Category: Trump administration

  • 11 numbers that capture the Trump effect on education

    11 numbers that capture the Trump effect on education

    by Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report
    December 18, 2025

    About 1.5 million people teach on college campuses in the United States, and nearly 4 million teachers work in its public elementary and secondary schools. More than 15 million undergraduates attend U.S. colleges and universities. There are more than 50 million school-age children across the country.   

    They all have one thing in common: Federal education policy affects their lives. 

    President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon say they want to close the Department of Education and return control of education to the states. At the same time, however, they have aggressively, and rapidly, wielded federal power over schools. 

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    Here’s a look at some key data points from the first year of Trump’s second term that represent the outsized effect this presidency has had on the nation’s educational institutions and the people within them.

    — 15 —

    Number of executive orders Trump signed that exclusively address colleges or schools 

    In 2017, the first year of his first term, Trump signed two executive orders related to education. This year, he signed three times that number on just a single day in April.

    Among his most notable executive orders was one early in his term requiring the Department of Education to begin dismantling itself. He also established an Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force and asked cabinet members to provide him with a plan to end “radical indoctrination” in schools. Other executive orders have addressed school discipline, transgender athletes, registered apprenticeships and foreign influence on college campuses. 

    Another set of executive orders indirectly affected schools. For instance, the Department of Education interpreted an order about undocumented immigrants to require limiting access to some adult and career and technical education programs. And separately, in a presidential memorandum, Trump ordered universities to begin reporting the race of their applicants and admitted students, not just those who enroll in the fall. 

    — 26 —

    Number of investigations into K-12 transgender policies announced by the Education Department

    At the K-12 level, the administration has given no issue more attention than policies that govern which bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams transgender students can access. In all, the department has announced at least 26 such investigations, including into six state education agencies and three statewide athletic associations. 

    By comparison, the Trump administration announced eight investigations into antisemitism at elementary and secondary schools and four cases of alleged racial discrimination that hurts white teachers or students. 

    In higher education, it’s the inverse: Just five investigations into transgender issues have been announced, while dozens of cases of antisemitism and racial discrimination are being investigated. 

    — 50+ —

    Number of education-specific lawsuits filed against the Trump administration

    It’s not unusual for presidential administrations to be sued: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton brags about suing the Biden administration 100 times. But the first year of Trump’s second term has been marked by unprecedented legal activity related to his administration’s education actions, according to a review of court documents and other lawsuit trackers. Trump, McMahon and the Department of Education have been sued over efforts to fire employees and dismantle the department, freeze funding and cancel grants, and end diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

    The administration’s track record defending itself in court has been mixed, but it scored a major victory when the Supreme Court allowed its March layoffs of hundreds of Education Department staffers. However, courts have blocked some efforts to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, forced the federal government to pay out some once-frozen grants and allowed Harvard to continue enrolling foreign students. 

    — 1,950 —

    Number of employees who left the Department of Education in the spring

    When Trump took office, the Education Department had more than 4,100 employees. Soon after, those numbers started dropping. In the first seven weeks of the new administration, 572 staffers voluntarily resigned. In March, 1,378 more employees were let go. Many offices were decimated without a clear plan for how or if their work would continue. 

    The National Center for Education Statistics, for example, went from about 100 staffers to three. That office is responsible for collecting data on the nation’s schools and colleges and administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Or take the Office for Civil Rights, which is in charge of investigating complaints about civil rights violations, including sexual harassment, racial discrimination and failure to provide an adequate education to students with disabilities. Seven of its 11 regional offices were shuttered and, in all, it lost nearly half its staff. (In December, some of those staffers were temporarily called back to help reduce a backlog of cases.) 

    The administration notified another 466 employees they were being let go during the government shutdown in October. Those positions were reinstated, however, as part of a congressional deal to reopen the government. The department also launched a plan to move large swathes of its work to other agencies, including the departments of Labor, State and Health and Human Services. 

    The Education Department did not respond to several requests for information about how many people are working at the agency now.

    — 5 — 

    Number of regional Head Start offices closed

    As part of the administration’s sweeping reductions in force, five out of 10 regional Head Start offices were abruptly closed and all employees fired in April. The offices, all in blue states, help oversee the free child care services provided by local early education programs for low-income children. In all, the five offices had been responsible for oversight of 318,000 — or 44 percent — of Head Start slots. 

    That wasn’t the only upheaval Head Start programs faced this year. At the end of January, the Trump administration directed agencies to temporarily freeze federal funding for thousands of financial assistance programs, including Head Start. Soon after, the White House said the program was exempt, and later it withdrew the order altogether. (A federal judge eventually ruled the entire directive was illegal.) But dozens of centers serving more than 20,000 children reported weeks-long delays in accessing federal money, with some forced to close temporarily. Then, during the government shutdown in the fall, centers serving 9,000 kids had to close their doors, some for several weeks, according to tracking by the First Five Years Fund.

    — 17% — 

    Decline in new international student enrollment in fall 2025

    The Trump administration’s attacks on foreign students with political views it disliked made international headlines this spring, as it targeted students protesting the Israel-Hamas war for deportation and announced plans to scour the social media accounts of new visa applicants. It also imposed travel restrictions and delayed some processing of student visas. The result is a slower pipeline of new foreign students coming to the United States, according to data from the Institute of International Education.

    The decrease in new international students was driven by graduate students, whose enrollment declined most sharply. But because most returning students stuck with their U.S. education plans, the overall number of foreign students (including those engaged in jobs related to future or past higher education enrollment) ticked down just 1 percent. Still, that’s a big deal for colleges and universities: Graduate students make up the lionʼs share of international enrollment and are a major source of revenue for many colleges. International students typically do not get financial aid, paying full price to attend. 

    — $1,700 —

    Maximum tax break an individual can get for donating to school choice scholarships

    Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, was a major win for school choice advocates: It created a new federal school voucher program. The law sets up tax credit scholarships — vouchers — families can use to pay for private school tuition, tutoring or other educational expenses. Parents will also be able to use the money to cover homeschooling costs. Starting in 2027, individuals can get a tax credit of up to $1,700 for donations to nonprofits that provide the scholarships. Those nonprofits, in turn, will be in charge of handing out the money. 

    States must opt in if they want schools within their respective borders to be able to participate. At least three states so far have said they will decline, but more than 20 others have already established their own tax credit scholarship programs and are expected to sign up when the federal option becomes available. 

    — 6,353 —

    Number of complaints the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights dismissed between mid-March and mid-September

    In one six-month stretch, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights dismissed more than 6,000 complaints without an investigation, according to a September court filing. By contrast, the Biden administration did the same with 2,527 cases in its final three months. 

    The Trump administration has said in court filings it is following longstanding policies for dismissing cases. Former employees and advocates counter that the jump in dismissals suggests student and parent complaints are not being adequately probed, and that layoffs are affecting an agency that has long struggled to keep up with its caseload. 

    The rate at which the Trump administration reaches a final resolution in the cases it does investigate has significantly slowed. Between mid-March and mid-September, OCR resolved 581 complaints through mediated settlements, voluntary agreements or technical assistance. Another 138 were resolved after an investigation did not find evidence of violations. Those numbers are roughly the same as the last three months of the Biden administration (595 and 119 respectively).

