A federal judge in Massachusetts has issued a preliminary injunction halting President Donald Trump’s executive order to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, dealing a significant blow to the administration’s efforts to eliminate the federal agency.
District Court Judge Myong J. Joun on last Thursday blocked Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon from carrying out the executive order and ordered the administration to reinstate approximately 1,300 Education Department employees who were terminated in March as part of a sweeping reduction-in-force.
The ruling comes in response to consolidated lawsuits filed by a coalition of 20 states, the District of Columbia, educator unions, and school districts challenging the administration’s moves to shrink and eventually close the department.
When Trump took office in January, the Education Department employed 4,133 workers. The reduction-in-force announced March 11 terminated more than 1,300 positions, while nearly 600 additional employees chose to resign or retire, leaving roughly 2,180 remaining staff—approximately half the department’s original size.
In his ruling, Judge Joun wrote that “a department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all,” adding that the court “cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself.”
The judge also prohibited Trump from transferring management of the federal student loan portfolio and special needs programs to other federal agencies, as the president had pledged to do from the Oval Office.
Judge Joun determined that the Trump administration likely violated the separation of powers by taking actions that conflicted with congressional mandates. He noted the administration had failed to demonstrate that the staff reductions actually improved efficiency, writing that “the record is replete with evidence of the opposite.”
The plaintiffs argued that the department could no longer fulfill critical duties, including managing the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio serving roughly 43 million borrowers and ensuring colleges comply with federal funding requirements.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which joined the legal challenge alongside other educator groups, praised the ruling as a crucial victory for higher education access.
“The AAUP is thrilled that District Judge Joun has blocked Trump’s illegal attempt to gut the Department of Education and lay off half of its workforce,” said AAUP President Dr. Todd Wolfson. “Eliminating the ED would hurt everyday Americans, severely limit access to education, eviscerate funding for HBCUs and TCUs while benefiting partisan politicians and private corporations looking to extract profit from our nation’s higher education system.”
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called the decision “a first step to reverse this war on knowledge and the undermining of broad-based opportunity.”
The Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, Madi Biedermann, criticized the ruling in a statement, calling Judge Joun a “far-left Judge” who “dramatically overstepped his authority” and vowed to “immediately challenge this on an emergency basis.”
The case, Somerville Public Schools v. Trump, represents the consolidation of two separate lawsuits filed in March. Democracy Forward is representing the coalition of plaintiffs, which includes the AAUP, Somerville Public School Committee, Easthampton School District, Massachusetts AFT, AFSCME Council 93, and the Service Employees International Union.
The ruling temporarily halts one of the Trump administration’s most ambitious efforts to reshape federal education policy, though the legal battle is expected to continue as the administration pursues its appeal.
DAVENPORT, Iowa — The Catholic prayer for the faithful echoed off the limestone walls and marble floor of the high-ceilinged chapel.
It implored God to comfort the poor and the hungry. The sick and the suffering. The anxious and the afraid.
Then it took an unexpected turn.
“Lord, hear our prayer for St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy University,” the young voice said, “that the grace of the Holy Spirit may help us to follow God’s plan for our new partnership.”
The speaker was talking about ongoing efforts to unite St. Ambrose University, where this weeknight Mass was being held, with fellow Catholic university Mount Mercy. Small religious schools in rural states are shutting down at an accelerating rate, a fate these two are attempting to avoid.
Credit: Mike Rundle for The Hechinger Report
“Lord, hear our prayer,” responded the congregation of students in St. Ambrose-branded T-shirts and hoodies.
The heads of both St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy, which is in Cedar Rapids, said they’ve watched as nearby religiously affiliated colleges, athletic rivals and institutions that employed their friends and former colleagues closed.
With falling numbers of applicants to college — especially in the Midwest — “we just don’t have the demographics anymore,” said St. Ambrose President Amy Novak. Now, as fewer graduates emerge from high schools, combining forces is a way to forestall “the reality that we might all see in five or seven years,” Novak said.
For many other small religiously affiliated institutions, time has already run out.
More than half of the 77 nonprofit colleges and universities that have closed or merged since 2020, or announced that they will close or merge, were religiously affiliated, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of news coverage and federal data. More than 30 that are still in business are on a U.S. Department of Education list of institutions considered “not financially responsible” because of comparatively low cash reserves and net income and high levels of debt.
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Some small, religiously affiliated institutions that are not on these lists are also showing signs of strain. Saint Augustine’s University in North Carolina, which is Episcopal, has 200 students, down from 1,100 two years ago, and has lost its accreditation. The 166-year-old St. Francis College in New York, which is Catholic, has sacked a quarter of its staff. Catholic Saint Louis University in Missouri laid off 20 employees, eliminated 130 unfilled faculty and staff positions and sold off its medical practice after running a deficit.
Bluffton University in Ohio, which is Mennonite, is looking for a new partner after a planned merger fell through in February and the president resigned. Catholic St. Norbert College in Wisconsin is eliminating 11 majors and minors and 21 faculty positions. And Georgetown College in Kentucky averted closing only after an alumnus gave it $16 million, which, along with another $12 million in donations, was enough to pay off crippling debt that was costing the small Baptist institution $3 million a year just in interest.
Other religiously affiliated schools are also taking steps to buttress themselves against demographic and financial challenges. Ursuline College in Ohio, for instance, which has fewer than 1,000 students, has agreed to merge with larger Gannon University, 95 miles away. Both are Catholic. Spring Hill College in Alabama and Rockhurst University in Missouri, both also Catholic, are teaming up so they can jointly offer more academic programs, though they will remain independent.
More than a fifth of colleges and universities in the United States, or 849 out of 3,893, are religiously affiliated, according to the most recent figures from the National Center for Education Statistics.
The threats to them are getting new attention. Presidents of 20 Catholic universities and colleges met in November in Chicago at a conference sponsored by DePaul University and held at the offices of the Deloitte consulting firm, which collected data to help them figure out solutions to the challenges they face.
“The intent was to think about a blueprint for the future of Catholic higher education,” including more partnerships, shared services and other kinds of alliances, said Donna Carroll, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. “Survival of the fittest is not the strategy that will advance the common good of Catholic higher education. We have to work together.”
The American Council on Education last year launched a Commission on Faith-Based Colleges and Universities, with leaders of what has since grown to 17 institutions including Pepperdine, Brigham Young and Yeshiva universities and the University of Notre Dame.
The idea of the commission, which is scheduled to meet in Washington in June, is “to increase visibility for the important contributions of religious and faith-based colleges and universities and to foster collaboration” among them.
Some religious colleges and universities are doing fine, and even posting enrollment gains — at least in part because of growing political divisions, campus protests and ideological attacks on secular institutions, said David Hoag, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.
