to be given the tools to achieve those goals and those dreams that he has.”

DOGE cuts labs that helped ‘Mississippi Miracle’ in reading

The dramatic improvement in reading proficiency that Carey Wright oversaw as state superintendent in one the nation’s poorest states became known as the “Mississippi Miracle.”

Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast, based out of the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University, was a key partner in that work, Wright said.

When Wright wondered if state-funded instructional coaches were really making a difference, REL Southeast dispatched a team to observe, videotape, and analyze the instruction delivered by hundreds of elementary teachers across the state. Researchers reported that teachers’ instructional practices aligned well with the science of reading and that teachers themselves said they felt far more knowledgeable about teaching reading.

“That solidified for me that the money that we were putting into professional learning was working,” Wright said.

The study, she noted, arose from a casual conversation with researchers at REL Southeast: “That’s the kind of give and take that the RELs had with the states.”

Wright, now Maryland state superintendent, said she was looking forward to partnering with REL Mid-Atlantic on a math initiative and on an overhaul of the school accountability system.

But this month, termination letters went out to the universities and research organizations that run the 10 Regional Educational Laboratories, which were established by Congress in 1965 to serve states and school districts. The letters said the contracts were being terminated “for convenience.”

The press release that went to news organizations cited “wasteful and ideologically driven spending” and named a single project in Ohio that involved equity audits as a part of an effort to reduce suspensions. involve reading, math, career connections, and teacher retention.

Jannelle Kubinec, CEO of WestEd, an education research organization that held the contracts for REL West and REL Northwest, said she never received a complaint or a request to review the contracts before receiving termination letters. Her team had to abruptly cancel meetings to go over results with school districts. In other cases, reports are nearly finished but cannot be distributed because they haven’t gone through the review process.

REL West was also working with the Utah State Board of Education to figure out if the legislature’s investment in programs to keep early career teachers from leaving the classroom was making a difference, among several other projects.

“This is good work and we are trying to think through our options,” she said. “But the cancellation does limit our ability to finish the work.”

Given enough time, Utah should be able to find a staffer to analyze the data collected by REL West, said Sharon Turner, a spokesperson for the Utah State Board of Education. But the findings are much less likely to be shared with other states.

The most recent contracts started in 2022 and were set to run through 2027.

The Trump administration said it planned to enter into new contracts for the RELs to satisfy “statutory requirements” and better serve schools and states, though it’s unclear what that will entail.

“The states drive the research agendas of the RELs,” said Sara Schapiro, the executive director of the Alliance for Learning Innovation, a coalition that advocates for more effective education research. If the federal government dictates what RELs can do, “it runs counter to the whole argument that they want the states to be leading the way on education.”

Some terminated federal education research was nearly complete

Some research efforts were nearly complete when they got shut down, raising questions about how efficient these cuts were.

The American Institutes for Research, for example, was almost done evaluating the impact of the , which aims to improve literacy instruction through investments like new curriculum and teacher training.

AIR’s research spanned 114 elementary schools across 11 states and involved more than 23,000 third, fourth, and fifth graders and their nearly 900 reading teachers.

Researchers had collected and analyzed a massive trove of data from the randomized trial and presented their findings to federal education officials just three days before the study was terminated.

“It was a very exciting meeting,” said Mike Garet, a vice president and institute fellow at AIR who oversaw the study. “People were very enthusiastic about the report.”

Another AIR study that was nearing completion among first and second graders. It’s a strategy that helps schools identify and provide support to struggling readers, with the most intensive help going to kids with the highest needs. It’s widely used by schools, but its effectiveness hasn’t been tested on a larger scale.

The research took place in 106 schools and involved over 1,200 educators and 5,700 children who started first grade in 2021 and 2022. Much of the funding for the study went toward paying for teacher training and coaching to roll out the program over three years. All of the data was collected and nearly done being analyzed when DOGE made its cuts.

Garet doesn’t think he and his team should simply walk away from unfinished work.

“If we can’t report results, that would violate our covenant with the districts, the teachers, the parents, and the students who devoted a lot of time in the hope of generating knowledge about what works,” Garet said. “Now that we have the data and have the results, I think we’re duty-bound to report them.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Washington, D.C.