    — $153 million —

    Amount of grant money the administration is spending to promote civics education 

    The Education Department said in September it gave more than $153 million to 85 grantees to work on civics education. That’s a major increase: Since this grant program launched in 2017, just 38 grants worth about $75 million had been awarded in all. 

    Promoting patriotic education is one of McMahon’s goals. “Patriotic education presents American history in a way that is accurate, honest, and inspiring,” her agency said in a September announcement prioritizing discretionary spending on this issue. “It emphasizes a unifying and uplifting portrayal of the nation’s founding ideals.” 

    McMahon also started the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, in preparation for next year’s anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The coalition is made up largely of conservative organizations including Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, Hillsdale College and Priests for Life. 

    — $5.8 billion —

    Minimum amount of federal research funding cut or frozen

    Federal research dollars, many of which flow to colleges and universities, were cut way back this year. It’s difficult to calculate exactly how much was lost; this money comes from many agencies and some remains mired in legal battles. The website Grant Witness, run by a group of researchers, tracks canceled or frozen grants. Its data shows that more than $5.1 billion in National Institutes of Health money that had yet to be spent was earmarked for colleges or universities, as was nearly $700 million from the National Science Foundation. (Some of that funding may have been restored.)

    Those agencies were two of the largest sources of federal grants to higher education, but not the only ones. More than $425 million in National Endowment for the Humanities grants, many of which are awarded to colleges, were canceled. (Those cuts were later found to be unlawful.) The Department of Agriculture canceled tens of millions of dollars in higher education research funding, and the Environmental Protection Agency also terminated such grants. 

    The picture doesn’t look better for year two of Trump’s term: The White House has proposed cutting all federal research funding by a third — a decrease of more than $33 billion from 2025. 

    — 0 —

    Number of colleges that have signed the Trump ‘Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education’

    The Trump administration has been aggressive in trying to bend higher education to its will. In October, officials reached out to nine universities, including some of the country’s most selective institutions, with a deal. The schools could be first in line for federal money if they agreed to a litany of demands including: 

    • Publishing standardized test scores for admitted students by race, sex and ethnicity
    • Capping foreign student enrollment at 15 percent
    • Prohibiting transgender females from using women’s locker rooms and bathrooms 
    • Freezing tuition for five years

    So far, none have accepted the offer, with seven universities rejecting it outright. The University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt University did not publicly rebuke the compact, but did not sign it. New College of Florida, which was not one of the nine, said it would sign if given the chance. Other universities signed separate agreements with the administration to unfreeze federal money. Columbia University, for example, paid $221 million and accepted a host of conditions to regain access to billions of federal dollars. 

    Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at [email protected] or on Signal: @sbutry.04.

    This story about Trump’s effect on education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.  

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  • OPINION: Workforce Pell can lead to good jobs for students if they get the support needed for long-term success

    OPINION: Workforce Pell can lead to good jobs for students if they get the support needed for long-term success

    by Alexander Mayer, The Hechinger Report
    December 16, 2025

    Ohio resident Megan Cutright lost her hospitality job during the pandemic. At her daughter’s urging, she found her way to Lorain County Community College in Ohio and onto a new career path.  

    Community colleges will soon have a new opportunity to help more students like Megan achieve their career goals. Starting next summer, federal funds will be available through a program known as Workforce Pell, which extends federal aid to career-focused education and training programs that last between eight and 15 weeks. 

    Members of Congress advocating for Pell Grants to cover shorter programs have consistently highlighted Workforce Pell’s potential, noting that the extension will lead to “good-paying jobs.”  

    That could happen. But it will only happen if states and colleges thoughtfully consider the supports students need for success.  

    This is important, because helping students pay for workforce programs is not enough. They also need support and wraparound services, much like the kind Megan was offered at Lorain, where her program followed an evidence-based model known as ASAP that assigns each student a career adviser. 

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. 

    Megan’s adviser “helped me from day one,” she said, in a story posted on the college’s website. “I told her I was interested in the radiologic technology program but that I had no idea where to start. We just did everything together.”  

    Megan went on to secure a job as an assistant in the radiology department at her local hospital, where she had interned as a student. She knew what steps she needed to take because her community college supported and advised her, using an evidence-backed practice, illustrating something we have learned from the experience of the community colleges that use the ASAP model: Support is invaluable.  

    Megan also knew that her path to a full-time position in radiologic technology required her to pass a licensure test — scheduled for four days after graduation.  

    The students who will enroll in Workforce Pell programs deserve the same careful attention. To ensure that Workforce Pell is effective for students, we should follow the same three critical steps that helped drive the expansion of ASAP and brought it to Megan’s college: (1) experiment to see what works, (2) collect and follow the data and (3) ensure that colleges learn from each other to apply what works. 

    Before ASAP was developed, the higher education community had some ideas about what might work to help students complete their degrees and get good jobs. When colleges and researchers worked together to test these ideas and gathered reliable data, though, they learned that those strategies only helped students at the margins. 

    There was no solid evidence about what worked to make big, lasting improvements in college completion until the City University of New York (CUNY) worked with researchers at MDRC to test ASAP and its combination of longer-lasting strategies. They kept a close eye on the data and learned that while some strategies didn’t produce big effects on their own, the combined ASAP approach resulted in significant improvements in student outcomes, nearly doubling the three-year college completion rate.  

    CUNY and MDRC shared what they learned with higher education leaders and policymakers, inspiring other community colleges to try out the model. Those colleges started seeing results too, and the model kept spreading. Today, ASAP is used in more than 50 colleges in seven states. And it’s paying off — in Ohio, for example, students who received ASAP services ended up earning significantly more than those who did not. 

    That same experimentation and learning mindset will be needed for Workforce Pell, because while short-term training can lead to good careers, it’s far from guaranteed.  

    For example, phlebotomy technician programs are popular, but without additional training or credentials they often don’t lead to jobs that pay well. Similarly, students who complete short-term programs in information technology, welding and construction-related skills can continue to acquire stackable credentials that substantially increase their earning potential, although that also doesn’t happen automatically. The complexity of the credentialing marketplace can make it impossible for students and families to assess programs and make good decisions without help.  

    Related: OPINION: Too many college graduates are stranded before their careers can even begin. We can’t let that happen 

    A big question for Workforce Pell will be how to make sure students understand how to get onto a career path and continue advancing their wider career aspirations. Workforce Pell grants are designed to help students with low incomes overcome financial barriers, but these same students often face other barriers.  

    That’s why colleges should experiment with supports like career advising to help students identify stepping-stones to a good career, along with placement services to help them navigate the job market. In addition, states must expand their data collection efforts to formally include noncredit programs. Some, including Iowa, Louisiana and Virginia, have already made considerable progress linking their education and workforce systems.  

    Offering student support services and setting up data systems requires resources, but Workforce Pell will bring new funds to states and colleges that are currently financing job training programs. Philanthropy can also help by providing resources to test out what works best to get students through short-term programs and onto solid career paths.  

    Sharing what works — and what doesn’t — will be critical to the success of Workforce Pell in the long-term. The same spirit of learning that fueled innovation around the ASAP model should be embedded in Workforce Pell from the start.  

    Alexander Mayer is director of postsecondary education at MDRC, the nonprofit research association. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected]. 

