Trump Drops DEI Case Appeal. Is He Really Giving Up?

Posted on by

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education withdrew its appeal of an August 2025, federal district court decision, which blocked the Department’s February 14, 2025 “Dear Colleague” letter banning all forms of what the administration calls “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) in U.S. public schools and colleges and universities, and also blocked an April 3, 2025  follow-up threat to penalize public school superintendents and cut federal funding for districts that refuse to eliminate DEI policies and programming.

K-12 Dive‘s Naaz Modan describes the lawsuit that led Maryland’s federal U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie Gallagher to issue a preliminary injunction last August to block the Department of Education’s new strategy of banning what have become public schools districts’ and university’s efforts to protect the rights of students in groups that have historically experienced segregation and discrimination: “In American Federation of Teachers v. U.S. Department of Education, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland’s Baltimore Division, Judge Stephanie Gallagher last August issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the anti-DEI letter and a subsequent letter requiring school districts to certify that they do not incorporate DEI in their schools. Gallagher did not rule on the contents of the letters but said the manner in which the department changed its policies violated decision-making procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act.”

For the Washington Post last week, Laura Meckler clarified: “After a lawsuit and a defeat in court, however, the Trump administration says it is dropping the matter entirely. That means an August federal court order blocking the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter will stand. The Trump administration had also (in April) demanded that schools certify that they are in compliance with the letter, and that demand is now dead, too.”  Meckler is skeptical, however, that the Trump administration will back off its contention that traditional civil rights enforcement to protect the rights of students who have historically experienced educational injustice has harmed the white majority. She adds: “(I)n July, the Justice Department published a memo that included many of the same ideas that were in the Education Department’s letter.”

Like Meckler, I am skeptical that the Department’s withdrawal of its legal appeal will, in the long run, give schools more freedom to shape programs that protect students’ civil rights. The Trump administration has already established other ways to enforce its anti-DEI ideology.

That Department of Justice memo mentioned by Laura Meckler is in fact a document defining “Guidance for All Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination.” It was sent from the Department of Justice on July 29, 2025, as a “Memorandum for All Federal Agencies.”  In the memo, the Department of Justice defines practices that would pose “significant legal risks of initiatives that involve discrimination based on protected characteristics and provides non-binding best practices to help avoid the risk of violations.” Its executive summary defines: “Statutory nondiscrimination requirements: Federal law prohibits discrimination based on protected characteristics like race, sex, color, national origin or religion.” Hence any program specifically to serve students of a particular race or sex, or color would violate federal law.  The document declares, “Using race, sex, or other protected characteristics for employment, program participation, resource allocation, or other similar activities, opportunities, or benefits, is unlawful….”  The document also prohibits programs and policies that qualify participants by using proxies for race: “Unlawful Proxy Discrimination: Facially neutral criteria (e.g., ‘cultural competence,’ ‘lived experience,’ geographic targeting) that function as proxies for protected characteristics violate federal law if designed or applied with the intention of advantaging or disadvantaging individuals based on protected characteristics.”

President Trump has been blunt in defining the ideology that pervades his administration’s policy on civil rights law.  After several NY Times reporters met with the President in early January, Erica Green quoted Trump’s words in the interview: “When asked whether protections that began in the 1960s, spurred by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, had resulted in discrimination against white men, Mr. Trump said he believed ‘a lot of people were very badly treated.’ ‘White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college.’  Mr. Trump’s comments were a blunt distillation of his administration’s racial politics, which rest on the belief that white people have become the real victims of discrimination in America.”

Last week the NY Times‘ Dana Goldstein summed up the ideology the Trump administration has been trying to impose through its attempts to control civil rights programming in public schools and in higher education: “There is no single definition of diversity, equity and inclusion. The administration has said that programs like single-race discussion and mentorship groups, set up with the intention of countering racial privilege and discrimination, violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by segregating students and reinforcing racial stereotypes. It is also argued that college scholarships reserved for students of specific races amount to unlawful discrimination. The White House has repeatedly argued that because the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, all racially targeted education programs are illegal, but district court judges have rejected that idea.” Most experts instead explain that the 2023 court case in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard  narrowly banned affirmative action in college admissions but should not be applied more broadly.

It has been speculated that Linda McMahon intends to move the work of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil rights to the Department of Justice, under Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, who has been a strong supporter of the President’s anti-DEI ideology. Last April, the Washington Post‘s Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck explained: “The new head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division is dramatically reshaping the office to propel President Donald Trump’s social agenda…  In one of her first acts, Dhillon changed the mission statements for many of division offices to align with Trump executive offices with titles such as ‘Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,’ ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,’ and ‘Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.’ “

Perhaps Linda McMahon and others in the Department of Education decided to withdraw their appeal of the case overturning last spring’s letters banning DEI in schools because they know that the Justice Department will take care of the enforcement of such matters.

 

/subscribe

Congress Looks to Pass Education Budget that Rejects Trump’s Proposed Funding Cuts. Will It Pass by Friday?

Posted on by

We began federal Fiscal Year 2026 on the first of October, 2025, but so far the federal government has been operating without a formal budget agreement.  You’ll remember that the agreement to end the October federal shutdown was yet another continuing resolution that expires January 30, this coming Friday. Congress is attempting a bipartisan compromise to avoid another federal shutdown by passing a final budget this week in incremental budgets for particular departments.

Will a final budget Pass by the end of the week?  Congress has already passed budgets for several federal departments. Rushing to adjourn for a one-week-break and get home before the big storm, last Thursday night the U.S. House passed the budgets for eight more—Homeland Security (the most controversial), Treasury, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education—and combined them into one bill for passage by the U.S. Senate.

It looked as though the Senate, returning this week from a one week break, would pass these remaining budgets without amendments by this Friday’s deadline to avoid a government shutdown.  However the catastrophic ICE operations in Minneapolis have been so dangerous and appeared so unlawful that Democratic Senators plan to block the passage of the budget for the Department of Homeland Security. Hence another federal shutdown looks increasingly likely.

On Sunday, the Washington Post‘s Riley Beggin reported: “Existing government funding runs out at the end of the day on Friday, and most of the government would shut down if a funding bill is not approved in time. At least seven Senate Democrats would need to vote for the legislation for it to pass in the upper chamber, where 60 votes are needed to overcome the filibuster. Lawmakers could try to split the Homeland Security bill from the legislation to fund the rest of the government, which has stronger bipartisan support. Splitting up the package would require the House, which is scheduled to be on recess until Feb. 2, to return to Washington to finalize the changes. A spokesperson for Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she is ‘exploring all options’ to pass the remaining government funding bills in time.”  There is every indication that when the House budget does reach the Senate, it will pass.

Bipartisan House education budget overturns Trump’s proposed funding cuts.  Roll Call reported late Thursday that the House passed the Labor-HHS-Education budget “with lopsided bipartisan support on a vote of 341-88.  This time, Republicans compromised to avoid a shutdown instead of trying to please President Trump.

In coverage headlined, “Rebuking Trump, Congress Moves to Maintain Most Federal Education Funding,” Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman reports the good news: “(F)unding next school year for key federal programs serving low-income students and students with disabilities would remain virtually the same as in the current and previous school years. And numerous programs the Trump administration has moved to other federal agencies or proposed to eliminate would continue to exist.” While “the Trump administration last May proposed to shrink federal K-12 investments by roughly $7 billion and eliminate or consolidate dozens of decades-old education grant programs, district leaders and their advocates have spent the ensuing months lobbying fiercely against these changes… The bill does include modest increases of $60 million for charter school grants ($500 million total); $10 million for the Rural Education Achievement Program… ($225 million total); $5 million for Impact Aid school districts with federally owned land ($1.6 billion total); and roughly $100 million for the early-childhood education program Head Start ($12.4 billion).”  Title I for school districts serving concentrations of poor children and funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act would be funded at this year’s level.  While the bill fails to accommodate the increased costs school districts face due to inflation, education leaders are relieved there are no cuts.

House Budget does not prevent administration’s attempt to shift education offices to other Departments.  While some press reports claim that the new budget blocks the Trump administration’s efforts to move some programs to other departments, a process already announced by the administration to fulfill Trump’s goal of ending the Department of Education, Lieberman explains that the new budget actually does not preclude those moves. He adds, however, that a report accompanying the House budget strongly warns against the dismemberment of the Department: “The bill and its accompanying report express a litany of concerns that in-progress efforts to shift program responsibilities to other agencies could hurt students and waste taxpayer dollars. But they don’t order the department to cease those efforts.” Lieberman quotes Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, which lobbies Congress during budget hearings on behalf of school districts: “There’s language aimed at having the administration send Congress proposals to make changes, but there’s nothing in it that explicitly stops the administration from doing what it has been doing.”