Credit: Mike Rundle for The Hechinger Report
Parents are “wanting to put their son or daughter at a safe place that’s going to have a biblical worldview or a way to look at challenges that’s not polarized,” Hoag said. “At our institutions, you’re not going to be seeing protests or things that are happening at many of these [other] universities and colleges. You’re going to see them rallying together, whether it’s for a sporting event or for a revival or baptisms.”
Other trends also offer some hope to religiously affiliated colleges and universities. A long decline in the proportion of adults who consider themselves affiliated with a religion appears to have leveled off, the Pew Research Center finds. And while enrollment at parochial schools that feed graduates to Catholic universities fell more than 10 percent from 2017 to 2021, the most recent year for which the figure is available, the number of students at other kinds of religious primary and secondary schools is up.
Even religiously affiliated institutions confronting the realities of falling enrollment and financial woes fill a critically important role, their advocates say. They often serve low-income students who are the first in their families to go to college and are reluctant to enroll at large public universities.
Many are in rural areas where access to higher education is more limited than in urban and suburban places and is becoming less available still as public universities in rural states have merged or closed or cut dozens of majors.
Attending a small rural, religiously affiliated institution “is, I think — especially for rural students — a great opportunity,” said Todd Olson, president of Mount Mercy, above the sound of trains crossing Cedar Rapids outside his window. “I know kids from very small towns around Iowa,” like the one where he grew up, Olson said. “This campus is a much more comfortable place for them.”
Credit: Mike Rundle for The Hechinger Report
When Jacob Lange arrived at St. Ambrose from East Dubuque, Illinois, and attended a Mass on campus, “all of a sudden all these new people I had never met were kind of chatting with me and it was really kind of nice. It felt like I was kind of included and I didn’t really think I would be originally,” he said. “You figure, ‘I’m probably going to sit in the back and probably not talk to anyone all night,’ and then I showed up, and I walked out here and all of a sudden they’re, like, ‘Here, come join our group.’ ”
His parents also liked that he decided to go to a Catholic university, Lange said. “You know, you go to one of these big schools with 25,000 kids, and you’re kind of worried about your kid — like, what kind of dumb things is he going to get up to?”
Catholic universities in particular have a slightly higher four-year graduation rate than the national average, according to the Center for Catholic Studies at St. Mary’s University in Texas. Graduates have a stronger sense of community purpose, the center found in a survey. Alumni are 9 percentage points more likely to say they participate in civic activities.
More students at religiously affiliated than at secular institutions receive financial aid, the American Council on Education says. Three out of five get scholarships from the colleges themselves, compared to fewer than one in four at other kinds of schools. At both Mount Mercy and St. Ambrose, which have about 1,450 and 2,700 students, respectively, 100 percent get financial aid.
But these benefits for students can be vulnerabilities for budgets, said Novak, at St. Ambrose.
“We serve the poor. We educate the poor,” she said. “That is a risky financial proposition at the moment for small, regional institutions that are largely tuition-driven.”
The threats to smaller religiously affiliated institutions in rural areas stem largely from the downturn in the already short supply of high school graduates choosing to enroll. The proportion of such students going straight to college has fallen even more sharply in many largely rural states.
While they’re generous with their financial aid, religiously affiliated colleges are also generally more expensive than many other higher education institutions, at a time when many families are questioning the return on their investments in tuition. Median tuition and fees average $25,416 a year, according to the American Council on Education.
St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy, about 90 minutes away,are teaming up from positions of relative strength. Publicly available financial documents suggest that neither faces the immediate enrollment or financial crises that threaten many similar institutions. But their leaders say that they’re trying to fend off problems that could arise later. By joining forces, each can increase its number of programs while lowering administrative costs.
Reaction among students and alumni has been mixed.
Combining with St. Ambrose “was kind of nerve-racking at the beginning because it’s, like, ‘Oh, this is a lot of change,’ ” said Alaina Bina, a junior nursing major at Mount Mercy.
She picked the university in the first place because she liked the small, hilly campus.
“I came from a small town, so I didn’t really want to go bigger,” she said. “Even when I came here on a tour, people would say ‘Hi’ to each other. You just know everyone, and that’s kind of how it is in a small town, too.”
Students were worried about what name would appear on their degrees (the degrees will still say “Mount Mercy”) and whether sports teams that once competed against each other would be merged. Novak and Olson promised to keep their athletics programs separate and even add a sport at Mount Mercy: football, beginning in 2026.
Combining sports teams “would not be wise at all from a business perspective,” Olson said the two agreed, because they are “a powerful enrollment driver” for both schools.
Credit: Mike Rundle for The Hechinger Report
“Honestly, this was probably the biggest student concern,” said Nasharia Patterson, student government president at Mount Mercy, who was wearing a brace on her wrist from an awkward back tuck basket catch during cheer practice. Keeping the athletics teams “gives us a piece of Mount Mercy specifically to just hold on to.”
Among alumni, meanwhile, “there’s mixed feelings” about what’s happening to their alma mater, said Sarah Watson, a leadership development consultant who graduated from Mount Mercy in 2008.
Still, she said, “I know the great challenges that higher ed is facing right now. It’s not just Mount Mercy. It’s not just St. Ambrose. It’s the bigger schools, too. Enrollment numbers have dropped. The desire to go to a traditional four-year college is just not quite what it used to be.”
For Mount Mercy, which was founded by an order of nuns in 1928, Watson said, “If we don’t do this, what’s the alternative? We want to be around for another hundred years.”
After all, said Novak, the St. Ambrose president, “to watch universities close across the heartland because we can’t make it work will leave our communities fallow.”
Carroll, of the Catholic colleges and university association, said that many other religiously affiliated institutions are closely watching what’s happening at St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy.
“It’s a leap of faith,” she said. “And who better to take a leap of faith than a Catholic institution?”
Religiously affiliated colleges that have closed or merged, or announced that they will merge, since 2020
Alderson Broaddus University, West Virginia, Baptist
Alliance University, New York, Christian
Ancilla College, Indiana, Catholic
B. H. Carroll Theological Institute, Texas, Baptist
Birmingham-Southern College, Alabama, Methodist
Bloomfield College, New Jersey, Presbyterian
Cabrini University, Pennsylvania, Catholic
Cardinal Stritch University, Wisconsin, Catholic
Chatfield College, Ohio, Catholic
Clarks Summit University, Pennsylvania, Baptist
College of Saint Rose, New York, Catholic
Compass College of Film & Media, Michigan, Christian
Concordia College New York, Lutheran
Concordia University, Oregon, Lutheran
Eastern Nazarene College, Massachusetts, Christian
Finlandia University, Michigan, Lutheran
Fontbonne University, Missouri, Catholic
Holy Family College, Wisconsin, Catholic
Holy Names University, California, Catholic
Iowa Wesleyan University, Iowa, Methodist
Judson College, Alabama, Baptist
Limestone University, South Carolina, Christian
Lincoln Christian University, Illinois, Christian
MacMurray College, Illinois, Methodist
Magdalen College, New Hampshire, Catholic
Martin Methodist College, Tennessee, Methodist
Marymount California University, California, Catholic
Mount Mercy University, Iowa, Catholic
Multnomah University, Oregon, Christian
Nebraska Christian College, Nebraska, Christian
Notre Dame College of Ohio, Catholic
Ohio Valley University, West Virginia, Christian
Presentation College, South Dakota, Catholic
Rosemont College, Pennsylvania, Catholic
St. Louis Christian College, Missouri, Christian
St. Augustine College, Illinois, Episcopal
St. John’s University Staten Island campus, New York, Catholic
University of Saint Katherine, California, Orthodox Christian
Ursuline College, Ohio, Catholic
Wave Leadership College, Virginia, Christian
Wesley College, Delaware, Methodist
SOURCE: Hechinger Report analysis of news coverage and federal data.