    This story about Workforce Pell was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter. 

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  • As Justice Department priorities shift, concerns about protection of students’ civil rights escalate

    As Justice Department priorities shift, concerns about protection of students’ civil rights escalate

    by Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report
    December 14, 2025

    The 10-year-old was dragged down a school hallway by two school staffers. A camera captured him being forced into a small, empty room with a single paper-covered window. 

    The staffers shut the door in his face. Alone, the boy curled into a ball on the floor. When school employees returned more than 10 minutes later, blood from his face smeared the floor.

    Maryland state lawmakers were shown this video in 2017 by Leslie Seid Margolis, a lawyer with the advocacy group Disability Rights Maryland. She’d spent 15 years advocating for a ban on the practice known as seclusion, in which children, typically those with disabilities, are involuntarily isolated and confined, often after emotional outbursts. 

    Even after seeing the video, no legislators were willing to go as far as a ban. Nor were they when Margolis tried again a few years later.

    In 2021, however, the federal Justice Department concluded an investigation into a Maryland school district and found more than 7,000 cases of unnecessary restraint and seclusion in a two-and-a-half-year period. 

    Four months later, Maryland lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting seclusion in the state’s public schools, with nearly unanimous support.

    “I can’t really overstate the impact that Justice can have,” said Margolis. “They have this authority that is really helpful to those of us who are on the ground doing this work.”

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    Within the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a small office devoted to educational issues, including seclusion, as well as desegregation and racial harassment. The division intentionally chooses cases with potential for high impact and actively monitors places it has investigated to ensure they’re following through with changes. When the Educational Opportunities Section acts, educators and policymakers take notice.

    Now, however, the Trump administration is wielding the power of the Justice Department in new and, some say, extreme ways. Hundreds of career staffers, including most of those who worked on education cases, have resigned. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also has been decimated, largely through layoffs. The two offices traditionally have worked closely together to enforce civil rights protections for students. The result is a potentially lasting shift in how the nation’s top law enforcement agency handles issues that affect public school students, including millions who have disabilities. 

    “There are those who would say that this is an aberration, and that when it’s over, things will go back to the way they were,” said Frederick Lawrence, a lecturer at Georgetown Law and former assistant U.S. attorney under President Ronald Reagan. “My experience is that the river only flows in one direction, and things never go back to the way they were.”

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

    The Justice Department’s lawyers historically have worked on a few dozen education cases at once, concentrating on combating sexual harassment, racial discrimination against Black and Latino students, restraint and seclusion, and failure to provide adequate services to English learners. 

    In the last 11 months, however, the agency has sued over and opened investigations into concerns about antisemitism, transgender policies and bias against white people at schools. It sued at least six states for offering discounted tuition to undocumented immigrants and pressured the president of the University of Virginia to resign as part of an investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies. And it joined other federal departments to form a special Title IX investigations team to protect students from what the administration called the “pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities.”  

    As the Educational Opportunity Section’s mission shifted, it shrunk in size. In January, before President Donald Trump took office, about 40 lawyers tackled education issues. In the spring, the U.S. Senate confirmed Harmeet Dhillon as leader of the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon founded the conservative Center for American Liberty, which describes itself as “defending civil liberties of Americans left behind by civil rights legacy organizations.”

    After her confirmation, staff who weren’t political appointees began resigning en masse, concerned Dhillon would promote only the administration’s agenda. 

    By June, no more than five of the 40 lawyers were left, according to former employees. Some new staff have been hired or reassigned to the section, but the head count remains well below usual. It’s far from enough to sustain the typical workload, said Shaheena Simons, who was chief of the Educational Opportunities Section until she resigned in April. “There’s just no way the division can function with that level of staffing. It’s just impossible,” said Simons, who took over the section in 2016. “The investigations aren’t going to happen. Remedies aren’t going to be sought.” 

    Department officials responded to a list of questions from The Hechinger Report about changes to their handling of student civil rights protection with “no comment.” 

    The Department of Justice, including its educational work, has always been somewhat subject to White House interests, said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. During President Joe Biden’s term, for example, the agency pursued allegations of discrimination against transgender students, reflecting administration priorities. 

    McCluskey added, though, that the Trump administration is more aggressive in how it is pursuing its goals and is bypassing typical protocols, noting that in many cases “it’s like they’ve already decided the outcome.”  

    Related: Which schools and colleges are being investigated by the Trump administration?

    An investigation into allegations of antisemitism at the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, took just 81 days before the department concluded the school had violated federal law. DOJ investigations typically have taken years, not months, to complete. 

    Lawrence, who also serves as president of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, said he could not speak to specific investigations, but the UCLA timeline “does suggest a rather accelerated process.”

    A federal judge recently ruled that the administration could not use the findings from its UCLA investigation as a reason to fine the university $1.2 billion, which if paid would have unlocked frozen federal research funding. She wrote that the administration was using a playbook “of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding.” 

    As new investigations are opened, older ones remain unresolved, including one of practices in Colorado’s Douglas County Public Schools.

    In 2022, Disability Law Colorado submitted a complaint to the Justice Department about the district’s use of seclusion, as well as restraint, where school employees physically restrict a student’s movement.

    The following year, three other families sued the school system, alleging racial discrimination against their children. The students were repeatedly called monkeys and the N-word, threatened with lynchings and “made by teachers to argue the benefits of Jim Crow laws,” according to the complaint.

    Related: Red school boards in a blue state asked Trump for help — and got it

    The Department of Justice decided to investigate both issues. Four staffers were assigned to the restraint and seclusion investigation, said Emily Harvey, co-legal director at Disability Law Colorado.  

    As part of the inquiry, Justice officials visited the district twice. The second time was during the final week of Biden’s presidency. 

    After that visit, Douglas County didn’t hear anything about the investigation from the Trump administration until a mid-May email. “Good morning,” it read. “We are having some staffing changes.”

    The email, which The Hechinger Report obtained through a public records request, said that going forward, the district could contact two staffers on the restraint and seclusion case. The racial harassment case would be reduced to only one employee until another Justice staffer returned from leave in the fall. 

    One Douglas County parent, who asked her name be withheld because she is afraid of retaliation from the district, said that although she knew the investigation could take a couple of years, the longer it goes without a resolution, the more children could be harmed. 

    “The justice system is just moving so incredibly slow,” she said. 

    The parent said she knows of dozens of families who have dealt with restraint and seclusion issues in the district. Her own son, she said, was secluded in kindergarten. “He was scared of the person who put him in there. He kept saying, ‘I can’t go back,’” she said. “I never envisioned, until my son was secluded, a world where the school would not care about my child.” 

    When Harvey, of Disability Law Colorado, first contacted the Department of Justice, she hoped for statewide reform. She wanted to see a ban on seclusion, like Margolis had helped secure in Maryland, and for the state to commit to more accurate tracking of use of restraints. The way Colorado law is written, restraints must be recorded only if they last more than a minute. Douglas County, the second largest in the state with 62,000 students, reported 582 restraints to the Colorado Department of Education in the 2023-24 school year. The number of shorter-term restraints, however, is unknown. 

    “We believe this is an arbitrary distinction,” Harvey said. “My hope was that the Department of Justice would potentially weigh in on that as a violation” of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

    Related: How Trump 2.0 upended education research and statistics in one year

    Douglas County school administrators said in a statement to The Hechinger Report that their “focus is on taking care of each and every one of our students” and that they take all concerns seriously. 

