But the “techlash” took a turn last week when seven families in a Philadelphia suburb sued their school district in federal court for not allowing families to opt their children out of using the internet.

The 8,500-student Lower Merion School District adopted a Aug. 17 that limits the use of devices in elementary school and doesn’t assign laptops or iPads to students until they’re in fifth grade. 

The policy tries to strike a balance between recognizing that “families have different perspectives on student access to technology,” while still “maximizing the educational value of technology resources.” But in June, the board repealed a that allowed  parents to refuse internet-connected devices for their kids. 

Citing research on the addictive nature of online sites and the harmful effects of social media, the parents accuse the district, Superintendent Frank Ranelli and seven board members of creating “an environment that is unhealthy, unsafe and invasive for students.” The complaint argues that the policy denies parents’ rights to make decisions about their children’s “upbringing and education” and puts kids at risk of accessing online pornography and violent videos. One child, according to the lawsuit, began “compulsively playing an online poker game on his school device.”

In a statement, the district said it “denies the allegations and will respond further through the judicial process.” But officials also noted that not all of the parents have students in the district. Of the seven families bringing the lawsuit, just three have students still enrolled. The rest have children described as “eligible to attend” this fall. One family enrolled their kids in a private school, according to the complaint.

An ‘unusual lawsuit’

The case is the latest move by the EdTech Law Center, led by a husband and wife legal team in Texas, to force districts to significantly restrict internet use. Andrew and Julie Liddell, who are working with a representing the parents, also have several active cases against ed tech vendors, including , an online learning platform, and  , a student information system. In a statement, Andrew Liddell said he believes the case “is the first of its kind.” It’s not typical, experts say, for disputes between parents and districts over tech use to end up in court. 

“This is an unusual lawsuit,” said Stacy Hawthorne, board chair for the Consortium for School Networking, a professional organization. It’s difficult, she said, to bring a constitutional challenge over a school board’s policymaking authority. “Courts generally have not given individual families a veto over a district’s instructional or technology policies.”

The lawsuit comes about a week after Education Secretary Linda McMahon said during a CNN interview that to request something different if they think an ed tech tool, especially one using artificial intelligence, is not right for their child. 

In response to parents’ concerns and warnings from researchers about the effects of too much screen time, several states are . Last week, New York lawmakers that would make paper-and-pencil tasks the predominant means of instruction in elementary classrooms. 

Kelly Clancy, a Brooklyn mom of three who serves on a local community education council in the New York City Public Schools, said parents are “really excited” about the bill and that advocacy groups “are planning a major statewide push.” But she thinks most parents are more interested in seeing districts adopt strict screen time policies rather than opting out. 

“Parents want to trust their kids’ schools to put learning first,” she said. “No one wants to reach the point of litigation.” 

Ed tech organizations and the have called for limiting overuse while thoroughly vetting programs to ensure they improve learning.

“Nothing should replace that one-on-one teacher interaction with students,” McMahon said during her CNN spot. “Are we looking at it as recreational screen time or are we looking at it as tutorial screen time? There is a right balance to be used in the classroom.” 

Hawthorne, chair of the Consortium for School Networking, said she doesn’t expect similar lawsuits to become common, and that most disputes over screen time, privacy and AI “will continue to play out through school board deliberations, elections and state policymaking.” 

But she urged districts to take parents’ concerns seriously and to explain how their use of technology supports learning and protects kids online.

‘Teacher-led education’

The debate between Lower Merion district leaders and parents flared up in the spring when, according to the complaint, device use “had grown intolerable to many parents.” 

Yair Lev, the lead plaintiff, has two children at Cynwyd Elementary in the district and helped organize Pencils Over Pixels to advocate in favor of maintaining the opt-out policy. When Ranelli, the superintendent, and local school administrators began telling parents they couldn’t opt out, the conflict escalated.

Lev, a cardiologist and professor at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, sent numerous emails to board members asking them not to “eliminate parent protections.”

In a July message, he described an earlier conversation in which he said the superintendent told him that parents who object to Chromebooks and online curriculum “were welcome to leave the public school district and go to private school.”

at previous meetings by some parents demanding to opt their children out of using devices, the district ultimately moved the final vote on the policy to Zoom and allowed no public comments. The district is also adopting a new program that allows both to monitor device use.

In a statement shared with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Lev said he has no plans to pull his kids out of the district.

“We are not willing to sacrifice the public schools and community we love,” he said. “We simply seek to preserve our right as parents to choose a teacher-led education for our children without mandatory technology requirements.”

Every few years, testing experts at the U.S. Department of Education weigh state assessments against their “gold standard,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as “the nation’s report card.”

In released in 2021, two states stood out, but not in a good way. Both Iowa and Virginia established fourth grade reading standards that only measured up to  “below basic” on NAEP. 

In Virginia, the revelation sparked a public outcry.

Former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin seized on the discrepancy, often called the “honesty gap,” to push through tougher standards and assessments. His administration to the mismatch and Aimee Guidera, his education secretary, traversed the state, preparing that many of their children’s scores would soon be going dramatically down. News coverage kept up with the for and against the changes.

But in Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds, also a Republican, has stayed silent on the matter. In fact, there’s been so little reaction to the gap that some state capitol insiders had no idea it existed. 

“I was shocked,” said Dustin Miller, a lobbyist. “If this is our future workforce, we need to ask questions about this.”

This past spring, he took part in what he called a “master class” on K-12 issues offered by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. The foundation had just released calling on business leaders in states with large honesty gaps to advocate for higher standards.

In Iowa, 75% of fourth graders reached proficiency in reading in 2025 on the , one of the highest rates in the nation. But the rate is deceptive, masking the fact that less than a third of Iowa’s students hit the proficiency mark on NAEP. Sean Finn, a policy analyst with Common Good Iowa, a left-leaning think tank, noted those results when that the state was no longer a leader in education.

Largely behind closed doors, the state is now updating its assessment system. It adopted new standards in 2024, and this past spring, administered new tests based on those standards. But so far, state officials have devoted scant public attention to the matter. In a state where Gov. Reynolds has been criticized for , Anne Discher, executive director of Common Good Iowa, said she’s not surprised.  

“I am not sure that we are experiencing a state government that prioritizes openness with the public,” she said.

Carmen Gwenigale-Ogoli, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment for the Iowa City School District, said the “Iowa Department of Education has not yet released extensive information” about the testing changes. 

Some teachers in her district, however, participated in a standard-setting process in June. They were among the 155 educators who met in Des Moines to recommend the minimum scores students must earn to pass the new tests, also known as cut scores. 

Heather Doe, a spokeswoman for the state education agency, pushed back on the suggestion that officials haven’t informed districts of the changes to come. The information, she said, has been “broadly shared,” and Director McKenzie Snow discussed the process at the School Administrators of Iowa’s recent meeting. In November, the state board will vote on final cut score recommendations. 

But Brad Buck, executive director of the organization, said he couldn’t tell from Snow’s comments whether the changes will be significant.

Doe said a date for the release of the cut scores hasn’t been set. She wouldn’t say whether they’ll accord with NAEP, but said the teachers were informed “by the high expectations” of the national test. If they raise the bar, that could result in fewer students passing the test. 

Because of the update, this year’s results to previous years, but they should “provide families with clearer information about student progress,” Doe said. 

‘Healthy thing’

Not all state officials are convinced their proficiency cut scores should match NAEP’s.

Republican state Sen. Lynn Evans, chair of the education committee and a former superintendent, said it’s a “healthy thing” to compare state and NAEP performance levels. But he called NAEP a “one-shot assessment” only given to a sample of students, and is skeptical of the honesty gap.

“NAEP is a dipstick. Only certain school districts give it,” he said. “I always leaned more into locally developed assessments. To me, that’s a truer test of how students perform.”

A new from NCES, released in July, showed that Maine’s fourth grade reading standards also fall in the below basic range. But Janette Kirk, chief of federal programs at the Maine Department of Education, said the agency would wait for a final study, expected in the coming months, before making any adjustments. 

She said officials agreed with NCES’ statements that the reviews are not intended to “suggest that NAEP achievement levels are more valid than state standards or that states should emulate NAEP standards.”

In recent years, several states, like Wisconsin and New York, have lowered expectations on state tests, saying the post-pandemic decline in student performance called for a “new normal.” 

Virginia chose to go in a different direction. Its tougher cut scores, phased in over time, are set to this school year. In June, the state education agency, now under Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger, , but the state board rejected it. 

Andrew Rotherham, a former Virginia state board member, said some leaders struggle with the honesty gap topic, likening it to “water on cats for some people.” But in Virginia, he said, on the timeline was the right thing to do. He also acknowledged that it’s politically difficult to implement higher standards when the public thinks their schools are doing well. 

