The recent United States military incursion into Venezuela and abduction and subsequent arrest of its President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in New York is a major geopolitical event. Like all major geopolitical events, it has several components — historical, legal, political and moral.
And like all major geopolitical events, it has very different points of view. There is no grandiose “Truth” about what happened. There are many truths and points of view.
What can be said is that on 3 January 2026, the United States military carried out strikes on Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife Cilia Flores. The two were then flown to the United States where they were arrested and charged with issues related to narcoterrorism.
The United States’ intervention in a Latin American country has historical precedents as well as current foreign policy implications.
Under President James Monroe, the United States declared in 1823 that it was opposed to any outside colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. Now known as the Monroe Doctrine, it established what political scientists refer to as a “sphere of influence”; No foreign country could establish control of a country in the United States-dominated Western Hemisphere.
(This was indeed one of the central issues in the 13-day October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the United States established a blockade outside Cuba to stop the installation of Soviet missiles on the island.)
The Trump Corollary
In the latest U.S. official security strategy document — National Security Strategy 2025 — the Monroe Doctrine was presented in what has been labelled “The Trump Corollary.” In it, the government said that defending territory and the Western Hemisphere were central tasks of U.S. foreign policy and national interest. The document clearly stated that activities by extra-hemispheric powers would be considered serious threats to U.S. security.
As such, the “Trump Corollary” of the Monroe Doctrine is the justification of the military action in Venezuela based on stopping Russian and Chinese influence in Venezuela. In addition, it can be seen as the justification for the U.S. to acquire Greenland, resume control of the Panama Canal and stop narcotics and illegal migrants coming into the United States from anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.
But the Corollary and Doctrine are mere national strategic statements. Are they legally justified? The U.S. military operation in Venezuela has been highly criticized by international lawyers as well as United Nations officials. The United Nations Charter, of which the United States is a signatory, clearly forbids the use of force by one country against another country except in the case of self-defense and imminent threat.
In an interview with New Yorker magazine reporter Isaac Chotiner on 3 January, Yale Law School Professor Oona Hathaway noted that when the UN Charter was written 80 years ago, it included a critical prohibition on the use of force by states. “States are not allowed to decide on their own that they want to use force against other states,” she told Chotiner. “It was meant to reinforce this relatively new idea at the time that states couldn’t just go to war whenever they wanted to.”
Hathaway said that in the pre-UN Charter world, you could use force if you felt like drug trafficking was hurting you and come up with legal justification that that was the case. “But the whole point of the UN Charter was basically to say, ‘We’re not going to go to war for those reasons anymore’,” she said.
The legality of an ouster
Besides the international legal issue, there is also a domestic legal question about the Venezuelan military action. The 1973 War Powers Act was enacted to limit the power of the U.S. president to use military forces with the approval of the Congress.
It was enacted following the Vietnam War during which the president engaged troops without Congressional approval or a formal declaration of war. The Act clearly requires the president to notify Congress before committing armed forces to military action.
Trump did not consult with members of Congress before and during the military action in Venezuela. The political implications of the Venezuelan strikes and abduction also have international as well as domestic implications. Internationally, there is a dangerous precedent being set.
If the United States asserts its sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, what is to stop the Russian Federation from claiming a similar sphere of influence in the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as well as Ukraine?
Similarly, what about Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region and especially Taiwan? If the United States claims domination in one geographic region, why can’t other powers like Russia and China do the same?
The Westphalian system
Within the United States, there have also been serious reservations about President Trump’s actions. That was to be expected from the opposing Democratic Party. But, several members of Trump’s Republican Party as well as loyal members of his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement argue that Trump was elected on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” One of the pillars of that movement is a focus on internal problems instead of foreign interventions.
Republican U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene used to be one of Trump’s staunchest supporters. On 3 January she told interviewer Kristen Walker on the NBC show “Meet the Press” that America First should mean what Trump promised on the campaign trail in 2024.
“So my understanding of America First is strictly for the American people, not for the big donors that donate to big politicians, not for the special interests that constantly roam the halls in Washington and not foreign countries that demand their priorities put first over Americans,” Greene said.
Other criticisms have centered on President Trump’s focus on restoring business in Venezuela for the U.S. oil industry, which has the world’s largest oil reserves. Republican U.S. Representative Thomas Massie warned that “lives of U.S. soldiers are being risked to make those oil companies (not Americans) more profitable.”
Finally, there are moral arguments against the use of force in Venezuela as well as Trump’s threats of the use of force in Colombia, Cuba and elsewhere. There is no question that Venezuelans had suffered under the rule of Maduro; statistics show the rapid decline in the economy as well as a significant democratic deficit.
Fundamental to today’s notion of international order is what’s known as the Westphalian system of the integrity of state sovereignty. The world has seen an order since the end of World War II and the establishment of the United Nations. That order was based on respect for the rule of law. There are other means for states to act against other states, such as sanctions, below military intervention. One country invading another goes against the basis of the Westphalian system.
The Venezuelan strikes and abduction have set a dangerous precedent.
Questions to consider:
1. What is meant by the “Monroe Doctrine”?
2. When is one country considered part of a “sphere of influence” of another country?
This week on the podcast from Nijmegen on the SUs study tour the team discuss the return of the UK to Erasmus+. What steps can UK HE take to ensure that UK students take advantage of and get the benefits of mobility?
Plus there’s a Private Members’ Bill on student loan timings, and the team share reflections on the associations, student leaders, curricula and food they’ve seen across Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg and Switzerland.
With Abi Taylor, President at Durham SU, Gary Hughes, CEO at Durham SU, Mack Marshall, Community and Policy Officer at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
When a little known politician recently declared himself interim president of Venezuela and called for fresh elections, opponents of the sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, saw a bright future for a country mired in misery and hunger.
But ousting Maduro has proved more difficult than expected. Optimistic assumptions have collided with a reality once summed up by the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Juan Guaidó, the youthful opposition figure who declared himself president on January 23, has been recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader by the United States and almost 50 other countries. But Maduro is still in power, backed by the country’s military and paramilitary forces. Maduro’s international backers include China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua.
What Guaidó and Washington administration officials had in mind sounded optimistic but not impossible.
After Guaidó emerged as undisputed leader of an opposition long weakened by internal feuds, he brought out tens of thousands of demonstrators who denounced a government they blame for an economic collapse that has resulted in severe shortages of basic goods and services.
Humanitarian aid and presidential power
Displays of public anger week after week, or so the thinking went, would convince Maduro to step aside in favor of his 35-year-old challenger. A key test of the dueling presidents’ power — and the military’s ultimate loyalty — hinged on the delivery of humanitarian aid flown in by U.S. military planes in mid-February to the city of Cúcuta on Venezuela’s border with Colombia.
Maduro said the aid was a precursor to a U.S. military invasion, blocked border crossings and dispatched troops to block convoys of trucks or people carrying supplies. In the scenario envisaged by Guaidó, the troops would refuse to intercept desperately needed aid and instead defect en masse.
That did not happen.
Instead, things have gone from bad to worse since the failed aid delivery. Tons of food, medicine and medical supplies remain boxed in warehouses on the Colombian side of the border.
In March, a week-long power cut across all of Venezuela’s 23 states brought more hardship. With electricity out, scarce food rotted in refrigerators and water pumping stations stopped.
No early end to the suffering
One heart-breaking video showed people rushing to catch water in buckets and plastic bottles from a leak in a drainage pipe feeding into a sewer.
Maduro blamed the blackout on saboteurs using cyber attacks and electromagnetic waves to cripple the power system, operations in an “electric war” waged by the United States.
The opposition pointed to lack of maintenance and an infrastructure that has been crumbling for years.
In the wake of the longest blackout in Venezuela’s history, Guaidó launched a second round of protests, but the crowds have been noticeably thinner than in the early stage of the contest between the rival presidents.
Hopes for an early end of the country’s agony appear to be fading in Venezuela. Not so in Washington, judging from bullish statements by President Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Michael Pompeo. Trump told an enthusiastic crowd of Venezuelan exiles and Cuban-Americans in Miami last month that what he called “the ugly alliance” between the Maduro government and Cuba was coming to a rapid end.
Soon after, Pompeo told a television interviewer he was confident that Maduro’s “days are numbered.”
Bullish statements from Washington
When huge crowds jammed the streets of Caracas and other cities to cheer Guaidó, some U.S. administration officials thought Maduro would soon be on the way out. That he has managed to hang on despite popular anger, international condemnation and painful American sanctions has come as a surprise to many.
Now, the bullish statements from Trump and Pompeo bring to mind American predictions during Barack Obama’s administration concerning Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad when he faced mass demonstrations, international condemnation and U.S. sanctions.
In Syria, peaceful protests morphed into civil war in the summer of 2011, and the Obama team’s point man on the Middle Eastern country described Assad as “a dead man walking.” Eight years later, having prevailed in the war with the help of Russia and Iran, Syria lies in ruins, but Assad looks secure in power.
Shortly before taking office, Trump promised that he would avoid intervention in foreign conflicts and “stop racing to topple foreign regimes.” He has largely stuck to that pledge but is making Venezuela an exception, with repeated assertions that “all options are on the table” — a Washington euphemism for military action.
There’s no single explanation for Trump’s untypical focus on Venezuela. But it is worth noting that he made his toughest speech on the subject in Florida and that he is running for re-election in 2020. Hawkish rhetoric on Venezuela and Cuba plays well with the large Venezuelan-American and Cuban-American communities in that state.
Florida, the country’s third most populous state, is of key importance in presidential elections. It is a so-called swing state that can go to either of the presidential candidates, often by very narrow margins.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
1. Can you think of a country where a long-entrenched leader recently bowed to the demands of demonstrators?
2. Why do you think China, Russia and several other countries are standing by Maduro?
3. The United States has a history of intervention in Latin America. Can you name some cases?
by Kathryn Joyce, The Hechinger Report January 6, 2026
The West Shore school board policy committee meeting came to a halt almost as soon as it began. As a board member started going over the agenda on July 17, local parent Danielle Gross rose to object to a last-minute addition she said hadn’t been on the district’s website the day before.
By posting notice of the proposal so close to the meeting, charged Gross, who is also a partner at a communications and advocacy firm that works on state education policy, the board had violated Pennsylvania’s open meetings law, failing to provide the public at least 24 hours’ notice about a topic “this board knows is of great concern for many community members interested in the rights of our LGBTQ students.”
The committee chair, relentlessly banging her gavel, adjourned the meeting to a nonpublic “executive session.” When the committee reconvened, the policy was not mentioned again until the meeting’s end, when a lone public commenter, Heather Keller, invoked “Hamlet” to warn that something was rotten in the Harrisburg suburbs.
The proposed policy, which would bar trans students from using bathrooms and locker rooms aligned with their gender identity, was a nearly verbatim copy of one crafted by a group called the Independence Law Center — a Harrisburg-based Christian right legal advocacy group whose model policies have led to costly lawsuits in districts around the state.
“Being concerned about that, I remembered that we don’t partner with the Independence Law Center,” Keller said. “We haven’t hired them as consultants. And they’re not our district solicitor.”