On Monday, a federal district court judge in Maryland granted a barring the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management from disclosing personally identifiable information to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, filed a federal lawsuit with a coalition of labor unions Feb. 12 alleging that the department illegally gave DOGE access to millions of private and sensitive records.

The court ruled that the AFT would likely succeed in its lawsuit and agreed that the two agencies “likely violated the Privacy Act by disclosing their personal information to DOGE affiliates without their consent.” The restraining order will expire March 10. 

“This is a significant decision that puts a firewall between actors whom we believe lack the legitimacy and authority to access Americans’ personal data and are using it inappropriately, without any safeguards,” union President Randi Weingarten said in a press release.

In other action, the union announced on Feb. 19 that as part of a recently launched campaign called . 

The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, organized a rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 12 to protest the nomination of Linda McMahon as secretary of education.

In response to administration efforts to downsize federal agencies, the American Federation of Government Employees filed a lawsuit to stop a resignation program that prompted thousands of workers to leave their jobs. The nation’s largest federal employee union — which represents U.S. Department of Education staff — argued that the program was unlawful, .

California

Members of unions in 32 California school districts have banded together to negotiate a shared set of contract demands: improved wages and benefits, smaller class sizes, fully staffed schools and more resources for students.

The locals united as part of the California Teachers Association’s , which launched Feb. 4. The districts employ a total of 77,000 educators and teach 1 million students, and include some of the largest in the state: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento. 

Many of the unions’ contracts are set to expire this summer. California Teachers Association President David Goldberg said in a Feb. 4 webinar that the campaign is intended to build pressure statewide, .

At one charter school in the San Fernando Valley, teachers staged a four-day after working without a contract since July 1. Educators at El Camino Real Charter High School, who are represented by United Teachers Los Angeles, walked out from Feb. 10 to 14 before reaching an agreement that includes a 19% salary increase over three years, .

The nation’s first charter school strike occurred in 2018, a four-day work stoppage at Acero, one of Chicago’s largest charter school networks. The vast majority of charter schools are not unionized.

Idaho

A bill that would ban taxpayer funds from going toward teachers union operations advanced out of committee to the full House on Feb. 12. The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Judy Boyle, said is intended to cut down on what she called “under-the-table” dealings between school districts and unions, according to the .

HB98 would apply only to teachers unions, not to other public-sector unions that represent occupations like first responders, according to the Idaho Education Association. It would require teachers to use personal leave to do union work, eliminate payroll deductions for dues and ban distribution of union materials on school property. Violators could be fined up to $2,500.

“This wasn’t the outcome we wanted, but we’re not done fighting this bad bill yet,” Chris Parri, the union’s political director, said . “We’ll need all hands on deck to kill it for good in the [state] Senate when the time comes.” 

Illinois

The Chicago Teachers Union rejected a recommendation Feb. 4 from a neutral arbitrator that negotiators return to the bargaining table and reach agreement with Chicago Public Schools on a that includes higher pay for veteran teachers and more librarians. In a letter to the district, the union that the mediator “rightly notes that [Chicago Public Schools] consistently signs … labor contracts despite claiming it lacks the funds to afford them.”

Once the recommendation is rejected, the union has to wait 30 days before it can give the district a 10-day strike notice. The Chicago Teachers Union went on strike during contract negotiations for seven days in 2012, one day in 2016 and 11 days in 2019.

Massachusetts

Lawmakers questioned the state’s largest teachers union at a special hearing Feb. 10 over learning materials that some members believe were antisemitic. 

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, which represents more than 117,000 educators, was about the Israel-Hamas conflict. President Max Page said that the documents were created by request from the union’s board and published in a members-only area of the union website.

Examples included a poster on the Israel-Hamas war reading, “what was taken by force can only be returned by force” and a book about a Palestinian girl who says, “a group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people,” according to .

“The notion that our union is trying to ‘indoctrinate’ our young people is simply not true, and accusations to that effect have led to death threats to me and my staff, and to other attacks on our union,” Page said. “Posting resources does not imply agreement with each and every document. Nor would we ever expect that our members would look at these resources with an uncritical eye.”

An by the Israeli-American Civic Action Network that asks lawmakers and state agencies to halt collaboration with the union on legislation has received more than 17,000 signatures.

