Category: Proof Points

  • How schools are tackling absenteeism

    How schools are tackling absenteeism

    (Note: This is the second piece in a two-part series on absenteeism in schools. Read the first part, on seven insights from researchers.)

    Chronic absenteeism, when students miss 10 percent or more of the school year, is 50 percent higher across the nation than before the pandemic. Researchers say it’s difficult for schools to address the problem because it is both so intense, with students missing huge chunks of the school year, and so extensive, affecting both rich and poor students and even high achievers. And the reasons vary widely, from asthma and bullying to transportation problems and the feeling that school is boring.

    “It’s hard to know where and when to target resources,” said Sam Hollon, a data analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, which hosted a symposium on the problem in May. “Who do you help when every student potentially can be a candidate for help?”

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement is exacerbating the problem. A June draft paper by Stanford University professor Thomas Dee calculated that recent raids coincided with a 22 percent increase in daily student absences with particularly large increases in absenteeism among the youngest students.

    Talking about the problem isn’t enough. Researchers say they want to study more schools that are making headway. It remains unclear if there are broadly applicable fixes or if each school or even each student needs individual solutions. Some underlying root causes for skipping school are more complex than others, requiring psychotherapy or housing assistance, which schools can’t provide alone. Here are a few examples of how very different communities are tackling the problem.

    Providence: Bus stops and weekend food bags

    Principal W. Jackson Reilly of Nathanael Greene Middle School in Providence, Rhode Island, said that when he arrived in April 2023, half of his 900 students in grades six to eight were chronically absent, up from 30 percent of students before the pandemic. Thirty percent of his teachers were also chronically absent. Achievement scores were in the state’s bottom 1 percent.  

    Reilly managed to slash his chronic absenteeism rate in half to 25 percent this past 2024-25 year. That’s still high. One in four students missed more than 18 days of school a year. But, it’s better. 

    He began by identifying 150 kids who were just over the threshold for chronic absenteeism, those who missed between 18 and 35 days, hoping that these kids would be easier to lure back to school than those who were more disengaged. Reilly and a group of administrators and guidance counselors each took 10 to 15 students and showed their families how much school they had missed and how low their grades were. His team asked, “What do you need in order for your kid to be coming to school?’” 

    The two most common replies: transportation and food. 

    Related: The chronic absenteeism puzzle

    Many students lived only a mile away, too close to school to qualify for bus service. Yet the walk deterred many, especially if it was raining or snowing. Yellow buses often passed these children’s homes as they were transporting children who lived farther out, and Reilly convinced the district to add stops for these chronically absent children. 

    Ninety percent of his students come from families who are poor enough to qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program and 80 percent are Hispanic. Although many children were fed breakfast and lunch at school, their families admitted that their kids would get so hungry over the weekend that they didn’t want to wake up and come to school on Mondays. Reilly partnered with a food pantry and sent bags of meat and pasta home with students on Fridays. 

    Individual attention also helped. At the start of each school day, Reilly and his team check in with their assigned students. Kids who show up get five “green bucks” to spend on snacks and prizes. Administrators call the homes of those who didn’t come to school. “If they did not answer the phone, we’d make a home visit,” said Reilly. 

    The most dramatic overhaul was scheduling. Reilly scrapped individual schedules for students and assigned four teachers to every 104 students. The kids now move in pods of 26 that take all their classes together, rotating through the same four teachers throughout the day. The classrooms are right near each other, creating a smaller community within the school. 

    “It’s all about relationship building,” said Reilly. When students look forward to seeing their classmates and teachers, he said, they’re more motivated to come to school. 

    Researchers say fostering relationships is effective. Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit organization that advises schools on how to boost attendance rates, said it’s still a battle to persuade some school leaders (and school board members) that making school a more welcoming place is more productive than punishing kids and families for skipping school.* 

    Reilly said his school now posts the lowest student and teacher chronic absenteeism rates in Providence. And he said his school is the highest performing middle school in the city and among the highest statewide in reading.  

    New York City: Catching the butterflies

    A cluster of New York City high schools are taking a more data-driven approach, guided by New Visions, a consulting organization that supports 71 city high schools. 

    After some experimentation, New Visions staff saw strong improvement in attendance in one subgroup of students who were on the cusp of missing 10 percent of school days, but had not yet crossed the chronic absenteeism threshold. These are students who might miss a day or two every week or every other week but were relatively engaged at school. Jonathan Green, a New Visions school improvement coach who is spearheading this effort, calls them “butterflies.” “They would flutter in and out every week,” he said. 

    Green suggested that someone at school meet weekly with these butterflies and show them their attendance data, set goals for the coming week and explain how their attendance was leading to better grades. The intervention took two to five minutes. “There were marked changes in attendance,” said Green.

    New Visions built a website where school administrators could print out two-page documents for each student so the data, including monthly attendance and tardiness, appeared in an easy-to-digest format. The quick meetings took place for eight to 10 weeks during the final grading period for the semester. “That’s when there’s the most opportunity to turn those potentially failing grades into passing grades,” said Green. “We were finding these sweet spots within the school calendar to do this very high resource, high-energy intensive weekly check-in. It’s not something that anyone can easily scale across a school.”

    Related: Tracking student data falls short in combating absenteeism at school

    Staff had to figure out the bell schedule for each child and intercept them between classes. One succeeded in holding their entire caseload of students below the chronic absenteeism threshold. Not everyone thought it was a good idea: Some school administrators questioned why so much effort should go into students who weren’t yet chronically absent rather than students in greater trouble.

    The dramatic results help answer that question. Among schools in the Bronx that volunteered to participate in the butterfly intervention, chronic absenteeism rates dropped 15 percentage points from 47 percent in 2021 to 32 percent in 2025, still high. But other Bronx high schools in the New Visions network that didn’t try this butterfly intervention still had a chronic absenteeism rate of 46 percent. 

    Green said this solution wouldn’t work for other high schoolers. Some have trouble organizing their study time, he said, and need more intensive help from teachers. “Two- to five-minute check-ins aren’t going to help them,” said Green. 

    Indianapolis: Biscuits and gravy

    The leader of an Indiana charter school told me he used a system of rewards and punishments that reduced the chronic absenteeism rate among his kindergarten through eighth graders from 64 percent in 2021-22 to 10 percent in 2024-25.

    Jordan Habayeb, the chief operating officer of Adelante Schools, said he used federal funds for the school breakfast and lunch program to create a made-from-scratch restaurant-style cafeteria. “Fun fact: On homemade biscuit and gravy days, we saw the lowest rates of tardies,” he said.

    Researchers recommend avoiding punishment because it doesn’t bring students back to school. But Habayeb said he adheres strictly to state law that requires schools to report 10 absences to the state Department of Child Services and to file a report with the county prosecutor. Habayeb told me his school accounted for a fifth of truancy referrals to the county prosecutor.

    The school created an automated warning system after five absences rather than waiting for the critical 10-day loss. And Habayeb said he dispatched the safety and attendance officer in a van to have “real conversations with families rather than being buried in paperwork.” Meanwhile, students who did show up received a constant stream of rewards, from locker decorations to T-shirts.

    Parent education was also important. During mandatory family orientations, the school illustrated how regular attendance matters for even young children. “We shared what a child might miss during a three-day stretch in a unit on ‘Charlotte’s Web’ — showing how easily a student could leave with a completely different understanding of the book,” said Habayeb. “This helped shift perspectives and brought urgency to the issue.”

    Kansas City: Candy and notes

    School leaders in Kansas City, Kansas, shared some tips that have worked for them during a webinar earlier this month hosted by Attendance Works. One elementary school reduced its chronic absenteeism from 55 percent in 2021 to 38 percent in 2024 by assigning all 300 students to an adult in the building, encouraging them to build an “authentic” relationship. Teachers were given a list of ideas but were free to do what seemed natural. One teacher left candy and notes on their assigned students’ desks. A preschooler proudly pasted his note, which said he was a “genius,” on the front door of his house. “The smiles kids have on their faces are amazing,” said Zaneta Boles, the principal of Silver City Elementary School. 

    When students do miss school, Boles said educators try to take a “non-blaming approach” so that families are more likely to divulge what is going on. That helps the school refer them to other community agencies for assistance. 

    Albuquerque: A shining example regroups 

    Alamosa Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was once a shining example of a school that persuaded more families to send their kids to class. Chronic absenteeism fell as low as 1 in 4 students in 2018, when The Hechinger Report wrote about the school. 

