On May 6, Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS), along with Sens. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Jim Justice (R-WV), and Pete Ricketts (R-NE), introduced the Overtime Wages Tax Relief Act, which is intended to fulfill President Trump’s campaign promise to eliminate taxes on overtime pay. The proposal provides an income tax deduction for overtime pay up to a certain threshold. Marshall explained that his goal with the legislation was to target the benefit to lower- and middle-income workers in industries and occupations that traditionally pay overtime.
Under the proposal, individuals would be able to deduct up to $10,000 of overtime pay from their income taxes. For married couples, the cap would be set at $20,000. This is an “above-the-line” income tax deduction, so workers would have the ability to claim the deduction whether they itemize their deductions or take the standard deduction.
Additionally, the proposal phases out the benefit for top earners, identified as individuals earning $100,000 or more and married couples earning $200,000 or more. The deduction is reduced by $50 for every $1,000 in income the individual or married couple earns above their respective threshold.
The legislation also includes reporting obligations for employers “to ensure transparency and accuracy in claiming the deduction.” Employers will be required to report overtime earnings to employees in their annual wage and tax statements.
Marshall is hoping to have the legislation included in the Republican’s fiscal year 2025 budget reconciliation bill, which is expected to cover everything from border security to extensions for the expiring 2017 tax cuts President Trump signed into law during his first term.
CUPA-HR will keep members apprised of additional updates on this bill and others related to overtime laws and regulations.
Mark Carney’s whirlwind start as Canadian prime minister has seen his party surge in the polls against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s threats but has provided little time to flesh out the newcomer’s policies on higher education and science.
When Justin Trudeau announced his resignation in January, the Liberal Party was trailing the Conservatives by more than 20 percentage points and was only narrowly ahead of the New Democratic Party.
But since Trump started a trade war with what he has belittled as his “51st state,” the Liberals have rebounded remarkably in the polls and are now favorites to retain power in the snap election on April 28.
Although the federal government is the primary player when it comes to investments in research and innovation in Canada, higher education has seldom been a major issue in national elections, said Glen Jones, professor of higher education at the University of Toronto.
“Not surprisingly, the entire election is focusing on the trade war that has been initiated by President Trump,” he said.
“The Carney platform, at least to date, has largely been about providing support and stability to individuals and industries that will be directly impacted by tariffs.”
Carney has been focusing primarily on positioning himself as the leader best able to respond to the new, evolving relationship with the U.S.—a strategy that seems to be working, added Jones.
Sarah Laframboise, executive director of Evidence for Democracy, a science policy nonprofit organization, said Carney’s background—as a former United Nations special envoy for climate action—suggests that he will remain committed to his views on climate policy, and that his pro-economic growth platform could translate into targeting investments in research, innovation and artificial intelligence.
“We will also likely see an increased focus on defense-related research, particularly around Arctic security and collaborative defense technologies. However, it remains unclear if this will extend to basic research,” said Laframboise.
“Additionally, his restrictive stance on international student admissions could have significant consequences for Canada’s higher education sector.”
Carney, who has never previously held elected office, earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in the U.K. before later going on to become governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.
“The investment fell short of reinvigorating funding for science, tech and the innovation sector,” he said.
“If the Carney Liberals are elected to power, I think we can expect the previous government’s investment to stay … but will they double down on that investment?”
Having examined Carney’s website—which mentions artificial intelligence 11 times, innovation once and science not at all—Johnson said the prime minister’s priorities in future funding seemed fairly clear.
With either Carney or Poilievre in charge, he said the next government will have an “amazing opportunity” to invest in science, technology and innovation.
“Given the USA’s deep cuts to science funding, Canada has the opportunity to leap forward as a global leader in strategic areas, but only if we increase our investment in science, training, technology and mobilization of the innovations that come from these activities.”
Maraida Caraballo Martinez has been an educator in Puerto Rico for 28 years and the principal of the elementary school Escuela de la Communidad Jaime C. Rodriguez for the past seven. She never knows how much money her school in Yabucoa will receive from the government each year because it isn’t based on the number of children enrolled. One year she got $36,000; another year, it was $12,000.
But for the first time as an educator, Caraballo noticed a big difference during the Biden administration. Because of an infusion of federal dollars into the island’s education system, Caraballo received a $250,000 grant, an unprecedented amount of money. She used it to buy books and computers for the library, white boards and printers for classrooms, to beef up a robotics program and build a multipurpose sports court for her students. “It meant a huge difference for the school,” Caraballo said.