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.
“Denver Public Schools to close 7 schools, cut grades at 3 others despite heavy resistance.”
“The list is out: These are the SFUSD schools facing closure.”
Such reports can leave the impression that districts are rapidly closing schools in response to declining enrollment and families leaving for charters, private schools and homeschooling.
But the data tells a different story.
School closures have actually declined over the past decade, a period of financial instability that only increased in the aftermath of the pandemic, according to research from the Brookings Institution.
The analysis, shared exclusively with The 74, shows that in 2014-15, the closure rate — the share of schools nationwide that were open one year and closed the next — was 1.3%. In 2023-24, the rate was just .8%, up from .7% the year before.
“I think it’s important for people to realize how rare school closures are,” said Sofoklis Goulas, a Brookings fellow and the study’s author.
Last fall, his research showed how schools that have lost at least 20% of their enrollment since the pandemic are more likely to be low-performing. The Clark County Public Schools, which includes Las Vegas, had the most schools on the list — 19 — but isn’t currently considering closures. In Philadelphia, with 12 schools in that category, district leaders are just beginning to discuss closures.
When it released Goulas’s initial report, leaders of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute argued that low-performing schools should be the first to close. But efforts to do so are often met with pushback from families, teachers and advocacy groups who argue that shutting down schools unfairly harms poor and minority students and contributes to neighborhood blight. Their pleas often push district leaders to retreat. Working in advocates’ favor, experts say, is the fact that many big district leaders are untested and have never had to navigate the emotionally charged waters of closing schools.
“Closing a neighborhood school is probably one of the most difficult decisions a district’s board makes,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a California state agency that provides financial oversight to districts. “They are going to avoid that decision as long as they can and at all costs.”
Such examples aren’t hard to find:
Just weeks after announcing closures, the San Francisco district halted plans to shutter any schools this fall.
In September, outgoing Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez pledged to put off school closures for another two years, even though state law allows the city to take action sooner. The district is in the process of absorbing five charter schools to keep them from closing.
In October, Pittsburgh Public Schools recommended closing 14 schools; several others were set to be relocated and reconfigured. About a month later, Superintendent Wayne Walters hit pause, saying the district needed more “thoughtful planning” and community input.
Last May, the Seattle Public Schools announced it would shutter 20 elementary schools next school year in response to a $100 million-plus budget deficit. They later increased the number to 21. By October, the list had dwindled to four schools. Just before Thanksgiving, Superintendent Brent Jones withdrew the plan entirely.
“This decision allows us to clarify the process, deepen our understanding of the potential impacts, and thoughtfully determine our next steps,” Jones wrote to families. While the plan would have saved the district $5.5 million, he said, “These savings should not come at the cost of dividing our community.”
Graham Hill Elementary in Seattle, which fifth grader Wren Alexander has attended since kindergarten, was initially on the list. The Title I school sits on top of a hill in a desirable area overlooking Lake Washington. But it also draws students from the lower-income, highly diverse Brighton Park neighborhood.
Among Wren’s neighbors are students from Ethiopia, Vietnam and Guatemala. Wren, who moves on to middle school this fall, said she looks forward to visiting her former teachers and cried when she heard Graham Hill might close. She wanted her younger brother and sister to develop the same warm connection she had.
“I don’t think I would be who I am if I didn’t go to the school,” she said.
Wren Alexander and her little sister Nico, outside Graham Hill. (Courtesy of Tricia Alexander)
Tricia Alexander, her mother, was among those who opposed the closures, participating in rallies outside the district’s administration building and before board meetings.
“We were really loud,” said Alexander, who’s also part of Billion Dollar Bake Sale, an effort to advocate for more state education funding. She said there was “no real evidence” that closing schools would have solved the district’s budget woes. “In no way would kids win.”
It’s a view shared by many school finance experts, who note that the bulk of school funding is tied up in salaries, not facility costs. Districts may save some money from closing schools, but unless coupled with staff reductions, it’s often not enough to make up for large budget shortfalls.
‘So bad at this’
If enrollment doesn’t pick up, experts say, leaders who delay closures will have to confront the same issues a year later or — perhaps even more likely — pass the problems on to their successors.
“If there continues to be fewer and fewer children …then that doesn’t get better,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant.
One Chicago high school, for example, had just 33 students last year. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, 34 elementary schools have fewer than 200 students and 29 of those are using less than half of the building, according to a recent report. The share of U.S. students being educated outside of traditional schools also continues to increase, according to a forthcoming analysis Goulas conducted with researchers at Yale University.
“We don’t see a trajectory of enrollment recovery,” he said. “Things actually got worse in the most recently released data batch.”
But such conditions haven’t stopped advocacy groups from campaigning against closures. One of them, the left-leaning Advancement Project, has joined with local groups in Denver and Pittsburgh to make a case against closures nationally.
“All children deserve to have a local, neighborhood public school in which they and their families have a say,” said Jessica Alcantara, senior attorney for the group’s Opportunity to Learn program. “It’s not just that school closures are hard on families. They harm the full education ecosystem that makes up a school — students, families, school staff and whole communities.”
Last May, Alcantara and other Advancement Project staff urged the U.S. Department of Education to treat school closures as a civil rights issue. Nine of the 10 schools the Denver district planned to close in 2022 had a majority Black or Hispanic student population.
The advocates argued that in cases of enrollment loss, run-down facilities and empty classrooms, there are alternatives to closing schools. They encourage communities to push for renovations and urge district leaders to use vacant spaces for STEM, arts or other programs that might attract families. Opponents of closures also say that districts sometimes underestimate how much of a building is used for non-classroom purposes like special education services, early-childhood programs and mental health.
Eschbacher’s assessment of why districts often back down from closing schools is more blunt.
“Districts are so bad at this,” he said. “If you just do a few things wrong, it could sink the whole effort.”
For one, leaders often target schools with under 300 students for closure, appealing to parents that they can’t afford to staff them with arts programs, a school nurse or a librarian.
But those explanations sometimes fall flat.