Lieberman elaborates: “Education Department’s recent staffing changes appear poised to proceed. In November, the Education Department announced it had signed six ‘interagency agreements’ that move the responsibility for administering most K-12 education programs, and some for higher education, to other agencies. The new appropriations bill’s report includes language requiring the administration to brief lawmkers at least twice a month on the status of implementing those agreements. It also says the bill’s authors are concerned the interagency agreements will create new inefficiencies, weaken federal support for vulnerable children, and place programs in the hands of agencies that ‘do not have experience, expertise, or capacity to carry out these programs and activities.’  It stops short, however, of invalidating already-signed agreements with the departments of Interior, Labor, and State, or prohibiting agreements the department has said it’s developing to move special education, data collection, and civil rights enforcement elsewhere in the federal government. It also doesn’t include language from an earlier budget bill draft that requires that Title I and IDEA remain in the Department of Education.  Democratic lawmakers’ insistence on pushback to these agency-shifting efforts was a key sticking point last week in negotiations over the appropriations bill…”

It seems that Democratic appropriators are attempting to ensure Congress has regular input on the future of the Department of Education.  Whether Congress will be able to maintain what its members consider their prerogative to control federal education spending by passing an FY 2026 budget that will satisfy the needs of our nation’s 50 million students enrolled in public schools is, however, a bigger question than the current budget deliberations can guarantee.

Programs will remain in jeopardy as Trump administration violates power of the purse.  Two weeks ago Lieberman, who covers federal education funding for Education Week, published a reflection on “at least $12 billion in school funding disruptions” last year as Trump launched a second term: “The constitutional principle known as ‘the power of the purse’ has been a fixture of American history classrooms for generations. Federal law explicitly prohibits the executive branch from overriding Congress’ spending decisions. But with a cascade of unilateral federal funding changes in the last year, President Donald Trump has challenged those principles more directly and aggressively than any leader in the nation’s 250-year history—and the education field felt the effects early and often.  Education Week has spent the last year building a running—and increasingly sprawling—tabulation of the individual grant cancellations and broader funding disruptions affecting education as they’ve happened.”

Here are some of the details in Lieberman’s report: “During the first year of Trump’s second term, Education Week found that the federal government bypassed Congress and disrupted more than $12 billion for K-12 education that lawmakers had already allocated, much of it before Trump took office… As a result of Trump’s education cuts, hundreds of educators have lost their jobs. Thousands of aspiring teachers found themselves without financial support they were using to cover college tuition. Dozens of school districts canceled plans to upgrade buildings, purchase library books, contract with mental health providers, and help… high schoolers apply to college… Individual Education Department grants (were) targeted for cancellation… Education Week tabulated an estimated sum of all the future-year funds grant recipients lost as a result of these cancellations: $2.2 billion… Nearly all the notices accused the grantees of engaging in illegal or improper initiatives to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion… Only a small fraction of these grantees—including school districts, state education agencies, colleges and universities, and education nonprofits—were able to secure court injunctions that permanently restored their funding.”

Why are the Department of Education and its budget so important?  The ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn) defends the importance of the work of Congress to protect the programs of the U.S. Department of Education with a budget equal to last year’s investment and to include language that will at least give Congress a voice in the debate about eliminating the Department by moving education programs into other departments: “The Trump administration’s plan is to …disorganize education policy: to take several core functions of Education and spread them throughout the Departments of Labor, State, Interior, and Health and Human Services without any congressional consultation or oversight… Does the administration seriously believe it will be more efficient for schools to navigate not one, but four separate federal entities? Are they under the impression that asking a dwindling number of increasingly demoralized federal workers to administer additional programs… or to split time between multiple agencies will make anything easier for anyone?  Nine in ten American students attend public school. We, as a society, are richer both culturally and economically for investing in it.”

Trump Administration Awards Grants to Promote Patriotic Education

Posted on by

While press reporting is scanty, it would appear that the America 250 Civics Education Coalition—an organization convened and coordinated by the U.S. Department of Education and the America First Policy Institute—is attempting to drive a particular historical bias on American history into public schools across the states at the same time the U.S. Department of Education is making grants to promote patriotic civics education in public schools.

Last September, when the  America 250 Civics Education Coalition was launched, the U.S. Department press release declared: “This landmark initiative is dedicated to renewing patriotism, strengthening civic knowledge, and advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation… ‘As America approaches 250 years since its founding, we are proud to announce this coalition to ensure every young American understands the beauty of our nation and is equipped with the civic knowledge required to contribute meaningfully to its future,’ said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.”

Red flags appear later in the press release when the U.S. Department of Education lists the more than 40 organizations convened to operate the project.  They include the Alliance Defending Freedom, America First Legal, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Claremont Institute, the Council for National Policy, the Eagle Forum, the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the Goldwater Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College, Moms for Liberty, PragerU, and Turning Point USA.

When the Department of Education and the  America First Policy Institute announced the project, News from the States’ Shauneen Miranda quoted an official from Department of Education: “The coalition will have nothing to do with school curricula, a department official said last month, acknowledging that the agency legally cannot dictate what schools teach. And it will not receive any federal funding from the department, the official added.”  This group promoting “patriotic history” will apparently compliment the work of two other coalitions, America 250 and Freedom 250, which are organizing the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday this summer. There is a lot of hoopla here without many specifics about how any of this might affect what children learn in public schools about civics and American history.

In the inaugural address at the January 2025 meeting of the American Historical Association, a history professor at Western Washington University, Johann Neem discussed three very different ways people are approaching American history today. Neem’s explanation helps clarify what seems to be going on with the Trump administration’s purpose as it shapes our nation’s 250th birthday this summer:

“Despite the importance and need for national history right now, historians disagree profoundly on the narratives to offer Americans. Much like other Americans, historians are divided by politics and culture… (W)e find historians offering three distinct narratives, each with its own politics and each providing Americans a different civic story. The first, perhaps the dominant, paradigm among professional historians is what I refer to as the ‘post-American’ turn in U.S. history, a turn that reflects some progressive historians’ deep frustration with Americans’ unwillingness to confront the ongoing legacies of racism and other forms of inequality… In response, conservatives instead offer what I call a ‘hyper-American’ counternarrative in which the country’s best qualities become its constitutive features while its wrongs—including slavery and racial inequality—are contingent and secondary… Between the post-American and hyper-American paradigms is what I call ‘mainstream’ American history because it reflects the historical sensibility of most Americans regardless of race, ethnicity, or party affiliation… It combines a narrative of progress with acknowledgments of America’s wrongs and an emphasis on struggles for justice and equality. To mainstream historians, the story of America is that of an unfinished experiment.”

The Trump administration’s bias on American history has never been a secret. In 2025, President Trump released at least two executive orders which define what Neem calls the “hyper-American counternarrative”: Celebrating America’s 25th Birthday, on January 29th, and Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, on March 27th. Then on September 17, the U.S. Department of Education proposed guidance to define rules for Departmental grants supporting school projects in American history—Proposed Priority and Definitions–Secretary’s Supplemental Priority and Definitions on Promoting Patriotic Education—for comment in the Federal Register.  Here is some of the language in the proposed federal guidance:

“The success of the American experiment in self-government requires the cultivation of both citizenship, competency, and informed patriotism among the American People. Citizens must understand why our free-market economy is a highly evolved system of cooperation fostered by our constitutional republic, and how it functions to secure the blessings of liberty for all Americans… (O)ur voluntary individual actions channeled through the intermediary institutions of civil society—such as our companies, places of worship, schools, fraternal organizations and civic association—are critically important to the proper functioning of the American economic, social, and political system. In the American system of liberty, educated citizens who know their rights and meet their responsibilities cooperate to build a more perfect Union and inherit the opportunities of a free society…Proposed Priority: Projects that are designed to provide an introduction to and understanding of the founding documents and primary sources of the American political tradition in a manner consistent with the principles of a patriotic education… Patriotic education means a presentation of the history of America grounded in an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of the American founding and foundational principles, a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history; and the concept that commitment to America’s aspirations is beneficial and justified… Nothing in this definition should be construed as implicating a particular curriculum, program of instruction or specific academic content.”

As you might expect, the formal comments submitted on the proposed federal grant program covered a range of critiques—positive and negative. The American Historical Association asked its members to submit comments and suggested concerns: “Students deserve an honest and full account of U.S. history. This funding priority promises to support the teaching of ‘accurate and honest’ content. We consider this goal profoundly important, and this is why we are concerned about efforts to scrub historical content from federal websites, remove factual signage at historic sites, and attack curatorial decisions at Smithsonian museums, alleging that this history is insufficiently celebratory in its depiction of the United States… The Department of Education’s rule asserts that there can only be one interpretation of an event, an assertion that runs contrary to the practice of history, and the importance of allowing people to engage in civil deliberations… This rule narrows the concept of patriotism and patriotic education, with a disproportionate focus on the Founding Era, a period when most Americans could not vote, when many were enslaved, and before the U.S. Constitution explicitly embraced equal protection.”