Yabucoa, a small town in southeast Puerto Rico, was one of the regions hardest hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017. And this school community, like hundreds of others in Puerto Rico, has experienced near constant disruption since then. A series of natural disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and landslides, followed by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, has pounded the island and interrupted learning. There has also been constant churn of local education secretaries — seven in the past eight years. The Puerto Rican education system — the seventh-largest school district in the United States — has been made more vulnerable by the island’s overwhelming debt, mass emigration and a crippled power grid.
Maraida Caraballo Martinez has been an educator in Puerto Rico for 28 years and is now the principal of an elementary school. Her school has been slated for closure three times because of mass emigration from the island. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Under President Joe Biden, there were tentative gains, buttressed by billions of dollars and sustained personal attention from top federal education officials, many experts and educators on the island said. Now they worry that it will all be dismantled with the change in the White House. President Donald Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the U.S. territory, having reportedly said that it was “dirty and the people were poor.” During his first term, he withheld billions of dollars in federal aid after Hurricane Maria and has suggested selling the island or swapping it for Greenland.
A recent executive order to make English the official language has worried people on the island, where only 1 in 5 people speak fluent English, and Spanish is the medium of instruction in schools. Trump is seeking to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and has already madesweeping cuts to the agency, which will have widespread implications across the island. Even if federal funds — which last year made up more than two thirds of funding for the Puerto Rican Department of Education, or PRDE — were transferred directly to the local government, it would likely lead to worse outcomes for the most vulnerable children, say educators and policymakers. The PRDE has historically been plagued by political interference, widespread bureaucracy and a lack of transparency.
And the local education department is not as technologically advanced as other state education departments, nor as able to disseminate best practices. For example, Puerto Rico does not have a “per pupil formula,” a calculation commonly used on the mainland to determine the amount of money each student receives for their education. Robert Mujica is the executive director of the Puerto Rico Financial Oversight and Management Board, first convened under President Barack Obama in 2016 to deal with the island’s financial morass. Mujica said Puerto Rico’s current allocation of education funds is opaque. “How the funds are distributed is perceived as a political process,” he said. “There’s no transparency and there’s no clarity.”
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education.
In 2021, Miguel Cardona, Biden’s secretary of education, promised “a new day” for Puerto Rico. “For too long, Puerto Rico’s students and educators were abandoned,” he said. During his tenure, Cardona signed off on almost $6 billion in federal dollars for the island’s educational system, leading to a historic pay increase for teachers, funding for after-school tutoring programs, hiring of hundreds of school mental health professionals and the creation of a pilot program to decentralize the PRDE.
Cardona designated a senior adviser, Chris Soto, to be his point person for the island’s education system to underscore the federal commitment. During nearly four years in office, he made more than 50 trips to the island. Carlos Rodriguez Silvestre, the executive director of the Flamboyan Foundation, a nonprofit in Puerto Rico that has led children’s literacy efforts on the island, said the level of respect and sustained interest felt like a partnership, not a top-down mandate. “I’ve never seen that kind of attention to education in Puerto Rico,” he said. “Soto practically lived on the island.”
Soto also worked closely with Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, the president of the teachers union, Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, or AMPR, which resulted in a deal in which educators received $1,000 more a month to their base salary, a nearly 30 percent increase for the average teacher.“It was the largest salary increase in the history of teachers in Puerto Rico,” Bonilla said, though even with the increase, teachers here still make far less money than teachers on the mainland.
One of the biggest complaints Soto said he heard was how rigid and bureaucratic the Puerto Rico Department of Education was, despite a 2018 education reform law that allows for more local control. The education agency — the largest unit of government on the island, with the most employees and the biggest budget — was set up so that the central office had to sign off on everything. So Soto created and oversaw a pilot program in Ponce, a region on the island’s southern coast, focusing on decentralization.
For the first time, the local community elected an advisory board of education, and superintendent candidates had to apply rather than be appointed, Soto said. The superintendent was given the authority to sign off on budget requests directly rather than sending them through officials in San Juan, as well as the flexibility to spend money in his region based on individual schools’ needs.
In the past, that wasn’t a consideration: For example, Yadira Sanchez, a psychologist who has worked in Puerto Rican education for more than 20 years, remembers when a school got dozens of new air conditioners even though it didn’t need it. “They already had functioning air conditioners,” she said, “so that money was lost.”