To those who’d followed education politics in the state, Keller’s comment would register as wry understatement. Over the past several years, ILC’s growing entanglement with dozens of Pennsylvania school boards has become a high-profile controversy. Through interviews, an extensive review of local reporting and public documents, In These Times and The Hechinger Report found that, of the state’s 500 school districts, at least 20 are known to have consulted with or signed formal contracts accepting ILC’s pro bono legal services — to advise on, draft and defend district policies, free of charge.*
But over the last year, it’s become clear ILC’s influence stretches beyond such formal partnerships, as school districts from Bucks County (outside Philadelphia) to Beaver County (west of Pittsburgh) have proposed or adopted virtually identical anti-LGBTQ and book ban policies that originated with ILC — sometimes without acknowledging any connection to the group or where the policies came from.
In districts without formal partnerships with ILC, such as West Shore, figuring out what, exactly, their board’s relationship is to the group has been a painfully assembled puzzle, thanks to school board obstruction, blocked open records requests and reports of backdoor dealing.
Although ILC has existed for nearly 20 years, its recent prominence began around 2021 with a surge of “parents’ rights” complaints about pandemic-era masking, teaching about racism, LGBTQ representation and how library books and curricula are selected. In many districts where such debates raged, calls to hire ILC soon followed.
In 2024 alone, ILC made inroads of one kind or another with roughly a dozen districts in central Pennsylvania, including West Shore, which proposed contracting ILC that March and invited the group to speak to the board in a closed-door meeting the public couldn’t attend. (ILC did not respond to multiple interview requests or emailed questions.)
On the night of that March meeting, Gross organized a rally outside the school board building, drawing roughly 100 residents to protest, even as it snowed. The board backed down from hiring ILC, but that didn’t stop it from introducing ILC policies. In addition to the proposed bathroom policy, that May the board passed a ban on trans students joining girls’ athletics teams after they’ve started puberty and allowed district officials to request doctors’ notes and birth certificates to enforce it.
To Gross, it’s an example of how West Shore and other school boards without formal relationships with ILC have still found ways to advance the group’s agenda. “They’re waiting for other school boards to do all the controversial stuff with the ILC,” Gross said, then “taking the policies other districts have, running them through their solicitors, and implementing them that way.” (A spokesperson for West Shore stated that the district had not contracted with ILC and declined further comment.)
“It’s like a hydra effect,” said Kait Linton of the grassroots community group Public Education Advocates of Lancaster. “They’ve planted seeds for a vine, and now the vine’s taking off in all the directions it wants to go.”
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ILC was founded in the wake of a Pennsylvania lawsuit that drew nationwide attention and prompted significant local embarrassment.
In October 2004, the Dover Area School District — situated, like West Shore, in York County, south of Harrisburg — changed its biology curriculum to introduce the quasi-creationist theory of “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution. Eleven families sued, arguing that intelligent design was “fundamentally a religious proposition rather than a scientific one.” In December 2005, a federal court agreed, ruling that public schools teaching the theory violated the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause.
During the case, an attorney named Randall Wenger unsuccessfully tried to add the creationist Christian think tank he worked for — which published the book Dover sought to teach — to the suit as a defendant, and, failing that, filed an amicus brief instead. When the district lost and was ultimately left with $1 million in legal fees, Wenger found a lesson in it for conservatives moving forward.
Speaking at a 2005 conference hosted by the Pennsylvania Family Institute — part of a national network of state-level “family councils” tied to the heavyweight Christian right organizations Family Research Council and Focus on the Family — Wenger suggested Dover could have avoided or won legal challenges if officials hadn’t mentioned their religious motivations during public school board meetings.
“Give us a call before you do something controversial like that,” Wenger said, according to LancasterOnline. Then, in a line that’s become infamous among ILC’s critics, Wenger invoked a biblical reference to add, “I think we need to do a better job at being clever as serpents.” (Wenger did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The following year, in 2006, the Pennsylvania Family Institute launched ILC with Wenger as its chief counsel, a role he remains in today, in addition to serving as chief operating officer. ILC now has three other staff attorneys and has worked directly as plaintiff’s attorneys on two Supreme Court cases: one was part of the larger Hobby Lobby decision, which allows employers to opt out of employee health insurance plans that include contraception coverage; the other expanded religious exemptions for workers.
ILC has financial ties and a history of collaborating with Christian right legal advocacy behemoth Alliance Defending Freedom, including on a 2017 lawsuit against a school district outside Philadelphia that allowed a trans student to use the locker room aligned with their gender. ILC has filed amicus briefs in support of numerous other Christian right causes, including two that led to major Supreme Court victories for the right in 2025: Mahmoud v. Taylor, which limited public schools’ ability to assign books with LGBTQ themes; and United States v. Skrmetti, which affirmed a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors. In recent months, the group filed two separate amicus briefs on behalf of Pennsylvania school board members in anti-trans cases in other states. In both cases, which were brought by Alliance Defending Freedom and concern school sports and pronoun usage, ILC urged the Supreme Court to “resolve the issue nationwide.”
In lower courts, ILC has worked on or contributed briefs to lawsuits seeking to start public school board meetings with prayer and to allow religious groups to proselytize public school students, among other issues. More quietly, as the local blog Lancaster Examiner reported — and as one ILC attorney recounted at a conference in 2022 — ILC has defended “conversion therapy,” the broadly discredited theory that homosexuality is a disorder that can be cured.
To critics, all of these efforts have helped systematically chip away at civil rights protections for LGBTQ students at the local level, seeding the policies that President Donald Trump’s administration is now trying to make ubiquitous through executive orders. And while local backlash is building in some areas, activists are hindered by the threat that the ILC’s efforts are ultimately aimed at laying the groundwork for a Supreme Court case that could formalize discrimination against transgender students into law nationwide.
But ILC’s greatest influence is arguably much closer to its Harrisburg home, in neighboring Lancaster and York counties, where nine districts have contracted ILC and at least three more have adopted its model policies.
The rural hillside and farmland in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, are seen on Aug. 15, 2025. The local school district, Penn Manor, adopted anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ policies presented by the Independence Law Center, a Harrisburg-based Christian-right legal advocacy group.
A sign is seen in a residential neighborhood in Holtwood, Pennsylvania.
In Lancaster’s Hempfield district, it started with a 2021 controversy over a trans student joining the girls’ track team. School board meetings that had already grown tense over pandemic masking requirements erupted in new fights about LGBTQ rights and visibility. In the middle of one meeting, recalled Hempfield parent and substitute teacher Erin Small, a board member abruptly suggested hiring ILC to write a new district policy. The suddenness of the proposal caused such public outcry, said Small, that the vote to hire ILC had to be postponed.
But within a few months, the district signed a contract with ILC to write what became Pennsylvania’s first school district ban on trans students participating in sports teams aligned with their gender identity. Other ILC policy proposals followed, including a successful 2023 effort to bar the district from using books or materials that include sexual content, which immediately prompted an intensive review of books written by LGBTQ and non-white authors. (The Hempfield district did not respond to requests for comment.)
In nearby Elizabethtown, the path to hiring ILC began with a fraudulent 2021 complaint, when a man claimed, during a school board meeting, that his middle schooler had checked out an inappropriate book from the school library. Although it later emerged that the man had reportedly used a fake name and officials found no evidence he had children attending the school, his claim nonetheless sparked a long debate over book policies, which eventually led to the district contracting ILC as special legal counsel in 2024. Two anti-trans policies were subsequently passed in January 2025, and a ban on “sexually explicit” books, also based on ILC’s models, was discussed this past spring but has not moved forward to date. (The Elizabethtown district did not respond to requests for comment.)
Across the Susquehanna River in York County — where five districts have contracted ILC and two more have considered or passed its policies — the group’s influence has been broad and sometimes confounding. In one instance, as the York Dispatch discovered, ILC not only authored four policy proposals for the Red Lion Area School District, but ILC senior counsel Jeremy Samek, a registered Pennsylvania lobbyist, also drafted a speech for the board president to deliver in support of three anti-trans policies, all of which passed in 2024. (The Red Lion district did not respond to requests for comment.)
The same year, South Western School District, reportedly acting on ILC advice, ordered a high school to cut large windows into the walls of two bathrooms that had been designated as “gender identity restrooms,” allowing passersby in the hallway to see inside, consequently discouraging students from using them. (The district did not respond to requests for comment, but in a statement to local paper the Evening Sun, school board President Matt Gelazela cited student safety and said the windows helped staff monitor for vaping, bullying and other prohibited activities.)
In many districts, said Lancaster parent Eric Fisher, ILC’s growing relationships with school boards has been eased by the ubiquitous presence around the state of its sister organizations within the Pennsylvania Family Institute, including the institute’s lobbying arm, voucher group, youth leadership conference and Church Ambassador Network, which brings pastors from across Pennsylvania to lobby lawmakers in the state Capitol.
As a result, said Fisher, when ILC shows up in a district, board members often are already familiar with them or other institute affiliates, “having met them at church and having their churches put their stamp of endorsement on them. I think it makes it really easy for [board members] to say yes.”
But in nearly every district that has considered working with ILC, wide-scale pushback has also followed — though often to no avail. In June 2024, in Elizabethtown — where school board fights have been so fractious that they inspired a full-length documentary — members of the public spoke in opposition to hiring ILC at a ratio of roughly 5 to 1 before the board voted unanimously to hire the group anyway.
In the Upper Adams district in Biglerville, southwest of Harrisburg, the school board voted to contract ILC despite a cacophony of public comments and a 500-signature petition in opposition.
In Lancaster’s Warwick district, the school board’s vote to hire ILC prompted the resignation of a superintendent who had served in her role for 15 years and who reported that the district’s insurance carrier had warned the district might not be covered in future lawsuits if it adopted ILC’s anti-trans policies.
Since then, Warwick resident Kayla Cook noted during a public presentation about ILC this past summer, the mood in the district has grown grim. “We do not have any students at the moment trying to participate [in sports] who are trans. However, we have students who simply have a short haircut being profiled as being trans,” Cook said. “It’s tipped far into fear-based behaviors, where we are dipping our toes into checking the student’s body to make sure that they’re identifying as the appropriate gender.” (A district spokesperson directed interview requests to the school board, which did not respond to requests for comment.)
But perhaps nowhere was the fight as fraught as in Lancaster’s Penn Manor School District, which hired ILC to draft new policies about trans students just months after the suicide of a trans youth from Penn Manor — the fifth such suicide in the Lancaster community in less than two years.
Before the Penn Manor school board publicly proposed retaining ILC, in June 2024 — scheduling a presentation by and a vote on hiring ILC for the same meeting — district Superintendent Phil Gale wrote to the board about his misgivings. In an email obtained by LancasterOnline, Gale warned the board against policies “that will distinguish one group of students from another” and passed along a warning from the district’s insurance carrier that adopting potentially discriminatory policies might affect the district’s coverage if it were sued by students or staff.
In a narrow 5-4 vote, the all-Republican board declined to hire ILC that June. But after one board member reconsidered, the matter was placed back on the agenda for two meetings that August.
Members of the community publicly presented an open letter, signed by roughly 80 Penn Manor residents, requesting that, if policies about trans students were truly needed, the district establish a task force of local experts to draft them rather than outsource policymaking to ILC. One of the letter’s organizers, Mark Clatterbuck, a religious studies professor at New Jersey’s Montclair State University, said the district never acknowledged it or responded. (Maddie Long, a spokesperson for Penn Manor, said the district could not comment because of the litigation.)