Utah

One of the first bills Gov. Spencer Cox signed into law this year bars teachers unions from bargaining collectively and conducting operations on school property.

The governor on Feb. 14, marking the end of a weeks-long debate about how public-sector unions should operate. Lawmakers who favored the bill said it will ensure transparency in unions and protect taxpayer resources, but educators said it will only make a job that’s already full of challenges more difficult.

While it doesn’t prevent employees from joining a union, the law prohibits public agencies — which employ teachers, firefighters, police officers and county workers, among others — from “recognizing a labor organization as a bargaining agent” and “entering into collective bargaining contracts.” 

The Utah Education Association said HB267 will also weaken advocacy because it cuts off access to schools by barring unions from using public property for free. Some opponents of the bill charged it was created to retaliate against the Utah Education Association, which is The association is the state’s largest teachers union, with 18,000 members.

Up first: An order for schools to kill diversity, equity and inclusion — or else. 

Schools and universities were given 14 days to end diversity initiatives or risk losing federal funding. But the order’s vague language, civil rights advocates argue, could have a chilling effect and encourage schools to eliminate everything related to race. |

• Suggesting statewide resistance to the DEI order, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey responded by saying “we are going to stay true to who we are in Massachusetts.” |
• Michigan state Superintendent Michael Rice said a review of Trump’s letter “will take time,” but as of now, the state education department “continues to support diversity in literature, comprehensive history instruction and broad recruitment to Grow Your Own programs for students and support staff to become teachers.” |
• Meanwhile, in Louisiana, state Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley endorsed Trump’s DEI directive, noting in a letter this week that his department is working to “stop inherently divisive concepts, like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), from infiltrating Louisiana’s K-12 public education system.” |
• Trump’s order applies a broad interpretation of a recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions and could be leveraged to restrict content taught in classrooms. |
• My colleague Linda Jacobson reported this week on the Education Department’s abrupt decision to terminate $600 million in teacher training grants, many specifically designed to recruit future educators of color, who are underrepresented in the classroom. | ����Ӱ��

• After PBS scrubbed a video series on LGBTQ history in response to Trump’s DEI orders, the content has a new home: the New York City school district’s website. |
• A new lawsuit by college professors and diversity professionals alleges the order is unconstitutional. “In the United States, there is no king,” they write in their complaint. “In his crusade to erase diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility from our country, President Trump cannot usurp Congress’s exclusive power of the purse, nor can he silence those who disagree with him by threatening them with the loss of federal funds and other enforcement actions.” |
• A coalition of civil rights groups filed suit against the Trump administration on Wednesday, arguing the DEI order infringed on their free speech rights. NAACP Legal Defense Fund President and Director-Counsel Janai Nelson said that “beyond spreading inaccurate, dehumanizing and divisive rhetoric,” Trump’s orders tie the hands of organizations that are “providing critical services to people who need them most.” |

More from Washington: Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for children whose parents are undocumented or on work visas remains blocked after an appeals court declined to reinstate it — and paved the way for a potential battle in the Supreme Court. |

• A majority of Amerians in a recent poll opposed ending birthright citizenship and another Trump order allowing immigration agents to make arrests in churches, schools and other sensitive locations once considered off limits. |

Two federal courts have blocked a Trump executive order that sought to restrict transgender youth from receiving gender-affirming care, with a Washington judge writing the directive violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause and disregarded Congress. |

‘It looks like a zoo’: Children are among the nearly 100 migrants who were recently deported from the U.S. to Panama and placed in a detention camp with “fenced cages” on the outskirts of the jungle. |

Trump issued an order on Thursday to end “all taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens.” But undocumented immigrants generally don’t qualify for federal benefits with one major exception: In 1982, the Supreme Court found that all children, regardless of their immigration status, are entitled to a free K-12 education. |

More in the news

A judge has ordered the Milwaukee school district to station police officers on campuses within 10 days or face sanctions. Amid a dispute over school police funding, the district has not complied for more than a year with a state law that mandates police in schools. |

School police in Texas have opened an investigation into the suicide death of an 11-year-old girl after her mother said the middle school student suffered pervasive bullying from classmates who claimed her family was in the country illegally and threatened to have them deported. |