The pilot project also focused on increasing efficiency. For example, children with disabilities are now evaluated at their schools rather than having to visit a special center. And Soto says he tried to remove politics and increase transparency around spending in the PRDE as well. “You can improve invoices, but if your political friends are getting the work, then you don’t have a good school system,” he said.
A school bus under a tree that fell during Hurricane Maria, which hit the island of Puerto Rico in September 2017. More than a year later, it had not been removed. Credit: Al Bello/Getty Images for Lumix
Under Biden, Puerto Rico also received a competitive U.S. Department of Education grant for $10.5 million for community schools, another milestone. And the federal department started including data on the territory in some education statistics collected. “Puerto Rico wasn’t even on these trackers, so we started to dig into how do we improve the data systems? Unraveling the data issue meant that Puerto Rico can properly get recognized,” Soto said.
But already there are plans to undo Cardona’s signature effort in Ponce. The island’s newly elected governor, Jenniffer González Colón, is a Republican and a Trump supporter. The popular secretary of education, Eliezer Ramos Parés, returned earlier this year to head the department after leading it from April 2021 to July 2023 when the governor unexpectedly asked him to resign — not an unusual occurrence within the island’s government, where political appointments can end suddenly and with little public debate. He told The Hechinger Report that the program won’t continue in its current form, calling it “inefficient.”
“The pilot isn’t really effective,” he said, noting that politics can influence spending decisions not only at the central level but at the regional level as well. “We want to have some controls.” He also said expanding the effort across the island would cost tens of millions of dollars. Instead, Ramos said he was looking at more limited approaches to decentralization, around some human resource and procurement functions. He said he was also exploring a per pupil funding formula for Puerto Rico and looking at lessons from other large school districts such as New York City and Hawaii.
While education has been the largest budget item on the island for years, it’s still far less than any of the 50 states spend on each student. Puerto Rico spends $9,500 per student, compared with an average of $18,600 in the states.
The U.S. Department of Education, which supplements local and state funding for students in poverty and with disabilities, has an outsized role in Puerto Rico schools. On the island, 55 percent of children live below the poverty line, compared with 17 percent in the 50 states; for students in special education, the figures are 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively. In total, during fiscal year 2024, more than 68 percent of the education budget on the island comes from federal funding, compared to 11 percent in U.S. states. The department also administers Pell Grants for low-income students — some 72 percent of Puerto Rican students apply — and supports professional development efforts and initiatives for Puerto Rican children who move back and forth between the mainland and territory.
Linda McMahon, Trump’s new education secretary, has reportedly said that the government will continue to meet its “statutory obligations” to students even as the department shuts down or transfers some operations and lays off staff. The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.
Some say the Biden administration’s pouring billions of dollars into a troubled education system with little accountability has created unrealistic expectations and there’s no plan for what happens after money is spent. Mujica, the executive director of the oversight board, said the infusion of funds postponed tough decisions by the Puerto Rican government. “When you have so much money, it papers over a lot of problems. You didn’t have to deal with some of the challenges that are fundamental to the system.” And he said there is little discussion of what happens when that money runs out. “How are you going to bridge that gap? Either those programs go away or we’re going to have to find the funding for them,” Mujica said.
He said efforts like the one in Ponce to bring decision making closer to where the students’ needs are is “vitally important.” Still, he said he’s not sure the money improved student outcomes. “This was a huge opportunity to make fundamental changes and investments that will yield long-term results. I’m not sure that we’ve seen the metrics to support that.”
Puerto Rico is one of the most educationally impoverished regions, with academic outcomes well below the mainland. On the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, a test that students across the U.S. take, just 2 percent of fourth graders in Puerto Rico were proficient, the highest score ever recorded for the island, and zero percent of eighth graders were. Puerto Rican students don’t take the NAEP for reading because they learn in Spanish, not English, though results shared by Ramos at a press conference in 2022 showed only 1 percent of third graders were reading at grade level.
There are some encouraging efforts. Flamboyan Foundation, the nonprofit in Puerto Rico, has been leading an island-wide coalition of 70 partners to improve K-3 literacy, including through professional development. Teacher training through the territory’s education department has often been spotty or optional.