“Parents always say, ‘I wanted a small school. I know my teachers and they know my kid. And it’s right down the street,’” Eschbacher said. If they didn’t like their school, he added, they would have likely would have chosen a charter or some other option.
District officials also run into trouble if they try to spin the data. When Seattle officials talked about “right-sizing” the district, they pointed to the loss of 4,900 students since 2019-20.
But Albert Wong, a parent in the district and a lifelong Seattle resident, knew there was more to the story. Not only is the current enrollment higher than it was from 2000 to 2011, the pandemic-related decline seems to have leveled off. In a commentary, he argued that officials presented misleading data “to make current enrollment look exceptionally bad.”
Graham Hill Elementary, fifth-grader Wren’s school, actually saw a slight increase in enrollment this year, including a new class for preschoolers with disabilities. And while Pittsburgh schools are projected to lose another 5,000 students over the next six years, enrollment this year held steady at about 18,400.
To Eschbacher, the “burden of proof is always on the district” to make an airtight case for why students would be better off in larger schools. He has applauded the Denver-area Jeffco Public Schools, which has closed 21 schools since 2021, for having state demographers, not just district officials, explain population trends to families at community meetings.
‘It wasn’t realistic’
Walters, Pittsburgh’s superintendent, can easily rattle off reasons why the district should rethink how it uses its buildings. Early last year, local news reports showed that almost half of the district’s schools were less than 50% full.
“We’ve lost about a fourth of our population, but we have not changed anything to our footprint,” he said.
Meanwhile, the average age of the district’s buildings is 90 years old, and many lack air-conditioning, forcing some schools to send students home in sweltering weather.
But a consulting group’s proposal showed that Black and low-income students and those with disabilities would be disproportionately affected by the changes. Several advocacy groups drew attention to those disparities, calling the effort “rushed.”
412 Justice, an advocacy group, is among the community organizations pushing for alternatives to school closures in Pittsburgh. (412 Justice)
Walters agreed and put the plan on hold last fall, saying he lacked “robust” responses to parents’ tough questions about how schools would change for their kids.
“It doesn’t mean that we don’t see a path forward,” he said. “But it wasn’t realistic that we would have those questions answered within the timeline that we’ve been given.”
In March, parents pushed for another delay, causing the school board to postpone a vote on the next phase in the closure process.
As the Jeffco district demonstrates, some school systems are following through with closures. The school board in nearby Denver unanimously voted in November to close seven schools and downsize three more.
But that’s after community protests pushed the district to put the brakes on a plan to close 19 schools in 2021. Advocates argued that families in low-income areas, who had been heavily impacted by the pandemic, would be most affected. Then the district only closed three in 2023, and now board members are considering a pause on closures for three years.
School boards closing a dozen or more schools are often catching up with work their predecessors let pile up, said Goulas of Brookings.
“Closing a single school allows for easier placement of students and minimizes the political cost and community stress,” he said. “When a district releases a long list of schools to close, it likely indicates that they waited for conditions to improve, but this didn’t happen.”
Angel Gober, executive director of 412 Justice — one of 16 organizations that called on the Pittsburgh district to drop its plan — acknowledged that their fight isn’t over.
“I think we got a temporary blessing from God,” she said. But she wants the district to explore a host of alternatives, like community schools and corporate support, before it shutters and sells off buildings. “We do have very old infrastructure, and that is an equity issue. But can we try five things before we make a drastic decision to close schools for forever?”
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Dive Brief:
Limestone University, in South Carolina, will close when its current semester ends this week after last-ditch fundraising efforts came up short, the Christian institution announced Tuesday.
The university’s trustee board voted to permanently shutter Limestone despite raising $2.1 million from almost 200 donors in the last two weeks. The board previously said Limestone would need $6 million to stabilize operations.
“In the final analysis, we could not continue operations on-campus or online without a greater amount of funding,” board Chair Randall Richardson said in a Thursday statement.
Dive Insight:
Limestone ended last week on a hopeful note, with Richardson describing the board as “cautiously optimistic.”
“One of the largest in Limestone’s recent history, the transformative donation comes at a pivotal time as the institution rallies to secure critical funding that will help sustain its mission of providing life-changing educational opportunities,” the university said in the Fullerton announcement.
But even for a small university, the multimillion dollar campaign wasn’t enough to sustain Limestone.
Founded in 1845, Limestone’s enrollment has declined in recent years, with fall headcount dipping 27% to 1,782 students between 2018 and 2023, according to federal data. Current enrollment stands at about 1,600 students, the university said last week.
The university’s board has blamed those drops, as well as rising costs, for its financial travails. For fiscal 2024, it logged a budget deficit of $9.2 million, following an $11.4 million shortfall in 2023.
As it prepares to close, the university has promised an “orderly wind-down process” and said it will help students transfer to other institutions.
“More detailed information about the closure timeline, academic records, transfer assistance, employment impact, and other support services will be provided in the coming days,” it said.
Limestone plans to hold its commencement ceremony on Saturday for those students graduating at the end of the term, 246 in all.
“Our Limestone spirit will endure through the lives of our students and alumni who carry it forward into the world,” Richardson said. “Though our doors may close, the impact of Limestone University will live on.”
The Government Accountability Office is urging the Education and Agriculture Departments to better coordinate their efforts to connect students with SNAP benefits.
Alex Potemkin/E+/Getty Images
A new Government Accountability Office report concludes that the Education and Agriculture Departments should be doing more to ensure college students receive federal food assistance. Despite reforms, too few students are notified they could be eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
For instance, the GAO found that the Education Department’s plan to notify students about food assistance programs misses about 40 percent of those eligible for the aid.
The report, released Thursday, partly blames faulty communication and data sharing between the Education Department, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, colleges, and state agencies.
“It’s crucial that ED and USDA collaborate effectively, so that all eligible students can access the resources they need to thrive,” Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said in a statement. (He also emphasized that for the Education Department to help students, it has to remain intact.)
To reach its conclusions, the GAO interviewed officials at both federal agencies and at colleges and SNAP offices in California, Massachusetts and Washington, states actively working on student outreach, to learn more about students’ access to SNAP benefits. The report also based its findings on interviews with members of multiple higher education associations and an analysis of data from the Education Department’s 2020 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. The audit took place between May 2023 and February 2025.
‘Gaps in Planning and Execution’
The report pointed out that the Education Department and USDA have new legal avenues to help students obtain SNAP benefits.
The FAFSA Simplification Act, which passed in 2020 and included provisions related to student outreach that took effect last summer, requires the Education Department to notify low-income students of federal benefits, like SNAP, based on their Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The law also allows the Education Department to share FAFSA data with the USDA and state SNAP agencies to reach out to potentially eligible students and streamline their enrollment in the program.