    They have worked with the federal government to set up school visits and interviews during their visits, according to emails from January. 

    Subsequent emails between district and federal officials describe a phone call over the summer and requests for additional documents. Another DOJ employee was included in the messages.

    There are signs that the Justice Department is not abandoning restraint and seclusion work, said Guy Stephens, founder of the national advocacy group Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint. A webpage about previous cases that was removed after Trump took office has been restored, and in July, the DOJ announced a settlement with a Michigan district over these issues.

    Yet Stephens has concerns. “There are still people very, very dedicated to this work and the mission of this work, but it’s very hard to work in a system that is shifting and reprioritizing,” he said.

    Former DOJ employees worry that it might not only be future investigations that are markedly different. The department has historically monitored places where it has reached agreements that demand corrective action, rewriting them if districts or colleges fail to live up to their promises. It also provides support to achieve the new goals. Now, provisions written into past resolutions might be at odds with Trump administration actions, and oversight of some settlements is ending early.

    Take, for instance, a DOJ investigation into Vermont’s Elmore-Morristown Unified Union School District over allegations of race-based harassment against Black students. Investigators found that the district didn’t have a way to handle harassment or discrimination not targeted at a specific person, according to David Bickford, the school board chairman. 

    As part of a settlement agreement signed two weeks before Trump was inaugurated, the district agreed to provide staff training on implicit bias. A Trump executive order, however, calls for eliminating federal funding for anyone that discusses such a concept in schools. 

    Bickford said that the district has complied with everything the settlement called for, including professional development. 

    The investigation itself, he said, was extremely thorough, and required handing over nearly a thousand pages of documentation. Since then, the district has sent regular reports to the department but has not received any lengthy response or input, Bickford said. He also noted there had been staffing changes in who the district reports to. 

    Related: Federal policies risk worsening an already dire rural teacher shortage

    Justice officials decided to end supervision of a 2023 settlement early following a racial harassment investigation in another Vermont district, Twin Valley. The original plan was to monitor the district for three years. In October 2024, investigators visited the district to check in. In a letter two months later, officials noted that while Twin Valley had made significant progress, they still had several areas of concern, including how the district investigated complaints, as well as “persistent biased language and behavior on the basis of multiple protected classifications; a pervasive culture of sexism; and lack of consistent and effective adult response to biased language and behavior.” 

    Even so, the department was pleased overall with its visit, said Bill Bazyk, superintendent of Windham Southwest Supervisory Union, which includes Twin Valley. “But things certainly sped up after the election,” said Bazyk, who started his job after the case had been settled.

    Throughout the spring, Bayzk and his staff checked in with the department, and in May the district was told oversight of the settlement would end a year early, as Twin Valley had fully complied with the terms. 

    “We were doing all the right things,” Bayzk said, noting that the district’s work on diversity and equity is ongoing. “We took the settlement very seriously.”

    The investigation began in 2021 after the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont filed a complaint. Legal Director Lia Ernst said it is possible that Twin Valley resolved those lingering problems between December and May, stressing that it’s impossible to know from the outside. But still, she said, there is a larger pattern of ambivalence to the Justice Department’s approach to civil rights complaints.  

    “It is disappointing to see that one ending early,” she said. “It is my hope that it is ending early because Twin Valley has made so much progress, but it is my fear that it is ending early because DOJ just doesn’t care.” 

    Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at [email protected] or on Signal: @sbutry.04.

    This story about the Justice Department was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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  • Immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators

    Immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators

    by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
    December 10, 2025

    Close to 40,000 foreign-born child care workers have been driven out of the profession in the wake of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation and detainment efforts, according to a new study by the Better Life Lab at the think tank New America. That represents about 12 percent of the foreign-born child care workforce.

    Child care workers with at least a two-year college degree are most likely to be leaving the workforce, as well as workers who are from Mexico, a demographic targeted by ICE, or those who work in center-based care, the left-leaning think tank found. The disruption has worsened an already deep shortage of child care staffers, threatening the stability of the industry and in turn is contributing to tens of thousands of U.S.-born mothers dropping out of the labor market because they don’t have reliable child care.

    In addition to workers facing detainment or deportation, many people are staying home to avoid situations where they may encounter Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the report found. Agents are detaining people who have not traditionally been the focus of ICE actions, including those following legal pathways like asylum seekers and green card applicants. Child care centers were once considered “sensitive locations” exempt from ICE enforcement, but the White House rescinded that in January. In at least one example, a child care worker was detained while arriving for work at a child care program. 

    “What’s different now is the ferocity of the enforcement,” said Chris Herbst, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs and one of the authors of the report, in an interview with The Hechinger Report. “ICE is arresting far more people, the number of deportations has risen dramatically,” he added. “People are scared out of their minds.”

    Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues. 

    America has long relied on immigrants to fill hard-to-staff caregiving positions and enable parents to work. Across the country, around 1 in 5 child care workers is an immigrant. In Florida and New York, immigrants account for nearly 40 percent of the child care workforce. One study that compared native-born and immigrant child care workers found that nearly 64 percent of immigrants had a two- or four-year college degree, compared to 53 percent of native-born workers. The study also noted that immigrant workers are more likely than native-born workers to have child development associate credentials and to invest in professional development activities.

    Overall, the child care industry supports more than $152 billion in economic activity.

    In Wisconsin, Elaine, the director of a child care center, said her program has benefited greatly from a Ukrainian immigrant who has been teaching there for two years, ever since arriving in the United States as part of a humanitarian parole program. (The Hechinger Report is not using Elaine’s last name or the city where her child care center is located because she fears action by immigration enforcement.) Elaine’s center has experienced a teacher shortage for the past 13 years, and the immigrant, who has a college degree and past experience in social services, has been a steady presence for the children there.

    “She’s their consistent person. She spends more time than a lot of the parents do with the children during their waking hours,” Elaine said. “She’s there for them, she’s loving, she provides that support, that connection, that security that young children need.”

    In January, the Trump administration suspended the Uniting for Ukraine program, which allowed Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion to live and work in the United States for two years. While the program later opened up a process to apply for an extension, Elaine’s employee has encountered delays, like many others.

    The teacher’s parole expired this month. Under the law, she is now supposed to return to Ukraine, where her home city in southeast Ukraine is still under attack by Russian forces. 

    Elaine fears what will happen if the center loses her. “As a business, we need her. We need a teacher we can count on,” Elaine said. “For our teachers’ mental health, to have her leave and knowing where she would go would be really difficult.” 

    Elaine has decided to allow the employee to keep working, and is appealing to state lawmakers to help extend her stay. Several parents have also joined in the effort, writing letters to Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin telling her how much their children love the teacher — and how important she is to the local economy. One factor in granting an extension is that the person offers a “significant public benefit” to the country. 

    The authors of the new report found immigrants are not the only caregivers affected by ICE enforcement this year. There has also been a drop in U.S.-born child care workers in the industry, especially among Hispanic and less-educated caregivers. This could be the result of a “climate of fear and confusion” surrounding enforcement activity, according to the report, as well as a “perceived pattern of profiling or discriminatory enforcement practices.”