Sandy Hook Promise was credited with helping to thwart an 18-year-old Indiana student’s plot to commit a mass school shooting on Valentine’s Day. Police reports note a tipster to the nonprofit’s anonymous reporting system said “their friend has access to an AR15 and has just ordered a bulletproof vest.” |

Missouri public schools would be required to develop cardiac emergency response plans and equip campuses with automated external defibrillators under bipartisan legislation. |

Fewer than half of Texas school districts are in compliance with a 2023 law requiring armed security at every campus. |

Graduates of a Kent, Connecticut, boarding school have sued the institution on allegations its former IT administrator accessed financial records, medical information, photos and videos from hundreds of former students and employees. “There are potentially many hundreds of former Kent School students and employees who are victims of [the school official’s] personal invasion and sexual exploitation,” the complaint alleges. |

Kept in the Dark

For a recent investigation for ����Ӱ�� and Wired, I fell down a dark web rabbit hole and chronicled more than 300 school cyberattacks in the last five years — and revealed the degree to which school leaders in virtually every state repeatedly provide false assurances to students, parents and staff about the security of their sensitive information. 

This week, I highlighted my investigation into a ransomware attack on the Minneapolis school district — an “encryption event,” according to school officials — which led to the widespread exposure of students’ sensitive data. What the district told the public and the FBI, documents I obtained through public records requests show, differed drastically. 

ICYMI @The74

• Students Fearful After Posts Threaten to Report Undocumented Peers to ICE

• Parents, Medical Providers, Vaccine Experts Brace for RFK Jr.’s HHS Takeover

• ‘Evict Elon’: Teachers Union, Others Sue to Stop DOGE’s Access to Ed Dept. Data

• After Declaring NAEP Off-Limits, Education Department Cancels Upcoming Test

Emotional support

If Kathy Moore’s pup Sinead knows one thing, it’s how to build a good fort to ride out these cold winter days. 

Many voters cheer these efforts, frustrated with a system they see as prioritizing elite interests over their problems. The IES chaos energized Trump supporters and horrified the education research community. But few addressed the most important question: What now?

Like many government activities, the value of education research isn’t always immediately obvious. But just because something is obscure, that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. In fact, a strong case can be made that the nation underinvests in education research. IES’s budget of $793 million is a fraction of the more than $900 billion spent annually by federal, state and local governments on just K-12 public schools. That’s a staggeringly lower percentage for R&D than most industries — certainly less than what Elon Musk’s companies spend. 

Federal investment in education research focuses on closing the gap between the aspirations of public schools and real-world outcomes. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chief architect of the first federal modern education research agency, envisioned it as a way to develop “the art and science of education” to achieve true equality of opportunity. An essential mission — but the U.S. is failing to deliver on it.

“Shoddy work on trivial topics,” research warped by political priorities and bloated bureaucracies draining limited resources. That’s not Elon Musk and DOGE talking, that’s Chester E. Finn Jr., a key architect of federal education research-turned-critic pleading for reform in 2000.

Just two weeks ago, the Nation’s Report Card, produced by IES, showed the largest achievement gaps between the lowest- and highest-achieving students ever recorded. A decade of decline, coupled with disastrous pandemic responses, set achievement for struggling students back to 1990s level. International assessments reveal the U.S. as a global outlier, with a growing share of adults assessed at the lowest levels of literacy.

This is not inevitable. For decades, America made steady gains in educational achievement. States are recovering from the pandemic in differentiated ways. Overall, however, achievement stagnated in the years leading up to COVID, and the nation has clearly failed to recover from the pandemic learning loss, despite significant federal spending on schools. This makes government investments in education research instrumental to understanding America’s slow, halting progress toward making good on the promise of public education, and the cliff it’s gone off the past few years. 

The “science of reading” movement illustrates the power of research and the shortcomings of the existing federal approach. Journalist Emily Hanford’s reporting on reading instruction did more to change classroom practices than the entire What Works Clearinghouse — a federally funded, bureaucratic mechanism for reviewing evidence. 

IES’s mission, to “provide national leadership in expanding fundamental knowledge and understanding of education from early childhood through postsecondary study … to provide parents, educators, students, researchers, policymakers and the general public with reliable information about … the condition and progress of education in the United States” remains essential. Yet IES is not meeting these goals.