That February, Clatterbuck’s son, Ash — a college junior and transgender man who’d grown up in Penn Manor — had died by suicide, shortly after the nationally publicized death of Nex Benedict, a nonbinary 16-year-old in Oklahoma who died by suicide the day after being beaten unconscious in a high school girls’ bathroom.
In the first August meeting to reconsider hiring ILC, Clatterbuck told the Penn Manor board, through tears, how “living in a hostile political environment that dehumanizes them at school, at home, at church and in the halls of Congress” was making “life unlivable for far too many of our trans children.”
Two weeks later, at the second meeting, Ash’s mother, Malinda Harnish Clatterbuck, pleaded for board members talking about student safety to consider the children these policies actively harm.
“ILC does not even recognize trans and gender-nonconforming children as existing,” said Harnish Clatterbuck, a pastor whose family has lived in Lancaster for 10 generations. “That fact alone should preclude them from even being considered by the board.”
A painted portrait of Ash Clatterbuck in his parents’ home in Holtwood, Pennsylvania.
Malinda Harnish-Clatterbuck walks a labyrinth made in 2023 by her late son, Ash, on their property in Holtwood.
Hand-painted signs that once hung on the walls of Ash’s dorm room
Her husband spoke again as well, telling the board how Ash had frequently warned about the spread of policies that stoke “irrational hysteria around” trans youth — “the kind of policies,” Mark Clatterbuck noted, “that the Pennsylvania-based Independence Law Center loves to draft.”
Reminding the board that five trans youth in the area had died by suicide within just 18 months, he continued, “Do not try to tell me that there is no connection between the kind of dehumanizing policies that the ILC drafts and the deaths of our trans children.”
But the board voted to hire ILC anyway, 5-4, and in the following months adopted two of ILC’s anti-trans policies.
In anticipation of such public outcry, some school boards around Pennsylvania have taken steps to obscure their interest in ILC’s agenda.
Kristina Moon, a senior attorney at the Education Law Center of Pennsylvania, a legal services nonprofit that advocates for public school students’ rights, has watched a progression in how school boards interact with ILC.
When her group first began receiving calls related to ILC, around 2021, alarmed parents told similar stories of boards proposing book bans targeting queer or trans students’ perspectives, or identical packages of policies that included restrictions about bathrooms, sports and pronouns.
“At first, we would see boards openly talking about their interest in contracting with ILC,” said Moon. But as local opposition began to grow, “board members stopped sharing so publicly.”
Instead, Moon said, reports began to emerge of school boards discussing or meeting with ILC in secret.
In Hempfield, in 2022, the board moved some policy discussions into committee sessions less likely to be attended by the public, and held a vote on an anti-trans sports policy without announcing it publicly, possibly in violation of Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act, as Mother Jones reported.
Across the state, in Bucks County, one Central Bucks school board member recounted in an op-ed for the Bucks County Beacon how her conservative colleagues had stonewalled her when she asked about the origins of a new book ban policy in 2022, only to have the board later admit ILC had performed a legal review of it “pro bono,” as PhillyBurbs reported.
Subsequent reporting by the York Daily Record and Reuters revealed the board’s relationship with ILC was more involved and included discussions about other policies related to trans student athletes and pronoun policy. (Both Central Bucks’ books and anti-LGBTQ policies were later cited in an ACLU federal complaint that cost the district $1.75 million in legal fees, as well as in a related Education Department investigation into whether the district had created a hostile learning environment for LGBTQ students.)
But the sense of backroom dealing reached an almost cartoonish level in York County, where, in March 2024, conservative board members from 12 county school districts were invited to a secret meeting hosted by a right-wing political action committee, along with specific instructions about how to keep their participation off the public radar. According to the York Dispatch, the invitation came from former Central York school board member Veronica Gemma, who (after losing her seat) was hired as education director for PA Economic Growth, a PAC that had helped elect 48 conservatives to York school boards the previous fall. (Gemma did not respond to interview requests.)
Gemma’s invitation was accompanied by an agenda sent by the PAC, which included a discussion about ILC and how board members could “build a network of support” and “advance our shared goals more effectively countywide.” The invitation also included the admonition that “confidentiality is paramount” and that each district should only send four board members or fewer — to avoid the legal threshold for a quorum that would make the meeting a matter of public record.
“Remember, no more than 4 — sunshine laws,” Gemma wrote.
In the wake of stories like these, Wenger’s 2005 suggestion that conservatives “become as clever as serpents” in concealing their intentions became ubiquitous in coverage of and advocacy against ILC — showing up in newspaper articles, in editorials and even on a T-shirt for sale online.
“I think it’s very obvious,” reflected Moon, “but if something has to be taking place in secrecy, I’m not sure it can be good for our students.”
But the lack of transparency shows up in subtler ways too, in the spreading phenomenon of districts adopting ILC policies without admitting where the policies come from. That was the case in Eastern York in 2025, where board members who had previously lobbied for an ILC pronoun policy later directed their in-house attorney to write an original policy instead, following the same principles but avoiding the baggage an ILC connection would bring.
In Elizabethtown (which did contract ILC), one policy was even introduced erroneously referencing clauses from another district’s code, in an indication of how directly districts are copy-pasting from one another.
In 2025, ILC attorney Jeremy Samek even seemed to acknowledge the trend, predicting that fewer districts might contract ILC going forward, since the combination of Trump’s executive orders on trans students and the general spread of policies similar to ILC’s meant “it’s going to be a lot easier for other schools to do that without even talking to us.”
In the face of what appears like a deliberate strategy of concealment, members of the public have increasingly turned to official channels to compel boards to disclose their dealings with ILC. Mark Clatterbuck did so in 2024 and 2025, filing 10 Right-to-Know requests with Penn Manor for all school board and administration communications with or about ILC and policies ILC consulted on and any records related to a set of specific keywords.
Thirty miles north, three Elizabethtown parents sued their school board in the spring of 2025, alleging it deliberately met and conferred with ILC in nonpublic meetings and private communications to “circumvent the requirements of the Sunshine Act.”
In both cases, and more broadly in the region, ILC critics are keenly aware that, by bringing complaints or lawsuits against the group or the school boards it works with, they might be doing exactly what ILC wants: furthering its chances to land another case before the Supreme Court, where a favorable ruling could set a dangerous national precedent, such as ruling that Title IX protections don’t cover trans students.
“They’re itching for a case,” said Clatterbuck. To that end, he added, his pro bono attorneys — at the law firm Gibbel Kraybill & Hess LLC, which also represents the Elizabethtown plaintiffs pro bono — have been careful not to do ILC’s work for it.
Largely, that has meant keeping the cases narrowly focused on Sunshine Act violations.
But in both cases, there are also hints of the larger issue at hand — of whether, in a repeat of the old Dover “intelligent design” case, ILC’s policies represent school boards imposing inherently religious viewpoints on public schools. After all, ILC’s parent group, the Pennsylvania Family Institute, clearly states its mission is to make Pennsylvania “a place where God is honored” and to “strengthen families by restoring to public life the traditional, foundational principles and values essential for the well-being of society.” And in 2024, the institute’s president, Michael Geer, told a Christian TV audience that much of ILC’s work involves working with school boards “on the transgender issue, fighting that ideology that is pervasive in our society.”
In the Elizabethtown complaint, the plaintiffs argue that district residents must “have the opportunity to observe Board deliberations regarding policies that will affect their children in order to understand the Board members’ true motivation and rationale for adopting policies — particularly when policies are prepared by an outside organization seeking to advance a particular religious viewpoint and agenda.”
The public has ample cause to suspect as much. Five current and former members of Elizabethtown’s school board are connected to a far-right church in town, where the pastor joined 150 other locals in traveling to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. Among them were current board members Stephen Lindemuth — who once preached a sermon at the church arguing that “gender identity confusion” doesn’t “line up with what God desires” — and his wife, Danielle Lindemuth, who helped organize the caravan of buses that went to Washington. (Stephen Lindemuth replied by email, “I have no recollection of making any judgmental comments concerning LGBTQ in my most recent preaching the past few years.” Neither he nor his wife were accused of any unlawful acts on Jan. 6.)
Another board member until this past December, James Emery, went through the church’s pastoral training program and in 2022 served as a member of the security detail of far-right Christian nationalist gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano.
School board meetings in Elizabethtown have also frequently devolved into religious battles, with one local mother, Amy Karr, board chair of Elizabethtown’s Church of the Brethren, recalling how local right-wing activists accused ILC’s opponents of being possessed by demonic spirits or a “vehicle of Satan.”
In Penn Manor, Clatterbuck similarly hoped to lay bare the “overtly religious nature” of the board’s motivation by including in his Right-to-Know requests a demand for all school board communications about ILC policies containing keywords like “God,” “Christian,” “Jesus,” “faith” and “biblical.”
For nearly a year, the district sought to avoid fulfilling the requests, with questionable invocations of attorney-client privilege (including one board member’s claim that she had “personally” retained ILC as counsel), sending back obviously incomplete records and protestations that Clatterbuck’s keyword request turned up so many results that it was too burdensome to fulfill. Ultimately, Clatterbuck appealed to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records to compel the board to honor the request.
This fall, Clatterbuck received a 457-page document from the board containing dozens of messages that suggest his suspicions were correct.
In response to local constituents writing in support of ILC — decrying pronoun policies as a violation of religious liberty, claiming “the whole LGBTQ spectrum is rooted in the brokenness of sin” and calling for board members to rebuke teachers unions in “the precious blood of Jesus” — at least three board members wrote back with encouragement and thanks. In one example, board member Anthony Lombardo told a constituent who had written a 12-page message arguing that queer theory is “inherently atheistic” that “I completely agree with your analysis and conclusions.”
When another community member sent the board an article from an evangelical website arguing that using “transgendered pronouns … falsifies the gospel” and “tramples on the blood of Christ,” board member Donna Wert responded, “Please know that I firmly agree with the beliefs held in [this article]. And please know that heightened movement is finally being made concerning this, as you will see.”
To Clatterbuck, such messages demonstrate the school board’s religious sympathies, as well as how Christian nationalism plays out at the local level. While national examples of Christian right dominance, like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Crusader tattoos or Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s “Appeal to Heaven” flag, get the most attention, Clatterbuck said, “this is what it looks like when you’re controlling local school boards and passing policies that affect people directly in their local community.”
But the local level might also be the place where advocates have the best chance of fighting back, said Kait Linton of Public Education Advocates of Lancaster.
Speaking ahead of a panel discussion on ILC at Elizabethtown’s Church of the Brethren last June — one of several panels PEAL hosted around Lancaster in the run-up to November’s school board elections — Linton emphasized the importance of focusing on the “hyperlocal.”
“With everything that’s happening at the national level,” Linton said, “we find a lot of folks get caught up in that, when really we have far less opportunity to make a difference up there than we do right here.”
PEAL’s efforts have been matched by other groups at the district level, like Elizabethtown’s Etown Common Sense 2.0, which local parent and former president Alisha Runkle said advocates against the sort of policies ILC drafts and also seeks to support teachers “being beaten down and needing support” in an environment of relentless hostility and demands to police their lesson plans, libraries and language.
They’re also reflected in the work of statewide coalitions like Pennsylvanians for Welcoming and Inclusive Schools, which helps districts share information about ILC policies — including a searchable map of ILC’s presence around the state — and resources like the Education Law Center, which has sent detailed demand or advocacy letters to numerous school districts considering adopting ILC-inspired policies.