“The phase-in will be a transition, it will be confusing,” he recently wrote, “and it will require state leadership to help people understand what’s going on.”

New Jersey is currently going through the same shift, one that has in releasing scores. With two kids in middle school in the state, Charles Barone, senior director of the National Parents Union’s Center for Innovation, said it’s important for states to be transparent with the public when . 

It’s a highly technical process, he said, one that both Republicans and Democrats sometimes avoid. 

“I think the right is torn between culture warriorism and rigor,” he said. “And the left has mixed feelings about high-stakes testing.”

Youngkin, he said, didn’t need the Democratic-controlled legislature to approve the new standards and assessments. The state board, which made the final decision, was largely made up of .

But in Iowa, with a GOP majority in the state House and Senate, Reynolds focused on accomplishing her top , a universal education savings account program. 

The presence of the honesty gap didn’t stop Reynolds from receiving a lot of positive attention from Education Secretary Linda McMahon. In January the secretary granted the state a waiver from some rules governing federal funds. The governor pointed to the state test results when asking the administration for more flexibility. 

“We’re proving that I think we’re up to the task, that we’re definitely on the right track,” she said at a .

McMahon also for advancing “education freedom” and chose the state as the first recipient of a , which expands the federal financial aid program to cover short-term training programs.

Barone predicted that Reynolds would not be hurt if she chose to leave the testing issue alone. With the governor leaving office in January, he said, “she has a good enough legacy that she doesn’t have to worry about spending a lot of time on the honesty gap.”

Clarification: The headline on this story has been updated to clarify that Iowa’s standards were identified as below basic.

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham sits on ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s board of directors.

The U.S. Department of Education is expected to award $41.3 million in grant funding through the Alaska Native Education Program to 26 Alaska grantees after some delay, according to an announcement from Alaska Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

The grant funding was expected on July 1, but has been delayed more than a month. Grantees alerted Murkowski’s office they had not yet received the funding, prompting Murkowski to press the U.S. Sec. of Education Linda McMahon to release the awarded funding, according to the statement on Aug. 5.

“Last week, I raised this issue with Secretary McMahon, and I’m pleased she agreed to expedite the obligation of the funds for the Alaska Native Education Program grants that Congress appropriated earlier this year,” Sen. Murkowski wrote.

The Alaska Native Education Program provides federal funding to “meet the unique education needs of Alaska Natives” and to support education programs to benefit Alaska Native people, according to the.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Education’s grant office for the program did not give a reason for the delay or specify when the funds will be dispensed after a query on Friday.

The grants to Tribes, tribal organizations and school districts with a majority of Alaska Native students to support a variety of initiatives across a three-year grant period.

“Grants provide, for example, culturally relevant curriculum, tutoring and other academic supports, indigenous language revitalization, workforce development opportunities, teacher professional development, postsecondary planning and support, and success, early childhood education, and afterschool programming,” Murkowski said in the statement.

“I will continue to champion this program and work with the Department to ensure this funding is administered more expeditiously going forward,” she said.

Grantees include several early learning and literacy programs. Millions are slated for Indigenous language, art, science, and medicine including $2.1 million for the Baby Raven Reads project by Sealaska Heritage Institute and $1.4 million for tutoring and college readiness programs through the Rural Indigenous Students College Readiness Alliance launched by the Bering Strait and Lower Kuskokwim School Districts, two of Alaska’s largest, rural districts.

Rosita Kaaháni Worl, president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute, a Native non-profit corporation focused on Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian cultures, said her organization was one of the grantees that alerted Murkwoski’s office to the delay. Sealaska has not received its grant funds yet.

Worl said in an interview Friday that federal funds and support for Alaska Native communities is critical, given Alaska’s history of suppressing Native education and language.

“So these programs have helped us overcome the effects of that kind of suppression,” she said. “Our data shows definitely that it promotes and enhances Native education, and we show that through all of our evaluations
it’s led to higher academic performance.”

She said SHI has seen success in early childhood programs like Baby Raven Reads project and initiatives to support students continuing education, which reduces drop out rates. “We’re still behind non-natives, but we’re gaining ground,” she said.

Worl said the federal support helps Sealaska Heritage Institute provide annual funding for education across Southeast Alaska where state funding has fallen short. SHI provides $1 million each year to the Juneau School District and $2 million annually to the University of Alaska Southeast, as well as funding to support school districts across the region for teacher training, arts and language programs.

“It’s a program that has proven benefits,” she said. “There, there’s no doubt about it.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Claire Stremple for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a member of the House education committee, filed three articles of impeachment against McMahon, noting the secretary’s “willful intent to unilaterally dismantle and eliminate the Department of Education.”

Bonamici a week ago, prompting a swift response from McMahon defending her track record.

“It speaks volumes that House Democrats think an impeachable offense is working to improve student outcomes and reduce the federal bureaucracy,” she .

The resolution accuses McMahon of compromising the ability of the department to fulfill its duties. That’s also the conclusion that the department’s Inspector General reached in released Wednesday detailing how the administration has slashed the agency’s staff by 40% and canceled billions of dollars in grants and contracts. 

McMahon has been forced to backtrack. The department currently has several job openings posted, including and .

Democrats have introduced articles of impeachment against multiple members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, including Health and Human Services Secretary and Defense Secretary . But historically the attempts have rarely succeeded. Two years ago, the House impeached Biden Homeland Security for what members said was a failure to stop migrants from crossing the border, but the Senate dismissed the two articles against him.  Before him, the last cabinet member to be impeached was William W. Belknap, secretary of war under President Ulysses S. Grant, on , in 1876. 

Critics of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s first education secretary, called for her to and some groups advocating impeachment. But lawmakers never took formal steps to do so. A federal judge, however, held her in 2019 and fined her $100,000 when she continued student debt collections in violation of a court order. The department .

While some Republicans have also been critical of McMahon, Rep. Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who chairs the education committee, called the action “political theater.”

“Secretary McMahon is doing exactly what voters elected President Trump to do: rein in a bloated bureaucracy and put students, parents, and taxpayers first,” he said in a statement.

The effort is also largely “symbolic” and unlikely to succeed, said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University. 

“Symbolism can be important, and a case can be made for using this as a way to draw attention to the dismantling of the department,” he said.

The resolution says McMahon has “decimated” the agency and “created a culture of fear and chaos” that has harmed education programs.

Specifically, the articles of impeachment are:

1. Willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law

The text cites McMahon’s actions to transfer responsibilities, which under law rest with the Education Department, to other agencies. Just last week, she announced that the office overseeing special education would move to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Civil Rights would transfer to the Justice Department.

2. False statements before Congress

The resolution accuses McMahon of lying to Congress during her confirmation hearing that she would follow the law in disbursing education funds appropriated by Congress. Instead, the text reads, she has defended the cancellation of several research contracts and discontinued grants for programs like community schools.

3. Breach of public trust

Again focusing on funding, the resolution states that the administration held up payments for services like migrant education and afterschool care and put “critical” K-12 programs at risk.

Bonamici said parents, especially those of students with disabilities are “distraught” over splitting up the department. “They are asking us to take action to stop these illegal transfers,” she said. “To them I say, ‘We hear you.’ “

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, suggested McMahon’s actions aren’t grounds for impeachment.

“The race to the bottom continues, in this case regarding the definition of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ ” he said. “This is just politics, but I can appreciate that Congressional Democrats don’t feel like they have any other recourse right now.” 

When she negotiates with school officials, she often leans on a from the federal government that such “informal removals” — like repeatedly asking a parent to pick up their child early — could violate a student’s rights. 

“They’re denying them access to education,” she said. Parents need that guidance, she added, “because most families can’t afford attorneys and years of litigation.”

That Biden-era document was a of the two offices within the U.S. Department of Education that oversee special education and civil rights and drew attention to that had long gone under the radar. But with Secretary Linda McMahon’s announcement last week that staff in those offices will be sent to separate agencies — special education to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice — educators and attorneys worry the split will lead to crossed wires for students with disabilities. 

“When school districts have to navigate rules from separate federal departments, it will make it even more challenging to manage a single student’s behavior,” said Jessica Saum, a special education administrator in Arkansas’ Cabot Public Schools, north of Little Rock. Special education programs and civil rights enforcement “are completely intertwined in practice. I do not see how schools and districts can cleanly separate a student’s behavioral needs from their civil rights.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the education committee, has promised to schedule a vote next month to from moving special education to HHS. Parents say they’re concerned that their children’s disabilities would be viewed from a medical perspective. 