The report commended the two federal agencies for taking steps to connect students with SNAP benefits, including a memorandum of understanding in September 2024 with commitments from both agencies to take action on student access to SNAP. Notably, the Department of Education agreed to send out annual emails with information about SNAP to colleges and potentially eligible low-income students, sending emails to approximately eight million students in November 2024.
“But gaps in planning and execution remain,” according to the report.
The GAO accused the Education Department of initially offering insufficient guidance as to how data sharing would work, leaving colleges and state higher ed agencies in the dark.
In a December 2023 survey, 11 out of 19 state higher ed agency officials said it was unclear to them whether organizations could use student data for SNAP outreach, 15 out of 19 weren’t sure if they needed students’ consent to use certain data, and 12 out of 19 didn’t know which rules applied to which data sources. A 2023 survey of colleges by the Higher Learning Advocates and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators similarly found that fewer than a quarter of 182 colleges did outreach to students about federal benefits because of worries they’d incorrectly use FAFSA data. The department later provided more clear guidance.
The GAO also found that there still isn’t a clear, written process in place for data sharing between the Education Department and other federal and state SNAP agencies. The process involves obtaining student consent and establishing individual data-sharing agreements with each agency that administers benefits, according to department officials, but the details remain hazy.
“While officials told us they intend to move forward with sharing FAFSA data with other agencies, Education does not have a formal plan in place for how it would implement this effort, nor has the agency estimated a timeframe for when it would begin sharing data,” the report noted. “This could lead to delays in vulnerable college students getting information that could help them access food and benefits they are eligible for.”
The GAO also identified flaws in the Education Department’s system for notifying students about SNAP benefits.
As of November 2024, students eligible for Pell Grants who report their households receive at least one federal benefit automatically get a notification on their FAFSA submission page about other federal benefit programs with a link to more information. But the GAO’s analysis of Education Department data found that an estimated 40 percent of students who could be eligible for SNAP don’t meet both criteria. For example, some Pell-eligible students don’t apply for federal benefits, and graduate students may be eligible for SNAP but can’t receive Pell Grants. The GAO critiqued the department for not consulting with the USDA or other agencies on its approach.
The report also doesn’t let the USDA off the hook. The GAO argued that the USDA urged state SNAP agencies to target outreach to students but, like the Education Department, left out key details in its guidance, creating “areas of ambiguity.” College and state SNAP agency officials reported to the GAO that they weren’t sure if or when they could access or use students’ SNAP data and had trouble getting their questions answered at the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service regional offices.
“Without clear guidance on using and sharing SNAP data for student outreach and application assistance, states and colleges could inconsistently and inaccurately interpret what is allowable,” the report stated. “This could lead to missed opportunities for informing outreach and application efforts or some unintentionally engaging in noncompliance.”
What’s Next
The report offered a series of recommendations to the Education Department and the USDA to improve their work on behalf of students.
Notably, the GAO urged the education secretary to write up a formal plan for sharing FAFSA data with SNAP administrators, consult with the USDA to evaluate its system for notifying potentially SNAP-eligible students and better inform colleges and state SNAP agencies about the notification system. The USDA was also tasked with issuing better, more updated guidance to state SNAP agencies, in partnership with the Education Department, to clarify how student data can be used in outreach.
The GAO asserted that the stakes are high if these processes don’t improve.
“In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. Department of Education spent approximately $31.4 billion dollars [sic] on Pell Grants to help over 6 million students with financial need attend college,” the report read. “This substantial federal investment in higher education is at risk of not serving its intended purpose if college students drop out because of limited or uncertain access to food.”
President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. Small Business Administration would handle the student loan portfolio for the slated-for-elimination Education Department, and that the Department of Health and Human Services would handle special education services and nutrition programs.
The announcement — which raises myriad questions over the logistics to carry out these transfers of authority — came a day after Trump signed a sweeping executive order that directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of the department to the extent she is permitted to by law.
“I do want to say that I’ve decided that the SBA, the Small Business Administration, headed by Kelly Loeffler — terrific person — will handle all of the student loan portfolio,” Trump said Friday morning.
The White House did not provide advance notice of the announcement, which Trump made at the opening of an Oval Office appearance with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The Education Department manages student loans for millions of Americans, with a portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion, according to the White House.
In his executive order, Trump said the federal student aid program is “roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo,” adding that “although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid.”
‘Everything else’ to HHS
Meanwhile, Trump also said that the Department of Health and Human Services “will be handling special needs and all of the nutrition programs and everything else.”
It is unclear what nutrition programs Trump was referencing, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture manages school meal and other major nutrition programs.
One of the Education Department’s core functions includes supporting students with special needs. The department is also tasked with carrying out the federal guarantee of a free public education for children with disabilities Congress approved in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.
Trump added that the transfers will “work out very well.”
“Those two elements will be taken out of the Department of Education,” he said Friday. “And then all we have to do is get the students to get guidance from the people that love them and cherish them, including their parents, by the way, who will be totally involved in their education, along with the boards and the governors and the states.”
Trump’s Thursday order also directs McMahon to “return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
SBA, HHS heads welcome extra programs
Asked for clarification on the announcement, a White House spokesperson on Friday referred States Newsroom to comments from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and heads of the Small Business Administration and Health and Human Services Department.
Leavitt noted the move was consistent with Trump’s promise to return education policy decisions to states.
“President Trump is doing everything within his executive authority to dismantle the Department of Education and return education back to the states while safeguarding critical functions for students and families such as student loans, special needs programs, and nutrition programs,” Leavitt said. “The President has always said Congress has a role to play in this effort, and we expect them to help the President deliver.”
Loeffler and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said their agencies were prepared to take on the Education Department programs.
“As the government’s largest guarantor of business loans, the SBA stands ready to deploy its resources and expertise on behalf of America’s taxpayers and students,” Loeffler said.
Kennedy, on the social media platform X, said his department was “fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs and overseeing nutrition programs that were run by @usedgov.”
The Education Department directed States Newsroom to McMahon’s remarks on Fox News on Friday, where she said the department was discussing with other federal agencies where its programs may end up, noting she had a “good conversation” with Loeffler and that the two are “going to work on the strategic plan together.”
Maine Morning Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com.
President Donald Trump has signed a much anticipated executive order that he said is designed to close the U.S. Department of Education.
The order Trump signed Thursday tells Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities” to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” At the same time, the order says McMahon should ensure “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
Despite polling to the contrary, Trump said in his speech Thursday that closing the department is a popular idea that would save money and help American students catch up to other countries. He also said his order would ensure that other federal agencies take over major programs now housed at the Education Department, like those for students from low-income backgrounds and students with disabilities.
“Beyond these core necessities, my administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department,” Trump said. “We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible. It’s doing us no good. We want to return our students to the states.”
The executive order represents a symbolic achievement for Trump, who for years has expressed a desire to close the department. Yet the president has already radically transformed the department without relying on such an order. McMahon announced massive layoffs and buyouts earlier this month that cut the department’s staff nearly in half.