The answer is not to jettison the federal role in education research. On the contrary, the nation needs more of it, and better. The lack of outrage from people working in schools about the DOGE cuts is a silence worth listening to.

Here are five ideas for a more strategic, agile, relevant and impact-driven IES:

Confront the Political and Structural Barriers to Implementation 

Developing effective strategies is not enough — the real challenge is getting educators to use them at scale in a decentralized system where states, districts and schools operate independently. Testing and innovation must have buy-in from those in the field so they are more strongly linked to adoption.

Political pressures, bureaucratic inertia and rigid regulations often prevent research-backed solutions from taking hold. IES should prioritize research that not only evaluates effectiveness, but also identifies the policy, governance and systemic barriers that block effective implementation. The agency prioritizes rigorous experimental studies, which is good, but other methods are also needed to answer questions about implementation. And this work must be better disseminated and applied, not just passed around among researchers.

Be a More Active Arbiter of ‘What Works’

Every year, school districts spend billions on curriculum, technology and instructional interventions, often with little regard for evidence. IES should evolve beyond the passive and hard-to-interpret What Works Clearinghouse and become an active information and standards-setting body. That could mean:

• Continuing, even expanding, essential data that inform parents and policymakers, like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the , the Department of Education’s primary database on K-12 schools and districts.
  
• Issuing A-F ratings for educational interventions, modeled after the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in health care.
  
• Convening expert panels, like the National Reading Panel, to resolve key education debates and provide clear, evidence-based guidance.
  
• Tracking successes and failures, publishing reports on which states and districts effectively use research-based strategies.

Tackle Hard Questions Without Fear

For too long, education research has avoided politically sensitive but critical questions. IES should lead on issues such as:

• Why is early reading proficiency still tied so strongly to family income?
  
• How does the teacher pay structure discourage ambitious, high-achieving individuals from entering or staying in the profession?
  
• What outdated regulations and funding mechanisms are stifling school innovation?

IES must be willing to confront uncomfortable truths — and ensure its research drives real policy action.

Better Data and Utilization of Existing Field Capacity. 

The Common Core of Data, along with other information IES collects, represents some of the most used evidence in education research. Yet there are also glaring holes in what IES collects and, therefore, what researchers can explore. Very little is known, for instance, systemically about what teacher candidates learn when they are preparing to teach. Nor is there good, comprehensive national information about how much teachers earn or even what compensation is based on. 

IES can collect some data, but it must ask hard questions about whether this or other data collections should be done in house. Over time, IES has held onto functions that nonprofit organizations like RAND and the Advanced Education Research & Development Fund have proven they can do as well, or better. It can take years for IES to publish results, while others can do it in months. A reformed IES should focus on what it does best — funding and evaluating research, operating nimbly and maintaining quality and independence — while supporting capacity elsewhere in the field for things like large-scale data collection and reporting, fast-turnaround field surveys and DARPA-like R&D investments.

The Department of Defense’s DARPA has pioneered breakthrough innovations in the military by funding high-risk, high-reward research with clear objectives and short timelines. IES could replicate this strategy by funding one or more bold new initiatives to conduct ambitious, time-bound research. This would bring together top scientists, technologists and educators for five-year terms to work on pioneering transformative solutions, such as AI-driven personalized learning, early literacy breakthroughs and reimagined teacher preparation. Notably, DARPA is not a new governmental function; it’s a mechanism for using fieldwide capacity in the private and university sectors as a problem-solving framework. 

Launch a National ‘Moonshot’ for Education

Rather than spreading resources across countless disconnected projects, IES should focus on the most urgent educational challenges. A National Education Challenge Panel should be convened every five years to identify critical research priorities tied to a broader federal policy strategy. Immediate areas of focus could include:

• “Eliminate the early literacy gap by 2035.”
  
• “Ensure every eighth grader can master algebra”
  
• “Ensure every high school graduate is truly college- or career-ready by 2030.”
  
• “Revolutionize the teaching profession to attract a cross-section of top college graduates.”

Instead of fragmented efforts, this would focus the entire education research ecosystem on delivering real, transformative change.

Trump identifies as a deal maker. The ideas here could be the beginning of a new deal for education research, producing timely and usable evidence. We recognize that reforming IES in these ways will be controversial, requiring hard decisions about what research should prioritize and how the federal government should support it. But the status quo or abandonment of federal education research would be worse — leaving progress to a fragmented, underfunded patchwork of individual researchers and often ideological interest groups.