“I don’t want my son to be fixed. I want him to be educated,” said Courtney Hansen, a Colorado mom whose son has Down Syndrome. Like Frohling, she was among the hundreds of parents and advocates who joined a with department staff to voice their opinions on the administration’s plans to relocate oversight of special education. A medical model, Hansen said, is “what the disability rights movement has been trying to get away from for the past 50 years.”

But Cassidy, who has been critical of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., still wouldn’t keep special education and civil rights in the same agency. He thinks the Department of Labor is a better home for special education.  

In addition to the guidance on discipline, the department’s special education officials worked with OCR in 2016 on a clarifying that students with ADHD were eligible for services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

Until then, those students were often “overlooked because they were bright, quiet, passing classes or not creating obvious discipline problems,” said Jon Thomas, a Fairfax, Virginia, counselor who works with students who have ADHD. The condition, he said, “rarely shows up as one clean problem. It’s a kid who’s behind in reading, getting written up for impulsivity, leaning on a parent to hold the homework together, and missing instruction because nobody connected the dots. Split the agencies, and you split that dot-connecting job in half.”

‘Sharper teeth’

The with HHS and DOJ were the latest attempts by the Trump administration to break up and ultimately phase out the Education Department. The DOJ would also handle complaints related to . In her about the move, McMahon said the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and the Office for Civil Rights will “continue to partner together.” She promised that the move would “break down the bureaucratic barriers and strengthen the coordination of resources.”

Some advocates agree with her. Marilyn Muller, a whose daughter has dyslexia, is “cautiously optimistic” that moving oversight of special education and civil rights out of the Education Department would “finally deliver real accountability,” she . “Too many families have waited years for states and local districts to follow the law.”

The Department of Justice, she wrote, has “sharper teeth.” 

But that’s what some parents and advocates worry about. Relationships with district officials over special education services are already adversarial. In the District of Columbia Public Schools, an OCR investigation recently concluded that parents were often forced to sue to get services for their children. Putting DOJ, the federal government’s primary law enforcement agency, in charge could make the process even less collaborative, Hansen said.

Others say it’s unlikely that the DOJ will make progress on a backlog of OCR complaints when it, too, has experienced . 

“There has already been a dramatic drop in the number of cases OCR is taking and resolving,” particularly disability complaints, said Matt Cohen, a Chicago-based civil rights attorney who specializes in cases involving students with disabilities. “As would be true when any organization is uncoupled, collaboration, coordination and consistency will be far more difficult.”  

Among the complaints OCR is acting on, officials that it’s investigating the New Home Independent School District in Texas, south of Lubbock, for canceling a life skills class for students with disabilities. In May, it opened an investigation into the for its plans to move some services for students with disabilities to a central location this fall rather than keep them in general education classrooms. 

OCR also spent a year probing the D.C. Public Schools’ special education system, but a from the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency, found that OCR dismissed 90% of the 7,000 cases it says it resolved between March and September last year.

OCR’s most shows it received 22,687 complaints in fiscal year 2024, with more than 8,400 focusing on disabilities. But the public has no way to know how many complaints OCR, under McMahon’s leadership, is currently investigating because the website with that information since the Trump administration took office. 

‘Change does need to happen’

Even before staff departures, the DOJ’s civil rights division “traditionally handled a much lower volume of cases,” said Johnathan Smith, managing director of education and federal strategic advocacy at the National Center for Youth Law. He previously served as a deputy assistant attorney in that division. “It is not clear that there is the infrastructure to meaningfully handle such a high volume of complaints.”

Rob Harris, a Colorado father filed several complaints with OCR during the first Trump and Biden administrations, because his daughter, who is blind, wasn’t receiving services written into her individualized education program, like a cane and materials in Braille. But OCR never took any action.

He told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ that he “ended up bailing the school system” and now homeschools his children, while also serving as a “facilitator” in meetings between parents and educators to develop students’ special education plans, especially those related to job coaching and transition plans after high school.

“I really want to make sure that students receive the services that they’re entitled to,” he said. 

That’s what he when he gave his three-minute statement on the January call with parents and advocates. Like several parents and advocates who participated, he said no one voiced support for moving oversight of special education to HHS. 

“It might not be the change that we wanted,” he said, “but change does need to happen.”

Federal officials Tuesday that the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services will move to the Department of Health and Human Services, while the Office for Civil Rights will shift to the Department of Justice. It’s a decision that’s been in the making for more than a year, as the administration has attempted to dismantle the Education Department .

At a press conference Tuesday, senior department officials as new partnerships between the agencies. The officials said the changes won’t impact or reduce students’ rights, but instead improve efficiency. Senior department officials participated in the briefing on the condition that the speakers wouldn’t be identified by name. Education Secretary Linda McMahon did not take part.

Both the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and the Office for Civil Rights will retain some original functions, according to federal . But many specifics, such as staffing decisions and timelines, are still under discussion, the officials said. 

Special education advocates have protested that moving programs, including civil rights oversight, out of the Education Department will harm students with disabilities. 

In a  Tuesday, McMahon acknowledged that too many families must still fight for timely and appropriate special education services for their children. She said the changes will “break down bureaucratic barriers and strengthen the coordination of resources to improve programs.”

“It should not require herculean effort to obtain what the law guarantees,” McMahon said. “As the Trump administration scales back federal micromanagement when it hinders success, we are equally committed to bolstering the efficacy of federal oversight where it is essential.”

The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services oversees the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a landmark set of statutes that guarantee more than 8 million children with disabilities the right to attend public school. Critics say moving responsibility to HHS means taking oversight away from experts in specialized instruction and handing it to an agency ill-equipped to administer non-medical programs.

“Moving IDEA oversight into HHS pushes students with disabilities toward a medical model, where disability is treated as a diagnosis to manage instead of a natural part of human life,” Robyn Linscott, a director at The Arc of the United States, said in a Tuesday press release. “When that mindset drives education decisions, students are more likely to be segregated, underestimated or treated as separate from the school community.”

The Education Department the special ed office already overlaps with HHS programs for people with disabilities.

The Office for Civil Rights has been a key avenue of relief for parents unable to get services for their children through complaints filed with their state, mediation, administrative hearings or due process cases. Families in states lacking local enforcement of special education complaints depend on OCR to investigate discrimination.

McMahon said in her statement that the partnership between OCR and the Justice Department will provide more responsive and coordinated enforcement of civil rights laws.

“OCR and DOJ will combine their expertise and capacity to bolster evaluation, investigation, resolution of complaints and, above all, enforce critical protections for all students,” she said.

Senior education department officials said during Tuesday’s press conference that OCR will refer complaints to the Justice Department for evaluation, investigation and resolution. The agency will still be in charge of case settlements, civil rights data collection and state assistance, and will make final determinations on whether to pursue action by referring cases to the Justice Department for enforcement.

Though McMahon said the moves will improve student and family outcomes, The American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents 2,000 Education Department staffers, said the shift is breaking down government processes instead of streamlining them. 

“This isn’t efficiency — it’s chaos. Previous interagency agreements divvying up both P-12 and higher education programs to other federal agencies have led to massive delays in congressionally mandated funding and confusion for federal employees and the public alike,” union President Rachel Gittleman said in an emailed statement. “That’s an insult to the millions of students and families who rely on these services and the taxpayers who count on federal oversight to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.” 

The Trump administration is using interagency agreements to circumvent to close the Education Department, a move that House members have warned would “create inefficiencies” and “cause delays and administrative challenges.” When the Department of Labor picked up career and technical education last year, for example, some states had to wait months to access millions of dollars in funding.

“We wouldn’t be able to function as an organization without him,” said Superintendent Jennifer Gaffney. “A lot of what students, teachers and our office staff do is centered around the use of technology and data systems. He is the backbone of all that.”

But now Gaffney doesn’t know how much longer she can rely on the federal dollars that pay his salary. The Rural Education Achievement Program is among the 17 funding sources that the Trump administration wants to roll into a . Congress approved $220 million for REAP this year, but under the president’s plan, governors and state education chiefs would decide whether rural districts would get extra money.

Monty Mayer, superintendent of the Velva Public Schools in North Dakota, about 20 miles southeast of Minot, used the $14,000 he received from the program this year to pay teaching assistants to work with students who were behind academically.

“Money rolled into a block grant would be swallowed up by the bigger schools as their needs are much greater than ours,” he said. That would leave “small rural schools looking to find answers in different places without a clear picture as to where those resources would come from.”

During with the Senate appropriations committee in late April, Education Secretary Linda McMahon faced several questions from both Democrats and Republicans about the future of the program. She suggested that REAP was underutilized.

“A lot of rural schools do not have grant writers, cannot bring in the resources other states might have or other cities might have,” she said. “A lot of states never participated in any of the grant funding.”

Under a consolidated program, she said, all states would receive a portion of the block grant and officials would decide “how this money should be spent in their state, where the greatest needs are, whether that’s in rural communities.”