    “These deportations have been sold under the theory that they are going to be a boon for U.S.-born workers once we sort of unclog the labor market by removing large numbers of undocumented immigrants,” Herbst said. “We’re finding at least in the child care industry, and at least in the short run, that appears not to be the case.” Some foreign-born and U.S.-born workers have different skills and do not seem to be competing for the same caregiving jobs, he added. 

    Not all workers are leaving the caregiving industry altogether. Some immigrants are shifting to work as nannies or au pairs, Herbst said, “finding refuge” in private homes where they are less likely to come into contact with state child care regulators or be part of formal wage systems. (Already, an estimated 142,000 undocumented immigrants work as nannies and personal care or home health aides nationwide.) That contact with regulators and other authorities may be a reason why center-based early childhood educators are leaving the field in greater proportions now, Herbst said. 

    These findings come at the end of a difficult year for the child care workforce, which has long been in crisis due to dismally low pay and challenging work conditions. More than half of child care providers surveyed this year by the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford University reported experiencing difficulty affording food, the highest rate since the survey started collecting data on provider hunger in 2021. Other recent reports have found child care providers are at a higher risk for clinical depression, and in some cities an increasing number are taking on part-time jobs to make ends meet.

    Across the country this year, early childhood providers have seen drops in enrollment as families pull their children out of schools and programs to avoid ICE. Child care centers are losing money and finding that some staff members are too scared to come to work or have lost work authorization after the administration ended certain refugee programs. Many child care workers have taken on additional roles driving children to and from care, collecting emergency numbers and plans for children in their care in case parents are detained and dropping off food for families too scared to leave their homes.

    This story about immigration enforcement was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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  • Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission  

    Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission  

    by Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report
    December 4, 2025

    Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.

    The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, even though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared to 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data show.

    The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.

    While much of the president’s recent scrutiny of college admissions practices has focused on race, these experts say his ban on diversity, equity and inclusion is likely to hit another underrepresented group of applicants: men, and particularly white men — the largest subset of male college applicants.

    “This drips with irony,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, or ACE, the nation’s largest association of universities and colleges, who said he expects that colleges and universities are ending consideration of gender in admission. “The idea of males, including white males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”

    Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    For years universities and colleges have been trying to keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when growing numbers of men have been choosing not to go to college. Some schools have tried to attract more men by adding football and other sports, promoting forestry and hunting programs and launching entrepreneurship competitions. 

    Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data show.

    Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal anti-discrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses.

    But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. The White House has so far largely not succeeded in its campaign to press a handful of elite schools to agree to the terms and sign a wide-ranging Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education in exchange for priority consideration for federal funding.

    “The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention, but I know from having spoken with practitioners who work in college admissions, they have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender,’” in the administration’s pronouncements about ending preferences in admission, said Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.

    “What I think they don’t understand is that taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males,” Harper said. “It is likely to impact them the most, as a matter of fact.” 

    At some private colleges, male applicants are more likely to get in

    School % of males admitted % of females admitted
    Brown University 7.0 4.4
    University of Chicago 5.6 3.7
    Yale University 4.6 3.4
    University of Miami 22.5 16.5
    Middlebury College 12.2 9.6
    Baylor University 56.8 47.9
    Pomona College 7.6 6.7
    Tulane University 14.9 13.4
    Vassar College 20.4 17.6

    SOURCE: Hechinger Report calculations from universities’ Common Data Sets

    Agreements that the administration has reached with Brown, Columbia and Northwestern universities to settle allegations of antisemitism discrimination also include language about gender.

    In a statement announcing the Brown deal in July, Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”

    Asked if that meant male applicants would no longer be admitted at higher rates than female applicants — which has helped Brown keep its undergraduate enrollment at almost exactly 50-50, even with twice as many female applicants — spokesman Brian Clark said, “We have made no changes to our admissions practices in this regard.” 

    The Trump administration has also vowed to make all higher education institutions submit details about the students they admit, including their gender, to find out whether they’re “discriminating against hard working American” prospective students, McMahon said in another statement.

    Spokespeople for the Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether advantages in admission based on gender will be scrutinized in the same way as purported advantages based on race.

    Related: Inaccurate, impossible: Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

    Universities are looking at the administration’s edicts “and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’d rather be cautious than stick our neck out’” by continuing to give advantages to male applicants, said ACE’s Mitchell, who was undersecretary of education under President Barack Obama. “I think we will see people dropping gender preferences, even though it is still within the law.”

    Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will happen if their campuses become too female, said Madeleine Rhyneer, who headed admissions offices at four private universities and colleges and is now vice president of consulting services and dean of enrollment management for the education consulting firm EAB. Colleges worry, “Will men look at that and think, ‘That’s essentially a women’s college, and I don’t want to go there’?”

    Related: Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

    “For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, it is a problem,” Rhyneer said. “They want to create what feels like a balanced climate.”

    The results of ending this practice could be dramatic, experts predict. In 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 817,035 more women than men applied to universities and colleges, federal data show.  Boys also have lower mean scores on the SAT in reading and writing, score lower overall on the ACT and have lower grade point averages in high school.

    “If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight,” Mitchell said.

    Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that similar predictions were made after the 2023 Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action based on race.

    At the time, he said, colleges spoke “in apocalyptic terms of the implications for the racial composition of student bodies.” But the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled at universities and colleges the next year rose, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Then, said Hess, “there was a lot of, ‘Never mind.’” 

    The country’s top 50 private colleges and universities have 2 percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission, according to research by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer. He said this suggests that at least some are putting a thumb on the scale for male applicants.

    Columbia took 3 percent of women applicants last year and 4 percent of men. At the University of Chicago, 5.6 percent of male applicants were accepted last year, compared to 3.7 percent of female applicants. The ratio at the University of Miami was 22.5 percent to 16.5 percent; and at Vassar College, 20.4 percent to 17.6 percent. 

    Besides Brown, none of these universities would respond when asked if they will continue to accept higher percentages of men than women, Neither would others that do it, including Yale, Baylor and Tulane universities and Pomona College.

    Private institutions are allowed to consider gender in admission under Title IX, the federal law otherwise banning discrimination by universities and colleges that get federal funding. That’s due to a loophole dating from when the law was passed, in 1971.

    At the time, the gender ratio was exactly reversed, and men outnumbered women on campuses by nearly three to two. One of the universities’ congressional allies, Rep. John Erlenborn, R-Illinois, successfully amended the measure to let private colleges and universities continue to consider gender in admission.

    Erlenborn said at the time that forcing colleges to stop considering gender would be “one more giant step toward involvement by the federal government in the internal affairs of institutions of higher education.” 

    There’s little ambiguity for admissions offices now, said USC’s Harper.

    “It says here, in writing, ‘no discrimination on the basis of race and gender,’” he noted. “It says that explicitly.”

    Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

    This story about men in college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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  • Child care workers are building a network of resistance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement

    Child care workers are building a network of resistance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement

    This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.

    The mother was just arriving to pick up her girls at their elementary school in Chicago when someone with a bullhorn at the nearby shopping center let everyone know: ICE is here. 

    The white van screeched to a halt right next to where she was parked, and three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents piled out. They said something in English that she couldn’t decipher, then arrested her on the spot. Her family later said they never asked about her documentation.