Even if you don’t like how DOGE and the Trump administration are approaching their work — and we don’t — it is past time to substantially mend the federal role in education research. Especially now, if you don’t want to see that role end. 

Disclosure: The authors have all received funding from, or worked on projects funded by, IES and have worked or currently work with RAND. Andy Rotherham sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors.

The 12-11 vote fell along party lines, with the Republican chairman of the committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, calling McMahon “the partner this committee needs to improve the nation’s education system.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an Independent who is the committee’s ranking member, said he liked McMahon personally. “I respect the work she has done in building a large and successful business.” But he said no matter who the education secretary is, “he or she will not have the power” to make consequential decisions. A small group of people in The White House, he said, will be “calling the shots.”

Sanders was referring to massive cuts at the department by auditors deputized by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Along with other Democrats, Sanders criticized White House plans to dismantle the U.S. Education Department, which he said “provides vital resources for 26 million kids who live in high-poverty school districts. These are the kids who most need our help.”

During her confirmation hearing last week, McMahon said she supported dismantling the department, but admitted that the administration needs congressional support to do it. 

“We’d like to do this right,” she told the committee. “We’d like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with.”

Sanders on Thursday said that was misguided. “Is it a perfect entity?” he said. “No. Is it bureaucratic? Yes. Can we reform it? Yes. Should we abolish it? No.”

Likewise, Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, said he’d vote no on McMahon’s nomination for that reason. “I can’t vote for somebody who will willfully engage in the destruction of the very agency she wants to lead. That is disqualifying.”

McMahon’s nomination proceeds as the administration sends decidedly mixed signals on its education agenda. President Trump has nominated two experienced, well-regarded educators — North Dakota state Superintendent Kirsten Baesler and former Tennessee education chief Penny Schwinn — as top lieutenants to McMahon, even as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency decimates the department’s research arm, slashing millions of dollars in contracts in search of waste, fraud and abuse. At a press conference last week, Trump called the department “a con job.” 

McMahon, for her part, has said she supports DOGE’s work, saying, “It is worthwhile to take a look at the programs before money goes out the door.” 

While she’s expected to easily earn confirmation in the Republican-controlled Senate, with support among conservative groups, McMahon faces opposition from education and civil rights groups that more broadly oppose the White House education cuts. 

The conservative group last week said Trump was smart to nominate McMahon to lead the department “in what we hope is a short tenure” as she works to shutter it.

Conservative commentator Rick Hess McMahon’s WWE experience gives her the right background for the top job: “Considering that it’s an agency that’s long been plagued by low morale and accused of being too chummy with the unions and the college cartel,” he wrote, “there’s a strong case that what’s needed is an outsider with a strong managerial track record.”

By contrast, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights on Wednesday urged lawmakers to reject her nomination, saying in a co-signed by more than 240 groups that she’s “unprepared and unqualified” to lead the agency. Her confirmation would be “disastrous for students, their families, and educators,” the group said. 

Worth more than $3 billion

One of 13 billionaires tapped to lead Trump’s administration, McMahon has held tightly to Trump’s key education priorities: advancing private school choice, preventing trans students from competing in sports consistent with their gender identity and fighting antisemitism. 

McMahon’s confirmation has taken longer to schedule than those of most other cabinet nominees as the education committee waited for her to complete ethics paperwork detailing vast financial assets and ties to far-right organizations. Her net worth totals more than $3 billion.

As a board member of Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs the president’s Truth Social platform, she earns $18,400 quarterly. Politico reported that she also received stock in the company worth more than $800,000 in late January. McMahon is also on the advisory council for the Daily Caller, a conservative media outlet that has given her favorable coverage. 

If confirmed, McMahon has promised to step down from her board positions, forfeit any shares in Truth Social that she doesn’t yet fully own and divest from those that she does within three months. She also earns interest income from education-related municipal bonds that fund school construction across the country and has pledged to divest from those as well.

A vote before the full Senate has yet to be scheduled.

Six individuals joined the suit, filed by the nation’s second-largest teacher’s union, alongside a coalition of labor unions representing over 2 million workers. Those impacted include teachers, who relied on federal student loans to pay for their college tuition, and high school students, who recently filed their federal financial aid forms with the department.