Beyond the rhetoric, it’s unclear how exactly the order will impact the department’s work or existence.
The order does not directly change the department’s annual budget from Congress. And federal law dictates many of the Education Department’s main functions–changing those would require congressional approval that could be very hard to secure.
Still, Trump’s move to dramatically slash the department’s staff could impact its capacity and productivity, even if officially its functions remain in place.
At her confirmation hearing, McMahon promised to work with Congress on a reorganization plan. Project 2025, a prominent blueprint for conservative governance from the Heritage Foundation released before Trump’s second term, says that along with closing the Education Department, the federal government should move the department’s education civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice, while the collection of education data should move to the U.S. Census Bureau.
In a statement on Thursday, McMahon said closing the Education Department does not mean cutting off funds from those who depend on them.
“We will continue to support K-12 students, students with special needs, college student borrowers, and others who rely on essential programs,” she wrote. “We’re going to follow the law and eliminate the bureaucracy responsibly by working with Congress and state leaders to ensure a lawful and orderly transition.”
The executive order notes that the Education Department does not educate any students, and points to low test scores on an important national assessment as evidence that federal spending is not helping students.
“Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” the order says.
Trump order is triumph for department’s foes
The Republican governors of Florida, Texas, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee, Idaho, and Nebraska were present during the signing ceremony. Trump said they “badly” wanted the federal government to give their states more control over education.
The Education Department administers billions of dollars in federal assistance through programs such as Title I, which benefits high-poverty schools, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which offsets the cost of special education services.
The department also administers financial aid for college students, shares information about best practices with states and school districts, and enforces civil rights laws. And it oversees the school accountability system, which identifies persistently low-performing schools to extra support.
States and school districts already make most education decisions, from teacher pay to curriculum choices.
Conservatives have wanted to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education since it was created by President Jimmy Carter and Congress in 1979, and Trump talked about doing so in his first administration. But those efforts never gained traction.
Conservatives say that for decades the department has failed to adequately address low academic performance. They also see the department as generally hostile to their political and ideological perspectives.
The executive order says that McMahon must ensure that “any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology,” a reference to policies intended to make schools more welcoming for students of color and LGBTQ students.
They say they’re already seeing impacts from layoffs, which hit the Office for Civil Rights, Federal Student Aid, and the Institute of Education Sciences particularly hard.
The Education Department already was one of the smallest cabinet-level departments, with around 4,100 employees, before the layoffs. With buyouts and layoffs, the department now employs just under 2,200 people.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
A draft executive order obtained Thursday by Inside Higher Ed directs the newly confirmed education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps” to return authority over education to the states and facilitate closure of the Department of Education “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
If signed, the order—which has been rumored for weeks but is not yet official—would be the first step in carrying out the president’s controversial campaign promise to abolish the 45-year-old department, which he believes is unconstitutional and has grown too large.
Several media outlets reported Wednesday night that Trump would sign the order as soon as Thursday, but shortly after the news circulated, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X, “President Trump is NOT signing an Executive Order on the Department of Education today” and called the reports “fake news.”
Still, the reports set off a wave of comments from advocates and analysts. Liberals warned that shutting down the Education Department would be devastating for families and students, while conservatives backed Trump’s plan and said the draft order was key to cleaning up the agency.
McMahon, who took office Monday and will spearhead the closure effort, is supportive of overhauling the agency. She told department staff earlier this week to prepare for a “momentous final mission” to eliminate “bureaucratic bloat” and return education to the states.
Although vague, the secretary’s memo and the draft executive order give policy experts some idea of what could come next.
At the very least, they expect to see a major reduction in staff and a diminished federal role in education; some of that work is already underway. The agency has slashed millions in contracts and grants as well as fired dozens of employees. A larger reduction in force is also in the works, fueling concerns among department staff.
“There is probably not going to be anything in [the order] that isn’t already happening, largely,” said Kelly McManus, vice president of higher education at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic group. “The secretary’s final mission was clear … so I’m not particularly worked up about the EO specifically, because I don’t think it’s going to fundamentally change that.”
Abolishing the department would require an act of Congress, which McManus said the draft order appears to acknowledge. She and other experts say any effort to close the department will be lengthy and complicated.
“This is not a flip-on, flip-off situation here,” she said. “Practically, there will have to be a process … You cannot shut the doors tomorrow and be done.”
The 416-word draft order gives little detail as to what the “steps” of dismantling the department are or what would happen to certain congressionally mandated programs such as the Pell Grant, the student loan system or the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. However, the document does say that any funds allocated by the department should comply with federal law, including Trump’s previous orders on diversity, equity and inclusion and transgender athletes—both of which have been caught up in court.
Neither Trump nor McMahon has so far offered any plan outlining how closing the department would work, though some conservative plans recommend moving the Office for Federal Student Aid to the Treasury and sending the Office for Civil Rights to the Justice Department.
More than 4,000 people currently work for the department, which was created in 1979 and now has a $80 billion discretionary budget. Each year, the agency issues about $100 billion in student loans and doles out more than $30 billion in Pell Grants.
Shutting down the department isn’t popular with voters, recent surveys have found. One recent opinion poll found that 61 percent of all respondents “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed the idea of eliminating the department. Another showed that up to 72 percent either opposed the plan or weren’t sure how they felt. That number was 49 percent among Republicans.
Minimizing a D.C. ‘Footprint’
Trump has signaled for months, if not years, that he wants to shut down the Education Department, and many analysts have already taken a position on the issue.
To Michael Brickman, an adjunct fellow at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, nothing about the draft was a surprise. Like McManus, he noted that much of what the order directs McMahon to do is already underway.
Brickman expects the next steps will focus on finding new and “better” ways to maintain the department’s core functions as required under law with “less funding, less staff and possibly in conjunction with other agencies.”
“I don’t think anybody’s talking about cutting major programs,” he said, referencing financial aid services like the Pell Grant and disability protection acts like IDEA. “So the question will be, what is required under law? What can Congress change? And how can the department streamline things to minimize the footprint in D.C.?”
Shutting down the Education Department likely would be disruptive for colleges and students, advocates say.
J. David Ake/Getty Images
McManus stressed that it will be important to protect these core functions, especially the ones related to higher ed, saying it doesn’t make sense to send them back to the states.
“What is most important is that those core statutory functions have the people, capacity and expertise to be able to do effective oversight of how taxpayer dollars are being spent,” she said. “We are significantly less concerned about where those people sit, as long as there is the ability to safeguard taxpayer investments and to make sure that programs that are statutorily required and that have had long bipartisan support, like Pell Grants, are being effectively implemented.”
In Brickman’s view, some of the department’s regulatory operations, like analyzing and creating reports on grant or contract applicants and managing third-party accreditors, are simply “make-work.” By hiring hundreds of staff members to execute these tasks, he said, the department pulls tax dollars from local governments and then forces those same communities to spend more writing grant proposals to get it back.