In its formal comment, the Education Law Center does not accept the Department of Education’s assurance that its grants would avoid prescribing a specific curriculum: “By promoting a vague and ideologically motivated vision of ‘patriotic’ education, the U.S. Department of Education would violate federal law prohibiting interference with local control over curricula and chill accurate and inclusive instruction… The  proposed priority represents an unprecedented and unlawful attempt by the federal government to control state and local curricula… The federal government is in fact prohibited from interfering with state and local autonomy over curriculum. Federal agencies, including the Department, are expressly prohibited from directing, supervising, or controlling the curriculum, program of instruction, personnel or selection of instructional materials of any educational institution or school system.”

Warnings such as these are why Ohioans are concerned about a new initiative, announced last week, at Bowling Green State University, which is recruiting public school teachers for its CIVICS 250 Scholars Program: “Through funding by the (U.S.) Department of Education, the Democracy and Public Policy Network at Bowling Green State University is… establish(ing) learning communities among K-12 educators across the region over the next three years focused on developing and strengthening American history and civics education. Each cohort will consist of approximately 35 teachers who will receive year-long training and gain expert insight from BGSU faculty to establish learning communities in their districts… Through the learning communities, the Democracy and Public Policy Network will help Ohio’s K-12 teachers develop lessons and resources focused on the nation’s foundational principles, including the ideas, traditions and institutions essential to understanding American government and history. Teachings will focus on America’s founding documents including the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the anti-Federalist Papers, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, while also bringing in knowledge of lesser-known documents to broaden the scope of participating teachers’ ability to educate their students.”

Bowling Green’s Democracy and Public Policy Network, where the new initiative is to be housed, was created in 2024, is led by four of the university’s political science professors and has convened a bipartisan advisory board. Perhaps the university staff and the program’s board will ensure its political independence and freedom from historical bias. However, questions remain about the leaders’ and professors’ capacity to encourage open discussion and debate about major issues in American history when the grant that underwrites the program comes from the U.S. Department of Education, which launched the America 250 Civics Education Coalition.

Last November, the Harvard historian and writer for The New Yorker, Jill Lepore worried about the Trump administration’s effort to shape history: “An early executive order denounced ‘the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology’ abroad in the land and called for ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,’ under which the  Administration has sought to dictate what the American story is, and who can tell it. Much federal funding now requires celebrating American greatness, military valor, and exceptionalism… A tragedy of this year, if, admittedly, a small one relative to what else is going wrong in the United States, is that the two-hundred-and-fiftieth will be a missed opportunity to wrestle with the meaning of the American Revolution and of the principles on which the nation was founded at a time when debating those ideas and confronting their implications are desperately needed”

Student Loan Crackdown Delayed, Mental Health Grants Restored, but Dept. of Ed.’s Future Complicates Federal Budget Debate

Posted on by

Even in this quiet January lull, when we haven’t been reading headlines about federal education policy, there have been important developments in the Trump administration and Congress.  Twice in the past week, the Trump administration has made two, surprisingly pleasant announcements.

Department of Ed. Delays Student Loan Crackdown     Last Friday the U.S. Department of Education announced that it was suspending indefinitely its plan to begin garnisheeing wages and withholding tax refund dollars from people who have defaulted on their student loans.  The Washington Post‘s Danielle Douglas-Gabriel reported:

“With Americans reeling from high consumer prices, the federal government will suspend tax refund seizures and wage garnishments for people in default on their student loans… The action dials back the Trump administration’s recent decision to resume involuntary collections after a nearly six-year suspension because of the pandemic. The suspensions take effect immediately, with no defined end date. The move offers relief to the millions of Americans in default, but means the government is losing out on billions of dollars. The Education Department said Friday that the temporary suspension will help the agency implement student loan repayment reforms to give borrowers more options to repay their loans and give defaulted borrowers more time to rehabilitate their loans.”

Mental Health Grants Cancelled, Then Restored     The second reassuring Trump administration announcement followed what had seemed a piece of catastrophic policy. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration administered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr.  suddenly sent letters to community agencies and public school districts cancelling $2 billion in mental health grants. For Education Week, Evie Blad explained: “School mental health programs faced rapid whiplash after President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly canceled up to $2 billion in mental health and addiction treatment grants this week, only to reinstate them the next day. The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration notified thousands of grantees late January 13 that it had terminated their funding. These included recipients of Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resiliency in Education), a school mental health grant program created with bipartisan support following the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.”

The bulk of these grants were for community addiction treatment and prevention, though school grants were included. The NY Times‘ Jan Hoffman reported: “Kathryn Cates-Wessel, chief executive of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry, said she received a faxed letter at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday saying that her organization would lose $20 million in federal grants. Last year, the academy taught 500,000 doctors, social workers and nurses nationwide how to screen and treat people addicted to opioids… Hoffman cites a second example of programs suddenly slashed: “Programs to prevent suicide, reduce underage drinking and cannabis use in central Alabama would be eliminated.”

Evie Blad explains what happened a day later when the grants were suddenly restored without explanation: “After outcry from mental health advocacy organizations, educators, and members of Congress from both parties, an administration official told Education Week Jan. 15 that the terminations would be reversed… The abrupt action and confusing messaging continues a familiar pattern for the Trump administration, which has swiftly canceled a host of education grants and contracts without warning since the start of the president’s second term… Trump administration provided little information about cancellations, reversals.”

Twice last week federal threats which would have devastated the lives of citizens and essential community institutions were suddenly undone at least temporarily.  Perhaps, in a midterm election year, public outcry and bipartisan pressure on Congress and the administration resulted in the reversal.

Senate Debates Federal Education Budget that Must Pass by January 30     An urgently important, but almost unreported event in recent weeks is that Congress is still debating a key issue in the Labor, Education and Health and Human Services budget bill for Fiscal Year 2026. The federal shutdown over the budget was resolved at the end of October not with a final budget, but instead with a continuing resolution that expires at the end of next week: on Friday, January 30. Although Congress has been working to prevent another shutdown at the end of the month, as part of the budget debate, there remains strong disagreement about whether the Trump administration can take steps to end the Department of Education by moving key programs to the Department of Labor and several other federal departments.

Politico‘s Mackenzie Wilkes explains what’s been happening in the U.S. House Appropriations Committee: “Democrats are trying to stop the department from offloading some of its duties to other agencies by pushing for language blocking such moves to be included in spending legislation to fund the departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services…  Rep Robert Aderholt (R-Ala), chair of the subcommittee overseeing the bill… said adding that language would be a ‘heavy lift’ to getting the spending bill through the House.”

In the U.S. Senate, there also remains strong disagreement over the dissolution of the U.S. Department of Education. Wilkes explains: “Appropriations leaders overseeing the Education Department met last week to discuss the bill, and talks at the staff level continue. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), the top Democrat on the subcommittee overseeing the Labor-H bill, said she proposed letting the Education Department continue its interagency agreement with the Labor Department to operate career and technical education programs, but halting agreements on K-12 and higher education programs that have taken place. ‘There’s some level of appropriateness for Labor and Education to work closely together on career and technical education programs, but I don’t think Labor should be operating preschool and kindergarten,’ she said.”

In the midst of this heated federal budget debate, last week, in The American Prospect, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, published a profound defense of preserving the U.S. Department of Education to coordinate the federal programs supporting public education across the United States: “President Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon will exacerbate existing problems—cutting off desperately needed resources, expanding the department’s bureaucracy, creating more red tape for students and schools to navigate, eroding trust in federal education policy writ large, and ultimately undermining public education as an institution.”

She continues: “Let me review some history. The cornerstones of federal support for American education are the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and Higher Education Act (HEA), which were first passed as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, along with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), first enacted under President Ford. These laws made remarkable improvements in the access to, and quality of, education in America. They provided federal funding for schools in impoverished areas so that every American child, regardless of ZIP code, could have access to an education that could take them to new heights. They created accommodations for students with disabilities, recognizing that every child deserves the opportunity to receive an education that propels them forward. They helped narrow the gap in educational outcomes between low-income urban and rural students, and those in affluent suburbs. And many public schools were able to open their very first libraries thanks to ESEA funding. But despite those improvements, the government lacked a unified infrastructure to administer these programs in a clear and efficient manner. Crucially, there was no single, visible, high-ranking government official responsible for coordinating federal education resources. Educators and advocates had to wade through bureaucracies in several different offices and agencies just to figure out who was responsible for addressing their problems. Progress had been made, but the system was still disorganized.  So Congress wrote and President Carter signed the bipartisan bill to create the Department of Education.”