    But Alamosa has not been immune from the surge of absenteeism that has plagued schools around the nation. Chronic absenteeism spiked to 64 percent of students during the 2021-22 school year, when Covid variants were still circulating. And it remained shockingly high with 38 percent of students missing more than 10 percent of the 2024-25 school year — exactly matching the 50 percent increase in chronic absenteeism across the country since 2019.

    “We were on a roll. Then life happened,” said Daphne Strader, Albuquerque Public Schools’ director of coordinated school health, who works to reduce absenteeism.

    Strader said Alamosa and other Albuquerque schools have made some successful changes to how they’re tackling the problem. But the volume of absenteeism remains overwhelming. “There’s so many kids who have needs,” Strader said. “We need more staff on board.” 

    Related: 7 insights about chronic absenteeism, a new normal for American schools

    Strader said attendance interventions had been “too siloed” and they’re focusing more on the “whole child.” She’s encouraging schools to integrate attendance efforts with other initiatives to boost academic achievement and improve student behavior. “Students are hungry, they’re dysregulated, they don’t have grit,” said Strader, and all of these issues are contributing to absenteeism. But she also concedes that some students have more severe needs, and it’s unclear who in the system can address them.

    Her biggest advice for schools is to focus on relationships. “Relationships drive everything,” said Strader. “One of the major consequences of the pandemic was the isolation. If I feel a sense of belonging, I’m more likely to come to school.”

    *Clarification: This sentence was modified to make clear the Attendance Works executive director did not say all school leaders oppose the idea of eliminating punishments for absenteeism. 

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about how schools are tackling absenteeism was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • 7 insights about chronic absenteeism, a new normal for American schools

    7 insights about chronic absenteeism, a new normal for American schools

    Five years after the start of the pandemic, one of the most surprising ways that school has profoundly, and perhaps permanently, changed is that students aren’t showing up. Here are some insights from a May symposium at the American Enterprise Institute where scholars shared research on the problem of widespread absenteeism.  

    1. Chronic absenteeism has come down a lot from its peak in 2021-22, but it’s still 50 percent higher than it was before the pandemic.

    Roughly speaking, the chronic absenteeism rate nearly doubled after the pandemic, from 15 percent of students in 2018-19 to a peak of almost 29 percent of students in 2021-22. This is the share of students who are missing at least 10 percent, or 18 or more days, of school a year. Chronic absenteeism has dropped by about 2 to 3 percentage points a year since then, but was still at 23.5 percent in 2023-24, according to the most recent AEI data. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    Chronic absenteeism is more than 50 percent higher than it used to be. There are about 48 million public school students, from kindergarten through 12th grade. Almost 1 in 4 of them, or 11 million students, are missing a lot of school. 

    2. High-income students and high achievers are also skipping school.

    Absenteeism cuts across economic lines. Students from both low- and high-income families are often absent as are high-achieving students. Rates are the highest among students in low-income districts, where 30 percent of students are chronically absent, according to AEI data. But even in low-poverty districts, the chronic absenteeism rate has jumped more than 50 percent from about 10 percent of students to more than 15 percent of students. Similarly, more than 15 percent of students in the highest-achieving school districts (the top third) are chronically absent, up from 10 percent in pre-pandemic years.

    “Chronic absenteeism affects disadvantaged students more often, but the rise in chronic absenteeism was an unfortunate tide where all boats rose,” said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy studies at AEI.

    Related: The chronic absenteeism puzzle

    The data show strikingly large differences by race and ethnicity, with 36 percent of Black students, 33 percent of Hispanic students, 22 percent of white students, and 15 percent of Asian students chronically absent. But researchers said once they controlled for income, the racial differences were not so large. In other words, chronic absenteeism rates among Black and white students of the same income are not so disparate. 

    3. Moderate absenteeism is increasing.

    Everyone is missing more school, not just students who are frequently absent. Jacob Kirksey, an associate professor of education policy at Texas Tech University, tracked 8 million students in three states (Texas, North Carolina and Virginia) from 2017 to 2023. Half had “very good” absentee rates under 4 percent in 2019. By 2023, only a third of students were still going to school as regularly. Two-thirds were not.  

    “A lot of students who used to miss no school are now missing a couple days,” said Ethan Hutt, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who noticed the same phenomenon in the North Carolina data that he studied. “That’s just become the norm.”

    4. Many students say they skip because school is ‘boring.’

    Researchers are interviewing students and families to try to understand why so many kids are skipping school. 

    Kevin Gee, a professor of education at the University of California, Davis, analyzed surveys of elementary, middle and high school students in Rhode Island from 2016 to 2024. He found that more students are reporting missing school for traditionally common reasons: not getting enough sleep and illness. 

    After the pandemic, parents are more likely to keep their kids home from school when they get sick, but that doesn’t explain why absenteeism is this high or why physically healthy kids are also missing so much school.

    Gee found two notable post-pandemic differences among students in Rhode Island. Unfinished homework is less of a reason to skip school today than it used to be, while more elementary school students said they skipped school because “it’s boring.” 

    Researchers at the symposium debated what to do about school being boring. Some thought school lessons need to be more engaging for students who may have shorter attention spans. But others disagreed. “I think it’s OK for school to be boring,” said Liz Cohen, a research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. “We need to adjust expectations that school should be as exciting as ‘Dora the Explorer’ all the time.”

    5. Mental health issues contribute to absenteeism.

    Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, has also analyzed surveys and noticed a “strong connection” between mental health struggles and chronic absenteeism. It was unclear if the increase in mental illness was triggered or exacerbated by the pandemic, or if it reflects anxiety and depression issues that began before the pandemic. 

    He’s interviewing families and teenagers about why they’re absent, and he says he’s seeing high levels of “disengagement” and mental illness. Parents, he said, were often very concerned about their children’s mental health and well-being. 

    “Reading the transcripts of these parents and kids who are chronically absent is really difficult,” said Polikoff. “A lot of these kids have really severe traumas. Lots of very legitimate reasons for missing school. Really chronic disengagement. The school is not serving them well.”

    6. Showing up has become optional.

    Several researchers suggested that there have been profound cultural shifts about the importance of in-person anything. Seth Gershenson, an economist and associate professor of public affairs at American University, suggested that in-person school may seem optional to students in the same way that going to the office feels optional for adults.

    “Social norms about in-person attendance have changed, whether it’s meeting with the doctor or whatever,” said Gershenson, pointing out that even his graduate students are more likely to skip his classes. “We’re going to be absent now for reasons that would not have caused us to be absent in the past.” 

    At the same time, technology has made it easier for students to skip school and make up the work. They can download assignments on Google Classroom or another app, and schedule a video meeting with a classmate or even their teacher to go over what they missed. 

    Related: Tracking student data falls short in combating absenteeism at school

    “It is easier to be absent from school and make up for it,” said USC’s Polikoff. In his interviews, 39 of the 40 families said it was “easy” to make up for being absent. “People like that everything is available online and convenient. And also, there is absolutely no question in my mind that doing that — which is well-intentioned — makes it much easier for people to be absent.” 

    The numbers back that up. Gershenson calculated that before the pandemic, skipping 10 days of school caused a student to lose the equivalent of a month’s worth of learning. Now, the learning loss from this amount of absenteeism is about 10 percent less; instead of losing a month of school, it’s like losing 90 percent of a month. Gershenson said that’s still big enough to matter.

    And students haven’t felt the most severe consequence: failing. Indeed, even as absenteeism has surged, school grades and graduation rates have been rising. Many blame grade inflation and an effort to avoid a high school dropout epidemic.

    7. Today’s absenteeism could mean labor force problems tomorrow.

    Academic harm may not be the most significant consequence of today’s elevated levels of chronic absenteeism. Indeed, researchers calculated that returning to pre-pandemic levels of chronic absenteeism would erase only 7.5 percent of the nation’s pandemic learning losses. There are other more profound (and little understood) reasons for why students are so far behind. 

    More importantly, the experience of attending school regularly doesn’t just improve academic performance, researchers say. It also sets up good habits for the future. “Employers value regular attendance,” said Gershenson. He said employers he has talked to report having trouble finding reliable workers. 

    “There’s much more than test scores here,” Gershenson said. “This is a valuable personality trait. It’s part of a habit that gets formed early in school. And we’ve definitely lost some of that. And hopefully we can bring it back.”

    Next week, I’ll be writing a follow-up column about how some schools are solving the absenteeism puzzle — at least with some students — and why the old pre-pandemic playbooks for reducing absenteeism aren’t working as well anymore. 