“There’s just a lot of work and churn that evidence shows does not lead to improved student outcomes,” he said.
But when asked what the Trump administration has done to convince stakeholders he not only intends to tear down the department but also build it back up again, Brickman didn’t directly answer the question. Instead, he referenced actions of the Biden administration.
“The Biden administration broke the entire Federal Student Aid system on purpose … They were trying to illegally turn the trillion-plus-dollar portfolio from a loan program into a grant program,” he said. “That is not what the Trump administration is doing. The Trump administration has tried to improve these programs and make them actually work again.”
Although what Biden did was “unfortunate,” Brickman said, it also creates an opportunity.
“This mess isn’t being created; it’s being responded to,” he said. “I hope institutions that may be predisposed to oppose anything coming from the Trump administration will welcome this as the end of a failed experiment that just put more restrictions on teaching and learning.”
Democrats Push Back
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers, student advocacy groups, civil rights organizations and left-leaning think tanks warn that Trump has no intention of rebuilding, only dismantling. The American Federation of Teachers, a key higher ed union, said the order is a government attempt to “abdicate its responsibility to all children, students and working families.”
Randi Weingarten, the union’s president, recognized in a statement Wednesday night that there are certainly ways the department could be more efficient, but she implied that’s not Trump’s goal.
“No one likes bureaucracy, and everyone’s in favor of more efficiency, so let’s find ways to accomplish that,” she said. “But don’t use a ‘war on woke’ to attack the children living in poverty and the children with disabilities, in order to pay for vouchers and tax cuts for billionaires.”
Senate Democrats criticized the pending executive order to abolish the Department of Education as a press conference Thursday.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images
Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington State, blasted the Trump administration’s plans at a press conference Thursday. She said that Trump and his unelected government efficiency czar Elon Musk “don’t know what it’s like to count on their local public school having the resources to get their kids a great education … And they don’t care to learn why. They want to break the department, break our government, and enrich themselves.”
To the American Association of University Professors, “dismantling the Department of Education would hasten us into a new dark age.”
Former Biden under secretary James Kvaal told Inside Higher Ed that the draft order should dispel any notion that Trump is not trying to shut down the department. But at the same time, he said, the GOP administration’s approach to doing so has been “schizophrenic” and “inconsistent.”
“It can’t be true that students of color and with disabilities will have their civil rights protected, but also the federal government is not going to be involved in those decisions,” he said.
But at the same time, Kvaal and others note that, ultimately, the Trump administration lacks the legal authority to actually close the Department of Education, making full abolishment more complicated than the president suggests.
Shuttering the agency would require 60 votes in the Senate as well as a majority in the House, as the department’s existence is written into statute. And with a 53-seat majority in the Senate, Republicans don’t currently have the votes unless some Democrats back the plan.
“[The Republicans] don’t have the votes to close the department, and they already plan to enforce their plans on DEI, so it’s not clear what the EO adds to that,” Kvaal said. “It’ll get sorted out in the courts.”
Katherine Knott and Liam Knox contributed to this report.
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — Many students in New Zealand have a story to tell about “streaming” — being grouped into separate math classes based on their perceived ability to master the subject.
Manaaki Waretini-Beaumont, now 18 and an environmental science major at the University of Canterbury, learned about the downside of streaming when she enrolled in Avonside Girls’, a 1,000-student high school in Christchurch.
Avonside starts at Year 9, equivalent to eighth grade in the United States, and ends at Year 13, equivalent to 12th grade. Before the start of her Year 9 term, Waretini-Beaumont and her fellow students were divided up into groups to take tests in “maths,” reading comprehension, and patterns and shapes.
Afterward, the students were separated into lettered groups that spelled out the word B-I-N-O-C-U-L-A-R-S. Waretini-Beaumont was a “9-N” student in mathematics — as she describes it, “the top of the middle block.”
But she said she didn’t feel comfortable as one of the few Māori students in the class.
“I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be in that space,” said Waretini-Beaumont, whose iwi, or tribal affiliations, are Te Āti Haunui-A-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Apa, Ngāti Paoa. “If there was something I wasn’t understanding, I felt like I wasn’t able to say that, because I’m supposed to be in the smart class with all these smart people.”
So she shifted to another mathematics class with her Māori friends, who were in the “S” classes.
“Being in two different spaces, I could really see the change,” Waretini-Beaumont said. “At the top classes, the teachers’ language towards the students was always positive and it was always encouraging. And they really wanted students to learn and were trying to help them.”
Manaaki Waretini-Beaumont experienced the effects of “streaming,” or academic ability tracking, during her time as a high school student at Avonside Girls’ School in Christchurch, New Zealand. Credit: Image provided by Richie Mills/Ngāi Tahu
In the classroom where her friends were assigned, in contrast, the mathematics work mostly amounted to simple worksheets — “coloring pages and word find,” Waretini-Beaumont said.
For years, much like in the United States, New Zealand has worried about sliding student proficiency in mathematics, as captured by both national and international test scores. Later this month — the beginning of the New Zealand school year — the country is launching an overhaul of mathematics instruction that education leaders hope will reverse the trend.
But other groups in the country have been trying to approach the problem of academic achievement from a different angle. They believe that streaming is driving achievement gaps in the country, including in mathematics. Tokona te Raki/Māori Futures Collective, a think tank focused on youth, has been working since 2019 to persuade schools to voluntarily end the practice by 2030. The initiative is called “Kōkirihia”— Māori for “take action.”
Streaming is just one of many ways that schools group students by academic ability. Ability grouping can include separating students into vocational or university tracks at different schools as early as age 10, as is common in Germany and other Western European countries. But it could also include teachers creating informal and non-permanent groupings within their own classrooms to provide enrichment or extra support to students who need it.
In New Zealand, critics say streaming pushes two groups into so-called “cabbage,” or lower-level mathematics, at a disproportionate rate: Māori students, who are indigenous to New Zealand, and students who are Pasifika, the New Zealand term for people from Samoa, Tonga and other nations in the Pacific Islands.
In the 14th century, the Polynesian ancestors of today’s Māori migrated thousands of miles by canoe to what they called Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud. Hundreds of years later, English settlers came to engage in trade and now represent the majority ethnic group in New Zealand. In 1840, the two groups signed the Treaty of Waitangi that established New Zealand’s bicultural identity.
Many youth with Pacific Island backgrounds are descended from people who were encouraged to move to New Zealand after World War II to address a labor shortage.
Both Māori and Pasifika are a fast-growing, and young, population. By the 2040s, more than a third of children in the country are expected to identify as Māori, according to Stats NZ, the country’s official data agency.