This past November, that local-level work resulted in some signs for cautious hope. In Lancaster County’s Hempfield School District — one of the first districts in the state to hire ILC — the school board flipped to Democratic control. Among the new board members are Kait Linton and fellow PEAL activist Erin Small.
Across the river, in West Shore, the departure of three right-wing board members — one who resigned and two who lost their elections — left the board with a new 5-4 majority of Democratic and centrist Republican members. After the election, the board promptly moved to table three contentious policy proposals, including the anti-trans bathroom policy the board had copied from ILC and a book ban policy that drew heavily on ILC’s work.
While in other Lancaster districts — including Elizabethtown, Warwick and Penn Manor — school boards remained firmly in conservative control, there are also signs of growing pushback, as in Elizabethtown, where Runkle noted the teachers union has recently begun challenging the board during public meetings and local students have gotten active protesting book bans.
Similar trends have happened statewide, said the Education Law Center’s Kristina Moon, who noted that voters “were so concerned about the extremist action they saw on the boards that it was kind of a wake-up call: that we can’t sleep on school board elections, and we need to have boards that reflect a commitment to all of the students in our schools.”
While reports of ILC’s direct involvement with school boards seem to have waned in recent months, said Moon, that “does not mean the threat to our public schools is over. We see continued use of those discriminatory policies by school boards just copying the policy exactly as it was adopted elsewhere. And it causes the same harm in a district, whether the district is publicly meeting with ILC or not.”
Plus there are now Trump’s anti-trans executive orders, which have spread confusion statewide. And just this December, a legal challenge brought by another Christian right law firm, the Thomas More Society, is challenging the authority of Pennsylvania’s civil rights commission to apply anti-discrimination protections to trans students in public schools.
As a consequence, the Education Law Center has spent much of the past year trying to educate school and community leaders that executive orders are not the law itself, and they cannot supersede case law supporting the rights of LGBTQ students.
“We’re trying to cut through the noise,” Moon said, “to ensure that schools remain clear about their legal obligations to provide safe environments for all students … so they can focus on learning and not worrying about identity-based attacks.”
*Correction: At least 20 of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts are known to have consulted with or signed formal contracts accepting the ILC’s pro bono legal services. This story previously reported 21.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/clever-as-serpents-how-a-legal-groups-anti-lgbtq-policies-took-root-in-school-districts-across-a-state/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
Begoña Gómez, the wife of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, was born a man by the name of Begoño. Some 500 kilos of gold were once found in her house on the Canary Islands. She is now being blackmailed with material stolen from her mobile phone while she was on a trip to Morocco. Oh, and she headed a drug-trafficking cartel.
If you believe even some of these stories as a Spaniard, you’d think your country had gone insane. You’d think you were being ruled by a class of deceiving drug traffickers. Lies, or rather disinformation, are nothing new in Spain, but in recent years they have been forming increasingly coherent narratives of an alternative reality.
They are often a fantasy that sometimes does brush up against reality: last June, several higher-ranking members of the governing party Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), or Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, were forced to step down due to a corruption case. Private messages emerged in which they talked about large sums of money and escort services.
The case was particularly painful for Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who came into power fighting corruption.
In 2018, as leader of the opposition, he called a vote of no confidence involving then Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. That government fell, and since then Sánchez has led consecutive governments, on a promise to finally eradicate the systemic corruption that plagues Spain.
“This [latest corruption case] is confirming the narrative that all politicians lie, all politicians steal, all politicians are there for their personal gain,” said Alba Tobella, director of Catalan fact-checking platform Verificat. “Every case of corruption serves to further reinforce this idea.”
A flood of falsehoods
Through their website and social media, Verificat checks the accuracy of news spread over the internet. They noticed that from the moment Sánchez came into power, institutions on the right have tried hard to discredit him.
“Anything that can be used to delegitimize Pedro Sánchez will be used against him,” Tobella said. “Any failure in Spain is directly linked to Pedro Sánchez.”
These disinformation campaigns were particularly evident during the 2017 referendum for independence of Catalonia, when falsehoods from both sides were widespread. That period was one of the reasons Verificat was founded.
Another surge of false information swept through the country in 2024, following the flooding disaster in the Valencia area in which at least 229 people died. At the time, misinformation spread among the local population quickly, because people felt the government had failed to protect them.
What is new though, Tobella said, is that hoaxes are becoming increasingly complex and nuanced. She notes a normalization of these alternative realities, which some people are completely immersed in.
“It’s like a complete disconnection of the audience from the truth, as well as a lack of interest in seeking the facts,” she said.
The spreaders of fabricated “facts”
Much of the disinformation reaches people through social media and WhatsApp messages, as is shown on the websites of fact checkers like Verificat. Some websites and media outlets also contain this kind of fake news, and it is sometimes spread by politicians such as Santiago Abascal, leader of radical-right party Vox.
Now, following the latest corruption cases involving the PSOE, misinformation has again found fertile ground. Even though Sánchez has acted and those involved in the corruption have stepped down, a general feeling of being unprotected persists among the Spanish population. In a Eurobarometer survey this summer, a whopping 90% of Spaniards said they considered corruption to be “widespread” — one of the worst scores in the EU.
Sebastiaan Faber, a professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College in the United States, sees parallels with what is happening in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
“What is going on is a very conscious undermining of trust,” Faber said. “Creating doubt about science, about the judicial system, public health institutions. The goal is to push people away from traditional institutions so that maintaining them will be seen as less important.”
Faber, who wrote several books about Spain, the Spanish Civil War and the long dictatorship under Francisco Franco that ended in 1975, notes clear links between the way misinformation is used as a political tool in Spain and the United States.
“They, for instance, try to keep sending the message that any left-leaning government is illegitimate,” Faber said. “That goes back to ’36. The Franco regime was based on the idea that the elected government had forged the election results and that they were financed by Russia, with anti-Spanish ideas. It’s always a repetition of portraying the left as immoral.”
Actual corruption and phony accusations
Faber sees a clear connection between these Francoist tactics and Trumpism. Figures surrounding Trump during his rise, such as his former political advisor Steve Bannon, represent a group of people that actively try to deconstruct democracy.
Bannon once famously stated: “Flood the zone with shit.” He was referring to the creation of a deluge of half-truths and lies so consistent that people lose track of reality. Social media are an effective way to do so.
These tactics of disinformation campaigns crossed the ocean twice, Faber said. It could be seen under Franco, who constantly spread lies about the legitimate Segunda Republica government of Spain.
That made its way up to the United States. There, similar lies and disinformation campaigns culminated in Trump loyalists storming the Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory. These same tactics, a deluge of disinformation, are now being copied again in Europe to delegitimize people in power, such as Pedro Sánchez.
Faber doubts that the public is ready to believe all the disinformation about Sànchez even with the proven case of corruption in the Prime Minister’s own political party. “I would say that the receptiveness for fake news is very much defined by your political preferences and the information bubbles [you] are in,” he said.
Alienating voters
The corruption case might leave those on the right feeling further alienated from the left-wing government however, and they might start to believe additional falsehoods about the government and Sánchez.
And on the left, a general sense of hopelessness has now taken hold, as becomes clear when speaking with Spaniards about the case since the story of the corruption case broke.
Tobella said that what’s important here, is that people understand that it’s never only ‘the other side’ that behaves badly. For example, from a Catalonian perspective, where sentiments can at times be very anti-Spanish, there’s a long-standing myth that Catalonian politicians are less corrupt than those politicians in the national government in Madrid.
At the time of the interview with Tobella, the corruption case involving Catalonian leader Jordi Pujol had just begun. Pujol was in power for 24 years, and now faces charges of money laundering and criminal association.
“These accusations are extremely serious,” Tobella said. “If it is said that there is no corruption in Catalonia, I think that that is maybe the oldest myth going around. It is clear that there are also very serious cases here.”
So what can be done to counter the weakening of democracy through disinformation, especially when an alternative narrative does intersect with reality, as happens with these corruption cases? Debunk the lies, sift through hoaxes and show where claims rely on questionable evidence. In short, flood the zone with truth.
“Well, what we already do, right?” Tobella said.
Questions to consider:
1. What is new about the latest round of disinformation in Spain?
2. Why might disinformation campaigns have limited power when it comes to changing the minds of political supporters?
3. Do you generally trust the politicians representing you in government? What affects how you feel about them?
by Chris Berdik, The Hechinger Report January 5, 2026
PEACHAM, Vt. — Early on a chilly fall morning in this small Vermont town, Principal Lydia Cochrane watched a gaggle of kids chase one another and a soccer ball around their school recess yard. Between drop-off and first bell, they were free, loud and constantly moving.
With only about 60 students in prekindergarten through sixth grade, Peacham Elementary is the sort of school where all the kids know one another and locals regularly respond to calls for supplies and volunteers for field trips and other school activities. Cochrane gestured at the freshly raked wood chips around the swings and climbing structures, one of many tasks Peacham families completed at a recent community workday.
“With a small school, the families know how crucial it is to support it and ensure it succeeds, and so they show up for it,” said Cochrane.
Peacham is also a type of school that’s disappearing nationwide, as education systems grapple with plunging enrollments and rising costs. Amid declining birth rates and growing competition from private-school voucher programs, the number of students in U.S. public schools dropped about 2.5 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to the most recent federal data. Fewer students leads to higher per-pupil spending, because district staffing and other expenses largely remain in place despite enrollment drops, and states are increasingly trying to escape the education budget crunch via school consolidation: In the past three years alone, at least 10 states have considered measures to mandate or incentivize district mergers.
These pressures are especially keen in rural areas where the smallest schools predominate and play an outsized role in community life. Vermont, the nation’s most rural state, has lost about 20 percent of its K-12 public school student population in the past two decades. That’s helped push per-pupil costs and property taxes to the breaking point. Early in 2025, the state’s governor and education secretary released a plan to overhaul Vermont education, proposing massive district consolidation as the foundation for sweeping changes in school funding, curricula and academic standards.
The Legislature responded with its own comprehensive plan, which passed last summer as Act 73, calling for a minimum of 4,000 students per district, a threshold now met by only 1 of the state’s 119 districts.
District mergers are not the same as school closures, but one invariably leads to the other, as they have in Vermont’s other recent waves of district consolidations. The scope of Act 73’s proposals have ignited intense pushback from people fearing the loss of local control over education, even from a majority of the task force created to map options for bigger districts.
This month, the state Legislature will consider whether to push forward or completely rethink the process, a debate that will be closely watched by rural education advocates nationwide. Backers of school consolidation maintain that the crises of declining enrollment, falling test scores and tight education budgets demand a bold response and that consolidating schools is necessary to control costs and more equitably distribute resources and opportunities.
Opponents say the evidence that widespread school consolidation saves money — or helps students — is mixed at best, and that success depends highly on local context. They want any mergers and closings to be voluntary and done with a clear-eyed accounting of what’s to be gained and lost.
Vermont’s student-teacher ratio of 11 to 1 is the lowest in the nation, and the state now spends nearly $27,000 per student, second only to New York State. That has triggered spikes in local taxes: In 2024, Vermonters facing double-digit property tax increases subsequentlyrejected nearly one-third of school budgetswhen they next went to the polls.
The school budget revolts led Republican Gov. Phil Scott and his recently appointed education secretary, Zoie Saunders, to propose an education overhaul in January 2025 that would have divided the state into five regional districts serving at least 10,000 kids each. That plan was then superseded by Act 73, which created a redistricting task force of lawmakers and education leaders to map options for the Legislature to consider when it returns to work this month.