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about chronic absenteeism was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

    Source link

  • Suddenly sacked

    Suddenly sacked

    Peggy Carr, the former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, at her Maryland home on July 1. Carr worked for the Education Department for more than 35 years before the Trump administration placed her on administrative leave on Feb. 24. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report

    Peggy Carr’s last day on the job came so abruptly that she only had time to grab a few personal photos and her coat before a security officer escorted her out of her office and into a chilly February afternoon. She still doesn’t know why she was summarily dismissed as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), where she helped build the National Assessment of Educational Progress into the influential Nation’s Report Card. NCES is the federal government’s third-largest statistical agency after the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Running it for three and a half years was the capstone of Carr’s 35-year career at the Education Department. 

    And suddenly, she was out in the cold with no explanation. 

    “I would say that what has happened is a professional tragedy, not just for me, but for all of NCES and my staff,” said Carr, 71, in a recent interview. “But for me, it really was a personal tragedy because I have spent my career helping NCES build its solid reputation as a premier statistical agency in the federal system.” 

    Carr doesn’t know if the decision to fire her came from the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or an outside policy advocate. 

    But she is clear about what was lost by the firing of the head of a nonpartisan statistical agency: an objective assessment of how American students are doing. And she finds it “ironic,” she said, that her increasingly grim reports were President Donald Trump’s public rationale for dismantling the Education Department. 

    Although Carr was the first woman and the first Black person to run NCES, her “firsts” go back decades. She joined NCES in 1993, after teaching statistics at Howard University and a stint as a statistician in the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. “I was the first person of color in NCES to ever have a managerial job, period,” said Carr. She broke a long record: The education statistical agency dates back to 1867, created in the aftermath of the Civil War as part of an effort to help the South recover during Reconstruction. She was appointed commissioner by former President Joe Biden in 2021.

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    “It’s a kill-the-messenger strategy,” she said. “We have just been the messenger of how students in this country are faring.” 

    Congress established a six-year term for the commissioner so that the job would straddle administrations and insulate statistics from politics. Carr’s term was supposed to extend through 2027, but she made history with yet another first: the first NCES commissioner to be fired by a president. 

    Carr wasn’t thinking about her gender or her race, despite the fact that three days earlier, Trump had abruptly fired another Black senior official, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Maybe they found out I was the only Biden appointee left in the department,” Carr said. “Maybe they didn’t realize that until then.”

    Carr has reason to be puzzled by her firing. She is hardly a radical. She defended standardized tests against charges that they are racist. She publicly made the case that the nation needs to pay attention to achievement gaps, even if it sometimes means putting a spotlight on the low achievement of Black and Hispanic students. “The data can reveal things about what people can do to improve it,” Carr said.

    She was dismissed on Feb. 24, more than a week before Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s Senate confirmation on March 3. The department named Carr’s deputy, Chris Chapman, to act as her replacement, but subsequently fired him in a round of mass layoffs on March 11. The agency was then leaderless until July 7, when another senior department official was told to add NCES to his responsibilities. 

    Civil servant

    In January, at the start of the second Trump administration, Carr thought her job was relatively safe. As a career civil servant, she’d worked with many Republican administrations and served as second in command under James “Lynn” Woodworth, whom Trump appointed as NCES commissioner in his first term. Both Woodworth and Carr say they had a good working relationship because they both cared about getting the numbers right. Indeed, Woodworth was so troubled and disturbed by Carr’s dismissal and the fate of the nation’s education statistics agency that he spoke out publicly, risking retaliation. 

    Even Carr’s fiercest critics, who contend she was an entrenched bureaucrat who failed to modernize the statistical service and allowed costs to balloon, condemned the humiliating way she was dismissed.

    “She deserves the nation’s gratitude and thanks” for setting up a whole system of assessments, said Mark Schneider, who served as the director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which oversees NCES, from 2018 to 2024 and as NCES commissioner from 2005 to 2008. 

    The official appointment of Peggy Carr as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics by former President Joe Biden. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report

    A landing team

    The transition seemed normal at first. A “landing team” — emissaries from the Trump transition team — arrived in mid-January and Carr briefed them three times. They asked questions about NCES’s statistical work. “They were quite pleasant, to be honest,” Carr said. “They seemed curious and interested.”

    “But that was before DOGE got there,” she said. 

    Carr released the 2024 Nation’s Report Card on Jan. 29. More students than ever lacked the most basic reading and math skills. It was front-page news across the nation.

    Days later, DOGE arrived. Still, Carr wasn’t worried. “We actually thought we were going to be OK,” Carr said. “We thought that their focus was going to be on grants, not contracts.” 

    Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more

    The Institute of Education Sciences had awarded millions of dollars in grants to professors and private-sector researchers to study ways to improve diversity and equity in the classroom — priorities that were now out of favor with the Trump team. Carr’s agency is housed under the IES umbrella, but Carr’s work didn’t touch upon any of that. 

    However, NCES has an unusual structure. Unlike other statistics agencies, NCES has never had many statisticians on staff and didn’t do much in-house statistical work. Because Congress put restrictions on its staffing levels, NCES had to rely on outside contractors to do 90 percent of the data work. Only through outside contractors was the Education Department able to measure academic achievement, count students and track university tuition costs. Its small staff of 100 primarily managed and oversaw the contracts.

    Keyword searches

    Following DOGE instructions, Carr’s team conducted keyword searches of DEI language in her agency’s contracts. “Everyone was asked to do that,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad. The chaotic part really started when questions were being asked about reductions in the contracts themselves.”

    Carr said she never had direct contact with anyone on Musk’s team, and she doesn’t even know how many of them descended upon the Education Department. Her interaction with DOGE was secondhand. Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, summoned Carr and the rest of his executive team to his office to respond to DOGE’s demands. “We met constantly, trying to figure out what DOGE wanted,” Carr said. DOGE’s orders were primarily transmitted through Jonathan Bettis, an Education Department attorney, who was experienced with procurement and contracts. It was Bettis who talked directly with the DOGE team, Carr said. 

    The main DOGE representative who took an interest in NCES was “Conor.” “I don’t know his last name,” said Carr. “My staff never saw anyone else but Conor if they saw him at all.” Conor is 32-year-old Conor Fennessy, according to several media reports. His deleted LinkedIn profile said he has a background in finance. (Fennessy has also been involved in getting access to data at Health and Human Services and spearheading cuts at the National Park Service, according to media reports.) Efforts to reach Fennessy through the Education Department and through DOGE were unsuccessful.

    “It was chaotic,” said Carr. “Bettis would tell us what DOGE wanted, and we ran away to get it done. And then things might change the next day. ‘You need to cut more.’ ‘I need to understand more about what this contract does or that contract does.’”

    It was a lot. Carr oversaw 60 data collections, some with multiple parts. “There were so many contracts and there were hundreds of lines on our acquisition plans,” she said. “It was a very complex and time-consuming task.”

    Lost in translation

    The questions kept coming. “It was like playing telephone tag when you have complicated data collections and you’re trying to explain it,” Carr said. Bettis “would sometimes not understand what my managers or I were saying about what we could cut or could not cut. And so there was this translation problem,” she said. (Efforts to reach Bettis were unsuccessful.) Eventually a couple of Carr’s managers were allowed to talk to DOGE employees directly.

    Carr said her staff begged DOGE not to cut a technology platform called EDPass, which is used by state education agencies to submit data to the federal Education Department on everything from student enrollment to graduation rates. For Carr, EDPass was a particular point of pride in her effort to modernize and process data more efficiently. EDPass slashed the time it took to release data from 20 months in 2016-17 to just four months in 2023-24. 

    Carr said DOGE did not spare EDPass. Indeed, DOGE did not spare much of NCES. 

    On Feb 10, only about a week after DOGE arrived, Carr learned that 89 of her contracts were terminated, which represented the vast majority of the statistical work that her agency conducts. “We were in shock,” said Carr. “What do you mean it’s all gone?” 

    Even its advocates concede that NCES needed reforms. The agency was slow to release data, it used some outdated collection methods and there were places where costs could be trimmed. Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said that the department, “in partnership with DOGE employees,” found contracts with overhead and administrative expenses that exceeded 50 percent, “a clear example of contractors taking advantage of the American taxpayer.”

    Piloting an old airplane

    Carr said she was never a fan of the contracting system and wished she could have built an in-house statistical agency like those at the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that would have required congressional authorization for the Education Department to increase its headcount. That never happened. Carr was piloting an old airplane, taped together through a complicated network of contracts, while attempting to modernize and fix it. She said she was trying to follow the 2022 recommendations of a National Academies panel, but it wasn’t easy. 