The organization now works closely with the University of Puerto Rico and, as part of that effort, oversees spending of $3 million in literacy training. Approximately 1,500 or a third of Puerto Rico’s K-5 teachers have undergone the rigorous training. Educators were given $500 as an incentive for participating, along with books for their classrooms and three credit hours in continuing education. “It was a lot of quality hours. This was not the ‘spray and pray’ approach,” said Silvestre. That effort will continue, according to Ramos, who called it “very effective.”
A new reading test for first through third graders the nonprofit helped design showed that between the 2023 and 2024 school years, most children were below grade level but made growth in every grade. “But we still have a long way to go so that this data can get to teachers in a timely manner and in a way that they can actually act on it,” Silvestre said.
Kristin Ehrgood, Flamboyan Foundation’s CEO, said it’s too soon to see dramatic gains. “It’s really hard to see a ton of positive outcomes in such a short period of time with significant distrust that has been built over years,” she said. She said they weren’t sure how the Trump administration may work with or fund Puerto Rico’s education system but that the Biden administration had built a lot of goodwill. “There is a lot of opportunity that could be built on, if a new administration chooses to do that.”
Another hopeful sign is that the oversight board, which was widely protested when it was formed, has cut the island’s debt from $73 billion to $31 billion. And last year board members increased education spending by 3 percent. Mujica said the board is focused on making sure that any investment translates into improved outcomes for students: “Our view is resources have to go into the classroom.”
Betty A. Rosa, education commissioner and president of the University of the State of New York and a member of the oversight board, said leadership churn in Puerto Rico drives its educational instability. Every new leader is invested in “rebuilding, restructuring, reimagining, pick your word,” she said. “There is no consistency.” Unlike her New York state position, the Puerto Rican education secretary and other positions are political appointments. “If you have permanent governance, then even when the leadership changes, the work continues.”
Ramos, who experienced this instability when the previous governor unexpectedly asked to resign in 2023, said he met McMahon, the new U.S. secretary of education, in Washington, D.C., and that they had a “pleasant conversation.” “She knows about Puerto Rico, she’s concerned about Puerto Rico, and she demonstrated full support in the Puerto Rico mission,” he said. He said McMahon wanted PRDE to offer more bilingual classes, to expose more students to English. Whether there will be changes in funding or anything else remains to be seen. “We have to look at what happens in the next few weeks and months and how that vision and policy could affect Puerto Rico,” Ramos said.
Ramos was well-liked by educators during his first stint as education secretary. He will also have a lot of decisions to make, including whether to expand public charter schools and close down traditional public schools as the island’s public school enrollment continues to decline precipitously. In the past, both those issues led to fierce and widespread protests.
Soto says he’s realistic about the incoming administration having “different views, both ideologically and policywise,” but he’s hopeful the people of Puerto Rico won’t want to go back to the old way of doing things. “Somebody said, ‘You guys took the genie out of the bottle and it’s going to be hard to put that back’ as it relates to a student-centered school system,” Soto said.
Cardona, whose grandparents are from the island, said Puerto Rico had seen “academic flatlining” for years. “We cannot accept that the students are performing less than we know they are capable of,” he told The Hechinger Report, just before he signed off as the nation’s top education official. “We started change; it needs to continue.”
Principal Carabello’s small school of 150 students and 14 teachers has been slated for closure three times already, though each time it has been spared in part because of community support. She’s hopeful that Ramos, with whom she’s worked previously, will turn things around. “He knows the education system,” she said. “He’s a brilliant person, open to listen.”
Escuela de la Communidad Jaime C. Rodriguez is a Montessori school in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, that did not have any sports facilities for its students. It recently began work on a multipurpose sports center, made possible by federal funds under former President Joe Biden. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
But the long hours of the past several years have taken a toll on her. She is routinely in school from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. “You come in when it’s dark and you leave when it’s dark,” she said. There have been many new platforms to learn and new projects to implement. She wants to retire but can’t afford to. After decades of the local government underfunding the pension system, allowances that offset the high price of goods and services on the island were cut and pension plans were frozen.
Now instead of retiring with 75 percent of her salary, Carabello will receive only 50 percent, $2,195 a month. She is entitled to Social Security benefits, but it isn’t enough to make up for the lost pension. “Who can live with $2,000 in one month? Nobody. It’s too hard. And my house still needs 12 years more to pay.”
Carabello, who is always so strong and so optimistic around her students, teared up. But it’s rare that she allows herself time to think about herself. “I have a great community. I have great teachers and I feel happy with what I do,” she said.
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.