Rep. DeLauro concludes by naming why she believes Congress must resist the Trump administration’s playbook: “Project 2025, the manifesto that President Trump immediately embraced after taking office… calls for not only dismantling the Department of Education, but eliminating Head Start, ending Title I grants to low-income students, weakening civil rights protections, shifting public funds to private schools, and minimizing funding for students with disabilities. Each of these positions would be devastating by themselves. But together, they would all but destroy public education in this country. That is their ultimate goal.”

Trump Administration Destroys the Systems that Support and Protect America’s Children

Posted on by

In an important column, the President of First Focus on Children, Bruce Lesley names what ought to be our nation’s social policy agenda, if justice and equity are the goals we seek:

  • “demanding a Child Tax Credit that actually reaches the children who need it most;
  • “rejecting the dismantling and undermining of our nation’s public schools and the federal Department of Education, as children deserve federal champions of their fundamental educational rights rather than federal retreat;
  • “protecting child care and funding early education programs, including Head Start;
  • “restoring health programs by reversing the cuts to Medicaid, making the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) permanent, and putting science at the forefront of vaccine and medical research programs rather than ideology… and
  • “treating every child, regardless of income or status, as fully human and fully deserving of fulfilling their… potential.”

By contrast, Lesley identifies the Trump administration’s ‘Stephen Miller and Russ Vought playbook’ now driving public policy. The new Miller-Vought agenda, “recognizes that the public overwhelmingly supports children’s issues. Thus, rather than attack children directly, they seek to ‘otherize’ kids by category, imposing ‘deservingness’ exclusions on their parents and dividing the nation into in-groups and out-groups. Lesley describes the new playbook: demonizing and deporting immigrant children; attacking LGBTQ children; targeting low-income children by excluding them from benefits “with rules and restrictions that sound neutral but function like walls and barriers”; targeting Black and Brown parents; threatening religious minority groups; closing programs for rural children; and embracing partisan politics and targeting blue states “with cuts and exclusions.”

Lesley’s example is last week’s injustice when the Trump administration imposed a sudden funding freeze on federal funds for child care and family support on five states:  Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois and Colorado: “The Trump Administration—citing vague concerns about fraud stemming from a misleading video by a known provocateur—suspended payments to programs that keep day cares open, staff employed, and parents able to work across Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota. Strangely, the administration added four other states to the freeze with seemingly no evidence of fraud beyond partisan politics.  But there are no red children and blue children. There are just children.”

Lesley cites a new analysis from First Focus staff—Chad Bolt, economic policy; Lily Klam, early childhood and education policy; and Averi Pakulis, early childhood and health policy—exploring what will be the impact of the administration’s recent funding freeze on essential programs for the poorest families in five states with large populations of children at risk: “In its latest attack on children, the Trump administration has announced that it will withhold at least $7.35 billion in funding for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), $2.4 billion in child care funding, and $870 million in Social Services Block Grant funding from California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. The administration asserts, without evidence, that these states have allowed the funding to be used fraudulently. While fraud must be prevented through strong oversight, this can and must be done without punishing children… Children are once again collateral damage in a political battle.”

Here are some of the details these experts provide to help us all grasp the on-the-ground meaning of these programs being frozen:

  • TANF     “Since expiration of the 2021 Child Tax Credit expansions, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program stands as one of the only federal programs providing monthly cash assistance to families with low incomes. TANF supports millions of children and families thorough cash assistance as well as child care subsidies, state tax credits, food banks and other aid. Nearly 70% of TANF recipients are children. By withholding TANF funding from California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York, the Trump administration is cutting off 55.8% of the total number of children who benefit from TANF nationally….”
  • Child Care     “The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), which includes the discretionary Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and the mandatory Child Care Entitlement to States provides vital support to families… Freezing CCDF funding for these five states will delay payments that child care providers rely on to survive, cause confusion and stress for families and providers alike, and potentially result in a loss of care. This freeze would impact 23.7% of children from low-income families who rely on child care subsidies from the federal government in these five states, plus children who don’t receive direct child care support but attend child care centers that receive federal funding, for a total of over 500,000 children.”
  • Child Welfare and Protective Services     “The Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) funds essential child welfare programs, including child protective services, foster care, and support for struggling families, as well as child care in some states.  Freezing SSBG funds could reduce the number of child protective services workers… weaken foster care support, forcing states to cut services for children in need; rob families facing crises of needed resources, increasing homelessness and instability…”

In his column last week, Bruce Lesley highlights the moral implications for our society of the cascade of federal actions after last week’s tragedy in Minneapolis when a child was orphaned during a protest against the surge of ICE agents:

“While the debate has largely focused on fault, more people need to be asking questions about what happens to this child now. Unfortunately in our political system, children are too often invisible, especially when the policies and actions that harm them are wrapped in the language of law enforcement, border security, or fiscal discipline… Schools in Minneapolis were placed on lockdown and are now closed out of concern for children’s welfare. Parents have kept their kids home to stay out of harm’s way…. This week of fear, lockdowns, and mourning is only one of a number of calamities for children at the hands of its own government. It’s a symptom of a much larger, more deliberate pattern. In the same week that a child was orphaned by a government gun, the federal government also took a number of ill-fated steps to rip away support systems for other children across Minnesota and the entire country… It’s what happens when federal policymakers begin treating children not as a group that deserves to be protected, but as line items to be eliminated. This is what ‘organized abandonment’ looks like. It is part of a deliberate hollowing out and defunding of the systems that help protect the health, education, development, safety, and well-being of children.”

Trump’s Dept. of Ed. Waives Some Federal Oversight for Iowa: A New Trend?

Posted on by

In his newest book, Dangerous Learning, constitutional law scholar Derek Black explores one of the most basic reasons our public schools, our society’s most extensive and inclusive civic institution, are essential: they are an enormous system whose promise is to serve the needs and protect the rights of nearly 50 million children and adolescents.  Justice cannot be achieved solely through the protection of parents’ rights, by which parents vie to advance their own children’s needs.

Black writes: “As rhetoric, educational freedom sounds good.  As a practical matter, it falls well short of freedom for all. It does not even attempt to ensure that private education works for children. At best, it is agnostic toward the school environments students enter. At worst, it uses public funds to facilitate patterns and values that America has spent the past half century trying to tame…  Public schools to be sure, are far from perfect. They have never fully met the needs of all students and all communities. But those shortcomings are clearly understood as problems to fix. They are seen as bugs, not features, of public education, which has operated for two centuries on the premise that public schools are the place where children—regardless of status—share a common experience, come to appreciate the public good, and prepare for equal citizenship. The purpose of public education has always been to sustain a republican form of government. And public schools are the only place in society premised on bridging the gaps that normally divide us—race, wealth, religion, disability, sex, culture, and more. The founders of the American public education system believed that rather than inhibiting liberty, a common public education is essential to it.” (Dangerous Learning, pp. 182-183)

Widespread educational justice across the nation cannot be achieved solely through the laws of the states. At the federal level, Brown v. Board of Education, and federal laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act have for three quarters of a century been tools by which the federal government could challenge and rectify injustice in public schools.  In 1979, the U.S. Department of Education was founded to pull together many of the programs designed to increase opportunity for children in states whose public schools had failed to protect their educational rights due to their race, ethnicity, or disability—the work of the Office for Civil Rights, and programs supporting English language learners and special education for disabled students, for example.  The Education Department also increased investment in school districts which states had inadequately funded—Title I for school districts serving concentrations of poor children, for example, and grants for Full-Service Community Schools and 21st Century After-School Programs.

The Trump administration has, however, avoided acknowledging the history of educational injustice as the President has consistently promoted the goal of shutting down the U.S. Department of Education and “returning education to the states.”  When she was confirmed as Education Secretary last March, Linda McMahon declared: “President Trump pledged to make American education the best in the world, return education to the states where it belongs, and free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice. I intend to make good on that promise.”  McMahon has laid off staff whose positions were created by Congress, threatened to send specific programs to other federal departments, and cancelled a raft of specific, congressionally allocated grant funding —all contrary to federal law. Many of these threats have been temporarily stayed by the courts; others are quietly moving forward.

Last week, McMahon took a new step to weaken the Department’s reach—by agreeing to waive federal rules that prescribe how federal funding can be spent and allowing states to combine at their discretion funding from specific federal grant lines. For the Associated Press, Colin Binkley explained: “The Trump administration is giving Iowa more power to decide how it spends its federal education money, signing off on a proposal that is expected to be the first of many as conservative states seek new latitude from a White House promising to ‘return education to the states.’ Iowa was the first state to apply for an exemption from certain spending rules.”  Binkley describes Education Secretary McMahon’s justification for giving Iowa control of spending federal dollars from four different grant programs: “McMahon told The Associated Press that the new flexibility will free up time and money now devoted to ensuring compliance with federal rules. With fewer strings attached, states can pool their federal dollars toward priorities of their choosing, including literacy or teacher training….”