    The chaos continued over the next two weeks. DOGE provided guidelines for justifying the reinstatement of contracts it had just killed and Carr’s team worked long hours trying to save the data. Carr was particularly worried about preserving the interagency agreement with the Census Bureau, which was needed to calculate federal Title I allocations to high-poverty schools. Those calculations needed to be ready by June and the clock was ticking. 

    Her agency was also responsible for documenting geographic boundaries for school districts and classifying locales as urban, rural, suburban or town. Title I allocations relied on this data, as did a federal program for funding rural districts. “My staff was panicking,” said Carr. 

    The DOGE sledgehammer came just as schools were administering an important international test — the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The department was also in the midst of a national teachers and principals survey. “People were worried about what was going to happen with those,” said Carr. 

    Even though DOGE terminated the PISA contract, the contractor continued testing in schools and finished its data collection in June. But now it’s unclear who will tabulate the scores and analyze them. The Education Department disclosed in a June legal brief that it is restarting PISA. “I was told that they’re not going to do the national report, which is a little concerning to me,” Carr said. Asked for confirmation, the Education Department did not respond.

    Another widely used data collection, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS-K 2024), which tracks a cohort of students from kindergarten through elementary school, was supposed to collect its second year of data as the kindergarteners progressed to first grade. “We had to give up on that,” said Carr.

    NAEP anxiety

    Carr said that behind the scenes, her priority was to save NAEP. DOGE was demanding aggressive cuts, and she worked throughout the weekend of Feb. 22-23 with her managers and the NAEP contractors to satisfy the demands. “We thought we could cut 28 percent — I even remember the number — without cutting into critical things,” she said. “That’s what I told them I could do.”

    DOGE had been demanding 50 percent cuts to NAEP’s $185 million budget, according to several former Education Department employees. Carr could not see a way to cut that deep. The whole point of the exam is to track student achievement over time, and if too many corners were cut, it could “break the trend,” she said, making it impossible to compare the next test results in 2026 with historical scores. 

    “I am responsible in statute and I could not cut NAEP as much as they wanted to without cutting into congressionally mandated activities,” Carr said. “I told them that.” 

    Related: NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, was supposed to be safe. It’s not

    While Carr and DOGE remained far apart in negotiations over cost, a security officer appeared at her office door at 3:50 p.m. on Feb. 24. Carr remembers the exact time because colleagues were waiting at her door to join her for a 4 p.m. Zoom meeting with the chair of the board that oversees NAEP.

    The security officer closed the door to her office so he could tell her privately that he was there to escort her out. He said she had 15 minutes to leave. “Escort me where? What do you mean?” Carr asked. “I was in shock. I wasn’t even quite understanding what he was asking, to be honest.”

    The security officer told her about an email saying she was put on administrative leave. Carr checked her inbox. It was there, sent within the previous hour.

    The security officer “was very nice,” she said. “He refused to call me Peggy,” and addressed her as Dr. Carr. “He helped me collect my things, and I left.” He opened the doors for her and walked her to her car.

    “I had no idea that this was going to happen, so it was shocking and unexpected,” Carr said. “I was working like I do every other day, a busy day where every minute is filled with something.” 

    She said she’s asked the department why she was dismissed so abruptly, but has not received a response. The Education Department said it does not comment to the public on its personnel actions. 

    Packing via Zoom

    Two days later, Carr returned to pick up other belongings. Via Zoom, Carr’s staff had gone through her office with her — 35 years worth of papers and memorabilia — and packed up so many boxes that Carr had to bring a second car, an SUV. 

    When Carr and her husband arrived, she said, “there were all these people waiting in the front of the building cheering me on. The men helped me put the things in my husband’s car and my car. It was a real tearjerker. And that was before they would be dismissed. They didn’t know they would be next.”

    Less than two weeks later, on March 11, most of Carr’s staff — more than 90 NCES staffers — was fired. Only three remained. “I thought maybe they just made a mistake, that it was going to be a ‘whoops moment’ like with the bird flu scientists or the people overseeing the weapons arsenal,” Carr said.

    The fate of NCES remains uncertain. The Education Department says that it is restarting and reassessing some of the data collections that DOGE terminated, but the scope of the work might be much smaller. Carr says it will take years to understand the full extent of the damage. Carr was slated to issue a statement about her thoughts on NCES on July 14.

    The damage

    The immediate problem is that there aren’t enough personnel to do the work that Congress mandates. So far, NCES has missed an annual deadline for delivering a statistical report to Congress — a deadline NCES had “never, ever missed” in its history, Carr said — and failed to release the 2024 NAEP science test scores in June because there was no commissioner to sign off on them. But the department managed to calculate the Title I allocations to high-poverty schools “in the nick of time,” Carr said.

    In addition to the collection of fresh data, Carr is concerned about the maintenance of historical datasets. When DOGE canceled the contracts, Carr counted that NCES had 550 datasets scattered in different locations. NCES doesn’t have its own data warehouse and Carr was trying to corral and store the datasets. She’s worried about protecting privacy and student confidentiality. 

    An Education Department official said that this data is safe and will soon be transferred to IES’s secure servers. 

    Peggy Carr holds artwork made by a former colleague at the National Center for Education Statistics. NAEP stands for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which Carr helped build into the influential barometer of how American students are faring. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report

    In the meantime, Carr says she plans to stay involved in education statistics — but from the outside. “With this administration wanting to push education down to the states, there are opportunities that I see in my next chapter,” Carr said. She said she’s been talking with states and school districts about calculating where they rank on an international yardstick.

    Carr is in close touch with her former team. In May, 50 of them gathered at a church in Virginia to commiserate. A senior statistician gave Carr a homespun plaque of glued blue buttons spelling the letters NAEP with a shiny gold star above it. It was a fitting gift. NAEP is regarded as the best designed test in the country, the gold standard. Carr built that reputation, and now it has gone home with her.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about Peggy Carr was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • Release of NAEP science scores

    Release of NAEP science scores

    UPDATE: After this story was published, the Education Department issued a press release Monday afternoon, July 7, announcing that Matthew Soldner will serve as acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, in addition to his role as acting director of the Institute of Education Sciences. The job of statistics chief had been vacant since March and had prevented the release of assessment results.

    The repercussions from the decimation of staff at the Education Department keep coming. Last week, the fallout led to a delay in releasing results from a national science test.

    The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is best known for tests that track reading and math achievement but includes other subjects, too. In early 2024, when the main reading and math tests were administered, there was also a science section for eighth graders. 

    The board that oversees NAEP had announced at its May meeting that it planned to release the science results in June. But that month has since come and gone. 

    Why the delay? There is no commissioner of education statistics to sign off on the score report, a requirement before it is released, according to five current and former officials who are familiar with the release of NAEP scores, but asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press or feared retaliation. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    Peggy Carr, a Biden administration appointee, was dismissed as the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics in February, two years before the end of her six-year term set by Congress. Chris Chapman was named acting commissioner, but he was fired in March, along with half the employees at the Education Department. The role has remained vacant since.

    A spokesman for the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP,  said the science scores will be released later this summer, but denied that the lack of a commissioner is the obstacle. “The report building is proceeding so the naming of a commissioner is not a bureaucratic hold-up to its progress,” Stephaan Harris said by email.

    The delay matters. Education policymakers have been keen to learn if science achievement had held steady after the pandemic or tumbled along with reading and math. (Those reading and math scores were released in January.)

    The Trump administration has vowed to dismantle the Education Department and did not respond to an emailed question about when a new commissioner would be appointed. 

    Related: Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3

    Researchers hang onto data

    Keeping up with administration policy can be head-spinning these days. Education researchers were notified in March that they would have to relinquish federal data they were using for their studies. (The department shares restricted datasets, which can include personally identifiable information about students, with approved researchers.) 

    But researchers learned on June 30 that the department had changed its mind and decided not to terminate this remote access. 

    Lawyers who are suing the Trump administration on behalf of education researchers heralded this about-face as a “big win.” Researchers can now finish projects in progress. 

    Still, researchers don’t have a way of publishing or presenting papers that use this data. Since the mass firings in mid-March, there is no one remaining inside the Education Department to review their papers for any inadvertent disclosure of student data, a required step before public release. And there is no process at the moment for researchers to request data access for future studies. 

    “While ED’s change-of-heart regarding remote access is welcome,” said Adam Pulver of Public Citizen Litigation Group, “other vital services provided by the Institute of Education Sciences have been senselessly, illogically halted without consideration of the impact on the nation’s educational researchers and the education community more broadly.  We will continue to press ahead with our case as to the other arbitrarily canceled programs.”