Officials with years of experience in rural education say that isn’t how REAP works. States or districts don’t write grant proposals for the funding, said Steven Johnson, superintendent of the Fort Ransom Public School District, which operates one elementary school in southeast North Dakota. Districts , based on size and location, receive an invitation to apply. And most do, Johnson said.

“It’s rarely about capacity or lack of grant-writing ability. If anything, what we’re seeing is the opposite,” he said. “Rural districts rely on REAP because it is simple, direct and does not require extensive administrative capacity.”

Abigail Swisher, who previously worked on the REAP program at the department, said where rural districts struggle is applying for large, competitive grant programs.

“Applying for competitive federal grants is time-consuming and complex. Larger districts are hiring grant writers who have the specialized expertise and who have time,” she said. “That’s exactly why we have the REAP program. It was designed by Congress to help fill that gap.”

There were efforts to help rural districts access those other programs, she said, but those ended with the new administration.

‘Testing and reporting standards’ 

Districts that for Small, Rural School Achievement funding, one of the two REAP programs, have fewer than 600 students and are located in an area their state defines as rural. Others, with 20% of students who live below the poverty line, qualify for the Rural and Low-Income School program, and some are eligible for both. This year, 17,873 were eligible for one or both programs.

Last week, Kirstin Baesler, the assistant secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, that they have considerable leeway to use federal funds for programs like tutoring or after-school programs. 

But Johnson said that flexibility was “one of the original core concepts behind REAP.” His district, for example, didn’t have enough poor students to qualify for Title I funding, but under existing law, he was able to use federal funds to provide students with reading and math tutoring.

Congress created REAP as part of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal accountability law that set strict expectations for school improvement, and reauthorized the program as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Despite their small size, rural districts were not exempt from NCLB’s mandates, Johnson said. 

“Small, rural schools were expected to meet the same testing and reporting standards as larger systems but often lacked the staffing and resources to do so,” he said.

A from AASA, the School Superintendents Association, showed that districts most commonly used the funds for technology, followed by staff training, compensation and expanding programs like STEM and arts for students. When Johnson asked other administrators across the country, they listed bullying prevention, special education assistants and support to help students graduate among the ways they use the funds.

“Rural districts piece together budgets with many smaller sources,” said Margaret Buckton, a school finance consultant in Iowa. Although REAP “isn’t a huge sum, when combined with other small grants, it likely makes a difference.”

Questions of ‘efficacy’

In her exchanges with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican who has made rural schools a priority, McMahon questioned whether the program has a positive impact.

“Many of these programs have lost their efficacy and they really are not returning, giving the returns that we hope to see for rural schools,” McMahon said.

The Department of Education did not respond to questions about what data McMahon was referring to when she said the program wasn’t effective. But Melissa Sadorf, executive director of the National Rural Education Association, said because districts can use the funds in a variety of ways, the department looks primarily at compliance issues rather than impact on students.

“There is no single, consistent student outcome measure applied across grantees,” she said. “The program has not been the subject of a comprehensive federal evaluation in close to a decade, which makes any sweeping claim about effectiveness difficult to substantiate from the data.”

That was mostly a summary of the challenges facing rural schools, like transportation and teacher recruitment, and what the department was doing to support them.

The department also tracks whether districts comply with the rules for using the funds.

A in the Custer County, Colorado, district, for example, discovered an accounting error because a staff member entered data using hand-written notes. The same issue came up in Indiana’s in 2022. The department’s website doesn’t list any reports conducted since McMahon took office.

The administration pitched the same block grant idea last year, and Congress ultimately rejected it. With the appropriations process likely to drag out for months, it’s unclear whether lawmakers will be more receptive this year. 

But for rural districts like Sackets Harbor, the site of an important naval base during the war of 1812, the continued uncertainty over federal funding is “unnerving,” said Gaffney, the superintendent. 

The district’s annual , in which students fanned out across the historic town for service projects, like gardening and polishing headstones, is popular with local residents. The school board asked voters to approve a nearly 8% tax increase, which they did. But with increases in English learners and students with disabilities, Gaffney said the district is still under “a great deal of financial pressure.”

“That is precisely why every dollar matters to us, including REAP funding,” she said. “These resources are vital in helping us maintain programs, services and opportunities for our students.”

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 ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, 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.”

You cannot claim to support literacy while slashing the very programs that help children become readers, stay healthy and succeed in school.

For more than two decades, I have worked alongside families as a social worker, nonprofit leader and education advocate. Today, I lead Families In Schools, a nonprofit that equips parents with the tools, knowledge and confidence to support their children’s learning. I have seen firsthand what happens when families have the support they need — and what happens when they do not.

The parents we work with remind me of my own parents. My father came to this country through the Bracero program and, like so many parents, trusted public schools to create opportunities for his children. I was the first in my family to graduate from college. That should not be the exception for children in communities like mine.

I benefited from programs that helped me succeed. Today, too many families risk losing those same opportunities.

The president’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget proposal would take 17 education programs that families rely on and roll them into a single block grant, cutting their funding from $6.47 billion to just $2 billion.

This is not reform. It is a dismantling.

Under this proposal, funding would no longer be dedicated to specific programs. Instead, states would receive significantly reduced amounts of money, with broad discretion over how it is spent. There would be no requirement to maintain investments in afterschool activities that keep children safe while parents work, college access programs like TRIO and Gear UP, community schools, family engagement efforts, academic supports and services for homeless children.

Programs like these aid more than 26 million students from low-income families. With reduced funding and no dedicated protections, they would be pitted against one another, and many would be at risk of disappearing altogether. But these programs are not extras; they are lifelines.

Families and educators know exactly what these cuts could mean.

They could mean parents working a second job scrambling to find somewhere safe for their child to go after school. They could mean English learners losing critical assistance in the classroom, or community schools having to cut back on health care, counseling, food assistance and other basic services that enable children to learn.

And they could mean family engagement — one of the most powerful drivers of student success — being pushed even further to the margins.

Parents are children’s first teachers and their most fierce and stalwart advocates. Literacy development begins at birth, in play and conversation with caregivers. Kids learn to love reading when people they love read to them. If they are struggling or falling behind, it’s usually the parents or caregivers who fight to make sure they get the help they need, whether that means demanding testing, changing schools or finding tutoring and afterschool activities. Children do not learn in a vacuum. They learn best when their families have the tools, information and resources to be active partners in their education.

The programs on the chopping block have been in place for decades, and they define “evidence-based.” They have been evaluated, showing improvements in attendance, academic outcomes and the ability of families to better support their children’s success.

Walking away from them puts that progress at risk.

States and local districts cannot absorb cuts of this . Families cannot simply make up the difference with time they do not have, money they cannot spare or resources that may not exist.

Parents, educators and policymakers all want children to read, succeed in school and build better futures for themselves. But literacy cannot just be a slogan, and literacy skills cannot be learned if children’s overall developmental needs are not met.

If children are truly to succeed, Congress should reject the president’s proposed cuts and protect the programs students and families rely on every day.

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. 

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. 

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. 

“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.” 

Ironically, the announcement comes as the administration is aggressively inserting itself in state and local education decision-making through a little-known administrative process. 

A General Services Administration that would require almost all applicants for federal funds to certify compliance with federal laws, executive orders and regulations — including non-discrimination laws — would also mandate adherence to the administration’s interpretation of what is discriminatory. In doing so, the announcement suggests that the Trump administration is interested not just in enforcing the law, but in discouraging efforts to increase diversity in education and beyond. 

The document treats “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” initiatives as potentially discriminatory, including, for example, statements used by many employers to encourage applicants from various backgrounds. It rejects what the administration calls “cultural competence” requirements, potentially imperiling teaching practices that connect instruction to students’ backgrounds. And it would likely ban questions asking applicants to describe how they have overcome obstacles, as colleges are increasingly doing in the wake of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action in admissions. States and school districts found in violation of the proposed requirements would be subject to funding reductions, civil liability or even criminal prosecution — stark consequences for refusing to conform to administration policy. 

The GSA’s proposal flies in the face of studies showing that teacher diversity benefits all students.

demonstrates that student and teacher diversity in schools and colleges helps Black, Hispanic and other traditionally underserved students achieve in school and beyond. As FutureEd noted in a , when students of color have teachers of color, attendance, academic achievement and college enrollment increase and disciplinary infractions decline. 

The research has an important bearing on the performance of the nation’s schools, given that students of color comprise more than 50% of public-school enrollment nationally, while nearly 80% of teachers in the country’s schools are white.