For K-12 Dive, Kara Arundel lists four separate programs established by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act whose funding streams Iowa has been permitted to combine: Title II, Part A—Supporting Effective Instruction; Title III, Part A—English Language Acquisition; Title IV, Part A—Student Support and Academic Enrichment; and Title IV, Part B—21st Century Community Learning Centers (after-school programs). Arundel describes Iowa’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds expressing gratitude for giving her state more freedom: “Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, speaking at the press conference, said the state is ‘confident that we can do even more by reallocating compliance resources. Iowa will begin shifting nearly $8 million and thousands of hours of staff time from bureaucracy to actually putting that expertise and those resources in the classroom.’ ”

Several writers, looking at the modesty of last week’s Iowa waiver to consolidate grants are not yet anticipating that the Iowa situation bodes massive deregulation of federal funding.  Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman explains: “The waiver approval appears to mark the first time since the 2015 passage of the Every Student Success Act that the federal government has used its authority under that law to allow a state to consolidate funding. But, in contrast with proposals the state put forward roughly a year ago, the new federal approval touches only 5% of Iowa’s overall allocation of federal education funds, the part that’s set aside for the state education agency. The bulk of federal dollars that flow to school districts each year—$900 million worth—will retain their current structure and spending and reporting requirements.”

Binkley reassures the public: “Iowa’s new plan leaves Title I funding untouched.”

Lieberman quotes Anne Hyslop, who now leads All4Ed, and who worked in the Department during the Obama administration: “This announcement could signal an acknowledgment from the department that its legal authority to flatten discrete funding programs and implement unrestricted block grants without congressional approval is limited, said Anne Hyslop… It also foreshadows an uphill battle for other states aiming to convert federal education funding to block grants, including Indiana, which submitted a request for that flexibility, along with relief from certain school accountability requirements in October.”

Chalkbeat’s Erica Meltzer adds States already control most aspects of education. Federal funding makes up about 10% of overall education spending, and those dollars do come with restrictions and reporting requirements that aim to ensure money is spent appropriately… Iowa’s waiver doesn’t allow districts to consolidate most of their federal funding, which would have represented a much larger pot of money.

However, the reporters acknowledge that, in the context of the Trump administration’s goal to return education to the states, the Department may increasingly grant waivers that limit federal oversight.  Will Iowa’s waiver be the first step as the Department of Education reduces guardrails that protect students’ civil rights?

Meltzer reports that the new waiver, “does allow Iowa school districts to take advantage of a 1999 federal provision called  Ed-Flex to roll over more money year over year to make it easier to invest in big-ticket items and longer-term strategies….”  Lieberman adds: “Separate from the waiver approval, McMahon also simultaneously announced she’s approved Iowa to join 10 other states currently participating in the department’s Ed-Flex program, which gives state education agencies the authority to waive certain spending regulations for individual districts… The 10 states currently participating are Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin. Iowa is the first state to gain the distinction since McMahon became secretary.”

Meltzer concludes by cautioning readers: “(T)he Education Department still needs to ensure money is being appropriately spent, which is more challenging after massive layoffs.” She quotes Hyslop worrying: “(T)he U.S. Department of Education right now lacks the capacity to do meaningful oversight of how this program is being implemented or the waiver process in general.”

Specifically, Meltzer warns that one of the federal grants Iowa was allowed to merge supported English language instruction, a step that could well reflect the Trump administration’s attack on immigrants or its anti-DEI initiatives: “Advocates are particularly concerned that Iowa’s new block grant consolidates Title III funds that are required to go to English learners…. The Trump administration laid off most of the staff at the Education Department who support those students, and rescinded a guidance document considered to be the ‘bible’ in that field.” She quotes the Education Trust’s Nicholas Munyan-Penney: “I think of red tape equaling protections for students… We want to make sure that students have access to the protections and resources they need to be successful.”

Will 2026 be the year that the Department of Education expands the use of waivers to undercut the federal oversight of funds that protect equality of educational opportunity across our nation?  We will need to watch carefully as the chaotic education policy in McMahon’s Department of Education continues into its second year.

Complex Issues Rumble Beneath Plan to Close Cleveland Schools

Posted on by

Despite that voters in the the Cleveland (Ohio) school district passed an operating levy in 2024 that will continue to raise roughly $49 million in additional property taxes every year, on December 9, 2025, the school board voted unanimously to restructure the school district, including the closure of 23 school buildings and consolidation of other small schools into the same building.  Keep in mind that in this year’s state budget, the Ohio Legislature failed fully to enact, as promised, the Fair School Funding Plan, a new state funding formula which would have helped districts like Cleveland afford to provide adequate services for students.

The Plain Dealer‘s Sean McDonnell reported the details of the district’s new consolidation plan: “Cleveland’s school board unanimously approved a plan… that drastically consolidates the school district’s footprint ahead of the 2026-27 school year. Cleveland Metropolitan School District will close 23 buildings and operate 29 fewer schools, changes CEO Warren Morgan says are needed to confront steep drops in enrollment and a looming $150 million deficit… CMSD will save about $30 million a year, mainly by reducing administrative staff to serve fewer schools. Pre-K through eighth-grade schools will drop from 61 to 45. High schools will drop from 27 to 14.”

While the press has reported on the details of the closure of some schools and the merging of others, we have not been reading enough about several deeper issues underneath what is being discussed as a straight-forward school consolidation plan whose purpose is primarily to address a district-wide financial deficit.

District-Wide Equity

When the plan was first publicly released back in November, McDonnell quoted CEO Morgan describing an additional purpose for the restructure: “Consolidation… will allow CMSD to offer a better education to more students… He said… that Cleveland’s schools have ‘pockets of excellence.’ Some schools have great academics and other have great sports programs. But to offer all students an excellent education and extracurriculars, action is needed.”

Here we begin to see that beneath the details of the Cleveland school consolidation plan is a complex philosophical debate about one of the thorniest policy issues we have been watching for two decades now. Which students’ needs get served well and which students find their needs needs are left out in a fiscal climate when public funds are scarce? And in a district with district-wide school choice, is it a good idea to let savvy parents extract their students into special places with more advanced programs?

Seasoned education reporter, Patrick O’Donnell, who used to cover public education for the Plain Dealer, now writes for The 74, where O’Donnell recently explored the pending loss of Cleveland’s special small schools from the point of view of something called “portfolio school reform theory,” which was the basis of a 2012 restructure called the Cleveland Plan. Portfolio school reform was developed around the idea of school district management of universal school choice and breaking up comprehensive high schools into small, specialty high schools.

In his recent article, O’Donnell profiles a small, science high school that will no longer exist as a stand-alone institution under the consolidation passed by the Cleveland school board last month: “(A)s part of budget cuts and a change in district priorities away from the small schools model that was once popular nationally, MC²STEM won’t exist anymore. Instead, it’s being turned into just a STEM program at a high school in the poorest neighborhood in the city. The school is the most dramatic casualty in a major reorganization and reduction of schools… The cuts come as the district… changes its philosophy from highlighting a few star high schools to keep strong students from fleeing, instead shifting toward offering more opportunities at all high schools… With the cuts, Cleveland is reversing the once-popular movement in districts across the country of carving up big schools into smaller schools that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his foundation once promoted and funded. Cleveland adopted the small schools approach heavily in the early 2000s as well as the similar ‘portfolio’ school district model that downplays large, standardized schools in favor of offering students a choice of many schools with different approaches… In Cleveland… several specialized high schools—including MC²STEM, two early college high schools, two schools that teach medicine by partnering with hospitals, and an aviation and maritime school helping students earn pilot licenses—will all become programs within large combined schools.”

O’Donnell highlights the strength of schools like MC²STEM, but as Morgan, Cleveland’s School District CEO, discusses the new consolidation plan, Morgan names the injustice that has emerged in so-called “portfolio” school district plans that break up large high schools and feature small, specialty schools that cater, in an environment of universal school choice, to students with particular interests or skills. After the school board passed the new plan the Plain Dealer again quoted Morgan emphasizing that a primary goal of today’s district-wide consolidation is equal access for the district’s students across all schools to an expanded curriculum: “It will be worth it because 100% of CMSD scholars will have better opportunities, including expanded access to Algbra 1, computer tech, sports, career and college prep.  100% of our buildings will soon be new or upgraded, providing safe and equitable teaching and learning environments.”

What about Charter Schools?

