Give a girl a drone, and she might see her future as a scientist.

But if her teacher doesn’t have the training or resources to turn cool tech into lessons that stick, she’s likely to crash it, get frustrated, and move on.

Take Flight, a research project backed by $1.5 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation, for rural middle schools. The drones could fly in classrooms — no big outdoor space needed. The lessons were developed with teachers and easy for newbies to pick up. And the program placed a particular emphasis on girls, who often get frustrated by the handheld controller while their male classmates, who tend to have more video game experience, whiz by.

The lessons included real-world scenarios for using drones, like finding a lost child, that often appeal to young girls, and writing exercises to remind kids of what they’re good at before they try something hard.

At first, Laurie Prewandowski wrinkled her nose at Take Flight’s approach. It seemed “touchy feely” to the digital learning specialist who works in a rural New Hampshire middle school and is known as the “drone lady.” But then she saw kids enjoying the lessons and getting a STEM confidence boost.

“All those little things matter,” she said. “It’s really for any kid with a barrier.”

For decades, the federal government believed getting more students interested in science, math, and technology was a national security priority. But in April, the Trump administration cancelled funding for Take Flight . The agency said it, as well as environmental justice and combatting disinformation.

It’s yet another way the Trump administration has sought to undermine efforts specifically and . The administration has frequently claimed this work is, in fact, discriminatory, and has that don’t comply with its civil rights vision, .

Sixteen states sued to stop Trump’s NSF cuts, which represent a . NSF has long been a primary funder of this work, and one of the few institutions that helps researchers not only test new ideas in the classroom, but figure out what worked and why — which is key to replicating a successful program.

Researchers say these cancelled projects have broken trust, won’t be easy to revive, and left lots of data unanalyzed.

At the time Take Flight lost its National Science Foundation grant, its curriculum was being tested by 1,200 students and 30 rural middle school teachers across 10 states.

The research team had promising early data showing the program helped both boys and girls who weren’t interested in science or math before to envision working in a STEM field, said Amanda Bastoni, the lead researcher on the project.

That matters because . They often attend under-funded schools and have less access to high-tech industries than their peers in urban schools. But now researchers won’t be able to follow up with kids to see if Take Flight altered their trajectory in high school.

“The government spent all this money but didn’t get the results,” said Bastoni, who is the director of career technical and adult education at the nonprofit CAST. Without funding, her team has to “turn in a final report that says: We have no idea if this really works or not.”

Why the government funds STEM education research

President Harry S. Truman , in part to recognize the key role scientific research played in World War II.

are essential to the nation’s security, economy, and health. And, for decades, federal lawmakers have charged NSF with getting more people who are underrepresented in STEM into that pipeline to maintain a competitive workforce.

a “comprehensive and continuing program to increase substantially the contribution and advancement of women and minorities” in science and technology.

The law authorized NSF to create fellowships for women, minority recruitment programs, and K-12 programs to boost interest in STEM among girls.

The Trump administration’s approach runs counter to that. On April 18, any efforts by the agency to broaden participation in STEM “must aim to create opportunities for all Americans everywhere” and “should not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.”

Sixteen attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York, , arguing it does exactly the opposite of what Congress asked the agency to do. NSF has yet to file a response in court and a spokesperson for the agency declined to comment on the lawsuit.

It’s still unclear exactly how the Trump administration determined which grants to terminate.

In February, the Washington Post reported that like “cultural relevance,” “diverse backgrounds” and “women” to see if they violated Trump’s executive orders. Some projects previously appeared on , the Republican chair of the Senate science committee.

According to emails shared with Chalkbeat, Jamie French, a budget official with NSF, told researchers who lost their funding that their work no longer aligned with NSF priorities, but did not give more details. French told researchers the decision was final and they could not appeal.

In response to questions from Chalkbeat about why NSF cancelled Take Flight and other research projects, a spokesperson for NSF reiterated that rationale, and said the agency would still fund projects that “promote the progress of science, advance the national health, prosperity and welfare and secure the national defense.”