Saunders argues that school consolidation is key to the broader education transformation that Vermont needs in order to tackle several interconnected challenges, including rising student mental health issues, falling test scores and stubborn achievement gaps. “Many of these issues are hard to solve unless we address our issues around scale and funding,” she said in an interview. “We had to think about reform in a way that was going to focus on funding, quality and governance, because they’re all connected.”
The state has consolidated schools several times before. Most notably, in 2015, Act 46 triggered several years of mergers — first voluntary, then required — that eliminated dozens of districts and led many small schools to close.
Jessica Philippe, a Peacham parent who was on the school board at the time, recalled the worry that the district and its elementary school would be swallowed up. Many of Vermont’s smallest districts, including Peacham, operate only an elementary school and cover the higher grades by paying tuition for students to attend public or certain private schools outside the district.
“It seems like this is a cycle we have to go through,” she said. “Every five or 10 years, we have to fight to keep this place, because people from away think, oh, that’s just a few kids we have to disperse.”
The Peacham school board fended off that threat by showing the state board of education ample data that Peacham Elementary was viable and that there wasn’t much money to be saved from a merger. In fact, the state has never done a full financial analysis of Act 46. At the very least, the mergers failed to stem the spending and tax hikes that triggered Act 73.
The only comprehensive accounting of Act 46 was done by a Vermont native, Grace Miller, for her 2024 undergraduate thesis at Yale University where she studied economics and education. In her analysis of 109 districts between 2017 and 2020, she found that mergers did yield some savings, but it was soaked up by new spending such as higher salaries in newly combined districts and higher costs to bus students to and from schools farther away.
Meanwhile, some of the fastest-growing educational costs in Vermont are arguably outside school and district control, such as skyrocketing health care premiums, which account for about 15 percent of district spending. According to data from KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation), Vermonters pay the highest “benchmark” health care premiums of any state, nearly $1,300 a month, almost double what they paid just five years ago. The state has also shifted other financial burdens onto districts, such as capital construction costs for schools, which the state hasn’t funded in nearly two decades.
“We need to be focused on those core cost drivers,” said Rebecca Holcombe, a Vermont state representative and member of the redistricting task force, “not because there aren’t small schools that are inefficient and might not make it, but because even if we addressed them, we’d barely touch the real problem.”
Holcombe, who was the state’s education secretary when Act 46 passed, believes some school consolidation makes sense for Vermont, but not mandated mergers, especially at the scale proposed by Act 73. She was among the eight of 11 task force members who voted not to include maps of new, bigger district options in their final report in early December.
Instead they proposed a 10-year plan to create five regional “cooperative education service areas” where districts would pool resources to coordinate services — such as transportation, special education and professional development — and generate savings through scale. It also proposed that the state offer financial incentives to districts that voluntarily merge, centered on creating or strengthening high schools to serve students from combined districts and beyond.
Speaking to reporters, Gov. Scott admonished the task force a few days after its members voted to forward only the shared services plan to the state Legislature without mapping options for consolidating districts. “They didn’t redraw the lines,” he said. “They failed.”
When lawmakers reconvene on Jan. 6, it’s unclear how they’ll handle recommendations from a task force that arguably rebuked its founding legislation. They could ignore the task force and create their own maps of 4,000-student districts. They might amend Act 73 to fit the task force’s proposal.
Seated in her office at Doty Memorial School in Worcester, a small Vermont town north of Montpelier, Principal Gillian Fuqua choked up when explaining her change of heart — from opposing to supporting a plan to close the school she’s overseen since 2019. Doty has about 60 K-6 students this year, and Fuqua slides a paper across her desk showing projections based on town birth records that enrollment could drop to 40 by the fall of 2028.
“It’s absolutely heartbreaking to me,” she said. “But we have to think about what we want for our kids, and we’re not in a good place right now.”
Worcester is one of five towns merged into a single district by Act 46 in 2019. For two years in a row, the district has considered closing Doty, which would require voter approval. Last year, the plan was shelved without a vote after residents protested. But now a vote has been scheduled for February 10.
This past fall, when the district restarted consolidation discussions, Fuqua joined the “configuration committee” and dropped her previous opposition to closing the school. It already must combine two grades in classrooms to meet state minimums for class size. Fuqua worried that if classes shrink further, teachers might struggle to foster soft skills such as teamwork, collaborative problem solving and navigating a diversity of opinions. A larger school, she continued, could also support a full-time instrumental music teacher instead of the one-day-a-week instructor that Doty kids get, as well as a full-time librarian.
Indeed, there is ample evidence from Vermont and other states that merged schools can expose students to more and varied learning opportunities. A report released in 2024 by the Vermont Agency of Education, based on surveys and superintendent interviews from seven districts that merged early in the Act 46 era, highlighted merged districts saving, adding or restarting school offerings such as literacy intervention services, world languages and after-school extracurricular activities.
Nevertheless, education researchers stress that sending students to a bigger school with more resources doesn’t necessarily mean improved academic achievement or well-being. “These students are often experiencing an enormous transition, and there are a whole bunch of factors that can affect that,” said Mara Tieken, an education professor at Bates College who studies school consolidation.
School closings tend to be in more disadvantaged areas, for instance, and students there now take longer bus rides that cut into time for studying, sleep and after-school programs. Another variable is whether students from a closed school all transfer to the same new school, or are “starburst” out because no single school can accommodate them all. Tieken said it takes serious planning “to smooth that transition for new students, to create a culture that’s welcoming.”
“The answer to virtually every question about school consolidation is: It depends,” said Jerry Johnson, director of the Rural Education Institute and professor of educational leadership at East Carolina University, who has researched school consolidation for decades.
Whatever might be gained from a merger, many Doty parents (and students) remain opposed. In interviews, several said their tiny school provides something incredibly valuable and increasingly rare: human connection and community. In places like Worcester, a local school is one of the few spaces that regularly brings folks together and serves as a magnet for the young families that sustain small-town life.
Rosie Close, a fifth grader at Doty, described a tradition of students making and serving soup at the town’s free “community lunch” held every Wednesday at the town hall. “If they closed Doty,” she said, “that would kind of take away part of the town, too.”
While some Doty families had deep roots in the area, others moved to town more recently, including Caitlin Howansky, mother of a third grader. Howansky grew up in New York City, where she went to an elementary school with more than 30 kids per class.
“Nobody outside of that classroom necessarily knew my name or knew me as a whole person. I was just one of the crowd,” she said.
By contrast, Howansky said, the teachers at Doty “know every kid’s strengths and weaknesses across the whole building.”
That doesn’t mean that she and her neighbors are blind to demographic or economic realities, especially when housing, health care and so much else is getting more expensive. Early in December, for instance, Vermonters learned that property taxes would likely be spiking again next year, by nearly 12 percent on average.
“A lot of people are saying, if we fight this again, are they just going to come back and try again next year?” Howansky said. “And is it fair to the children to live under this constant threat and this constant stress of not knowing?”
She still thinks the fight against a merger is worth it, but said, “Everyone has to figure out where to draw their individual line.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/schools-are-closing-across-rural-america-heres-how-a-battle-over-small-districts-is-playing-out-in-one-state/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
by Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report December 18, 2025
Even with a conservative think tank’s blueprint detailing how the second Trump administration should reimagine the federal government’s role in education, few might have predicted what actually materialized this year for America’s schools and colleges.
Or what might be yet to come.
“2025 will go down as a banner year for education: the year we restored merit in higher education, rooted out waste, fraud and abuse, and began in earnest returning education to the states,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon told The Hechinger Report. She listed canceling K-12 grants she called wasteful, investing more in charter schools, ending college admissions that consider race or anything beyond academic achievement and making college more affordable as some of the year’s accomplishments.
“Best of all,” she said, “we’ve begun breaking up the federal education bureaucracy and returning education control to parents and local communities. These are reforms conservatives have championed for decades — and in just 12 months, we’ve made them a reality.”
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education.
McMahon’s characterization of the year is hardly universal. Earlier this month, Senate Democrats, led by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, called out some of the administration’s actions this year. They labeled federal changes, especially plans to divide the Education Department’s duties across the federal government, dangerous and likely to cause chaos for schools and colleges.
“Already, this administration has cancelled billions of dollars in education programs, illegally withheld nearly $7 billion in formula funds, and proposed to fully eliminate many of the programs included in the latest transfer,” the senators wrote in a letter to Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the committee that oversees education. “In our minds, that is unacceptable.”
So, what really happened to education this year? It was almost impossible for the average observer to keep track of the array of changes across colleges and universities, K-12 schools, early education and education research — and what it has all meant. This is a look back at how the education world was transformed.
The administration was especially forceful in the higher education arena. It used measures including antidiscrimination law to quickly freeze billions of dollars in higher education research funding, interrupting years-long medical studies and coercing Columbia, Brown, Northwestern and other institutions into handing over multimillion-dollar payments and agreeing to policy changes demanded by the administration.
A more widespread “compact” promising preference for federal funding to universities that agreed to largely ideological principles had almost no takers. But in the face of government threats, universities and colleges scrapped diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs that provided support based on race and other characteristics, and banned transgender athletes from competing on teams corresponding to genders other than the ones they were assigned at birth.
As the administration unleashed its set of edicts, Republicans in Congress also expanded taxes on college and university endowments. And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made other big changes to higher education, such as limiting graduate student borrowing and eliminating certain loan forgiveness programs. That includes public service loan forgiveness for graduates who take jobs with organizations the administration designated as having a “substantial illegal purpose” because they help refugees or transgender youth. In response, states, cities, labor unions and nonprofits immediately filed suit, arguing that the rule violated the First Amendment.
The administration has criticized universities, colleges and liberal students for curbing the speech of conservatives by shouting them down or blocking their appearances on campuses. However, it proceeded to revoke the visas of and begin deportation proceedings against international students who joined protests or wrote opinions criticizing Israeli actions in Gaza and U.S. government policy there.
Meanwhile, emboldened legislatures and governors in red states pushed back on what faculty could say in classrooms. College presidents including James Ryan at the University of Virginia and Mark Welsh III at Texas A&M were forced out in the aftermath of controversies over these issues. — Jon Marcus
Since Donald Trump returned to office earlier this year, K-12 schools have lost millions of dollars in sweeping cuts to federal grants, including money that helped schools serve students who are deaf or blind, grants that bolstered the dwindling rural teacher workforce and funding for Wi-Fi hotspots.
Last summer, the Trump administration briefly froze billions of dollars in federal funding for schools on June 30, one day before districts would typically apply to receive it. Although the money was restored in late July, some school leaders said they no longer felt confident they’ll receive all expected federal funds next year.And they are braced for more cuts to federal budgets as the U.S. Department of Education is dismembered.
That process, as well as the end goal of returning the department’s responsibilities to the states, has raised uncertainty about whether federal money will continue to be earmarked for the same purposes. If the state of Illinois is in charge of federal funding for every school in the state, said Todd Dugan, superintendent of a rural Illinois district, will rural schools still get money to boost student achievement or will the state decide there are more pressing needs?