While CEO Warren Morgan and the school board have presented the need for a massive consolidation of schools and school closures to save $30 million every year as a response to a “looming $150 million deficit,” the press has, to my knowledge, not explored the fact that the Cleveland school district continues to divert local property tax revenue to a group of charter schools that are said to partner with the district. Last February, for The 74, Patrick O’Donnell summarized the history of the growing diversion of local levy money as a sort of bonus to high-scoring Cleveland charter schools that, like all charter schools in Ohio, are already funded on a per-pupil basis from the state budget: “The district’s financial support of charter schools, controversial when it started in 2012, has continued and even doubled over time. In 2012, after the Ohio legislature approved the plan, the district started sharing more than $5 million a year with selected charters with strong academic results, that served almost entirely Cleveland kids and that agreed to share data and expansion plans with the district. The district is now sharing more than $10 million with 11 partnering charters, most of them with the Breakthrough Schools, the state’s highest-rated charter school chain and which helped create the Cleveland Plan.”

A key fact about the 2012 Cleveland Plan was that the school reform plan was enacted through state legislation. It was therefore not the school district’s decision to share its property tax revenue with charter schools. The district, which will close a mass of local elementary and high schools to save $30 million annually, does not have the power to stop giving away $10 million every year to the district’s most powerful charter schools whose operators helped negotiate the Cleveland Plan in the first place. State politics are likely to ensure that legislators continue to protect the local school district’s investment in the budgets of these particular charter schools. It is shocking that no one in the press, to my knowledge, has explored the loss of $10 million annually as an added bonus for well-connected charter schools at the same time Cleveland’s public schools are in the midst of a fiscal crisis.

What Will the School Consolidation Plan Mean for the Community?

While the Plain Dealer has reported on which schools will be closed or merged with other schools and the board’s purpose for instituting the plan, Signal Cleveland, an independent, non-profit local newsroom, has begun to explore the implications for families, students and educators.  One article addresses 18 key questions that include: the difference between closed or merged programs; the district’s promise to add more academic programs; how career training programs will change; how high school specialty tracks will be merged; what will happen to teachers and staff; and the implications for special education students.  Another Signal Cleveland reporter interviews students to examine what it will mean for them as Collinwood High School is closed and its students move into rival Glenville High School.

It will be urgently important for the press to continue exploring the challenges for the students who must change schools as well as for the students at schools receiving an influx of new students. Teachers and administrators will also face a huge adjustment, and in the neighborhoods where schools are closed, residents will look at the empty buildings and grieve the loss of former community anchors.

University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing traced widespread community grieving that accompanied Chicago’s closure of 50 neighborhood schools in 2013:

“There is the symbolic weight of a school as a bastion of community pride, and also the fear that losing the school means conceding a battle in a much larger ideological war over the future of a city and who gets to claim it. There is the need to consider that losing the school represents another assault in a long line of racist attacks against a people… There is our intensely segregated society to account for, in which those who attend the school experience a fundamentally different reality than those who have the power to steer its future. And finally, there is the intense emotional aftermath that follows school closure, which can have a profound, lasting effect on those who experience the closure even as it is rarely acknowledged with any seriousness by those who made the decision.”

Ewing continues: “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closures should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions… What is the history that has brought us to this moment? How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it?  Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p.159)

Trump’s Education Department Axes Grants for Full-Service Community Schools

Posted on by

The late, great David Berliner was the Regents’ professor emeritus in the psychology of education at Arizona State University, a former president of the American Educational Research Association, and the former dean of the College of Education at Arizona State.  In the first chapter of The Manufactured Crisis, a book he co-authored 30 years ago with another academic expert on education, Bruce Biddle, he derided what he saw as the misdirection of education reform ideas developed as a response to the 1983 A Nation at Risk report: “One of the worst effects of the Manufactured Crisis has been to divert attention away from the real problems faced by American education—problems that are serious and that are escalating in today’s world… (A)lthough many Americans do not realize it, family incomes and financial support for schools are much more poorly distributed in our country than in other industrialized nations. This means that in the United States, very privileged students attend some of the world’s best private and public schools, but it also means that large numbers of students who are truly disadvantaged attend public schools whose support is far below that permitted in other Western democracies.” (The Manufactured Crisis, pp. 4-5)

Then, in a 2017 analysis, Berliner listed some of the factors that underlie the test score achievement gap that No Child Left Behind was supposed to have addressed: “It’s neither this nation’s teachers nor its curriculum that impede the achievement of our children. The roots of America’s educational problems are in the numbers of Americans who live in poverty. America’s educational problems are predominantly in the numbers of kids and their families who are homeless; whose families have no access to Medicaid or other medical services. These are… families to whom low-birth-weight babies are frequently born, leading to many more children needing special education… Our educational problems have their roots in families where food insecurity or hunger is a regular occurrence, or where those with increased lead levels in their bloodstream get no treatments before arriving at a school’s doorsteps. Our problems also stem from the harsh incarceration laws that break up families instead of counseling them and trying to keep them together. And our problems relate to harsh immigration policies that keep millions of families frightened to seek out better lives for themselves and their children…  Although demographics may not be destiny for an individual, it is the best predictor of a school’s outcomes—independent of that school’s teachers, administrators and curriculum.”  (Emphasis in the original.)

We tend to think of these problems as though they reside exclusively in urban places where poverty is concentrated, but journalist Beth Macy just published Paper Girl to expose the very same issues in Urbana, Ohio, a small, MAGA town located in Jim Jordan’s Congressional district.

In a policy strategy left over from No Child Left Behind’s test-and-punish regime, lawmakers seem to believe that a teacher’s role is to produce test scores, that prescribed strategies like the Science of Reading and the Third Grade Guarantee will raise test scores, and that state takeovers of so-called failing schools will force teachers to work harder and smarter. But more thoughtful educators and policymakers have looked instead to reforms that surround vulnerable families with support. Full-Service Community Schools, designed to wrap medical and social services, and extracurricular enrichment programs right into the school building, have grown in their reach and are now valued by families and educators.

The Trump administration has begun canceling Full-Service Community Schools grants.  In December, however, the Trump administration cancelled $168 million in federal grants from the Education Department’s Full-Service Community Schools program. Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman reports: “Those 19 grants—spread across 11 states and the District of Columbia—amounted to nearly $61 million in funds that were due to flow Jan. 1, and another $107 million that was due to flow by 2028.  The loss of those funds could lead to layoffs for dozens of public school educators nationwide within weeks.  In Idaho alone, 60 community schools coordinators across 47 rural school districts have salaries funded in part or in full with the now-excised grant funds.”

Why cut grants from a federal program that has continued to grow due to the documented effectiveness of Full-Service Community Schools? Lieberman explains: “Grant cancellations are part of Trump efforts to eradicate DEI. The Trump administration has argued in ‘notices of non-continuation’ to affected grantees that the programs in question may be promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that top federal officials have characterized as divisive and harmful. Community schools advocates, though, describe their mission as a painstaking, constantly evolving, and research-backed effort to identify and meet the specific needs of students and their families—ranging from unemployment and food insecurity to difficulty accessing medical care and navigating bureaucracy.”

What is a Full-Service Community School?  Community Schools are public schools which collaboratively incorporate additional professional social and medical services, and additions like after-school programs right in the public school building. While in Ohio, the state calls privately operated charter schools “community schools,” Full-Service Community Schools are not the same as charter schools.

New York City’s Children’s Aid Society has a history of 25 years of experience operating community schools as part of New York City’s public schools, and operates 19 public community schools today. The Children’s Aid Society defines a community school: “The community school strategy delivers holistic services for children and families, connecting them to resources in their communities and fostering academic success… No two community schools look alike. When we partner with a school to make it a community school, we assess the needs of that student population and community. At all of our community schools, we are placing an emphasis on chronic absenteeism. We offer services that improve attendance and get the entire family involved in the academic success of their children… Services at a community school can include comprehensive health services, after-school academic enrichment, mentoring, parent engagement, and more.”

For The Progressive, education writer Jeff Bryant further explores what community schools do: “The community schools approach looks different depending on location, but the basic idea is that schools should serve as local hubs not only for education services, but also meet the broader needs of students and families such as physical and mental health, housing, transportation, after-school care, and neighborhood improvement. To provide these services, schools partner with local organizations, including nonprofits and businesses. And students, parents, community members, and school staff help to determine school policies and activities, such as curriculum offerings and sports programs.”

More recently Bryant reported on new research confirming the effectiveness of the model: “According to a 2020 analysis conducted by the nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization RAND, schools in New York City using the community school strategy experienced… positive results. Compared to similarly matched non-community schools, community schools saw higher graduation rates; decreased chronic absenteeism, especially among Black students and high school students in temporary housing; fewer disciplinary incidents among elementary and middle school students; and significantly improved measures of student achievement—such as math scores, credit accumulation, and on-time grade progression.”