White students also benefit from having teachers of color. In a of four East Coast school districts, white students who studied under a teacher of color reported working harder and being more confident in their abilities than those who did not. Among the potential reasons for the greater engagement: Teachers of color were more likely to believe that student intelligence is malleable rather than fixed and to address student misbehavior in ways that didn’t damage classroom climate.

For their part, teachers value diversity in their ranks. In a national survey of K-12 teachers conducted for by the RAND Corp., 81% of participants said it is “important or extremely important” for students of color to be taught by teachers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, and 79% said it is “important or extremely important” to have colleagues of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Of course, subject matter expertise and effective teaching experience should be paramount in hiring decisions. And anyone who receives federal funds should comply with non-discrimination law. But the GSA announcement would put at risk diversity initiatives that are valuable in schools and would seemingly pass legal muster. 

It’s the latest administration move against diversity in education. Weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, the Department of Education canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants awarded under the previous administration that had already been distributed and sought in part to increase educator diversity. 

Then, the department issued a that sought to eliminate DEI programs in school districts and institutions of higher education. It was subsequently struck down by the courts, and the department of Education dropped its appeal in January, only weeks before GSA’s proposal was released. This suggests that the administration is trying to achieve through administrative means what it failed to accomplish with last year’s letter. 

If the Trump administration wants to ensure appropriate enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in education, it has the tools to do so through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Unfortunately, the administration last year downsized OCR dramatically, leading a federal court to the reinstatement of hundreds of staffers so the agency could fulfill its duties. And staffing levels at the EEOC are down more than since the end of fiscal year .

The resulting cutback in civil rights enforcement under the Trump administration has been dramatic. As of December, OCR had , compared with 16,500 at the end of the Biden administration. 

Rather than staffing the federal government to enforce civil rights laws, the administration seems to be trying to weaken diversity efforts in schools by intimidating state and local educators with the threat of lost funding, criminal prosecution or civil liability into preemptively complying with its priorities, as it with its Dear Colleague Letter last year. 

But that tactic not only contradicts research on the value of educator diversity; it takes authority over teaching and learning out of the hands of the very leaders McMahon says she wants to empower. 

For Rachael Garnick, a former first grade teacher, the results were a reminder of how tough it’s been for schools to recover from historic declines in learning since the pandemic. 

“The literacy scores are still abysmal and we should be displeased,” said Garnick, who heads the Pennsylvania Literacy Coalition. Made up of over 70 organizations, the group has pushed and state officials to fund and implement reading reform.

But despite the discouraging statewide results, she also sees districts, like in northeastern Pennsylvania and the Mohawk Area district, northwest of Pittsburgh, “trending in the right direction,” and demonstrating urgency over reading scores. Their attitude, she said, was “the opposite of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Instead, ‘It’s broke; we’ve got to fix it.’ ” 

on pandemic learning loss from NWEA, an assessment company, captured that combination of frustration and hope over the state of academic recovery. About a third of schools have reached pre-COVID performance levels in reading or math, and just 14% have recovered in both subjects. But even some that were hit the hardest, like high-poverty schools, have made impressive gains.

The report was just the latest collection of results pointing to a long road ahead for most schools. Last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress scores showed students in the majority of states losing more ground, but included a few standouts with strong progress, like Louisiana in reading and Alabama in math. And state test scores tell a similar story: few have topped pre-COVID performance.

It’s not like experts didn’t predict a slow recovery. 

“If student performance improvement follows historical prepandemic trends, it could take decades for students to fully catch up,” researchers with McKinsey and Company, a consulting firm, .

Even the nation’s education chief isn’t expecting good news soon. 

“I would like to say that NAEP scores, when they come out again in January 2027, are going to show marked improvement,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a recent K-12 Dive . “I don’t think they are.”

But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, said it’s important to put NWEA data, and all measures of kids’ learning, in context.

“One of the reasons that we’re not seeing recovery and that the results aren’t better is because of what was happening in the decade ,” he said. “There was a slow degradation of academic achievement.”

Resisters and rebounders

Schools that were able to resist further declines during the pandemic are those that are more likely to be back on track, according to NWEA’s data, which represents five million students who took the MAP Growth tests through fall 2024. Such schools make up nearly three quarters of the recovered schools.

The Los Angeles-area is one example. 

Before the pandemic, the high-poverty, majority Latino district was already seeing gains on state assessments. When testing resumed in 2022, reading scores held steady. Math scores caught up the following year, and the district has continued to post gains ever since. 

Superintendent Darin Brawley highlighted a mix of academic routines, like a math problem of the day, weekly quizzes and challenging writing assignments, that the district continued despite the disruption of school closures. Teachers were encouraged to dial back their use of smart boards in the classroom and require students to keep math and language arts journals to improve retention. 

“Everything was being done on the smart board and kids weren’t notating anything,” Brawley said. “Certain things have to be worked out on paper.”

NWEA data also pointed to what the researchers call “rebounder” schools, those that saw significant drops in achievement but have been able to climb their way back. High-poverty schools are among those with impressive gains, but even districts seeing higher-than-ever performance still struggle to close wide achievement gaps.

“We’ve never had scores this high in English language arts or math,” said Buffy Roberts, associate superintendent of the Charleston County schools in South Carolina. “It’s been quite phenomenal.”

She was talking about , which, unlike NWEA and NAEP, aren’t comparable because states don’t all measure proficiency the same. But they can still reflect post-COVID trends if states haven’t changed their tests since 2019. 

South Carolina’s math test has remained constant. Results show that statewide, scores have nearly recovered. It’s a trend that NWEA noted as well, explaining that while schools “lost significant ground,” in math, many made “substantial gains afterward.”

In Charleston, 54% of students in grades three through eight met or exceeded expectations in math last year, up from 48% in 2019 and about 10 percentage points higher than the state average. The district also made the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research’s fully recovered districts in the nation last year.

Roberts pointed to a swift return to in-person instruction and high-dosage tutoring as some of the factors contributing to strong growth. But she said at the outset of the pandemic, leaders “knew there were some vulnerable groups” that would need “structures and support to mitigate some of that learning loss.”

The district’s , she explained, provided extra dollars to schools with high-poverty students even when the schools didn’t qualify for federal Title I funding. The schools used the funds for extra staff to reduce class sizes, incentives to increase attendance and mental health services.

But there’s still a lot of work to do. In fourth grade math, there’s a more than 50 percentage point gap between white and Black students, and students from wealthier families outscore students in poverty by 39 percentage points. 

“We agree that progress must be faster,” the district on Facebook after a conservative community group to the disparities. 

In an analysis of scores, Education Data Center researchers, led by Brown University’s Emily Oster, were hopeful about continued math recovery in 2026. Of the 32 states that have kept the same math test since before COVID, seven met or exceeded 2019 proficiency rates: Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Rhode Island and Tennessee.

But even if they didn’t, they all made some gains. Despite Pennsylvania’s decline in reading, for example, its performance in math is less than a percentage point from reaching the 2019 level. 

But the results in reading were less encouraging. Six out of 28 states have met or surpassed pre-pandemic performance. But several others, like Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon, remain well off that mark. 

Goldhaber, with CALDER, suggested that states haven’t seen improvement on tests because parents trust those scores less than the grades kids bring home on report cards and assignments. 

A recent reiterated that point. In a survey of over 2,000 parents, nearly three quarters said they believe grades more than tests when making decisions about their children’s learning. They’re also less likely to take action, like seeking out tutoring or other help for their child, when grades are good. 

The problem is that because of grade inflation, which was on the rise even before the pandemic, grades are a less accurate measure of how students are really doing. 

The results of that survey were no surprise to Bibb Hubbard, founder and CEO of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that focuses on helping parents understand achievement data. She said she’s been “screaming from the rooftops for 10 years” that parents are about their kids’ performance. 

“Good grades do not equal grade level,” she said. “Parents are deeply engaged, but we can’t afford to leave them on the sidelines relying on grades alone. The stakes are too high.”

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.”

Policymakers in Washington are starting to pay attention. Last year, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon named “Evidence-Based Literacy” as her No. 1 academic priority. And this month, the House Appropriations Committee held a on the science of reading.

So what role should the federal government play in reading policy?

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as stealing the playbook from the best-performing states. The so-called “” states of Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama,and Louisiana have seen the biggest gains in recent years, and many states have tried to copy them with their own science of reading bills — to of success.

The federal government also has a record of big investments in reading not leading to improved outcomes. That’s at least partly because reading policy is tricky, given all the potential reasons a child may or may not understand the words on the page.

But that doesn’t mean federal leaders are helpless. They just need to find the right levers. Here are five potential ideas:

1. Create a new national reading panel

In 1997, Congress brought together a group of experts to “assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read.” After reviewing thousands of research articles, the group focused on five critical components of reading instruction — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

The document that came out of that work, the , became a foundational text for the field. But it’s now decades old, and researchers know a lot more today than they did back then. It would be useful to have an update and a new consensus document from an esteemed body of experts.