As part of layoffs at the Education Department during the government shutdown in the fall, the Trump administration cut loose almost everyone who works in the Office of Special Education Programs, alarming many parents and advocates. About 7.5 million children ages 3 to 21 are served under federal law protecting students with disabilities, and the office had already lost staffers after the Trump administration dismissed nearly half the Education Department’s staff in March. Some worry this additional round of layoffs is a big step toward moving oversight of how states treat students with disabilities to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Even as the Trump administration attempts to push more control over education to the states, it has aggressively expanded federal power over school choice and transgender student rights in public schools. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will create a federal school voucher program, allowing taxpayers to donate up to $1,700 for scholarships that families can use to pay for private school. The program won’t start until 2027, and states can choose whether to participate — setting up potentially divisive fights over new money for education in Democratic-controlled states.
Already, some Democratic-led states have come to the defense of schools in funding and legal fights with the federal government over transgender athletes participating in sports. The U.S. departments of Education and Justice launched a special investigations team to look into complaints of Title IX violations, targeting school districts and states that don’t restrict accommodations or civil rights protections for transgender students. Legal experts expect the U.S. Supreme Court to ultimately decide how Title IX — a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education — applies to public schools.
The federal government directly runs just two systems of schools — one for military families and the other for children of tribal nations. In an executive order signed in January, the president directed both systems to offer parents a portion of federal funding allocated to their children to attend private, religious or charter schools.
And as part of the dismantling of the federal Education Department, the Interior Department — which oversees 183 tribal schools across nearly two dozen states — will assume greater control of Indian education programs. In addition to rolling out school choice at its campuses, the department will take over Indian education grants to public schools across the country, Native language programs, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian programs, tribally controlled colleges and universities, and many other institutions. — Ariel Gilreath and Neal Morton
Early education was not at the top of Trump’s agenda when he returned to office. On the campaign trail, when asked if he would support legislation to make child care affordable, he gave an unfocused answer, suggesting tariff revenue could be tapped to bring down costs. Asked a similar question, Vice President JD Vance suggested that care by family members was one potential solution to child care shortages.
However, many of the administration’s actions, including cuts to the government workforce and grants, have affected children who depend on federal support. In April, the administration abruptly closed five of 10 regional offices supporting Head Start, the free, federally funded early childhood program for children from low-income families. Head Start program managers worried they would be caught up in a freeze on grant funding that affected all agencies. Even though administration officials said funds would keep flowing to Head Start, some centers reported having problems drawing down their money. The prolonged government shutdown, which ended Nov. 12 after 43 days, also forced some Head Start programs to temporarily close.
Though the shutdown is over, Head Start advocates are still worried. Many of the administration’s actions have been guided by the Project 2025 policy document created by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 calls for eliminating Head Start, which serves about 715,000 children from birth to age 5, for a savings of about $12 billion a year.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contained some perks for parents, including an increase in the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200. The bill also created a new program called Trump accounts: Families can contribute up to $5,000 each year until a child turns 18, at which point the Trump account will turn into an individual retirement account. For children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, the government will provide a $1,000 bonus. Billionaires Michael and Susan Dell have also promised to contribute $250 to the account of each child ages 10 and under who lives in a ZIP code with a median household income of $150,000 or less.
That program will launch in summer 2026. — Christina A. Samuels
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/how-education-changed-in-one-year-under-trump/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
by Caroline Preston, The Hechinger Report December 18, 2025
Child care workers, students and teachers shared dismay over Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that are disrupting learning. School superintendents and college presidents described how uncertainty around federal funding is making their jobs far trickier.
Others — including a charter school leader and a for-profit college president — told The Hechinger Report they were grateful for recent changes to education policy, including a new emphasis on school choice and on the importance of workforce education.
Those were just a few of the many reactions we heard from 17 parents, students, educators and others around the country when we asked about the impact of President Donald Trump’s actions this year on their schools and communities. Several people told us that with the federal government stepping back from many of its long-standing responsibilities in education, they and their communities were taking on new roles.
Below are excerpts from the interviews, which have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Sylvelia Pittman, math interventionist, Henry H. Nash Elementary School, Chicago Public Schools
Under this administration we have witnessed ICE being in our neighborhoods. ICE detained two parents of our students. The husband of one of my colleagues was detained and deported to Mexico. The husband of another colleague was questioned at work because he’s half Latino, half white. So it’s hit hard. And then with the cuts that have been made to the Education Department, those have hit my school. We have a large population of special education students. We are about 35 percent Latino and the rest of our students are Black. Many of our families receive SNAP benefits and they were affected. Trump withheld $8 million from our schools because of the mayor’s Black Student Success Plan, for students to continue to learn their history and bring more Black teachers into schools. It’s almost like we’ve taken hit after hit. It’s just as stressful as when we had Covid. We have had to come to grips with the idea that we must take care of our own. It’s going to be up to us, to city officials. Homelessness, health care, mental health — all of these things have to be addressed at the state and local level, because we can’t wait for the federal government to get it right.
— Caroline Preston
TJ Katz, sophomore at Columbia University in New York, which reached a deal with the Trump administration restoring $400 million in federal funding frozen due to allegations of discriminatory conduct, including a failure to protect Jewish students during protests over the Israel-Hamas war
Campus feels completely different than two years ago. All of the protests have stopped. The Trump administration effectively eliminated them. Whether you want to say Columbia cares about antisemitism, they definitely fear what it would mean to have $400 million stripped away from their budget. As a Jewish student on campus, I would absolutely say I’m glad that the change happened. As someone who’s a massive proponent of democracy and free speech, I have qualms about it. What if there was an administration that didn’t align with what I think is just? We now have a precedent set where the administration could snap their fingers and say this is what has to happen on campuses now. It is slightly scary the precedent that’s been set and the power a president now has over higher education in America.
— Meredith Kolodner
Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in New York City, which Linda McMahon toured earlier this year in her first public school visit as education secretary
In the Trump administration, there’s a greater affinity for the concept of school choice. That alone is a huge breath of fresh air. There are other things, too — for example, the federal tax credit scholarship. On the surface, it may not seem like that would benefit charter schools, but it does. The money could pay for tuition for a student to attend a private religious school or it could cover SAT prep, tutoring — and that goes to any kind of parent. You could have parents in a public charter school who now have the additional resources to be able to pay for the kinds of things that a lot of middle- and upper-class families are doing to supplement education for their kids.
With the Department of Education already heavily gutted, it’s had zero impact on us — literally zero impact. But even if there’s not a formal federal Department of Education, there are a couple of different functions that are important. One is as the scorekeeper: There absolutely needs to be an assessment, annual or biannual, where you can consistently compare 2026 to 2024 to 2022 to 2020. That’s crucial because we do need, every couple years, a sense of what percent of our kids are reading against a common standard. I also think there is value in having kind of a best practices reservoir so that the federal government can be the place to show, ‘Here’s some innovative work going on in Indiana vs. New York.’But in general, there’s a very limited number of things that I think could really add value in education at the federal level.
— Nirvi Shah
Meka Mo, millennial comedian and nonprofit worker in New York City who took out student loans for undergraduate and graduate school
I’m one of the people who should be receiving public service loan forgiveness, but that’s in limbo and tied up in court right now. We don’t know what’s going to happen. So honestly, it’s kind of a mess, and no one’s paying attention to it, because everyone has, like, one thousand other things going on. Basically all our financial futures are being fought out in the courts right now. It’s like they’re not trying to have social upward mobility in the country.
— Marina Villeneuve
Leticia Wiggins, librarian at the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University, which closed its Office of Diversity and Inclusion and Center for Belonging and Social Change in response to the Trump administration’s threats to withhold funding from schools that use race-conscious practices in programs, scholarships and other areas of campus life
Those were places where people could go and feel a sense of community and that they belonged somewhere, and now those spaces no longer exist. Some of the student communities have been sort of dissolved — students feel at a loss for where to go. We’re still trying to conduct business as usual and make up for what’s lacking, but everything is just getting more threatened in terms of what we’re even able to talk about.
— Meredith Kolodner
Todd Dugan, superintendent of Bunker Hill Community Unit School District 8 in Illinois, which saw roughly $22,000 in Title II federal funds frozen for services to recruit, retain and train teachers
I’ve been a superintendent for 14 years. It’s definitely getting harder. It’s taking a job that’s already hard and getting harder, and making it harder still. And it appears that it’s being done needlessly. The freezing and clawing back of Title II was announced on June 30, when usually we apply for it on July 1. And then they finally released it the second week of August. It was a lot of extra work making things difficult for a job that is already difficult. I don’t know what the game was, because Title II funding didn’t get clawed back. It just made everybody anxious.
— Ariel Gilreath
Michael A. Elliott, president of Amherst College, in Massachusetts
I see an impact in the growing anxiety of our international students, faculty and staff members. Many are questioning whether there is a safe and stable place for them on our campus or in this country. These uncertainties touch every part of their lives — academic, personal and professional. They influence decisions about research, travel and connections with family, and they undermine the sense of belonging and security that is essential to a place like Amherst. When members of our community carry this kind of persistent fear, the effects are felt by all of us who care about them and want to support them as extraordinary classmates and colleagues.
— Lawrie Mifflin
Kyshanna Patman, a North Carolina mother of four children who works from home
It’s been a crazy year, especially since he’s been in office, with the food stamp benefits being delayed, Medicaid — it’s crazy. And then the things they’re saying about autism. My 4-year-old is autistic and it’s really, really crazy how they’re making the assumption about women taking Tylenol and causing autism. It has not been a good experience since he’s been in office.
When SNAP benefits were delayed, I was struggling trying to come up with the money to keep food in the house. I have four kids in the house and they need to eat. I mainly made sure they had enough before I tried to eat anything myself.
And with the Medicaid work requirements, I just don’t understand. It shouldn’t have to be a requirement for people to have Medicaid. People have preexisting conditions. You’re talking about a work requirement just for people to be seen. It doesn’t make any sense.
There’s too many changes he’s trying to do. They’re not trying to listen to what people have to say. People put you in [office]. He’s supposed to be listening to us and working for us instead of being stricter. You’re supposed to be helping and he’s not doing that. He’s doing the complete opposite.
— Jackie Mader
Leslie Cornick, provost and vice president of academic affairs at California State University, Chico, which lost funding for teacher training after the Trump administration canceled two grant programs of roughly $600 million, citing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives
One of the challenges we are still continuing to follow up on is the loss of the Teacher Quality Partnership and SEED grants that support stipends for students who are going into teacher education programs and becoming teachers in rural counties and communities. Many of those students are Latinx and are coming to Chico State to become teachers so they can go back into their rural communities that desperately need teachers.
We lost $700,000 or so. We couldn’t run the entire fall cohort of that program this year because access to those grants is still being litigated. We’re making the case for why these grants are so important and why they should not be discontinued. But in the meantime, we don’t have the money and so we can’t support the students. That means we are losing students that we will never get back. And there’s an impact not only on that individual student, but on that student’s family, generationally, and on our economy in the state of California because we’re not getting those teachers out into those rural communities that need them.
From my perspective, it’s critically important that we continue to engage the administration in dialogue and help them understand especially the value of the regional public institutions.
— Olivia Sanchez
Nicole Greene, a special education teacher at Scarsdale Middle School, in New York
The landscape of special education has changed dramatically in the 13 years that I’ve been teaching, and that’s thanks to the ample research and the amount of effort that can go into advancing the field, advancing the profession. Without that, how do teachers get better? How do we learn more about how students learn best? Maybe we can agree that grants are good for furthering the field.