    Pulver is the lead attorney for one of three suits fighting the Education Department’s termination of research and statistics activities. Judges in the District of Columbia and Maryland have denied researchers a preliminary injunction to restore the research and data cuts. But the Maryland case is now fast-tracked and the court has asked the Trump administration to produce an administrative record of its decision-making process by July 11. (See this previous story for more background on the court cases.)

    Related: Education researchers sue Trump administration, testing executive power

    Some NSF grants restored in California

    Just as the Education Department is quietly restarting some activities that DOGE killed, so is the National Science Foundation (NSF). The federal science agency posted on its website that it had reinstated 114 awards to 45 institutions as of June 30. NSF said it was doing so to comply with a federal court order to reinstate awards to all University of California researchers. It was unclear how many of these research projects concerned education, one of the major areas that NSF funds.

    Researchers and universities outside the University of California system are hoping for the same reversal. In June, the largest professional organization of education researchers, the American Educational Research Association, joined forces with a large coalition of organizations and institutions in filing a legal challenge to the mass termination of grants by the NSF. Education grants were especially hard hit in a series of cuts in April and May. Democracy Forward, a public interest law firm, is spearheading this case.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about delaying the NAEP science score report was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • Education Department reinstates some research and data activities

    Education Department reinstates some research and data activities

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon has repeatedly said that the February and March cancellations and firings at her department cut not only the “fat” but also into some of the “muscle” of the federal role in education. So, even as she promises to dismantle her department, she is also bringing back some people and restarting some activities. Court filings and her own congressional testimony illuminate what this means for the agency as a whole, and for education research in particular. 

    McMahon told a U.S. House committee last month she rehired 74 employees out of the roughly 2,000 who were laid off or agreed to separation packages. A court filing earlier this month says the agency will revive about a fifth of research and statistics contracts killed earlier this year, at least for now, though that doesn’t mean the work will look exactly as it did before.  

    The Trump administration disclosed in a June 5 federal court filing in Maryland that it either has or is planning to reinstate 20 of 101 terminated contracts to comply with congressional statutes. More than half of the reversals will restart 10 regional education laboratories that the Trump administration had said were engaged in “wasteful and ideologically driven spending,” but had been very popular with state education leaders. The reinstatements also include an international assessment, a study of how to help struggling readers, and Datalab, a web-based data analysis tool for the public. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    Even some of the promised reinstatements are uncertain because the Education Department plans to put some of them up for new bids (see table below). That process could take months and potentially result in smaller contracts with fewer studies or hours of technical assistance. 

    These research activities were terminated by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) before McMahon was confirmed by the Senate. The Education Department’s disclosure of the reinstatements occurred a week after President Donald Trump bid farewell to Musk in the Oval Office and on the same day that the Trump-Musk feud exploded on social media. 

    See which IES contracts have been or are slated to be restarted, or under consideration for reinstatement
    Description Status
    1 Regional Education Laboratory – Mid Atlantic Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    2 Regional Education Laboratory – Southwest Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    3 Regional Education Laboratory – Northwest Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    4 Regional Education Laboratory – West Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    5 Regional Education Laboratory – Appalachia Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    6 Regional Education Laboratory – Pacific Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    7 Regional Education Laboratory – Central Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    8 Regional Education Laboratory – Midwest Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    9 Regional Education Laboratory – Southeast Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    10 Regional Education Laboratory – Northeast and Islands Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    11 Regional Education Laboratory – umbrella support contract Intends to seek new bids and restart contract
    12 What Works Clearinghouse (website, training reviewers, but no reviewing of education research) Approved for reinstatement
    13 Statistical standards and data confidentiality technical assistance for the National Center for Education Statistics Reinstated
    14.  Statistical and confidentiality review of electronic data files and technical reports Approved for reinstatement
    15 Datalab, a web-based data analysis tool for the public Approved for reinstatement
    16 U.S. participation in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international test overseen by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Reinstated
    17 Data quality and statistical methodology assistance Reinstated
    18 EDFacts, a  collection of administrative data from school districts around the country Reinstated
    19 Demographic and geospatial estimates (e.g. school poverty and school locations) used for academic research and federal program administration Approved for reinstatement
    20 Evaluation of the Multi-tiered System of Supports in reading, an approach to help struggling students Approved for reinstatement
    21 Implementation of the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program and feasibility of conducting an impact evaluation of it.  Evaluating whether to restart
    22 Policy-relevant findings for the National Evaluation of Career and Technical Education Evaluating whether to restart
    23 The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (how students finance college, college graduation rates and workforce outcomes) Evaluating whether to restart
    24 Additional higher ed studies Evaluating whether to restart
    25 Publication assistance on educational topics and the annual report Evaluating whether to restart
    26 Conducting peer review of applications, manuscripts and grant competitions at the Institute of Education Sciences Evaluating whether to restart

    The Education Department press office said it had no comment beyond what was disclosed in the legal brief. 

    Education researchers, who are suing the Trump administration to restore all of its previous research and statistical activities, were not satisfied.

    Elizabeth Tipton, president of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) said the limited reinstatement is “upsetting.” “They’re trying to make IES as small as they possibly can,” she said, referring to the Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research and data arm. 

    SREE and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) are suing McMahon and the Education Department in the Maryland case. The suit asks for a temporary reinstatement of all the contracts and the rehiring of IES employees while the courts adjudicate the broader constitutional issue of whether the Trump administration violated congressional statutes and exceeded its executive authority.

    The 20 reinstatements were not ordered by the court, and in some instances, the Education Department is voluntarily restarting only a small slice of a research activity, making it impossible to produce anything meaningful for the public. For example, the department said it is reinstating a contract for operating the What Works Clearinghouse, a website that informs schools about evidence-based teaching practices. But, in the legal brief, the department disclosed that it is not planning to reinstate any of the contracts to produce new content for the site. 

    Related: Education researchers sue Trump administration, testing executive power

    In the brief, the administration admitted that congressional statues mention a range of research and data collection activities. But the lawyers argued that the legislative language often uses the word may instead of must, or notes that evaluations of education programs should be done “as time and resources allow.” 

    “Read together, the Department has wide discretion in whether and which evaluations to undertake,” the administration lawyers wrote. 

    The Trump administration argued that as long as it has at least one contract in place, it is technically fulfilling a congressional mandate. For example, Congress requires that the Education Department participate in international assessments. That is why it is now restarting the contract to administer the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), but not other international assessments that the country has participated in, such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).

    The administration argued that researchers didn’t make a compelling case that they would be irreparably harmed if many contracts were not restarted. “There is no harm alleged from not having access to as-yet uncreated data,” the lawyers wrote.

    One of the terminated contracts was supposed to help state education agencies create longitudinal data systems for tracking students from pre-K to the workforce. The department’s brief says that states, not professional associations of researchers, should sue to restore those contracts. 

    Related: DOGE’s death blow to education studies

    In six instances, the administration said it was evaluating whether to restart a study. For example, the legal brief says that because Congress requires the evaluation of literacy programs, the department is considering a reinstatement of a study of the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program. But lawyers said there was no urgency to restart it because there is no deadline for evaluations in the legislative language.

    In four other instances, the Trump administration said it wasn’t feasible to restart a study, despite congressional requirements. For example, Congress mandates that the Education Department identify and evaluate promising adult education strategies. But after terminating such a study in February, the Education Department admitted that it is now too difficult to restart it. The department also said it could not easily restart two studies of math curricula in low-performing schools. One of the studies called for the math program to be implemented in the first year and studied in the second year, which made it especially difficult to restart. A fourth study the department said it could not restart would have evaluated the effectiveness of extra services to help teens with disabilities transition from high school to college or work. When DOGE pulled the plug on that study, those teens lost those services too. 

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about the reinstatement of education statistics and research was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • Education researchers lose to Trump administration in first round of court challenge

    Education researchers lose to Trump administration in first round of court challenge

    The courts have pushed back against much of President Donald Trump’s agenda, but he did win a small victory this week in a dispute with education researchers.

    On June 3, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., denied a request by four education research trade associations for a preliminary injunction, which means that the Education Department doesn’t have to temporarily reinstate fired employees and canceled contracts within its research and data arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.

    Researchers had hoped to return the research division to its pre-Trump status while the court takes time to decide the overall issue in the case, which is whether the Trump administration exceeded its executive authority in these mass firings and contract terminations. Now, the cuts in the research arm of the department will remain while the case proceeds. 