    She was only able to get one phone call out before she was taken away. “The girls,” was all she said to her sister. Her daughters, a third grader and a fourth grader, were still waiting for her inside the school.

    Luckily, the girls’ child care provider had prepared for this very moment.

    Sandra had been taking care of the girls since they were babies, and now watched them after school. She’d been encouraging the family to get American passports for the kids and signed documents detailing their wishes should the mother be detained.

    When Sandra got the call that day in September, she headed straight to the school to pick up the girls. 

    Since President Donald Trump won a second term, Sandra has been prepping the 10 families at her home-based day care, including some who lack permanent legal status, for the possibility that they may be detained. (The 19th is only using Sandra’s first name and not naming the mother to protect their identities.) 

    She’s worked with families to get temporary guardianship papers sorted and put a plan in place in case they were detained and their kids were left behind. She even had a psychologist come and speak to the families about the events that had been unfolding across the country to help the children understand that there are certain situations their parents can’t control, and give them the opportunity to talk through their fears that, one day, mamá and papá might not be there to pick them up. 

    Read more

    And for two elementary school kids, that day did come. Sandra met them outside the school.

    “When they saw me, they knew something wasn’t right,” Sandra said in Spanish. “Are we never going to see our mom again?” they asked. 

    For all her planning, she was speechless.

    “One prepares for these things, but still doesn’t have the words on what to say,” Sandra said. 

    Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues. 

    After that day, Sandra worked with the mother’s sister to get the girls situated to fly to Texas, where their mother, who had full custody of them, was being detained, and then eventually to Mexico. She hasn’t heard from them in over a month. The girls were born in the United States and know nothing of Mexico. 

    “I think about them in a strange country,” Sandra said. “‘Who is going to care for them like I do?’ Now with this situation I get sad because I think they are the ones who are going to suffer.”

    In this year of immigration raids, child care providers have stepped up to keep families unified amid incredible uncertainty. Some are agreeing to be temporary guardians for kids should something happen to their parents. The workers themselves are also under threat — 1 in 5 child care workers are immigrant women, most of them Latinas, who are also having to prepare in case they are detained, particularly while children are in their care. Already, child care workers across the country have been detained and deported.

    “The immigration and the child care movements, they are one in the same now,” said Anali Alegria, the director of federal advocacy and media relations at the Child Care for Every Family Network, a national child care advocacy group. “Child care is not just something that keeps the economy going, while it does. It’s also really integral to people’s community and family lives. And so when you’re destabilizing it, you’re also destabilizing something much more fundamental and very tender to that child and that family’s life.” 

    A loose network of resistance has emerged, with detailed protection plans, ICE lookout patrols, and Signal or Whatsapp chats. Home-based providers like Sandra have been especially involved in that effort because their work often means their lives are even more intertwined with the families they care for. 

    “All the families we have in our program, I consider them family. We arrive in this country and we don’t have family, and when we get support, advice or the simple act of caring for kids, as child care providers we are essential in many of these families — even more in these times,” said Sandra, who has been caring for children in the United States for 25 years. All the families she cares for are Latinx, 70 percent without permanent legal status.

    Related: 1 in 5 child care workers is an immigrant. Trump’s deportations and raids have many terrified

    According to advocacy groups, child care providers are increasingly being asked to look after kids in case they are detained, typically because they are the only trusted person the family knows with U.S. citizenship or legal permanent residence. Parents are asking child care workers to be emergency contacts, short-term guardians and, in some cases, even long-term guardians. 

    “We heard this under the first Trump administration, and we’re hearing it much more now. It’s not so much a matter of if, but when, right now, and it used to be the other way around,” said Wendy Cervantes, the director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy, an anti-poverty nonprofit. “It adds just additional stress and trauma because they deeply care about these kids. Many of them have kids of their own and obviously have modest incomes, so as much as they want to say, ‘yes’, they can’t in some cases.” 

    The question was posed to Claudia Pellecer a couple weeks ago. A home-based child care provider in Chicago for 17 years, Pellecer cares for numerous Latinx families, at least one of whom doesn’t have permanent legal status. 

    In October, one of those moms was due to appear before ICE for a regular check-in as part of her ongoing asylum case. But she knew that many have been detained at those appointments this year.

    The mother asked Pellecer to be her 1-year-old son’s legal guardian should she be taken away.

    “I couldn’t say no because I am human, I am a mother,” Pellecer said.

    Claudia Pellecer, who runs a small daycare for young children out of her home, stands for a portrait outside her house. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th

    They got to work getting the baby a passport and filling out the necessary guardianship paperwork. Pellecer kept the originals and copies. The mother closed her bank account, cleaned out her apartment and prepped two bags, one for her and one for the baby. If the mother was deported, Pellecer would fly with him to meet her in Ecuador, they agreed.

    The day of the appointment, she dropped the baby off with Pellecer and set the final plan. Her appointment was at 1 p.m. “If at 6 p.m. you haven’t heard from me, that means I was detained,” she told Pellecer, who cried and wished her luck.

    At the appointment, the judge asked her three sets of questions:

    “Why are you here?”

    “Are you working? Do you have a family?”

    “Do you have proof of what happened to you in your country?”

    Related: Child care centers were off limit to immigration authorities. How that’s changed

    Claudia Pellecer plays games with children in the living room of her home daycare, where she cares for up to eight young children a day. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th

    The judge agreed to let her stay and told her to continue working. The mother won’t have a court date again until 2027.

    “We learned our lesson,” Pellecer said. “We had to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

    But their relief was short-lived. Recent events in Chicago have sent child care workers and families into panic, as the people who have tried to keep families together are now being targeted. 

    Resistance networks have sprung up rapidly in Chicago in recent weeks after a child care worker was followed to Spanish immersion day care Rayito de Sol on the city’s North Side and arrested in front of children and other teachers. The arrest was caught on camera and has sparked demonstrations across the city. 

    Erin Horetski, whose son, Harrison, was cared for by the worker who was arrested at Rayito de Sol in early November, said parents there had been worried ICE might one day target them because the center specifically hired Spanish-speaking staff.

    The morning of the arrest, parents were texting each other once they heard ICE was in the shopping center where the day care is located.

    Children crawl on a colorful rug while playing educational games at Claudia Pellecer’s home daycare. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th

    Her husband was just arriving to drop off their boys as ICE was leaving. The first thing out of his mouth when he called her: “They took Miss Diana.”

    Agents entered the school without a warrant to arrest infant class teacher Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano, an immigrant from Colombia. DHS said part of the reason for her arrest was because she helped bring her two teenage children across the southern U.S. border this year. “Facilitating human smuggling is a crime,” DHS said. Santillana Galeano fled Colombia fearing for her safety in 2023, filed for asylum and was given a work permit through November 2029, according to court documents. She has no known criminal record. After her arrest, a federal judge ruled that her detention without access to a bond hearing was illegal and she was released November 12.

    Horetski said the incident, the first known ICE arrest inside a day care, has spurred the community to action. A GoFundMe account set up by Horetski to support Santillana Galeano, has raised more than $150,000.

    Horetski said what’s been lost in the story of what happened at Rayito is the humanity of the person at the center of it, someone she said was “like a second mother” to her son.

    “At the end of the day, she was a person and a friend and a mother and provider to our kids — I think we need to remember that,” Horetski said. 