A child should be able to go to any state in the country and their needs should be supported based on federal law in equal measure. At the end of the day, the argument that we are going to leave it up to the states just means that they can interpret IDEA however they see fit, without anyone ensuring that that’s in compliance with what was written. That’s a dangerous place to leave kids.
— Christina A. Samuels
Daniel Cordova, junior at Edmonds-Woodway High School in the Edmonds School District in Washington state, which enrolls many children of migrant parents who work on nearby farms
It’s scary times right now. You leave school, and you don’t know if you’re going to see your friends the next day because they might have some orders from the government to go back to their country. One of my friends is an immigrant. He’s worried like crazy about being deported. My friend’s mother has a deportation order. They’re struggling a lot right now. We feel it across the whole school.
It kind of changes the atmosphere. There’s less trust. It doesn’t feel safe, I would say.
— Neal Morton
Brad Kuykendall, CEO of the for-profit Western Technical College, in El Paso, Texas
I point back to the executive order issued in April that dealt with preparing Americans for high-paying skilled trade jobs for the future. For far too long, there’s been a lack of acknowledgement of the importance of career, technical and trade schools. We were looked at as a lesser option for students, and to a degree, that’s still the case. But I think we’re starting to see that change a bit. The refocus and reemphasis — not as the only option, but as one of the many options — is very healthy for our economy as a whole and for our nation to continue to grow.
Under the Biden administration, we did feel like there was definitely not as friendly of an environment [for for-profit colleges] to operate in. I did feel that we were underrepresented in many of the negotiated rulemaking sessions in the previous administration on regulations that impacted us far more than any other institution. We were one or two out of 15 seats at the table, so trying to come to consensus about a regulation in that environment was just very difficult. Going into negotiated rulemaking [to develop regulations under the ’big, beautiful bill’], I think there’s more fair representation at the table, and it’s a more balanced approach.
— Meredith Kolodner
Mike Shaver, president and CEO at Brightpoint, an Illinois nonprofit that operates child-focused programs, including free, federally funded Head Start centers and home-based Early Head Start services
It’s impossible to escape that this administration has not exactly done a great job at supporting poor families when you look at what happened with the struggle over SNAP benefits. And in our state, the increased ICE enforcement activities have had a profound impact. We have seen attendance levels drop.
In November, an early learning employee — not someone in our program — got out of her vehicle, was walking into the facility where she was an instructor, and ICE agents followed her in, removed her from the building and detained her. It’s really hard to overstate what that kind of image does, not only for the staff who show up every day to meet the needs of these families, but also the families themselves. This is just a lot of added stressors for families, in addition to the challenges that already brought them to our Head Start programs.
— Jackie Mader
Tiffany Tangel, a disability advocate and parent of three — including two children with dyslexia and other learning differences — in western New York
I’m closely watching what’s happening with IDEA. Trump said he was going to move it to Health and Human Services. A lot of people are worried about that. There’s a lot of disabilities that have nothing to do with health in that way. My kids have dyslexia. When it was newly diagnosed for my oldest, I went to our pediatrician and asked for resources on dyslexia, for places I could go for help, and they said we don’t know and the school should be helping you.
I’m also working to restart our school’s special education PTA. Our school had one, but it closed in 2020. With so much unknown in terms of what’s next for our kids, a group of us just felt like now it was needed more than ever. Our hope is to be a place for the parents, because when you have kids in special education, it can be very lonely, and you feel very isolated. And then we really do want to focus on the teachers, because we know as soon as resources are cut, the teachers are feeling it.
You’ve got to keep advocating at a federal level, at a state level, but it’s going to come down to your individual level, too.
— Christina A. Samuels
Aiden Sirk, high school senior, Lawrenceburg, Indiana
Conservatives, they’re not about, ‘We don’t want kids to have an education,’ — it’s that we want to make sure that we’re doing it in the most efficient way possible. And with the Department of Education cut, what they’re making sure they’re doing is that we are still going to have Pell Grants, we’re still going to have FAFSA, I can see that’s OK. There is a lot of bureaucracy at the Department of Education.
A lot of these workers, they’re getting paid and they’re not even coming into the office like they were pre-pandemic. So we didn’t really need all that workforce. But then again, there is a proper way to do things. You can’t just dictate: ‘We’re shutting it down.’ You have to go through Congress. You have to go through the courts. And you have to do it the right way. So yes, I see it’s reasonable, but the way they’re doing it is not reasonable.
— Christina A. Samuels
Heather Shotton, new president of Fort Lewis College, in rural Durango, Colorado, where nearly 40 percent of students are Native American. The college is a Native American-Serving, Nontribal Institution. Shotton is an enrolled citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes
Fort Lewis lost $2.27 million in Title III money for Native American-serving institutions. The money paid for academic success initiatives: summer bridge programs, peer educators, various academic supports. That impacts our entire campus. Yes, it helped Indigenous students, but it also helped all of our students. It’s part of the federal government trust responsibility to support Native students. The majority of our Native students are not at tribal colleges and universities. And the majority of tribal colleges are two-year colleges. The shifting of money from Native-serving institutions to tribal colleges — itʼs one-time money, spread across 36 institutions.
— Nirvi Shah
Sevan Minassian-Godner, third-year student at the University of California, Irvineand president of Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi and Jewish campus organization Hillel
Oct. 7 was a really big event on our campuses, and there was a lot of antisemitism floating around. But that kind of petered off after the first year, and we’re now at a point where it’s much less than it was my first year. But I wouldn’t necessarily attribute that to the Trump administration. I just think we’re further from the incident and from the encampments. I will say that we have experienced an uptick in right-leaning antisemitism recently; there are more groups on campus now that are participating in right-leaning antisemitism. I think that’s become more OK with the Trump administration in office. And I actually do attribute it a lot to Charlie Kirk’s death, too. I think that that ignited a lot of people early on in the year. People are more openly antisemitic, and especially on the right, and this kind of far-right white supremacist ideology, I think, has found its way into a lot more people’s hearts recently.
— Meredith Kolodner
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/fear-fatigue-gratitude-students-parents-and-educators-on-the-new-trump-administrations-first-year/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
by Christina A. Samuels, The Hechinger Report December 18, 2025
Last year, Project 2025 was a conservative wish list: a grab bag of proposals large and small that would transform the federal government, including in education.
Months later, many of those wishes have become reality. That includes, at least in part, Project 2025’s ultimate goal of doing away with the Education Department.
The department still exists — getting rid of it completely would require congressional action— but it is greatly diminished: Much of the department’s work is being farmed out to other federal agencies. Half of its workforce of about 4,100 people have left or been fired. And Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote after her confirmation that she was leading the department’s “final mission.”
Eliminating the Education Department was just one of many goals, however. While the administration did not meet all the other tasks in this “to-do” list below, compiled by The Hechinger Report and taken directly from Project 2025, there’s still three more years to go.
Early childhood
Eliminate Head Start: NO. Head Start, which provides free preschool for low-income children, still exists, though some individual centers had problems accessing their money because of temporary freezes from the Department of Government Efficiency and the prolonged government shutdown. The federal government also closed five of 10 Head Start regional offices, which collectively served 22 states.
Pay for in-home child care instead of universal (center-based) daycare: NO. Project 2025 states that “funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare.” There have been no moves to fulfill this goal, but the budget reconciliation bill the president signed in July increased the child tax credit and introduced “Trump Accounts” for children under age 18.
Expand child care for military families:YES. The National Defense Authorization Act, passed on Dec. 17 and sent to the president for his signature, authorizes over $491 million to design and build new child care centers for these families, among other provisions. The Department of Defense provides child care to military families on a sliding scale based on income. However, about 20 percent of military families who need child care can’t get it because there is not enough space.
Give businesses an incentive to provide “on-site” child care: NO. Project 2025 states that “across the spectrum of professionalized child care options, on-site care puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.”
K-12 education
Move the National Center for Education Statistics to the Census Bureau; transfer higher education statistics to the Labor Department: NO. Education data collection remains at the Education Department. However, the agency’s capacity has been sharply reduced following mass firings and the termination of key contracts — a development not envisioned in Project 2025. At the same time, Donald Trump directed the center to launch a major new data collection on college admissions to verify that colleges are no longer giving preferences based on race, ethnicity or gender.
Expand choice for families by making federal funding portable to many school options: PARTIAL. In January, the president signed an executive order encouraging “educational freedom.” One of the order’s provisions requires the departments of Defense and Interior — which run K-12 schools for military families and tribal communities, respectively — to allow parents to use some federal funding meant for their children’s education at private, religious and charter schools. However, that initiative for Indian schools ended up being scaled back after tribes protested. The “big, beautiful” spending bill signed in July created a national voucher program, but states have to opt in to participate.
Send money now controlled by the federal government, such as Title I and special education funding, to the states as block grants: NO. In the current fiscal year, about $18.5 billion in Title I money flowed to districts to support low-income students. States received about $14 billion to support educating children with disabilities. Project 2025 envisions giving states that money with no strings attached, which it says would allow more flexibility. While the administration has not lifted requirements for all states, it is considering requests from Indiana, Iowa and Oklahoma that would allow those states to spend their federal money with less government oversight. Also, in his fiscal 2026 budget proposal, Trump floated the idea of consolidating several smaller education programs, such as those supporting rural students, homeless students and after-school activities, into one $2 billion block grant. That would be far less than the combined $6.5 billion set aside for these programs in the current budget.
Reject “radical gender ideology” and “critical race theory,” and eliminate requirements to accept such ideology as a condition of receiving federal funds:YES. Immediately after Trump was sworn into office, he reversed a Biden administration rule that included protection of LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, which bans sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal money. Trump also signed an executive order threatening to withhold federal dollars from schools over what the order called “gender ideology extremism” and “critical race theory.” In the months since, the administration launched Title IX investigations in school districts where transgender students are allowed to participate on sports teams and use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. It sent letters to schools across the country threatening to pull funding unless they agree to its interpretation of civil rights laws, to include banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and initiatives. The Education Department also pulled federal research grants and investigated schools and colleges over DEI policies it calls discriminatory.
Pass a federal “parents’ bill of rights,” modeled after similar bills passed at the state level: NO. House Republicans passed a Parents’ Bill of Rights Act two years ago, which would have required districts to post all curricula and reading materials, require schools receiving Title I money to notify parents of any speakers visiting a school, and mandate at least two teacher-parent conferences each year, among other provisions. The Senate did not take it up, and lawmakers have not reintroduced the bill in this session of Congress. About half of the states have their own version of a parentsʼ bill of rights.
Shrink the pool of students eligible for free school meals by ending the “community eligibility provision” and reject universal school meal efforts: NO. Under current rules, schools are allowed to provide free lunch to all students, regardless of their family’s income, if the school or district is in a low-income area. That provision remains in place. The Trump administration has not changed income eligibility requirements for free and reduced-price lunch at schools: Families that earn within 185 percent of the federal poverty line still qualify for reduced lunch and those within 130 percent of the poverty line qualify for free lunch.
Higher education
Roll back student loan forgiveness and income-driven repayment plans: PARTIAL.Three income-driven repayment plans will be phased out next year and a new one — the Repayment Assistance Plan — will be added. RAP requires borrowers to make payments for 30 years before they qualify for loan forgiveness. The administration also reached a proposed agreement to end even earlier the most controversial repayment plan known as SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education). Trump officials have referred to the SAVE plan as illegal loan forgiveness. Under the plan, some borrowers were eligible to have their loans cleared after only 10 years, while making minimal payments.