    Four education research groups (the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), the National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME)) are suing the Education Department because their federally funded studies, evaluations and surveys have been slashed and their access to data is slated to be curtailed. They also contend that historical data archives are at risk, along with future data quality. Their legal argument is that the cuts were arbitrary and capricious and they say that the Trump administration eliminated many activities that Congress requires by law.

    Related: Education researchers sue Trump administration, testing executive power

    U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden acknowledged that the “upheaval” at the Institute of Education Sciences is “understandably jarring for those who rely on studies and data produced by the Institute.” However, McFadden explained in a written opinion that the law that the researchers are using to sue the executive branch, the Administrative Procedure Act, was “never meant to be a bureaucratic windbreak insulating agencies from political gales.”

    “It is not this Court’s place to breathe life back into wide swathes of the Institute’s cancelled programs and then monitor the agency’s day-to-day statutory compliance,” McFadden wrote.

    In the opinion, McFadden noted that some of the researchers’ complaints, such as losing remote access to student data for research purposes, may be “ripe for standalone challenges,” but bundling all of their grievances together is a “losing gambit.”

    The ruling not only denied researchers the short-term remedy they sought but also cast doubt on the prospects of their overall case. “We are disappointed with and disagree with the Court’s decision, and are evaluating our next steps,” said Adam Pulver, an attorney at Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy organization representing two of the research organizations.

    A federal judge in Maryland is still considering a similar request to temporarily restore research-related cuts at the Education Department by two other education research groups. That suit, which also accuses the Trump administration of exceeding its executive power, was brought by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE). 

    Educators fighting the cuts have had one victory so far, in a separate case filed in federal district court in Boston. On May 22, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun ordered the Trump administration to reinstate 1,300 Education Department employees terminated in March. The Trump administration is challenging the decision, but the court said on June 4 that the Education Department couldn’t postpone rehiring everyone while the appeal works its way through the courts. This case was brought by two Massachusetts school districts, a teachers union and 21 Democratic attorneys general. 

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about education researchers suing the Trump administration was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • Trump cuts could expose student data to cyber threats

    Trump cuts could expose student data to cyber threats

    When hackers hit a school district, they can expose Social Security numbers, home addresses, and even disability and disciplinary records. Now, cybersecurity advocates warn that the Trump administration’s budget and personnel cuts, along with rule changes, are stripping away key defenses that schools need.

    “Cyberattacks on schools are escalating and just when we need federal support the most, it’s being pulled away,” said Keith Krueger, chief executive officer of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of technology officials in K-12 schools. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    The stakes are high. Schools are a top target in ransomware attacks, and cyber criminals have sometimes succeeded in shutting down whole school districts. The largest such incident occurred in December, when hackers stole personal student and teacher data from PowerSchool, a company that runs student information systems and stores report cards. The theft included data from more than 60 million students and almost 10 million teachers. PowerSchool paid an undisclosed ransom, but the criminals didn’t stop. Now, in a second round of extortion, the same cyber criminals are demanding ransoms from school districts.  

    The federal government has been stepping up efforts to help schools, particularly since a 2022 cyberattack on the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest. Now this urgently needed assistance is under threat. 

    Warning service

    Of chief concern is a cybersecurity service known as MS-ISAC, which stands for Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center. It warns more than 5,700 schools around the country that have signed up for the service about malware and other threats and recommends security patches. This technical service is free to schools, but is funded by an annual congressional appropriation of $27 million through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security.

    On March 6, the Trump administration announced a $10 million funding cut as part of broader budget and staffing cuts throughout CISA. That was ultimately negotiated down to $8.3 million, but the service still lost more than half of its remaining $15.7 budget for the year. The non-profit organization that runs it, the Center for Internet Services, is digging into its reserves to keep it operating. But those funds are expected to run out in the coming weeks, and it is unclear how the service will continue operating without charging user fees to schools. 

    “Many districts don’t have the budget or resources to do this themselves, so not having access to the no cost services we offer is a big issue,” said Kelly Lynch Wyland, a spokeswoman for the Center for Internet Services.  

    Sharing threat information

    Another concern is the effective disbanding of the Government Coordinating Council, which helps schools address ransomware attacks and other threats through policy advice, including how to respond to ransom requests, whom to inform when an attack happens and good practices for preventing attacks. This coordinating council was formed only a year ago by the Department of Education and CISA. It brings together 13 nonprofit school organizations representing superintendents, state education leaders, technology officers and others. The council met frequently after the PowerSchool data breach to share information. 

    Now, amid the second round of extortions, school leaders have not been able to meet because of a change in rules governing open meetings. The group was originally exempt from meeting publicly because it was discussing critical infrastructure threats. But the Department of Homeland Security, under the Trump administration, reinstated open meeting rules for certain advisory committees, including this one. That makes it difficult to speak frankly about efforts to thwart criminal activity.

    Non-governmental organizations are working to resurrect the council, but it would be in a diminished form without government participation.

    “The FBI really comes in when there’s been an incident to find out who did it, and they have advice on whether you should pay or not pay your ransom,” said Krueger of the school network consortium. 

    A federal role

    A third concern is the elimination in March of the education Department’s Office of Educational Technology. This seven-person office dealt with education technology policies — including cybersecurity. It issued cybersecurity guidance to schools and held webinars and meetings to explain how schools could improve and shore up their defenses. It also ran a biweekly meeting to talk about K-12 cybersecurity across the Education Department, including offices that serve students with disabilities and English learners. 

    Eliminating this office has hampered efforts to decide which security controls, such as encryption or multi-factor authentication, should be in educational software and student information systems. 

    Many educators worry that without this federal coordination, student privacy is at risk. “My biggest concern is all the data that’s up in the cloud,” said Steve Smith, the founder of the Student Data Privacy Consortium and the former chief information officer for Cambridge Public Schools in Massachusetts. “Probably 80 to 90 percent of student data isn’t on school-district controlled services. It’s being shared with ed tech providers and hosted on their information systems.”

    Security controls

    “How do we ensure that those third-party providers are providing adequate security against breaches and cyber attacks?” said Smith. “The office of ed tech was trying to bring people together to move toward an agreed upon national standard. They weren’t going to mandate a data standard, but there were efforts to bring people together and start having conversations about the expected minimum controls.”

    That federal effort ended, Smith said, with the new administration. But his consortium is still working on it. 

    In an era when policymakers are seeking to decrease the federal government’s involvement in education, arguing for a centralized, federal role may not be popular. But there’s long been a federal role for student data privacy, including making sure that school employees don’t mishandle and accidentally expose students’ personal information. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, commonly known as FERPA, protects student data. The Education Department continues to provide technical assistance to schools to comply with this law. Advocates for school cybersecurity say that the same assistance is needed to help schools prevent and defend against cyber crimes.

    “We don’t expect every town to stand up their own army to protect themselves against China or Russia,” said Michael Klein, senior director for preparedness and response at the Institute for Security and Technology, a nonpartisan think tank. Klein was a senior advisor for cybersecurity in the Education Department during the previous administration. “In the same way, I don’t think we should expect every school district to stand up their own cyber-defense army to protect themselves against ransomware attacks from major criminal groups.” 

    And it’s not financially practical. According to the school network consortium only a third of school districts have a full-time employee or the equivalent dedicated to cybersecurity. 

    Budget storms ahead

    Some federal programs to help schools with cybersecurity are still running. The Federal Communications Commission launched a $200 million pilot program to support cybersecurity efforts by schools and libraries. FEMA funds cybersecurity for state and local governments, which includes public schools. Through these funds, schools can obtain phishing training and malware detection. But with budget battles ahead, many educators fear these programs could also be cut. 

    Perhaps the biggest risk is the end to the entire E-Rate program that helps schools pay for the internet access. The Supreme Court is slated to decide this term on whether the funding structure is an unconstitutional tax.

    “If that money goes away, they’re going to have to pull money from somewhere,” said Smith of the Student Data Privacy Consortium. “They’re going to try to preserve teaching and learning, as they should.  Cybersecurity budgets are things that are probably more likely to get cut.

    “It’s taken a long time to get to the point where we see privacy and cybersecurity as critical pieces,” Smith said. “I would hate for us to go back a few years and not be giving them the attention they should.”

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about student cybersecurity was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • What happens to reading comprehension when students focus on the main idea

    What happens to reading comprehension when students focus on the main idea

    Why do so many students struggle to understand what they read, even after they learn how to read? 

    That’s a topic of hot debate among reading researchers. One camp has been arguing that schools have been going about it all wrong. These critics say that instead of drilling students on the main idea (similar to questions students will see on annual state exams), teachers should spend more time building students’ background knowledge of the world. 