For Frances Harper, an assistant professor of mathematics education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the change was jarring.

She received a $700,000 grant from NSF in 2021 to work with 10 Black and Latina mothers with children in Knox County Schools. Together, they were studying and what teachers can learn from them.

Some of the Latina mothers in the study, for example, saw that English learners had a lot of anxiety about taking high-stakes tests, so they created a peer study group for them.

When Sethuraman Panchanathan, the NSF director selected during Trump’s first term who also served under President Joe Biden, visited her university in 2023, Harper said, “he asked me to convey to the mothers how much he valued families being involved in NSF projects.”

But after Harper’s research appeared on Cruz’s “woke” list, her university asked her to pause her work. She lost her funding the same day NSF announced changes to its priorities. And .

NSF cuts felt from elementary school to college

from private foundations to salvage what they can. But much of their planned work will no longer be possible.

The Chicago Children’s Museum was working with Latino families from McAuliffe Elementary School in Chicago on a program known as Somos Ingenieros, or We Are Engineers, to get kids interested in engineering early on.

The team ran two after-school programs for around 20 families, but , or to reach the museum and wider school community.

Parents and children met after school for six weeks to learn about building with various materials, including everyday items like sticks, pine cones, and rocks. That helped kids see engineering in their daily lives and it invited immigrant parents who played with those materials as kids to share their own experiences.

Families also got to put their building skills to the test. One group chose to create puppets and had to figure out how to get the intricate pieces to move correctly. Another picked piñatas and had to strategize how to make them hold heavy candy and survive lots of whacks.

Already, the research team was seeing evidence that the program had boosted parents’ confidence to do engineering activities with their children, said Kim Koin, the director of art and tinkering studios at the Chicago Children’s Museum, who was also the lead researcher on the project.

For Ryan Belville, the principal of McAuliffe, the loss of the program means his students will have fewer opportunities to imagine a college or career pathway in STEM and the arts.

“It may be that moment that they made that puppet that makes them want to be an engineer or a scientist,” Belville said.

And for Karletta Chief, much of the harm is in the lost talent and broken trust caused by the abrupt NSF cancellation.

Chief, a professor of environmental science at the University of Arizona, was a lead researcher with the , which received $10 million from NSF to address food, energy, and water crises in Indigenous communities, and to develop pathways for Native Americans and other underrepresented students to pursue environmental careers.

The Alliance had built a vast network of research and mentorship opportunities over six years, Chief said. It was involved in dozens of projects across the U.S., from creating K-12 school curriculum to mentoring Native students as they transitioned from tribal colleges to four-year universities.

“Our partnerships are built on trust and long commitment,” Chief said. “These are relationships that we have built over years, and it was just really unfortunate that we had to say, ‘sorry!’”

Now Chief and others are scrambling to find funding to cover graduate student researchers’ outstanding tuition and health care bills.

She worries even if the cuts were somehow reversed, it would be difficult to put the project back together. Many of the students and staff they had to let go have already taken other jobs.

“There’s a lot of knowledge and expertise that will be lost,” she said. “We were stopped when we were going full force. 
 Now we just went to zero.”

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

In the fall, the group won a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1.5 million to teach elementary and middle-schoolers about climate-related issues in the U.S. Gulf Coast. The eagerly anticipated award came through NSF’s program.

But when she checked her NSF funding dashboard, the balance was $1.

Educators and researchers nationwide have been suffering similar shocks as the Trump administration raises a microscope — and in some cases an ax — to billions of dollars in federal research grants and contracts. On Monday, it said it had canceled dozens of Institute of Education Sciences contracts, worth an estimated $881 million and covering nearly the institute’s entire research portfolio, according to several sources. 

Last week, the NSF through billions of dollars in already-awarded grants in search of keywords that imply the researchers address gender ideology, diversity, equity and inclusion — all themes by the administration.