End Parent PLUS loans: PARTIAL. These loans, which parents take out to help their children, had no limit. They still exist, but as of July 2026, there will be an annual cap of $20,000 and a lifetime limit of $65,000 per child. Grad PLUS loans, which allow graduate students to borrow directly on behalf of themselves, are being phased out. Under the Repayment Assistance Plan, graduates in certain fields, such as medicine, can borrow no more than $50,000 a year, or $200,000 over four years.
Privatize the federal student loan portfolio: NO. The Trump administration reportedly has been shopping a portion of the federal student loan portfolio to private buyers, but no bids have been made public. Project 2025 also called for eliminating the Federal Student Aid office, which is now housed in the Education Department and oversees student loan programs. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the Treasury Department would be a better home for the office, but no plans for a move have been announced.
End public service loan forgiveness: NO. PSLF allows borrowers to have part of their debt erased if they work for the government or in nonprofit public service jobs and make at least 120 monthly payments. The structure remains, but a new rule could narrow the definition of the kinds of jobs that qualify for loan forgiveness. The proposed rule raises concerns that borrowers working for groups that assist immigrants, transgender youth or provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians, for example, could be disqualified from loan forgiveness. The new rule would go into effect in July.
Rescind Biden-era rules around sexual assault and discrimination: YES. The Department of Education almost immediately jettisoned changes that the Biden administration had made in 2024 to Title IX, which governs how universities and colleges handle cases of sexual assault and discrimination. Under the Biden rules, blocked by a federal judge days before Trump’s inauguration, accused students were no longer guaranteed the right to in-person hearings or to cross-examine their accusers. The Trump Education Department then returned to a policy from the president’s first term, under which students accused of sexual assault will be entitled to confront their accusers, through a designee, which the administration says restores due process but advocates say will discourage alleged victims from coming forward.
Reform higher education accreditation: YES. In an executive order, Trump made it easier for accreditors to be stripped of their authority and new ones to be approved, saying the existing bodies — which, under federal law, oversee the quality of colleges and universities — have ignored poor student outcomes while pushing diversity, equity and inclusion. Florida and Texas have started setting up their own accreditors and said the administration has agreed to expedite the typically yearslong approval process. The Department of Education has earmarked $7 million to support this work and help colleges and universities switch accreditors.
Dismantle DEI programs and efforts: PARTIAL. Though the administration called for eliminating college DEI programs and efforts, most of the colleges that have shut down their DEI offices have done so in response to state-level legislation. Around 400 books removed from the Naval Academy library because of concerns that they contained messages of diversity or inclusion, but most of the books were ultimately returned. The National Science Foundation canceled more than 400 grants related to several topics, including DEI.
Jill Barshay, Ariel Gilreath, Meredith Kolodner, Jon Marcus, Neal Morton and Olivia Sanchez contributed to this report.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/trump-administration-makes-good-on-many-project-2025-education-goals/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
by Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report December 18, 2025
About 1.5 million people teach on college campuses in the United States, and nearly 4 million teachers work in its public elementary and secondary schools. More than 15 million undergraduates attend U.S. colleges and universities. There are more than 50 million school-age children across the country.
They all have one thing in common: Federal education policy affects their lives.
President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon say they want to close the Department of Education and return control of education to the states. At the same time, however, they have aggressively, and rapidly, wielded federal power over schools.
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Here’s a look at some key data points from the first year of Trump’s second term that represent the outsized effect this presidency has had on the nation’s educational institutions and the people within them.
— 15 —
Number of executive orders Trump signed that exclusively address colleges or schools
In 2017, the first year of his first term, Trump signed two executive orders related to education. This year, he signed three times that number on just a single day in April.
Number of investigations into K-12 transgender policies announced by the Education Department
At the K-12 level, the administration has given no issue more attention than policies that govern which bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams transgender students can access. In all, the department has announced at least 26 such investigations, including into six state education agencies and three statewide athletic associations.
By comparison, the Trump administration announced eight investigations into antisemitism at elementary and secondary schools and four cases of alleged racial discrimination that hurts white teachers or students.
In higher education, it’s the inverse: Just five investigations into transgender issues have been announced, while dozens of cases of antisemitism and racial discrimination are being investigated.
— 50+ —
Number of education-specific lawsuits filed against the Trump administration
It’s not unusual for presidential administrations to be sued: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton brags about suing the Biden administration 100 times. But the first year of Trump’s second term has been marked by unprecedented legal activity related to his administration’s education actions, according to a review of court documents and other lawsuit trackers. Trump, McMahon and the Department of Education have been sued over efforts to fire employees and dismantle the department, freeze funding and cancel grants, and end diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
The administration’s track record defending itself in court has been mixed, but it scored a major victory when the Supreme Court allowed its March layoffs of hundreds of Education Department staffers. However, courts have blocked some efforts to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, forced the federal government to pay out some once-frozen grants and allowed Harvard to continue enrolling foreign students.
— 1,950 —
Number of employees who left the Department of Education in the spring
When Trump took office, the Education Department had more than 4,100 employees. Soon after, those numbers started dropping. In the first seven weeks of the new administration, 572 staffers voluntarily resigned. In March, 1,378 more employees were let go. Many offices were decimated without a clear plan for how or if their work would continue.
The National Center for Education Statistics, for example, went from about 100 staffers to three. That office is responsible for collecting data on the nation’s schools and colleges and administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Or take the Office for Civil Rights, which is in charge of investigating complaints about civil rights violations, including sexual harassment, racial discrimination and failure to provide an adequate education to students with disabilities. Seven of its 11 regional offices were shuttered and, in all, it lost nearly half its staff. (In December, some of those staffers were temporarily called back to help reduce a backlog of cases.)
The administration notified another 466 employees they were being let go during the government shutdown in October. Those positions were reinstated, however, as part of a congressional deal to reopen the government. The department also launched a plan to move large swathes of its work to other agencies, including the departments of Labor, State and Health and Human Services.
The Education Department did not respond to several requests for information about how many people are working at the agency now.
— 5 —
Number of regional Head Start offices closed
As part of the administration’s sweeping reductions in force, five out of 10 regional Head Start offices were abruptly closed and all employees fired in April. The offices, all in blue states, help oversee the free child care services provided by local early education programs for low-income children. In all, the five offices had been responsible for oversight of 318,000 — or 44 percent — of Head Start slots.
That wasn’t the only upheaval Head Start programs faced this year. At the end of January, the Trump administration directed agencies to temporarily freeze federal funding for thousands of financial assistance programs, including Head Start. Soon after, the White House said the program was exempt, and later it withdrew the order altogether. (A federal judge eventually ruled the entire directive was illegal.) But dozens of centers serving more than 20,000 children reported weeks-long delays in accessing federal money, with some forced to close temporarily. Then, during the government shutdown in the fall, centers serving 9,000 kids had to close their doors, some for several weeks, according to tracking by the First Five Years Fund.
— 17% —
Decline in new international student enrollment in fall 2025
The Trump administration’s attacks on foreign students with political views it disliked made international headlines this spring, as it targeted students protesting the Israel-Hamas war for deportation and announced plans to scour the social media accounts of new visa applicants. It also imposed travel restrictions and delayed some processing of student visas. The result is a slower pipeline of new foreign students coming to the United States, according to data from the Institute of International Education.
The decrease in new international students was driven by graduate students, whose enrollment declined most sharply. But because most returning students stuck with their U.S. education plans, the overall number of foreign students (including those engaged in jobs related to future or past higher education enrollment) ticked down just 1 percent. Still, that’s a big deal for colleges and universities: Graduate students make up the lionʼs share of international enrollment and are a major source of revenue for many colleges. International students typically do not get financial aid, paying full price to attend.
— $1,700 —
Maximum tax break an individual can get for donating to school choice scholarships
Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, was a major win for school choice advocates: It created a new federal school voucher program. The law sets up tax credit scholarships — vouchers — families can use to pay for private school tuition, tutoring or other educational expenses. Parents will also be able to use the money to cover homeschooling costs. Starting in 2027, individuals can get a tax credit of up to $1,700 for donations to nonprofits that provide the scholarships. Those nonprofits, in turn, will be in charge of handing out the money.
States must opt in if they want schools within their respective borders to be able to participate. At least three states so far have said they will decline, but more than 20 others have already established their own tax credit scholarship programs and are expected to sign up when the federal option becomes available.
— 6,353 —
Number of complaints the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights dismissed between mid-March and mid-September
In one six-month stretch, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights dismissed more than 6,000 complaints without an investigation, according to a September court filing. By contrast, the Biden administration did the same with 2,527 cases in its final three months.
The Trump administration has said in court filings it is following longstanding policies for dismissing cases. Former employees and advocates counter that the jump in dismissals suggests student and parent complaints are not being adequately probed, and that layoffs are affecting an agency that has long struggled to keep up with its caseload.
The rate at which the Trump administration reaches a final resolution in the cases it does investigate has significantly slowed. Between mid-March and mid-September, OCR resolved 581 complaints through mediated settlements, voluntary agreements or technical assistance. Another 138 were resolved after an investigation did not find evidence of violations. Those numbers are roughly the same as the last three months of the Biden administration (595 and 119 respectively).
— $153 million —
Amount of grant money the administration is spending to promote civics education
The Education Department said in September it gave more than $153 million to 85 grantees to work on civics education. That’s a major increase: Since this grant program launched in 2017, just 38 grants worth about $75 million had been awarded in all.
Promoting patriotic education is one of McMahon’s goals. “Patriotic education presents American history in a way that is accurate, honest, and inspiring,” her agency said in a September announcement prioritizing discretionary spending on this issue. “It emphasizes a unifying and uplifting portrayal of the nation’s founding ideals.”
McMahon also started the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, in preparation for next year’s anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The coalition is made up largely of conservative organizations including Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, Hillsdale College and Priests for Life.
— $5.8 billion —
Minimum amount of federal research funding cut or frozen
Federal research dollars, many of which flow to colleges and universities, were cut way back this year. It’s difficult to calculate exactly how much was lost; this money comes from many agencies and some remains mired in legal battles. The website Grant Witness, run by a group of researchers, tracks canceled or frozen grants. Its data shows that more than $5.1 billion in National Institutes of Health money that had yet to be spent was earmarked for colleges or universities, as was nearly $700 million from the National Science Foundation. (Some of that funding may have been restored.)
Number of colleges that have signed the Trump ‘Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education’
The Trump administration has been aggressive in trying to bend higher education to its will. In October, officials reached out to nine universities, including some of the country’s most selective institutions, with a deal. The schools could be first in line for federal money if they agreed to a litany of demands including:
Publishing standardized test scores for admitted students by race, sex and ethnicity
Capping foreign student enrollment at 15 percent
Prohibiting transgender females from using women’s locker rooms and bathrooms
Freezing tuition for five years
So far, none have accepted the offer, with seven universities rejecting it outright. The University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt University did not publicly rebuke the compact, but did not sign it. New College of Florida, which was not one of the nine, said it would sign if given the chance. Other universities signed separate agreements with the administration to unfreeze federal money. Columbia University, for example, paid $221 million and accepted a host of conditions to regain access to billions of federal dollars.
Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at [email protected] or on Signal: @sbutry.04.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/11-numbers-that-capture-the-trump-effect-on-education/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