    Related: They crossed the border for better schools. Now, some families are leaving the US

    Now, the parents are the ones coming together to put in place a safety plan for the teachers, most of whom have continued to come to the school and care for their children. 

    They are working on establishing a safe passage patrol, setting up parents with whistles at the front of the school to stand guard during arrival and dismissal time to ensure teachers can come and go to their cars or to public transit safely. Parents are also establishing escorts for teachers who may need a ride to work or someone to accompany them on the bus or the train. A meal train set up by the parents is helping to send food to the teachers through Thanksgiving, and two local restaurants have pitched in with discounts. Some of the parents are also lawyers who are considering setting up a legal clinic to ensure workers know their rights, Horetski said.

    A young child watches an educational TV show in the living room of Claudia Pellecer’s home daycare in Chicago. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th

    Figuring out how to come together to support teachers and the children who now have questions about safety is something that “continues to circle in all of our minds and brains,” Horeski said. “It’s hard to not have the answers or know how to best move forward. We’re in such uncharted territory that you’re like, ‘Where do you go from here?’ So we’re kind of paving that because this is the first time that something like this has happened.”

    Prep is top of mind now for organizers including at the Service Employees International Union, where Sandra and Pellecer are members, who are convening emergency child care worker trainings to set up procedures, such as posted signs that say ICE cannot enter without a warrant, showing them what the warrants must include to be binding, helping them set a designated person to speak to ICE should they enter and talking to their families to offer support. 

    Cervantes has been doing this work since Trump’s first term, when it was clear immigration was going to be a key focus for the president. This year has been different, though. Child care centers were previously protected under a “sensitive locations” directive that advised ICE to not conduct enforcement in places like schools and day cares. But Trump removed that protection on his first day in office this year, signaling a more aggressive approach to ICE enforcement was coming.

    Cervantes and her team are currently in the midst of a research project about child care workers across the country, conversations that are also illuminating for them just how dire the situation has become for providers.

    “We are asking providers to make protocols for what is basically a man-made disaster,” she said. “They shouldn’t have to worry about protecting children and staff from the government.”

    Since you made it to the bottom of this article, we have a small favor to ask. 

    We’re in the midst of our end-of-year campaign, our most important fundraising effort of the year. Thanks to NewsMatch, every dollar you give will be doubled through December 31.

    If you believe stories like the one you just finished matter, please consider pitching in what you can. This effort helps ensure our reporting and resources stay free and accessible to everyone—teachers, parents, policymakers—invested in the future of education.

    Thank you. 
    Liz Willen
    Editor in chief

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  • Fewer New International Students Enroll at U.S. Colleges Amid Trump Restrictions – The 74

    Fewer New International Students Enroll at U.S. Colleges Amid Trump Restrictions – The 74


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    New international students enrolling at U.S. colleges declined sharply this fall, a concerning development for universities that rely on those students for research, tuition revenue and the diversity they bring to campus culture. It could, however, create more space for U.S. residents at those campuses.

    Enrollments of new international students were down 17% compared to fall 2024, according to a report released Monday by the Institute of International Education, which surveyed more than 800 colleges about their fall 2025 enrollments. The institute, a nonprofit organization based in New York, publishes an annual report that examines the enrollment of international students. 

    The fall data was not broken down by state, so the scale of decline in California is unclear. At USC, which enrolls more international students than any other California college, overall enrollment of international students is down 3% this fall, according to a campus spokesperson. That includes returning and first-time students, so the drop could be much higher for new arrivals. USC this fall enrolls about 12,000 international students, or 26% of its total student population, according to the college. About half of those students are from China. 

    The declines come amid a changing landscape for international students under the Trump administration, which has delayed visa processing, created travel restrictions and pressured some campuses to recruit and admit fewer students from other countries. The colleges surveyed this fall by the institute cited visa application concerns and travel restrictions as top factors in the decline. 

    “We are confronting major headwinds with what I would say are poor policy decisions that the administration is taking. And that is creating a climate for international students that signals that you’re not welcome here,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, a nonprofit for international education and exchange.

    President Donald Trump has said that he wants to lower the number of international students at U.S. colleges to leave more room at those campuses for U.S. students. “It’s too much because we have Americans that want to go there and to other places, and they can’t go there,” he said earlier this year, referencing the number of international students at Harvard and other universities.

    For the full 2024-25 academic year, new international student enrollments were down by 7%, driven by a 15% drop among new international graduate students, compared to 2023-24. However, the number of new undergraduates was up by 5%. Trump took office in January, just before the start of the spring semester at most colleges. 

    In the U.S., students from India were the largest group of international students, accounting for 30.8% of all international students, followed by students from China, with 22.6% of enrollments.

    In the 2024-25 academic year in California, the largest share of international students were from China, and they made up 35.4% of enrollments, followed by students from India at 20.9%. Overall enrollment of international students in California was down 1.1% in 2024-25. 

    USC enrolled the most international students of any California university, followed by four University of California campuses: Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego and Irvine. According to the report, the total number of enrolled international students were: 12,020 at Berkeley, 10,769 at UCLA, 10,545 at San Diego, and 7,638 at Irvine.

    Across the state, international students make up about 7% of enrollments at four-year colleges, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. They make up a large share of graduate students, accounting for 31% of graduate students at UC campuses, 15% at private nonprofit universities, and 12% at California State University campuses. 

    Freya Vijay, 20, a third-year student from Canada studying business administration at USC, said she always planned to come to the United States for college. 

    “In terms of business and just the economy, you have Wall Street, you have New York, Chicago, L.A., and San Francisco, all these big cities that dominate what’s going on in the world,” she said. “So immediately, in terms of opportunity, my mind was set on the States.” 

    In addition to visa and travel restrictions, the Trump administration has directly requested — or threatened, as some have called it — California campuses to limit enrollments of international students. The administration’s compact offer to USC last month would have forced the university to cap international enrollment at 15% for undergraduates and limit enrollment from any one country to 5%.

    USC has since rejected the compact, which also would have required the university to make a number of other changes, including committing to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” 

    Separately, in a settlement proposal to UCLA, the Trump administration calls on the campus to ensure that “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” are not admitted. UCLA is still in negotiations with the administration and has not yet reached a deal. The Trump administration has charged the campus with antisemitism and civil rights violations. 

    Even amid the turmoil, experts say they expect California universities to continue recruiting international students. Julie Posselt, a professor of education at USC’s Rossier School of Education, noted that at research universities, much of the research is being carried out by international graduate students. 

    “Especially in STEM fields, international students are really central to the research functions of universities,” Posselt said. “Enrolling international students is not optional. It is absolutely a part of the fabric of what makes universities great.” 

    On top of that, colleges have financial incentives to enroll international students. That’s especially true at UC campuses, which charge international students and students from other states much higher rates of tuition than California residents. In the 2026-27 academic year, new international and out-of-state undergraduates at UC will pay nearly $52,000 in tuition, more than triple what in-state students will be charged. Nonresidents in graduate programs also generally pay higher rates than residents.

    Facing pressure from the state Legislature to make more room for California residents, UC in 2017 passed a policy to cap nonresident enrollment at 18%, with a higher percentage allowed for campuses that were already above that mark. But the system still gets significant tuition revenue from nonresidents, including international students, which UC says supports the system’s core operations and helps to lower the cost of attendance for California residents.  