The moves — as well as a broader of all federal aid, which a judge has temporarily reversed — have spread uncertainty, fear and anger through the education research community. 

“It is incredibly exhausting,” said the research director of a national nonprofit with several active NSF grants and contracts. She asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely. “It’s definitely absorbing all of our time right now.” 

Interviews with more than a dozen key stakeholders found that researchers with studies already in the field are being forced to suddenly pause their research, not knowing if or when it will resume. Nearly all spoke only on condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking out publicly could jeopardize future funding.

While the administration has said the moves are an attempt to rein in federal spending that doesn’t comport with its priorities and values, it has offered no explanation for cuts to bedrock, non-political research around topics like math, literacy, school attendance, school quality and student mental health.

“It’s hard to believe this administration is serious about stopping the alarming decline of U.S. student achievement and competitiveness when it puts the kibosh on federally funded research and access to data,” said Robin Lake, director of the at Arizona State University. “How will policy makers and educators know the bright spots to replicate and what practices are harmful? How will parents make informed choices? How will teachers know the best ways to teach math and prepare students for the jobs of the future?”

CRPE currently receives no federal funding, she said, so the recent moves won’t affect it immediately. But its ongoing work tracking pandemic recovery, studying the impact of social media, AI and school choice rely on “a broad national infrastructure of data, subject experts, and rigorous field studies,” Lake said. “The broad-based destruction of this infrastructure will affect us all and will cripple our efforts to make American students competitive in the world economy.”

Ulrich Boser, CEO of , a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works in education research, likened the recent moves to remodeling a house to make it more efficient. “Would you just cancel all of your contracts with gas, water, electricity, and then just redo them? It’s not a logical way of doing things. It’s just haphazard.”

An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The Learning Agency, which has contracts to, among other things, provide a that answers questions about IES’s What Works Clearinghouse, this week warning that GOP-backed plans to shut down the Education Department could mean the loss or delay of more than $70 billion in funding for students. 

Boser recalled that the recent debacle with college aid took place simply because the Education Department tried to . “It caused massive delays, most harmful to the kids we care about most.” Now take that dynamic, he said, and imagine what gutting an entire Cabinet-level agency could do. 

The recent NSF moves to review grant language are already having an effect: An academic dean at a leading graduate school of education said researchers at the institution are now reframing new funding proposals “in ways that allow them to ask the questions that they want” without being scrutinized — or eliminated altogether — “based on a ‘Ctrl-F review’ process.” Ctrl-F is a keyboard combination used to quickly search a document for keywords.

“I don’t think there’s an upside to the chaos and uncertainty that is being experienced in real time,” the dean said.

Likewise, the director of a research center that has long focused on K-12 education reform said the new administration has brought turmoil to a community that typically performs “non-ideological, empirical” research on issues like literacy and math.

 â€œI feel like every day there’s new confusion,” he said, adding that restrictions on DEI could also chill a basic function of education research: studying the results of interventions on diverse student populations — students of different races, ethnic backgrounds, economic levels and geographic locations.

“What ‘DEI’ means is really very ambiguous,” he said. “So if you are studying something and you look at differential outcomes between groups, is that DEI? I don’t know.” 

A ‘Man-Made Disaster’

The federal government funds billions of dollars in research each year for K-12 and higher education, but rarely has it scrutinized practitioners to this extent, said the leader of a nonprofit that advocates for better education research. 

She described conversations with scholars who are operating via grants through NSF, IES and elsewhere who “just have no idea what’s going on — they can’t get through to program officers. Sometimes program officers have been put on administrative leave. It’s just a huge amount of chaos, and overall [it] just creates this chilling effect” for both current grantees and future ones.

“This is a man-made disaster,” she said.

Mike England, an NSF spokesman, said the agency “is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders.” He referred a journalist to an outlining recent executive orders “and their impact on the U.S. National Science Foundation community.”