2. Expand the National Assessment of Educational Progress

The NAEP exams have been instrumental in documenting the extent of students’ challenges, but they don’t say much about the underlying reasons why kids are having such reading comprehension problems.

For example, on , 46% of fourth graders couldn’t accurately understand the meaning of the word “conform” in a passage from the book The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. Was it because they didn’t understand the question, didn’t know the meaning of the word “conform” or got misled in some other way?

Reading researchers like Hugh Catts have been raising the that most reading comprehension exams are not well equipped to pinpoint the reasons behind a student’s literacy mistakes. NAEP could take the lead here by introducing other types of assessments that seek to unpack the root causes of reading struggles, and how they might differ across age groups. 

For example, young students might get a phonics check like the one England administers to its 6-year-olds. Older students might benefit from an age-appropriate version of this, as researchers have found that even middle and high school students can struggle with complex words.

3. Give states flexibility on English Language Arts assessments

Building on the point above, the federal government currently requires states to administer their own reading or language arts assessments annually in grades 3 to 8 and once in high school. Right now, the states have all interpreted that requirement to mean that they must give generic reading comprehension tests.

But states could be given flexibility to interpret this differently. Educators might gain better insights into students’ reading challenges if they were tested on discrete skills like decoding, fluency and vocabulary, and comprehension questions were left to specific content areas like social studies and science. Louisiana attempted something like this a few years ago, but the feds could give states much more leniency to pursue this line of inquiry.

4. Nudge states on accountability

Congressional leaders probably don’t have much appetite to rewrite the Every Student Succeeds Act, which requires states to draft goals for student achievement and plans for holding schools accountable. But those original state plans were written nearly a decade ago, and conditions have changed (for the worse) since then. The Department of Education can’t force states to revisit their plans if they don’t want to, but it could signal that it would be open to letting states amend them in light of the declines of the last decade, especially among the lowest-performing students.

5. Empower parents with information

Despite their best intentions, schools are not good at helping students who fall behind in reading catch up. According to the from Amplify’s DIBELS early literacy screener, just 49% of students who start kindergarten well behind in reading get on track by the end of third grade. And the odds get worse every year that schools wait. Last year, among third graders who were far behind at the beginning of the term, just 5% caught up by the end of the year.

Thanks to , parents already have access to their child’s education records, but only if they request them. To bring greater urgency to this issue, Congress could require schools to inform parents when their child is behind in reading and to work with families to develop specific improvement plans.

If reading scores are a crisis, policymakers should treat it accordingly. But they also have to be realistic in accepting that there’s only so much they can do, and that part of the decline in performance can be traced back to the fact that kids aren’t reading for pleasure as often as they used to — and are adults.

So one way to improve literacy scores is for education leaders at all levels to talk about the importance of reading. People who read a lot tend to know more about the world, and people who know more about the world tend to succeed in many aspects of life. That’s not exactly a policy change, but leadership can shape behavior to make knowledge — and reading — cool again. 

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.” 

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. “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%. Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia also still have rates above 30%, according to a maintained by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. 

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.  

“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.”

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. 

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 ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ 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 ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ 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.”

These moves raise significant concerns that the federal government won’t be able to meet its legal obligations to students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ().

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has numerous times that federal special education funding will continue flowing, no matter where the office and programs land within the government. But what she has not acknowledged — and what is troubling — is how moving the program to an agency like HHS inevitably shifts the focus of special ed from education to health care, thus pathologizing disabled students.

This is especially true considering HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made about children with autism, calling them tragic and doubting their ability to lead full and meaningful lives. His statements indicate a belief that a medical diagnosis absolutely leads to tragic outcomes — which is simply untrue. 

Framing students with disabilities solely in medical terms hinders their potential for growth by narrowly confining them to a diagnosis and perceived limitations — resulting in low expectations in school. As recently as the , this allowed most states to exclude disabled students from academic assessments. Many schools encouraged their parents to keep their children at home on testing days.

Since then, the country has steadily moved away from low expectations for students with disabilities. Under the Biden administration, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services issued specifically focused on setting a high bar for these children. The guidance included a focus on inclusive education practices to ensure students with disabilities have access to high-quality education with the opportunity to meet challenging goals. It also offered details about how states and districts could leverage federal funding to achieve those ends. 

Inclusive education practices are flexible and creative. Using such an approach, a team determining appropriate classroom settings during an Individualized Education Program meeting might decide that instead of placing a student in need of behavioral support in a segregated class of peers with disabilities, the student could be put in a general-education classroom, assisted by a paraprofessional or special education teacher. operates this way. Teachers or paraprofessionals accompany students with disabilities to general-education classes, providing behavioral and academic support in real time, innovatively and effectively meeting a child’s unique education needs. Instead of limiting children with disabilities, guidance and practices like these help students look to an expansive future. 

But between moving special education to HHS and the longer-term to convert IDEA grants into formula block grants, it will fall to the states to ensure that their special education laws and regulations are robust. IDEA includes minimum requirements for supporting disabled students. States can and should do more, including developing their own laws and guidance on issues like inclusion, challenging academic standards, teacher and service provider support and training, and requirements to provide services in an equitable manner to all students.

Families and advocates can work to hold states and districts accountable by, for example, pushing for state-level disaggregated reporting on timely provision of services, restrictive class and school placements, and disproportionate disciplinary practices. Additionally, states must work toward timely resolutions of and for any violations of disabled students’ civil rights. 

Leaving schools without timely access to federal funding to provide legally mandated services means students will unnecessarily struggle, and their lack of progress will be used as an indication of the failures of the current program. There have already been that shifts of education programs to other federal agencies have tied up resources in even more layers of bureaucracy. 

Shifting responsibility for specific IDEA and special education programs to HHS means that when states come looking for guidance, the staff with deep understanding of the interplay among civil rights, disability and education will no longer be available to help them. What guidance they do receive could be limited and unsupportive of students’ true intellectual, cognitive or physical capabilities.

Burying special education deep in the can only make things more difficult for children with disabilities. Finding essential services that families are desperate to reach will be like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of IDEA. What should be a time for celebrating milestones in increasing inclusivity and accessibility in America’s public schools has instead been fraught with fear and fights to retain the unique supports provided to disabled children through the Department of Education. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn’t. 

Harold Hinds, is a civil rights attorney and Ph.D. student at the New School’s School for Public Engagement, also contributed to this essay.

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.” 

“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. ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ 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. 

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. 

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.”

While the federal education bureaucracy has room for improvement, this move should alarm anyone — across party lines — who understands the central purpose of Title I: to mitigate the effects of poverty on learning and ensure that every child has a fair chance at a high-quality education.

Title I was not created to build workforce pipelines or meet short-term labor market needs. It was created to address inequities in schooling. Relocating it to the Department of Labor – an agency with little experience in K-12 education, little familiarity with school improvement or academic intervention, and no core mission related to teaching or learning – fundamentally undermines its purpose.

Title I administration relies on specialists who spend their careers understanding the complexities of school improvement, early literacy, bilingual education, assessment, family engagement, data reporting and civil rights enforcement. These professionals interpret federal law, develop guidance that districts depend on, monitor state implementation, help local leaders navigate compliance challenges and support research-based strategies that improve academic outcomes for children in poverty. Their work is rarely visible to the public, but their expertise is vital to the day-to-day functioning of thousands of schools.

When these positions are eliminated or scattered across agencies, the federal government loses not only staff but decades of institutional memory. Labor does not have personnel trained to advise districts on effective reading interventions, to monitor support for English learners, or to help states build equitable accountability systems.

Nor does it have the infrastructure to provide guidance on the complex interdependence of Title I with federal programs governing students with disabilities, teacher training or English learners. That expertise cannot be rebuilt quickly. And the predictable result will be confusion, inconsistency and weaker oversight.

Narrowing the federal role to workforce preparation overlooks the broader civic, academic, social and developmental purposes of schooling. A child’s education is not simply a supply-chain function of the labor market. Title I was created to provide additional resources to schools serving students with the fewest opportunities: resources that fund literacy coaches, paraprofessionals, after-school tutoring, community school coordinators, summer learning programs, bilingual aides and social workers.

These efforts help children succeed academically and thrive as full members of their communities. They cannot be replaced by job-readiness activities, nor should they be justified only through workforce logic.

The students most harmed by this shift live in every corner of the country. In rural communities, Title I dollars support small schools that would otherwise be unable to hire reading specialists or maintain adequate transportation. These schools often have only one or two central-office staff members to manage federal programs. When reporting requirements or compliance expectations shift suddenly to a new agency unfamiliar with school operations, rural districts have little capacity to absorb the confusion. That leaves teachers and students vulnerable.