What does the Trump administration’s slashing of Community School Grants mean?  Clearly the Trump administration’s sudden cancellation of Full-Service Community Schools grants is part of the administration’s broad attempt to scrub from federal policy any program or policy that furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education, to include, welcome, and equitably serve students in groups that have been historically marginalized. Education Department staff have not been subtle about the administration’s redefinition of civil rights protection.  In a second article on the sudden cancellation of community school grants, Mark Lieberman reported: “Education Week reviewed one letter dated Dec. 12 announcing the non-continuation of a Community Schools grant. The stated reason for the cuts will look familiar to more than 200 other federal education grant recipients across close to 20 other programs that have received nearly identical letters in recent months as the Trump administration screens grants and pulls the plug on anything it claims is related to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion…”

Lieberman quotes: “Madi Biedermann, the agency’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, (who) wrote in an email that the Trump administration is generally repurposing non-continued grants into ‘high quality programs that better serve special needs students… The Trump administration is no longer allowing taxpayer dollars to go out the door on autopilot—we are evaluating every federal grant to ensure they are in line with the administration’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education.’ ”

Lieberman reports that last week the Department of Education also cancelled a grant for “at least one recipient of a Promise Neighborhoods grant.” While federal support for Community schools goes back decades, the Promise Neighborhoods program was launched by the Obama Administration to “bolster… academic and social supports for children in high-need neighborhoods.”  Lieberman adds that both Community Schools and Promise Neighborhoods were “zeroed out” of Trump’s proposed federal budget for education last year.  While the U.S. Senate’s proposed  education budget last summer fully funded both programs, the GOP- dominated appropriations committee in the  U.S. House proposed a budget that would end both programs. In Russell Vought’s federal shutdown layoffs, only one staff member was left in the office that oversees these grants. Then, “Congress passed a law in November rescinding those layoffs, but employment for those workers is only assured through Jan. 30.”

Lieberman contrasts Trump’s cancellation of funding for community schools with the Biden Administration’s increase in 2023 of annual funding for community schools from $25 million to $150 million.

AFT files a lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s cancellation of grants for community schools. Last week, Education Week reported that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Chicago’s Brighton Park Neighborhood Council filed a lawsuit to block the termination of grants for Full-Service Community Schools and charged that the Education Department “cut off funding without notice, without lawful justification, and without following required procedures.”  EdSource adds: “The plaintiffs also have asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the department from withholding the funds while the court hears the case.”

AFT’s Randi Weingarten points out that “there was no communication with districts or even a request to ask for modifications. These grants were simply terminated on a whim.”  Patrick Brosnan, who leads Chicago’s Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, declared that programs supported by the cancelled grant, “advanced the stated mission of the U.S. Department of Education Full-Service Community School grant to support low-income students and families in our community, to ensure their access to high-quality after-school academic support, and to provide technical and career support to help mold the workforce of the future.”

Community schools have been among the most effective strategies to address the effects of family and neighborhood poverty — the educational opportunity gaps that David Berliner and other experts blame for disparities in standardized achievement test scores.  Because federal dollars help school districts pay for the professionals who coordinate social service programs with the academic programs in a community school and pay for medical and social service professionals who provide specific services, the loss of federal funding will imperil the future of Full-Service Community Schools.

As 2026 Dawns, Future of Civil Rights Protection in K-12 Public Schools and Higher Ed. Looks Bleak Under Trump Administration

Posted on by

Nothing, except growing tariffs and the failure to mitigate the damage of the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine, has defined Donald Trump’s second term more than the administration’s attempt to undermine civil rights protection for students and educators in our nation’s 13,000 public school districts and the nation’s colleges and universities.

Happy Holidays! This blog will take a break and return on Tuesday, January 6, 2026.

We watched an attack on Maine’s public schools where trans students compete in women’s sports. We watched the Department of Education withhold funds from the Chicago Public Schools because the district has a Black student student success plan that promotes what the Trump administration considers the dangerous principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And just this week, Education Week reported that the Department of Education is cancelling many grants for Full Service Community Schools and the Promise Neighborhoods program where funds are being spent on services the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Many of the Department of Education’s efforts to curtail the protection of the civil rights of historically marginalized groups of students have been temporarily stayed by Federal District Courts, but a lot of these cases linger in temporary, local decisions without any legal resolution.

Some colleges and universities have felt enough pressure that they’ve signed agreements to share with the federal government admissions information including high school grades, test scores and family income of all applicants to prove they are not selecting their students based on proxy data that substitutes for race-based affirmative action. Others have lost federal research grants as a punishment for maintaining programs and policies the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and thereby discriminate against the white majority.

Is there any chance the Trump administration’s effort to stamp out civil rights will wind down in 2026?  Here are three events in December that indicate the attacks are likely to continue.

The Trump administration just ended the disparate impact test in civil rights enforcement.  For years the federal government has held schools accountable when data proves, for example, their discipline systems are discriminatory by race or ethnicity or disability status. Evidence of disparate impact has been used for decades to protect students and others from discrimination in institutions that receive government funding including education, law enforcement and fair housing. But that ended abruptly on Wednesday, December 9.

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler reported: “(T)he Justice Department moved Tuesday to kill a decades-old provision of civil rights law that allows statistical disparities to be used as proof of racial discrimination. The new regulations reinterpret a key plank of the Civil Rights Act and were issued without an opportunity for public comment, which is unusual for major regulatory action… Conservatives have long argued that proving discrimination should require proof that someone intended to treat people differently. And they say that when people are being judged by data, they feel pressure to make decisions based on racial quotas. In that way, the Trump administration argues, a policy meant to fight discrimination is actually fostering it… Supporters of disparate impact analysis say it is a critical tool because finding ‘smoking gun’ evidence to prove someone intended to discriminate is difficult.” Meckler notes that the way the new guidance was immediately implemented breaks federal precedent: “Federal agencies typically would allow time for public comment before publishing a final rule like this.”

Politico adds that Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, provided her particular justification for stamping out the disparate impact test: “Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ’s civil rights chief, highlighted that the rule change will lead to fewer civil rights lawsuits…. The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination… Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.”

By contrast, last spring when President Trump released an executive order trying to end “disparate impact,” the NY Times Erica Green considered disparate impact’s role in the history of enforcement of the Civil Rights Act: “The disparate impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities.”

Trump’s DOJ just sued Minneapolis Public Schools to end the district’s effort to increase the number of teachers of color.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Anthony Lonetree reported last week: “The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Minneapolis Public Schools, accusing the state’s third-largest district of providing discriminatory protections to teachers of color in layoff and reassignment decisions.  The lawsuit… marks the latest salvo against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—in this case, the district’s efforts to bolster its minority teaching ranks. At issue is a contract agreement with educators that includes language shielding teachers of color from ‘last-in, first-out’ layoff practices and prioritizing the hiring of Black male educators at a north Minneapolis elementary school.”

Lonetree quotes Attorney General Pam Bondi justifying the lawsuit: “Discrimination is unacceptable in all forms especially when it comes to hiring decisions… Our public education system in Minnesota and across the country must be a bastion of merit and equal opportunity—not DEI.”  Here are words from DOJ’s lawsuit itself: “While defendants claim that these provisions are to stop discrimination, they require defendants to blatantly discriminate against teachers based on their race, color, sex, and national origin.”

Lonetree explains the purpose of the school district’s hiring policy: “Students of color comprise nearly two-thirds of the district’s total student population, and Minneapolis Public Schools, like many districts around the state, has sought to place teachers whom students can relate to and aspire to be like.”

Is the Trump Department of Education making the Office for Civil Rights viable again? Will the December 5th recall of furloughed staff help families who have filed civil rights complaints?  After a year of massive layoffs and the closure of seven of the twelve regional offices of the Office for Civil Rights, for CNN last week, Sunlen Serfaty described what might have seemed like exciting news: “Beleaguered employees in the civil rights office got what they thought was welcome news last week. The Department of Education informed employees who had been terminated earlier this year, then placed on administrative leave in an ongoing court battle, that they are to return to work later this month. The email to about 250 employees noted they are needed to address the existing caseload.”

However, in the details in the Department of Education’s December 5th recall notice, there are some serious questions about what is happening: For the Associated Press, Collin Binkley explains: “The Trump administration is bringing back dozens of Education Department staffers who were slated to be laid off, saying their help is needed to tackle a mounting backlog of discrimination complaints from students and families. The staffers had been on administrative leave while the department faced lawsuits challenging layoffs in the agency’s Office for Civil Rights, which investigates possible discrimination in the nation’s schools and colleges. But in a Friday (December 5) letter, department officials ordered the workers back to duty starting Dec. 15 to help clear civil rights cases.”  (The emphasis is mine.)