An Education Department official on Tuesday said any IES contracts required by law will be re-issued for new competition, but Mark Schneider, who served as the agency’s director in Trump’s first term, said in an interview that the current chaos represents an opportunity to “make something good” in the research realm.

“What we should really do is say, ‘We’ve fallen into a rut for decades in the way we go about doing business,’” he said. “‘We are not focused on the highest reward. We’re not focused on mission-critical work.’ ” 

Now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Schneider has already suggested breaking the Education Department up and distributing its work to other agencies. He said the new administration has the opportunity to refocus to provide “data that the nation needs.”

Schneider noted that the National Center for Education Research last year handed out 42 research grants worth well over $100 million. “If we look at those grants, how many of those are really mission-critical?” He predicted that few focus on improving literacy instruction, which recent NAEP results suggest is in crisis.

The department did not release a list of zeroed-out programs, but a document online indicates that they include research covering a wide range of topics including literacy but also math, science, mental health, attendance, English acquisition and others. Also on the chopping block: contracts for The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (), a test given to students every four years in 64 countries and a key indicator of U.S. competitiveness.

‘I just don’t want more asterisk years’

The long-term impact of research pauses could be devastating, said the senior advisor to a research advocacy group — comparable to the interruption of the COVID epidemic, which shut many researchers out of schools for months, diluting the effectiveness of their research and, in some cases, requiring them to insert asterisks for the years when no data was available.

“I just don’t want more asterisk years,” she said. 

Several researchers said an even bigger fear is the prospect of key education, labor and other data sets such as NAEP being made unavailable. While NAEP data collection was unaffected by the recent moves, contracts to analyze the data and report it publicly were canceled, to be offered to new bidders. So far, U.S. Education Department data haven’t been affected, but public health data — including guidance on contraception, a fact sheet about HIV and transgender people; and lessons on building supportive school environments for transgender and nonbinary students — have from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website due to President Trump’s order to strip “gender ideology” from websites and contracts.

Amy O’Hara, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School for Public Policy, cautioned that removing data from public websites would “have a chilling effect on what can be done, what can be measured, what services we deliver to our communities.”

Even if some research funds are restored and researchers can go back to work, O’Hara said, she worries about the uncertainty created at the collegiate graduate school level, as well as for researchers who are early in their careers. “If their funding is disrupted and their access to data is disrupted, they have an incentive to walk away,” she said. “And if they walk away and find other work to do, what is going to be compelling to bring them back?”

CRPE’s Lake put it more bluntly: “I’m a very pragmatic researcher and I believe the feds could do much better in how they fund and support research. But a wholesale end to federal investment in education research feels like a cop-out. The hard but necessary work is making smarter investments.”

On April 8, more than 750 college students across the United States will launch hundreds of weather balloons into the atmosphere to research, observe and engage with the total solar eclipse as a part of a student initiative spearheaded by the Montana Space Grant Consortium.

Drawing from the highly successful NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored (NEBP) implemented during the 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2023 total solar eclipses, this current NEBP initiative aims to broaden STEM student participation during the upcoming total solar eclipse — .

Students from 75 higher education institutions, including Minority Serving Institutions and community colleges will have the opportunity to garner atmospheric measurements that can only be conducted during an eclipse. 

The balloons, carrying long, hanging strings of scientific instruments, will enter the path of totality, the area on Earth’s surface where the moon completely covers the sun. 

People along the path of totality, which stretches from Texas to Maine, will have the chance to see the eclipse. For those outside this path, a partial solar eclipse will be visible.

NEBP hopes to “enable inclusive STEM education for participating students, advance learners’ understanding of the process of science as well as create, enhance and sustain networks and partnerships.” 

As anticipation builds for the upcoming spectacle, we wanted to share incredible archives from NEBP’s previous balloon launches. The breathtaking snapshots from the sky offer a unique perspective on past solar eclipses to gear up for the big day.

All photos courtesy of National Eclipse of Ballooning Project (NEBP) Education