“When I filled out the FAFSA, I gave my Social Security number and my parent’s income information as well as their investment information,” Maryland high school student Sara Porcari said at an AFT Wednesday. “I thought that information would be private and secure. Now I’m not sure what’s happening.”

“I’m only 17 years old,” she continued, “and I don’t know who has access to my personal information or how this data breach will affect my future in college and in general.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten questioned why Musk, a billionaire given free rein by the president to remake the federal government, and DOGE want access to that information, expressing doubts about their stated purpose of improving government efficiency. 

 An AFT press release Tuesday called for “Elon Musk and his minions to be immediately evicted from the U.S. Department of Education,” alleging they were feeding the data from millions of people’s private student loan accounts “into artificial intelligence in one of the biggest data hacks in U.S. history.”

Ernesh Stewart, a Washington, D.C., school counselor and mom, echoed those concerns Wednesday, “Why do you need to access my daughter’s scholarship information? Why do you even need my home address? I can’t help but wonder if there is a hidden agenda. If one of the country’s wealthiest men, who also happens to be deeply invested in AI, has access to all this information, whatever it is, I feel like it’s a gross violation of privacy.”

The Education Department, which oversees the private information of 43 million student borrowers who hold $1.6 trillion in student debt, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A DOGE representative did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

Weingarten and other panelists at the conference expressed their hope that President Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon, would join them in condemning this “data breach,” during her Thursday confirmation hearing.

“I would hope that what she would do is protect students and protect families from this kind of financial intrusion and invasion and … say to the millions of people that have been affected the steps she’s taking to stop it,” Weingarten said.

While the lawsuit contends government agencies have valid purposes for maintaining these record systems, the makes clear they can only provide access to them in very specific situations. Here, though, the filing argues, DOGE representatives have accessed the data to shut down payments “and in the case of the Education Department, the agency itself.”

After gaining access to the systems last week, Musk, who is not an elected official, turned to X, the social media platform he owns, to boast that the Department of Education no longer exists. 

What is this “Department of Education” you keep talking about?

I just checked and it doesn’t exist.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

In another DOGE-led effort, the Trump administration moved Monday to gut the Institute of Education Sciences, temporarily disabling an essential source of data on a host of basic information, ranging from high school graduation rates to school safety. 

DOGE was created by a Trump executive order in January. Supporters argue Musk is working to cut federal bloat and streamline systems. But critics say Musk, whose companies, including SpaceX, receive billions in government contracts, lacks transparency and has immense conflicts of interest.  

The suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Maryland, also alleges that the U.S. Department of Education, along with the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Treasury, has exposed millions of Americans to “the risk of identity theft, harassment, intimidation, and embarrassment” by improperly disclosing their sensitive records to DOGE employees who lack appropriate security clearances. The staff includes a 19-year-old who has previously leaked proprietary information, according to the suit.

WIRED magazine broke the story earlier this month that at the center of DOGE’s effort to take over various federal departments and agencies are six male engineers, with ties to Musk.

In particular, plaintiffs claim that the Department of Education and its acting head, Denise Carter, have released data from the National Student Loan Data System, a financial aid-related database housed within the Education Department that contains information on almost 34 million borrowers and their families. It includes a plethora of sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, bank records, home addresses and immigration status. 

About 20 people with DOGE have begun working inside the education department, looking to cut According to reporting from some of these representatives have fed sensitive and personally identifiable data from across the department into artificial intelligence software to look into the agency’s programs and spending.

Plaintiffs are asking the court to end the data disclosure immediately by restoring Privacy Act protections and are demanding that any data currently in DOGE’s possession be deleted and destroyed. The act, put in place in the wake of the Watergate scandal, regulates the circumstances in which agency records about individuals can be shared; disclosing anything beyond this is illegal. 

On Tuesday, a federal judge in a against the Education Department blocked Musk’s team from accessing several systems that store sensitive data including student loans, but only temporarily. In a hearing for that case, Musk said he did not see how DOGE’s access to student loan data caused harm.

While it has previously been reported that DOGE representatives are political appointees, it now appears that some have received official government credentials, including email addresses, at multiple agencies, including at the Department of Education, leading to confusion about who actually employs them.