    The theory is that the more familiar students are with science, history, geography and even art, the easier it will be for students to grasp new ideas when reading. Many educators are embracing this theory, and knowledge building lessons have been spreading rapidly across the country, from Baltimore to Mississippi to Colorado. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    But the evidence for this approach is still emerging, and some reading researchers urge caution. They worry that sometimes, too much time is being spent on background knowledge rather than actually reading and discussing texts. These skeptics argue students aren’t going to magically understand what they are reading just from knowing more about the world, and they need to be explicitly taught how to identify the main idea and how to summarize. 

    Debates like this are common in education as new research addresses unresolved issues, such as exactly how to teach reading once students have learned phonics and how to decode the words on the page. 

    “Early research showed that background knowledge plays a part,” said Kausalai Wijekumar, a professor of education at Texas A&M University, who has been studying reading instruction and recently produced a study that sheds more light on the debate. “People with good background knowledge seem to be able to read faster and understand quicker.”

    For some children, particularly children from affluent families, she said, background knowledge is “enough” to unlock reading comprehension, but not for all. “If we want all the children to read, we have proven that they can be taught with the right strategies,” said Wijekumar. She has a body of research to back her position.

    Wijekumar agrees that drilling students on the main point or the author’s purpose isn’t helpful because a struggling reader cannot come up with a point or a purpose from thin air. (She’s also not a fan of highlighting key words or graphic organizers, both common strategies for reading comprehension in schools.) Instead, Wijekumar advocates for a step-by-step process, conceived in the 1970s by her mentor and research partner, Bonnie J.F. Meyer, a professor emeritus at Penn State. 

    The first step is to guide students through a series of questions as they read, such as “Is there a problem?” “What caused it?” and  “Is there a solution?” Based on their answers, students can then decide which structure the passage follows: cause and effect, problem and solution, comparisons or a sequence. Next, students fill in blanks — like in a Mad Libs worksheet — to help create a main idea statement. And finally, they practice expanding on that idea with relevant details to form a summary. 

    Related: The buzz around teaching facts to boost reading is bigger than the evidence for it

    Wijekumar analyzed the story of Cinderella for me, using her approach. The problem? Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters. We learn this because she’s forced to do extra chores and isn’t allowed to attend the ball. The cause of the problem? They’re jealous of her. That’s why they take away her pretty clothes. Finally, the solution: A fairy godmother helps Cinderella go to the ball and meet Prince Charming. Students can then put all these elements together to come up with the main idea: Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters because they are jealous of her, but a fairy godmother saves her.

    It’s a formulaic approach and there are certainly other ways of seeing or expressing the main idea. I wouldn’t have analyzed Cinderella that way. I would have guessed it’s a story about never giving up on your dreams even if your life is wretched now. But Wijekumar says it’s a helpful start for students who struggle the most. 

    “It’s very structured and systematic, and that provides a strong foundation,” Wijekumar said. “This is just the starting point. You can take it and layer on more things, but 99 percent of the children are having difficulty just starting.”

    Wijekumar transformed Meyer’s strategy into a computerized tutor called ITSS, which stands for Intelligent Tutoring using the Structure Strategy. About 200,000 students around the world use ITSS. Wijekumar’s nonprofit, Literacy.IO, charges schools $40 a student plus teacher training, which can run $800 per teacher, depending on school size. 

    The tutor allows students to practice reading comprehension at their own pace. ITSS was one of only three online learning technologies that demonstrated clear evidence for improving student achievement, according to a February 2021 report by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Education. 

    Related: Reading comprehension loses out in the classroom

    Since then, Wijekumar has continued to refine her reading program and test it with more students. Her most recent study, a large-scale replication in high poverty schools, was highly successful according to one yardstick, but not so successful, according to another measure. It was published last year in the Journal of Educational Psychology.  

    A team of six researchers led by Wijekumar randomly assigned 17 of 33 schools in the Northeast and along the Texas border to teach reading with ITSS, while the remaining 16 schools taught reading as usual. More than 1,200 fifth graders practiced their reading comprehension using ITSS for 45 minutes a week over six months. Their teachers received 16 hours of training in how to teach reading comprehension this way and also delivered traditional analog reading lessons to their students. 

    After six months, students who received this reading instruction posted significantly higher scores on a researcher-designed assessment, which measured students’ ability to write main ideas, recall key information and understand text structures. However, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups on a standardized test, the Gray Silent Reading Test (GSRT), which measured students’ general reading comprehension. The researchers did not report state test scores. 

    Earlier studies with wealthier students showed improvements on the standardized reading comprehension test. It’s hard to make sense of why this study showed giant benefits using one measure, but none using another. 

    Substantial changes in the instruction were needed for these high-poverty students. Some were such weak readers that Wijekumar’s team had to draft easier texts so that students could practice the method. But the biggest change was 14 hours of additional teacher training and the creation of instructional guides for the teachers. Wijekumar’s strategies directly contradicted what their schools’ textbooks told them to do. At first, the students were confused with the teachers teaching them one way and ITSS another. So Wijekumar worked with the teachers to scrap their textbook instructions and teach her way.

    I consulted with Marissa Filderman, a respected reading expert who has reviewed the literature on comprehension instruction for children who struggle with reading and is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. She said despite the imperfect evidence from this study, she sees Wijekumar’s body of research as evidence that explicit strategy instruction is important along with building background knowledge and vocabulary. But it’s still an evolving science, and the research isn’t yet clear enough to guide teachers on how much time to spend on each aspect.

    Improving reading comprehension is critical, and I’ll be watching for new research to help answer these questions for teachers. 

    Shirley Liu contributed reporting. 

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about teaching the main idea was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • Three-fourths of NSF funding cuts hit education

    Three-fourths of NSF funding cuts hit education

    The outlook for federal spending on education research continues to be grim. 

    That became clear last week with more cutbacks to education grants and mass firings at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent federal agency that supports both research and education in science, engineering and math.

    A fourth round of cutbacks took place on May 9. NSF observers were still trying to piece together the size and scope of this wave of destruction. A division focused on equity in education was eliminated and all its employees were fired. And the process for reviewing and approving future research grants was thrown into chaos with the elimination of division directors who were stripped of their powers.

    Meanwhile, there was more clarity surrounding a third round of cuts that took place a week earlier on May 2. That round terminated more than 330 grants, raising the total number of terminated grants to at least 1,379, according to Grant Watch, a new project launched to track the Trump administration’s termination of grants at scientific research agencies. All but two of the terminated grants in early May were in the education division, and mostly targeted efforts to promote equity by increasing the participation of women and Black and Hispanic students in STEM fields. The number of active grants by the Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM within the education directorate was slashed almost in half, from 902 research grants to 461.

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    Combined with two earlier rounds of NSF cuts at in April, education now accounts for more than half of the nearly 1,400 terminated grants and almost three-quarters of their $1 billion value. Those dollars will no longer flow to universities and research organizations. 

    Cuts to STEM education dominate NSF grant terminations

    Source: Grant Watch, May 7, 2025 https://grant-watch.us/nsf-summary-2025-05-07.html

    More than half the terminated grants…

    … and nearly three-quarters of their $1 billion value are in education 

    Data source: Grant Watch, May 7, 2025. Charts by Jill Barshay/The Hechinger Report

    The cuts are being felt across the nation. Grant Watch also created a map of the United States, showing that both red and blue states are losing federal research dollars. 

    Source: Grant Watch, May 7, 2025 

    It remains unclear exactly how NSF is choosing which grants to cancel and exactly who is making the decisions. Weekly waves of cuts began after the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE entered NSF headquarters in mid April. Only 40 percent of the terminated grants were also in a database of 3,400 research grants compiled last year by Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican. Cruz characterized them as “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.” Sixty percent were not on the Cruz list.

    Source: Grant Watch, May 7, 2025 

    Other NSF cuts also affect education. Earlier this year, NSF cut in half the number of new students that it would support through graduate school from 2,000 to 1,000. Universities are bracing to hear this summer if NSF will continue to support graduate students who are already a part of its graduate research fellowship program. 

    Related: Education research takes another hit in latest DOGE attack

    Developing story

    NSF watchers were still compiling a list of the research grants that were terminated on May 9, the date of the most recent fourth round of research cuts. It was unclear if any research grants to promote equity in STEM education remained active.