In suburban districts, Title I is often the lifeline that enables supports for rapidly changing demographics. Many suburban schools now serve increasing numbers of multilingual learners, low-income families and students experiencing housing instability. Title I funds help these districts build systems of early intervention, family engagement and academic support that would otherwise not exist. When federal guidance becomes unclear or inconsistent, these districts struggle to maintain those programs.

Urban districts depend on Title I at an even larger scale. Large-city schools use these funds to support community school models, mental health services, after-school programs, restorative justice initiatives and partnerships with nonprofits. They also rely on clear federal guidance to ensure that high-poverty schools receive their fair allocation of state and local funds in addition to Title I dollars, a safeguard called “supplement, not supplant.” Because Labor lacks the expertise or commitment to enforce this rule, inequities within districts will widen and children in red, purple and blue districts will suffer.

As a child of a low-income, single-parent family, my brother and I benefited directly from Title I funding in the 13 public schools we attended. Title I paid for more teachers, for literacy programs, books in our classrooms, after-school programs, breakfast, free and reduced-price lunch and even band instruments that allowed us to participate until we could afford to purchase our own.

Both of us entered the workforce at young ages, taking part time jobs in middle and high school. Both of us continued to work through college. And both of us have Title I to thank for providing funding and accountability mechanisms to the local districts we attended. Despite the financial instability and numerous moves, public schools and the educators serving in them offered us resources, programs and stability we otherwise would not have experienced.

Those advocating for the elimination of the Education Department insist that because Title I funding will continue, nothing fundamental will change. But funding without coherent and responsible oversight is functionally weaker funding.

Dollars do not implement themselves.

They require an expert federal partner, capable state agencies and local leaders who understand how to use those funds wisely. When the federal partner is replaced by an agency without educational expertise, the quality and equity of implementation deteriorate. That deterioration will disproportionately impact the very communities and families Title I was created to support.

Improving the federal role in education is a worthy goal. Streamlining bureaucracy, clarifying guidance and eliminating redundancies can make federal programs more effective. But dispersing the Education Department’s core functions across agencies that lack expertise is not reform, it’s abandonment. The nation’s commitment to public schooling as the foundation for increasing educational access and economic opportunity is too important to place in the hands of a department ill-equipped to uphold it.

Those resources apparently include the more than 250 OCR employees that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been trying to fire since March. 

Three weeks after Richey was sworn in, the department is telling laid-off staff to report by Dec. 15 to temporarily work through a backlog of civil rights complaints, according to an email sent out Friday. 

In a Monday statement, Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents department staff, said she’s “relieved these public servants are finally being allowed to return to work” and that keeping them sidelined has “wasted more than $40 million in taxpayer funds.” She accused McMahon of playing politics. “Department leadership allowed a massive backlog of civil rights complaints to grow, and now expects these same employees to clean up a crisis entirely of the Department’s own making.”

OCR has complaints to work through. In federal court updates as part of over the cuts, officials said that they were dismissing the majority of the complaints filed since the March layoffs. shows that staff have resolved 165 cases this year, but that’s well below previous years. 

The call back to work is the latest twist in a legal saga that has been a rollercoaster both for OCR employees and families waiting for action on their complaints. In October, a allowed the department to move forward with the layoffs as the lawsuit challenging them continues. Now, with the possibility that they could still ultimately lose their jobs, the attorneys, investigators and other OCR staff members must get back to work. 

“The department will continue to appeal the persistent and unceasing litigation disputes concerning the reductions in force,” Julie Hartman, press secretary for legal affairs, said in a statement. “But in the meantime, it will utilize all employees currently being compensated by American taxpayers.”

‘Drastically reduced staffing’ 

The department’s admission that it needs help to carry out its legal obligations is at least the third time officials have recalled staff after eliminating them. In May, a House appropriations subcommittee that she had rehired 74 people. 

“You hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon testified. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.” 

In August, the department brought back employees, placed on leave in late January. Many had on diversity, equity and inclusion during the first Trump administration, an activity that made them a target for the administration’s aggressive anti-DEI agenda. While the union filed for arbitration to challenge the firings, Madison Biederman, a spokeswoman for the department said the staffers were recalled because “the agency determined they are an asset to the workforce.” 

Last week’s development is further evidence that “the federal government cannot fulfill its civil rights mandate to students with such drastically reduced staffing,” said Amanda Walsh, deputy director of external affairs for the Victim Rights Law Center, a legal advocacy group that sued over the cuts to OCR. The organization represents victims of sexual assault. “We have not had any movement on our cases nor have we even heard where they’ve been assigned, demonstrating that the caseloads are too big for the reduced staff to manage.”

In March, the department shuttered seven of the 12 OCR regional offices, and during the government shutdown, tried to lay off another 137 OCR staffers. A the layoffs, and the agreement to reopen the government forced the secretary to bring the employees back to work, at least until the end of January. 

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, opened doors that were once firmly shut for students with disabilities.

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the IDEA, we reflect on how far we’ve come, and the work yet to do, to protect students with disabilities.

— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov)

One advocate for students with disabilities, whose cases make up the bulk of OCR’s work, suggested that Richey has contributed to the sense that “things are moving forward.”

Callie Oettinger, who publishes , a blog, highlighted Richey’s recent marking the 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Along with leading OCR, Richey is serving as acting assistant secretary for the office that oversees special education. Both offices, she said in an accompanying video, are “committed to vigorous enforcement.”

“This is not the language of an agency sunsetting a program,” Oettinger wrote. She told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ she found Richey’s video “a breath of fresh air, passionate and positive.” 

The department did not say whether recalling the staff was Richey’s idea. But one current OCR staff member, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retribution, said “she seems interested in us doing our work.”

But it took months for some states to access millions of dollars for career and technical education this year after the Department of Labor , part of the Trump administration’s plan to splinter and ultimately dismantle the Department of Education. The Labor Department’s grant system didn’t recognize state education agencies’ bank accounts. 

“We were in this endless loop of having to re-verify our account number,” said Richard Kincaid, assistant state superintendent of college and career pathways at the Maryland State Department of Education. “It never seemed to take in the system.”

Maryland used state funds to fill the gap while it waited on $22 million in reimbursements. But the glitch, some argue, doesn’t bode well for when the Labor Department begins dispersing funds from Title I, the largest federal education program. The annual budget for Title I is $18 billion, compared to $1.4 billion for , which funds CTE. Title I serves 26 million low-income students, covering salaries, tutoring programs and classroom materials. 

An , obtained by the website Government Executive, underscored the difficulties, calling the shift of CTE a “miniscule” task compared to what lies ahead. “Larger formula grants and competitive grants are going to be much more difficult to migrate,” the document said.

Beyond technical difficulties, educators say the Labor and Education departments have such vastly different missions that they worry about the message the Trump administration is sending by putting K-12 programs in an agency focused on getting jobless adults into the workforce. 

“We’re not talking about how to support a 28-year-old walking into an American job center looking for the next thing,” Kinkaid said. “We’re talking about kids.” 

The Education Department last week unveiled six interagency agreements with four other federal agencies as part of the Trump administration’s plan to wind down an agency that it argues was unconstitutional to begin with. 

“Let’s make sure that that grant money that’s coming from the federal government is getting in [states’] hands as efficiently as possible,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said during a White House briefing Thursday. “We don’t want teachers having to spend their time and money on regulatory compliance.” 

But for some state directors like Kinkaid, the result has been frustrating.

The administration, he said, has “asked state CTE programs to essentially fly for the past six months without air traffic control.”

‘Fruitful partnership’

Officials downplayed the initial rough spots, saying the transition of CTE, adult education and family literacy programs to the Labor Department has been relatively smooth. They worked with nine states to resolve the account number problem. During a call with reporters Tuesday, a senior department official said the administration expects a “similar fruitful partnership” when it merges other K-12 programs into the Labor Department.

State leaders, the official promised, would still be able to rely on “the expertise and concierge-level service” they expect. As of Thursday, staff housed in the Labor Department had processed 568 payment requests totaling over $227 million for 40 unique states and territories, according to an email from a Labor official.

But at least one state, Rhode Island, was still hitting roadblocks as of Friday.

“We are receiving error messages indicating that our organization name does not match the name on record,” said Rhode Island Department of Education spokesman Victor Morente. He said he expected the issue to be fixed this week. “This situation underscores the challenges that abrupt changes within federal departments can create.”

Lawmakers heard about the rocky start last week.

“Operationally, it is a muddle,” Braden Goetz told the . He spent 26 years in the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education and now works as a senior policy advisor at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “I don’t understand how the work gets done. When Secretary McMahon makes decisions, does she call the Secretary of Labor and ask her to communicate that down the chain?”