And K-12 Dive‘s Anna Merod quotes Julie Hartman, the Office for Civil Rights’ press secretary for legal affairs emphasizing “in a Dec. 8 email that… (the agency) is  temporarily bringing back OCR staff from administrative leave starting Dec. 15.” (The emphasis is mine.)

Let’s be clear. The Office for Civil Rights has never enforced the 1964 Civil Rights Act merely by charging school districts with violations, getting court orders that school district staff be fired, or imposing fines. OCR’s staff have been known for decades to work with school district teachers, counselors and administrators to develop programs and policies ensuring that children’s civil rights are no longer violated.

There is currently a serious problem at the Office for Civil Rights because all year while more than half the agency’s staff have been laid off, a huge backlog of uninvestigated complaints has built up. Reporters confirm that 2,500 complaints await investigation. NPR’s Cory Turner reports: “(P)ublic data show that OCR has reached resolution agreements in 73 cases involving alleged disability discrimination. Compare that to 2024, when OCR resolved 390, or 2017, the year Trump took office during his first term, when OCR reached agreements in more than 1,000 cases.”  CNN‘s Serfaty adds that this year  OCR has been “dismissing cases at an increasing pace, court documents reveal. About 7,000 cases have been dismissed under the Trump administration—hundreds more than in the same period last year under Biden.”

All this makes one question whether the furloughed staff are really being recalled to work with school districts to overcome the issues that have stimulated 2,500 complaints filed by families. Kimberly Richey emphasized that the recall of staff on leave is temporary, that the e-mail to staff emphasized the need to clear the backlog of complaints.  What percentage of the complaints processed by returning staff will be pursued with efforts to mitigate civil rights problems, and what percentage will be merely dismissed without further work?

There are additional questions about how utterly temporary the recall of staff might actually be. It is important to recall that Congress passed a continuing resolution to end the October government shutdown and also to delay the massive staff firings launched during the shutdown  by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.  That continuing resolution ends on January 30, 2026.  Are staff at OCR being recalled to work from December 15, 2025 only until January 30, 2026, when they will be permanently terminated?

The future of civil rights enforcement by the Trump administration continues to look bleak. Will the OCR be shut down? Will its work be shunted to the Department of Justice as Linda McMahon continues to dismantle the Department of Education?  The Trump administration has persisted in abandoning what have been—for 71 years since Brown v. Board of Education—historic efforts to expand educational opportunity for groups of children who were historically marginalized.  As 2025 ends, the attack on academic freedom and civil rights does not seem to be winding down.

For-Profit Immigrant Prison Will Hire For-Profit Virtual Charter School for Children Detained for Months

Posted on by

This is a story I would never have imagined I’d be covering in this blog whose purpose is to consider the needs of children in the United States today and their education. For me this story calls to mind Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, a dark and penetrating novel about a child born and raised in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison where her family is incarcerated due to her father’s debt. The novel is also about the moral corruption permeating an effete, mid-19th century British society that quietly imprisons whole families for debt. Today we imprison and subsequently expel families for being immigrants, even though most of our ancestors were immigrants. Little Dorrit, Dickens’ eleventh novel, captures a society awash in money, speculation, fraud, and pretension, a society that has abandoned the poor, and a government indifferent to its basic responsibilities. It is alarming to recognize how well Dickens’ old novel describes our own U.S. society during Donald Trump’s second term.

Last week, The American Prospect‘s Whitney Curry Wimbish covered the plight of children living at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, a prison for immigrant families awaiting extradition by ICE. It is a story set in 2025 in the United States about the mass roundup of immigrant families for deportation; a private, for-profit prison; and an online, for-profit charter school. While the operators of the immigrant detention prison and the operators of the online charter school the prison plans to open are both making gobs of money through the private contracting of services, there is no hint that they worry about about protecting the well-being of children, and there is no mention of the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe that protects the rights of all children living in the United States to a free public education. These children have been captured by ICE and are being held with their parents in a prison.

Stride, formerly K12 Inc., an online charter school management company is described by Wimbish as a “a $2 billion online education company that reportedly served 220,000 students in 31 states last year. Formerly McKinsey & Co. consultant Ron J. Packard founded the company in 2000 with $40 million in venture capital backing from Oracle’s Larry Ellison and junk bond king Michael Milken, among others.”  Stride Schools have different names across the states; in Ohio, for example, Stride operates the Ohio Virtual Academy.

CoreCivic is described by Wimbish as, “one of two major for-profit prison operators, whose fortunes have risen drastically under the Trump regime.” CoreCivic operates the South Texas Family Residential Center, an immigrant family prison in Dilley, Texas, which has set out to open some kind of education program. Wimbish explains why: “The establishment of a school is an effort to sanitize the extended detention of hundreds of children at Dilley, which violates a court settlement established 28 years ago. Under that settlement, children may not be held in immigration prison for more than 20 days unless the facility is nonsecure and licensed. But a recent court filing claims that ICE has held hundreds of children for well beyond that limit, in some cases for multiple months, and subjected them to neglect and abuse.”

Wimbish emphasizes that the South Texas Family Residential Center has continued to violate federal law by failing to protect children and by failing to provide adequate services for their education, all in violation of “the Flores Settlement Agreement, the 1997 legal requirement for the government to meet basic standards of care and oversight for children it holds in immigration prisons. Under the agreement, the government must provide education to immigration prisoners 17 years old and younger, along with adequate food, water, clothes, and medical attention. The government also must transfer children to a licensed, nonsecure child care facility after 20 days.” Right now at the South Texas Family Residential Center, “There’s no adequate education or recreation at the prison for children… Children reported that the educational program that currently exists is little more than an hour of drawing in a classroom so crowded that some children are turned away. Opening a new school is meant to resolve this inadequacy. But even if it is instituted, the facility would still not be licensed, and children would not be able to leave the facility, violating both tests set up by the Flores settlement.”

It doesn’t seem as though the CoreCivic for-profit prison looked to the public schools in the area for support or even sought the best possible private provider. If you are interested in mere court compliance and not worried about the kind of instruction you are providing for children and adolescents, you might go for an alliance with a big, for profit provider.  And since there would likely be continuing turnover of students, you might try to get by with an online, computer driven school, where teachers are there mostly to provide some supervision. “There’s no indication how big the school will be or when it will open…  The posting for the school’s principal says whoever holds that job will directly supervise 15 to 30 full-time equivalent regular employees and/or contractors. Postings for instructors, such as one for a high school English teacher, say they will be responsible ‘for a minimum of 20 students’ in two daily four-hour sessions. Immigration advocates said they expect the school to open in January.”

It would seem that one huge, for-profit company went for a handy collaboration with another big company. Did CoreCivic investigate Stride’s questionable reputation?  “Earlier this month, securities law firm Bleichmar Fonti & Auld LLP announced a class action lawsuit against Stride and its senior executives for defrauding investors by lying about enrollment figures and failing to disclose ‘a catastrophic technology failure’…   Two events prompted the claim. The first was in August, when New Mexico’s Gallup-McKinley County Schools announced it had severed all ties with Stride, which it had contracted to provide online education to its students, most of whom are Indigenous, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the school district, during its tenure Stride repeatedly violated state law and failed to provide adequate education to such an extent that graduation rates plummeted, along with academic proficiency in all subjects. During the 2023-2024 school year, the proficiency rate for reading dropped to less than 23 percent and math dropped to less than 6 percent, while fewer than 23 percent of students graduated. District officials said rates would decline again for the 2024-2025 school year because of Stride’s failures.”

Stride’s failure to operate in the public interest goes way back: “In 2011, for example, The New York Times profiled one of K12’s online schools, saying that by ‘almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.’ Six years later, a group of students from Yale published a study titled ‘K12 Inc.: Virtually Failing Our Students.’” They found that, ‘With no exceptions, students enrolled in K12 schools performed worse in math than their district and state counterparts. With only one exception, they performed worse in English and language arts.’ ”

The legal director of RAICES, a Texas immigrant support agency, Javier O. Hidalgo commented on the prison’s plan to open the school: “It makes sense that a private prison company would attract such a private education company… You’re profiting off of putting certain people into these jail settings, which is already disgusting, so it doesn’t surprise me that other companies that are in the business of profiting off people would be aligned with that… The intent absolutely is to be harmful … and try to punish these families for being here.”

Wimbish concludes: “The administration is forcing more longtime U.S. residents into immigration prisons, and plans to increase the number of prisoners even further next year…  It’s part of the Trump regime’s mass deportation campaign, which will significantly expand next year with more than $150 billion in tax dollars, including $45 billion for more facilities, a funding boost delivered in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”