    The Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM, a unit of the Education Directorate, was “sunset,” according to a May 9 email sent to NSF employees and obtained by the Hechinger Report, and all of its employees were fired. According to the email, this “reduction in force” is slated to be completed by July 12. However, later on May 9, a federal judge in San Francisco temporarily blocked the Trump administration from implementing its “reduction in force” firings of federal employees at the NSF and 19 other agencies.

    Several congressionally mandated programs are housed within the eliminated equity division, including Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) and the Eddie Bernice Johnson initiative, which promotes STEM participation for students with disabilities.

    The process for reviewing and approving new grant awards was thrown into chaos with the elimination of all NSF division directors, a group of middle managers who were stripped of their powers on May 8. In addition, NSF slashed its ranks of its most senior executives and its visiting scientists, engineers and educators. That leaves many leadership positions at NSF uncertain, including the head of the entire education directorate.

    Legal update

    An initial hearing for a group of three legal cases by education researchers against the Department of Education is scheduled for May 16.  At the hearing, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., will hear arguments over whether the court should temporarily restore terminated research studies and data collections and bring back fired Education Department employees while it considers whether the Trump administration exceeded its executive authority. 

    A first hearing scheduled for May 9 was postponed. At the May 16 hearing, the court will hear two similar motions from two different cases: one filed by the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) and the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), and the other filed by National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). A third suit by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) was filed in federal court in Maryland and will not be part of the May 16 hearing.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about NSF education cuts was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • Education researchers sue Trump administration, testing executive power

    Education researchers sue Trump administration, testing executive power

    UPDATE: The hearing scheduled for May 9 has been postponed until May 16 at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The court will hear two similar motions at the same time and consider whether to temporarily restore the cuts to research and data collections and bring back fired federal workers at the Education Department. More details on the underlying cases in the article below.

    Some of the biggest names in education research — who often oppose each other in scholarly and policy debates — are now united in their desire to fight the cuts to data and scientific studies at the U.S. Department of Education.

    The roster includes both Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, the first head of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) who initiated studies for private school vouchers, and Sean Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist who studies inequity in education. They are just two of the dozens of scholars who have submitted declarations to the courts against the department and Secretary Linda McMahon. They describe how their work has been harmed and argue that the cuts will devastate education research.

    Professional organizations representing the scholars are asking the courts to restore terminated research and data and reverse mass firings at the Institute of Education Sciences, the division that collects data on students and schools, awards research grants, highlights effective practices and measures student achievement. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    Three major suits were filed last month in U.S. federal courts, each brought by two different professional organizations. The six groups are the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), American Educational Research Association (AERA), Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE), National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). The American Educational Research Association alone represents 25,000 researchers and there is considerable overlap in membership among the professional associations. 

    Prominent left-wing and progressive legal organizations spearheaded the suits and are representing the associations. They are Public Citizen, Democracy Forward and the Legal Defense Fund, which was originally founded by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) but is an independent legal organization. Allison Scharfstein, an attorney for the Legal Defense Fund, said education data is critical to documenting educational disparities and improve education for Black and Hispanic students. “We know that the data is needed for educational equity,” Scharfstein said.

    Related: Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3

    Officers at the research associations described the complex calculations in suing the government, mindful that many of them work at universities that are under attack by the Trump administration and that its members are worried about retaliation.  

    “A situation like this requires a bit of a leap of faith,” said Elizabeth Tipton, president of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness and a statistician at Northwestern University. “We were reminded that we are the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, and that this is an existential threat. If the destruction that we see continues, we won’t exist, and our members won’t exist. This kind of research won’t exist. And so the board ultimately decided that the tradeoffs were in our favor, in the sense that whether we won or we lost, that we had to stand up for this.”

    The three suits are similar in that they all contend that the Trump administration exceeded its executive authority by eliminating activities Congress requires by law. Private citizens or organizations are generally barred from suing the federal government, which enjoys legal protection known as “sovereign immunity.” But under the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, private organizations can ask the courts to intervene when executive agencies have acted arbitrarily, capriciously and not in accordance with the law. The suits point out, for example, that the Education Science Reform Act of 2002 specifically requires the Education Department to operate Regional Education Laboratories and conduct longitudinal and special data collections, activities that the Education Department eliminated in February among a mass cancelation of projects. 

    Related: DOGE’s death blow to education studies

    The suits argue that it is impossible for the Education Department to carry out its congressionally required duties, such as the awarding of grants to study and identify effective teaching practices, after the March firing of almost 90 percent of the IES staff and the suspension of panels to review grant proposals. The research organizations argue that their members and the field of education research will be irreparably harmed. 

    Of immediate concern are two June deadlines. Beginning June 1, researchers are scheduled to lose remote access to restricted datasets, which can include personally identifiable information about students. The suits contend that loss harms the ability of researchers to finish projects in progress and plan future studies. The researchers say they are also unable to publish or present studies that use this data because there is no one remaining inside the Education Department to review their papers for any inadvertent disclosure of student data.

    The second concern is that the termination of more than 1,300 Education Department employees will become final by June 10. Technically, these employees have been on administrative leave since March, and lawyers for the education associations are concerned that it will be impossible to rehire these veteran statisticians and research experts for congressionally required tasks. 

    The suits describe additional worries. Outside contractors are responsible for storing historical datasets because the Education Department doesn’t have its own data warehouse, and researchers are worried about who will maintain this critical data in the months and years ahead now that the contracts have been canceled. Another concern is that the terminated contracts for research and surveys include clauses that will force researchers to delete data about their subjects. “Years of work have gone into these studies,” said Dan McGrath, an attorney at Democracy Forward, who is involved in one of the three suits. “At some point it won’t be possible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” 

    Related: Education research takes another hit in latest DOGE attack

    In all three of the suits, lawyers have asked the courts for a preliminary injunction to reverse the cuts and firings, temporarily restoring the studies and bringing federal employees back to the Education Department to continue their work while the judges take more time to decide whether the Trump administration exceeded its authority. A first hearing on a temporary injunction is scheduled on Friday in federal district court in Washington.*

    A lot of people have been waiting for this. In February, when DOGE first started cutting non-ideological studies and data collections at the Education Department, I wondered why Congress wasn’t protesting that its laws were being ignored. And I was wondering where the research community was. It was so hard to get anyone to talk on the record. Now these suits, combined with Harvard University’s resistance to the Trump administration, show that higher education is finally finding its voice and fighting what it sees as existential threats.

    The three suits:

    1. Public Citizen suit

    Plaintiffs: Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) and the  Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP)

    Attorneys: Public Citizen Litigation Group

    Defendants: Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and the U.S. Department of Education

    Date filed: April 4

    Where: U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia

    Documents: complaint, Public Citizen press release, 

    A concern: Data infrastructure. “We want to do all that we can to protect essential data and research infrastructure,” said Michal Kurlaender, president of AEFP and a professor at University of California, Davis.

    Status: Public Citizen filed a request for a temporary injunction on April 17 that was accompanied by declarations from researchers on how they and the field of education have been harmed. The Education Department filed a response on April 30. A hearing is scheduled for May 9.

    1. Democracy Forward suit

    Plaintiffs: American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE)

    Attorneys: Democracy Forward 

    Defendants: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and Acting Director of the Institute of Education Sciences Matthew Soldner

    Date filed: April 14

    Where: U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Southern Division 

    Documents: complaint, Democracy Forward press release, AERA letter to members

    A concern: Future research. “IES has been critical to fostering research on what works, and what does not work, and for providing this information to schools so they can best prepare students for their future,” said Ellen Weiss, executive director of SREE. “Our graduate students are stalled in their work and upended in their progress toward a degree. Practitioners and policymakers also suffer great harm as they are left to drive decisions without the benefit of empirical data and high-quality research,” said Felice Levine, executive director of AERA.

    Status: A request for a temporary injunction was filed April 29, accompanied by declarations from researchers on how their work is harmed. 

    1. Legal Defense Fund suit

    Plaintiffs: National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME)

    Attorneys: Legal Defense Fund

    Defendants: The U.S. Department of Education and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon 

    Date filed: April 24

    Where: U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia

    Documents: complaint, LDF press release

    A concern: Data quality. “The law requires not only data access but data quality,” said Andrew Ho, a Harvard University professor of education and former president of the National Council on Measurement in Education. “For 88 years, our organization has upheld standards for valid measurements and the research that depends on these measurements. We do so again today.” 

    Status: A request for a temporary injunction was filed May 2.*

    * Correction: This paragraph was corrected to make clear that lawyers in all three suits have asked the courts to temporarily reverse the research and data cuts and personnel firings. Also, May 9th is a Friday, not a Thursday. We regret the error. 

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about Education Department lawsuits was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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