An Education Department spokesperson said staff reached out to all grantees about requesting CTE funds from the new grant system and has yet to hear from five of them. 

“It is common for states to not draw down funds for several months for a variety of state-driven reasons,” the official said. The California, Michigan and Wyoming education departments told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ they haven’t had any trouble getting their CTE funds.

‘Bureaucracy will remain’

John Pallasch served as assistant secretary of the Employment and Training Administration, the Labor office to which K-12 programs are moving, during Trump’s first term. He said any hiccups are likely to be temporary and that the Labor Department “is pretty good at grants management.” 

Some observers said shuffling staff and programs from one agency to another doesn’t go far enough. 

“The Education Department still retains many functions,” Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote in . “So bureaucracy will remain, and the Constitution will continue to be violated.”

From Kinkaid’s perspective in Maryland, states have lost the strong working relationship they had with CTE staff at the Education Department. The team is down from 15 staffers to about five. There’s been “little to no communication since the movement happened,” he said. In addition, a lot of state CTE directors are relatively new and need guidance on how to comply with regulations, said Amy Loyd, former assistant secretary for the CTE and adult education office during the Biden administration.

The Employment and Training Administration manages about $3 to $4 billion in grants annually — a fraction of the $28 billion the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education administers.

In a , Angela Hanks, acting assistant secretary of that division from 2021 to 2022, described moving K-12 programs into the office like “having a frog carry a camel on its back.”

A few of the office’s existing grants focus on youth, but those target teens and young adults who fit “quite a different profile from the students who are served by Title I,” Hanks, now at the left-leaning Century Foundation, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Job Corps helps 16- to 24-year-olds find employment, while teaches vocational skills for “in-demand industries” like construction and hospitality. 

Loyd, now CEO at All4Ed, an advocacy organization, sees a similar mismatch with moving adult education programs to the Labor Department.

“Many of these older adults came to adult education services to strengthen their own literacy because they 
 want to be able to help their grandkids with homework,” she said. “They’re 72; they don’t want a workforce credential. They want to be better readers so they can read to their grandkids.” 

Several of the federal K-12 grants are complicated and depend on calculations year to year to ensure payments to districts are accurate. , for example, requires annual counts of military-connected students who attend schools on or near bases.

“The suggestion that these programs are on autopilot and [the Education Department] just flips a switch to flow the money to states and districts is a fundamental misunderstanding,” said Danny Carlson, who served as deputy assistant secretary of policy and programs in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education during the Biden administration. He’s now executive director of Learning First Alliance, a network that includes administrator associations, teachers unions and the National PTA.

In addition, McMahon tried to lay off 132 of the 185 remaining elementary and secondary employees during the shutdown. A the layoffs, and the agreement to reopen the government forced the secretary to bring the employees back to work, at least until the end of January. But it’s unclear whether she plans to try to terminate them again. 

After 10 months of canceled grants, temporary funding freezes and other disruptions, some district leaders are growing accustomed to the uncertainty. 

“I expect Labor will have a hard time managing Title I allocations for next year, but the administration is trying to do that,” said Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer for the Detroit Public Schools. “They want the system to fail so they can 
 shift funds to private schools or just give the money back to taxpayers.”

Pallasch, the former assistant labor secretary, said he supports integrating not just CTE, but all education programs into the Labor Department.

“We’re all pulling in the same direction,” he said. “Whether we’re talking K-12, community college or, quite frankly, Harvard and Yale, those are just job training programs. We are training folks to have the skills to be able to function in an organization.” 

But Kinkaid and fear that the move to the Labor Department takes the field back to a time when some students were “tracked” into vocational courses without rigorous academic content. 

There are growing efforts to expand apprenticeships and other opportunities for students who might not want to go to college. But for decades, Kinkaid said, the CTE field has tried to “shrug off” the stigma that career-focused instruction was only for lower-performing students.

“We may intentionally or unintentionally recreate that old system where low-income students and students of color were funneled into limited, low-mobility job paths,” he said. “This is exactly what the modern CTE system was designed to prevent.”

The Department of Labor will “co-manage” the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education by administering roughly $28 billion in grant funds through an interagency agreement. The Interior Department will take responsibility for Indian education. 

Decisions are still pending on whether to move the offices overseeing civil rights, special education and student loans, but additional agreements move the Office of Postsecondary Education to the Department of Labor and a campus-based child care program to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Federal education officials celebrated the announcement as a key milestone toward fulfilling President Donald Trump’s March executive order to dismantle the department and said state leaders could still expect “concierge-level service.” 

“At the end of the day, it means more dollars to the classroom, to the grantees, that does not get siphoned off through bureaucracy,” a senior department official said during a background call with reporters. “We think that this really does give states more power to 
 determine how those dollars are spent and to best best manage them.”

In a subsequent online presentation involving the White House, some education advocates sent thumbs down and sad face emojis as the call concluded.

Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a think tank, said she was concerned that they made no mention of what will happen to the Institute for Education Sciences. The department’s research arm was one of the Department of Government Efficiency’s first targets. It canceled roughly $900 million in grants, and McMahon laid off most of the staff in March.

“If there is any fundamental role for the government to play, it is the collection and reporting of data,” she said. “As for the rest of the plan, it sounds like they have spread these programs so far and wide it will be difficult to put Humpty Dumpty back together again”. 

The administration has plowed ahead with dismantling the department despite McMahon’s frequent acknowledgement that only Congress, which established the agency in 1979, has the power to completely eliminate it. She has the agency’s role, describing it as a “pass-through” for federal funds and used social media to minimize the department’s work. “Makes you wonder…do we really need at all?,” she after the government re-opened.

In October, she finished career and technical programs, adult education and family literacy to the Department of Labor. During the government shutdown, officials said they were “exploring partnerships” with the Department of Health and Human Services to take over special education. In higher education, the department is considering whether to its $1.77 trillion student loan portfolio to private companies. Like other aspects of the president’s plan, it’s unclear whether such moves would be legal.

‘Sudden, chaotic decisions’

Under that created the agency, the secretary can reorganize the department and enter into interagency agreements. 

Speaking to reporters, the department official cited the , a 1933 law that she said gives the agency the right to “contract with other federal agencies to procure services.” 

“Interagency agreements are a frequently used tool of the federal government,” the official said, adding that because the Labor Department already oversees workforce development programs, it’s best positioned to manage funding focused on helping students prepare for the workforce. 

But Emily Merolli, a partner with the Sligo Law Group, and a former member of the department’s general counsel’s office, said the administration’s actions “are not legally supportable.”

The law “absolutely does not grant the secretary the authority to just transfer those actual functions — let alone entire offices — to another agency,” she said. “Dressing this up as a ‘co-management or ‘partnership’ agreement doesn’t make it legal. They’re trying to dress up the pig, but it’s still an illegal pig.”

In a statement, the Council of Chief State School Officers said they seek assurances that the department won’t miss deadlines and that funding “flows without interruption to support students.” 

But individually, some state education leaders condemned the day’s events.

“This decision is the latest in a long pattern of sudden, chaotic decisions at the federal level that have created widespread anxiety and confusion,” Rhode Island education Commissioner AngĂ©lica Infante Green said in a statement.

California state Superintendent Tony Thurmond said, “It is clearly less efficient for state departments of education and local school districts to work with four different federal agencies instead of one.”

Opponents say eliminating the department leaves the most vulnerable students without important protections because other agencies lack expertise to administer complex laws like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.  

Multiple surveys, including one from and another from PDK International, show the public is largely opposed to the idea. But from Yes. Every Kid. Foundation, a school choice advocacy group, found that respondents were more positive when they were told that K-12 funding, like Title I for high-poverty schools, would be preserved. 

Some conservatives say the government should phase out the Title I program along with the department and hand the $18 billion annually over to states for private school choice. 

“The money has been spent for more than 50 years and it hasn’t accomplished much,” said Ray Domanico, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “One of the things we’ve learned is that Washington is not the place to dictate policy.”

A showed that Black students in high-poverty, high-minority schools made greater gains in reading when their schools used Title I to reduce class sizes. When schools used the funds for teacher training, Black and Latino students made greater gains in math. But and are getting larger between high- and low-achieving students.

But Domanico is skeptical that the Republicans will be able to finish the job of eliminating the department. A lot depends on whether the Democrats take control of the House in next year’s midterm elections, and ‘in two years,” he said, “Trump is going to be a lame duck.” 

Others think that advocates are overreacting to the news. Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and a former department official during the second Bush administration, dismissed the announcement as “a nothing burger.”

“They will move some boxes (and people) around,” , “and, if a Democrat wins in 2028, it will be swiftly undone.”