    In a Nov. 10 interview with Fox News, Trump seemed to acknowledge the importance of international students, saying colleges might “go out of business” without them.

    “You don’t want to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country — destroy our entire university and college system — I don’t want to do that,” he said. 

    International students also bring diverse perspectives and “a richness to the campus culture,” said Stett Holbrook, a spokesperson for the University of California system. “That’s something we really appreciate and try to cultivate.”

    At USC, the presence of international students from more than 130 countries means there are “innumerable opportunities at USC to encounter different perspectives” and “experience new cultures,” a spokesperson said in a statement. 

    Vijay, the USC student from Canada, said she regularly boasts about USC to friends, adding that she hopes attending remains an option for other international students. 

    “I always think it’s just such a great opportunity and that no international student should ever take it for granted,” she said. “I wish other internationals could experience it.”

    This story was originally published on EdSource.


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  • Trump vows to “permanently pause” migration from “third world countries”

    Trump vows to “permanently pause” migration from “third world countries”

    The President made the statement in a Thanksgiving post on Truth Social, in which he said the measures would allow the “US system to fully recover”, while vowing to remove anyone who is not an “asset” to the country. 

    Trump said he would end all federal benefits and subsidies to “noncitizens” in the US and deport any foreign national deemed a security risk or deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilisation”. 

    His remarks follow the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington DC on November 26, one of whom died the following day. The suspect in the shooting is an Afghan national who is said to have arrived in the US in September 2021. 

    Officials say the accused came to the country legally, under a program that offered immigration protections to Afghanistan nationals who worked with US forces and feared retribution from the Taliban.  

    No details of Trump’s immigration suspension plan or what would be considered a “third world” country have been released, and the State Department did not immediately respond to The PIE News’ request for comment. 

    Trump previously said after Wednesday’s shooting that the attack constituted an “act of terror”, and vowed to remove people “from any country who doesn’t belong here”. 

    Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation

    Donald Trump, US President

    As announced by USCIS director Joseph Edlow on Thursday: “Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols.” 

    In June 2025, the Trump administration imposed an all-out travel ban on 12 nations including Afghanistan, and a partial ban on a further seven, barring the entry of international scholars and students. Only Afghan nationals holding Special Immigration Visas were among the few exceptions to the policy.

    Those holding valid visas before the ban was announced were allowed to remain in the US, and in 2024/25 there were a total of 712 Afghan students studying at US institutions, according to Open Doors data.

    The countries currently impacted by the ban are Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, whose nationals are obstructed from all types of travel to the US including immigrant and nonimmigrant visas.  

    Nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela are subject to partial restrictions. 

    “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation”, Trump continued on Truth Social.  

    His presidency has seen a widespread crackdown on immigration, including the revocation of 80,000 non-immigrant visas, 10% of which were for international students.  

    The administration’s arrests, detentions and attempted deportations of international students for their pro-Palestinian advocacy have drawn widespread condemnation from within the US and globally, with a court ruling them illegal last month.  

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  • It will take patience and courage to fix K-12 education without the Department of Education

    It will take patience and courage to fix K-12 education without the Department of Education

    by John Katzman, The Hechinger Report
    November 19, 2025

    The Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education this week provides a rare opportunity to rethink our current top-down approach to school governance.

    We should jump on it. It’s not sexy to talk about governance, but we can’t fix K-12 education until we do so, no matter how we feel about the latest changes.

    Since the Department of Education opened in 1980, we’ve doubled per-pupil spending, and now spend about twice as much per student as does the average country in the European Union. Yet despite that funding — and the reforms, reports and technologies introduced over the past 45 years — U.S. students consistently underperform on international benchmarks. And people are opting out: 22 percent of U.S. district students are now chronically absent, while record numbers of families are opting out of those schools, choosing charters, private schools and homeschooling.

    Most federal and state reform approaches have been focused on curricular standards and have accomplished little. The many billions spent on the Common Core standards coincided with — or triggered — a 13-year decline in academic performance. The underlying principles of the standards movement — that every student should learn the same things at the same time, that we know what those things are and that they don’t change over time — have made our schools even less compelling while narrowing instruction to what gets tested.

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

    We need to address the real problem: how federal, state and district rules combine to create a dense fog of regulations and directives that often conflict or constrain one another. Educators are losing a rigged game: It’s not that they’re doing the wrong things, it’s that governance makes them unresponsive, bureaucratic, ineffective and paralyzed — can you name an industry that spends less on research and development?

    Fixing governance won’t be simple, but it shouldn’t take more than 13 years to do it: three years to design a better system of state governance and 10 more to thoroughly test and debug it.

    I would start by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, ideally at a new “Center for K-12 Governance” at a university’s school of education or school of public policy, and give them three years to think through a comprehensive set of state laws and regulations to manage schools.

    The center would convene experts from inside and outside of education, in small groups focused on topics including labor, funding, data, evaluation, transportation, construction, athletics, counseling, technology, curricula and connections to higher education and the workforce. Its frameworks would address various educational and funding alternatives currently in use, including independent, charter and parochial schools, home schooling and Education Savings Accounts, all of which speak to the role of parents in making choices about their children’s education.

    Each group would start with the questions and not the answers, and there are hundreds of really interesting questions to be considered: What are the various goals of our K-12 schools and how do we authentically measure schools against them? What choices do we give parents, and what information might help them make the right decisions for their kids? How do we allow for new approaches to attract, support and pay great teachers and administrators? How does money follow each student? What data do we collect and how do we use it?

    After careful consideration, the center would hand its proposed statutes to a governor committed to running a long-term pilot to fully test the model. He or she would create a small alternative department of education, which would oversee a few hundred volunteer schools matched to a control group of similar schools running under the state’s legacy regime; both groups would include schools with a range of demographic and performance profiles. The two systems could run side by side for up to a decade.

    Related: Schools confront a new reality: They can’t count on federal money

    Each year, the state would assess the two departments’ performance against metrics like graduation and college-completion rates, teacher retention, income trajectories, civic participation, student and parent satisfaction, and, yes, NAEP scores. Under intense scrutiny by interested parties, both groups would be free to tweak their playbooks and evaluate solutions against a range of real-world outcomes. Once definitive longitudinal data comes in, the state would shutter one department and move the governance of its schools over to the other, perhaps launching a new test with an even better system.

    This all may seem like a lot of work, but it’s a patient approach to a root problem. Schools remain the nation’s most local public square; they determine income mobility, civic health and democratic resilience. If we fail to rewire the system now to support them properly, we guarantee their continued decline, to the detriment of students and society. Instead of celebrating students, teachers and principals who succeed despite the odds, we should address why we made those odds so steep.

    That’s why we should use this moment to draft and test something audacious, and give the next Supreme Court a happier education case to decide: how to retire a legacy system that finally lost a fair fight.

    John Katzman has founded and run three large ed tech companies: The Princeton Review, 2U and Noodle. He has worked closely with many large school districts and has served on the boards of NAPCS and NAIS.

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

    This story about fixing K-12 education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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  • Students face dropout risk in Trump cuts – Campus Review

    Students face dropout risk in Trump cuts – Campus Review

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