The New Zealand Ministry of Education’s official stance discourages streaming, but the country’s more than 2,500 schools operate with a great deal of independence: Principals have similar powers and responsibilities as school superintendents in the United States, and each school has an elected board that sets policy and manages budgets.
New Zealand does not track streaming or ability grouping by race or ethnicity, but surveys show it is common: Eighty percent of students are in schools that group students by ability level in mathematics, according to a 2022 survey conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment.
Other data shows a wide academic gap among students of different ethnicities in New Zealand.
Students at May Road School in Auckland, New Zealand, work through a lesson on fractions. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
In the Auckland region, the country’s most densely populated of 16 regions in all, 76 percent of Asian students left secondary school with the highest of three levels on the country’s National Certificate of Educational Achievement in 2022. Like a high school diploma, the NCEA Level 3 is a minimum qualification to enter college in New Zealand.
About 66 percent of Pākehā, or white, students left school with that credential. About 46 percent of Pasifika students and 40 percent of Māori students did the same.
In comparison, the high school graduation rate by race and ethnicity in the United States in the 2021-22 school year was 94 percent for Asian American/Pacific Islander students, 90 percent for white students, 83 percent for Hispanic students, 81 percent for Black students and 74 percent for American Indian/Alaskan Native students.
Misbah Sadat, the newly appointed principal at Kuranui College, a high school 50 miles northeast of the capital of Wellington, began actively working to “destream” mathematics courses soon after emigrating to New Zealand in 2009 and becoming a teacher there.
As head of mathematics at a high school called Horowhenua College, she started by identifying promising Māori students on her own, moving them to higher level classes, and mentoring them, as described in a Ministry of Education newsletter.
Eventually she convinced her colleagues at Horowhenua to create mixed-ability classes rather than dividing the students. She continued the same work as deputy principal at Onslow College in suburban Wellington, where she worked before her new appointment.
The streaming practice comes from a patronizing mindset, said Sadat, who was also a math teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland.
Schools are telling parents that their children might be lost and overwhelmed in a more rigorous class. In actuality, “We have demoted some students to learn crap,” she said. “And then we are saying that at age 16, ‘You are dumb at maths.’ How dare we decide what a young person is capable of or not capable of?”
Students at Kaiapoi North School in suburban Christchurch, New Zealand, work through a multiplication problem in chalk on the playground blacktop. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
Both of New Zealand’s unions for elementary and secondary teachers signed onto the pledge to end streaming by 2030. In a newsletter to members, the elementary teachers union noted that its members have noticed “a sense of ingrained hopelessness that comes with being in the ‘cabbage’ classes.”
But in the same newsletter, another teacher said educators struggle with the mix of abilities in one classroom, along with managing behavior challenges.
David Pomeroy, a senior lecturer in education at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, is studying schools that have committed to reducing their reliance on streaming.
It’s a difficult task, he said. So many teachers are accustomed to the practice, since they went through it in school themselves. Parents of students in high-level classes are worried their children will be shortchanged. Teachers also say that it is easier to work with students who are all roughly on the same skill level.
And then there is an emotional connection to the practice, Pomeroy said. Unlike in the United States, lower-level mathematics classes are often taught by teachers who have a lot of classroom experience and who express real fondness for their students, he said. Pushing students too hard is seen as setting them up for repeated failure, which teachers were reluctant to do.
Abby Zonneveld’s bulletin board at St. Clair School in Dunedin, New Zealand, asked students to describe their “tūrangawaewae,” or place where they feel a special connection. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
“Even if they accepted streaming wasn’t the right next step, they wanted to protect them from anything that could damage their confidence,” Pomeroy said.
For schools that have made a commitment to reducing or ending streaming, he said, one useful tool has been to bring mathematics teachers in different schools together so they can work through challenges, such as lesson planning, and share successes.
The research into the benefits or harms of academic tracking or streaming show mixed results. In 2016, a group of researchers compiled all the best U.S-based research on ability grouping and acceleration at that point, going back for a century. They found certain kinds of ability grouping, such as placing highly gifted students together, was a benefit to those students. But grouping students in high- or low-performing classes did not show any benefit or detriment for students.
The New Zealand Initiative, a right-of-center think tank, said that the country should conduct its own research on the effects of streaming in the country, rather than relying primarily on research done elsewhere and on qualitative reports that primarily capture feelings about the practice. “Research suggests that lowerstream students are often taught less engaging content by less experienced teachers. So, it may not be streaming itself that increases gaps in achievement but streaming done poorly,” the initiative said in a report.
But the efforts to reduce streaming voluntarily seem to be catching on.
When looking at all academic subjects, not just mathematics, principals on a 2022 PISA survey said 67 percent of students in New Zealand are grouped by ability into different classes for at least some subjects. That’s a drop from 2015, when 90 percent of principals reported that students were grouped into different classes in their schools.
The change is welcome, said Waretini-Beaumont, who works on social media for Tokona te Raki. Streaming “has more impact than just cutting off some opportunities and stopping someone from doing calculus,” she said. “Our grandparents have been streamed and they don’t know it was even a thing. They just thought they were dumb.”
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RANDOLPH, Vt. — The thermostat was turned low in the admissions office at Vermont State University on a cold winter morning.
It’s “one of our efficiencies,” quipped David Bergh, the institution’s president, who works in the same building.
Bergh was joking. But he was referring to something decidedly serious: the public university system’s struggle to reduce a deficit so deep, it threatened to permanently shutter several campuses after dramatic drop-offs in enrollment and revenue.
While much attention has been focused on how enrollment declines are putting private, nonprofit colleges out of business at an accelerating rate — at least 17 of them in 2024 — public universities and colleges are facing their own existential crises.
State institutions nationwide are being merged and campuses shut down, many of them in places where there is already comparatively little access to higher education.
David Bergh, president of the newly consolidated Vermont State University, in the building where he works at the VTSU campus in Randolph. “Public institutions are not exempt from the challenges” facing higher education, Bergh says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
“Public institutions are not exempt from the challenges” facing higher education, Bergh said. “We are already seeing it, and we’re going to see more of it, and it’s particularly acute in some more rural states, where there’s a real need to balance limited resources but maintain access for students.”
Vermont is a case study for this, and an example of how political and other realities make it so hard for public universities and colleges to adapt to the problems confronting them.
“The demographics of fewer traditional-age college students, the over-building of these campuses, the change in the demand for what we need for our workforce in terms of programs — this is something that’s happening everywhere,” said Vermont State Rep. Lynn Dickinson, who chairs the Vermont State Colleges System Board of Trustees.
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Public university and college mergers have already happened in Pennsylvania, Georgia, California and Minnesota, and public campuses have closed in Ohio and Wisconsin. A merger of public universities and community colleges in New Hampshire is under study.
When state university and college campuses close, the repercussions for communities around them can be dire.
Until this month, local students had a college “in their backyard,” said Thomas Nelson, county executive in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, where the two-year Fox Cities outpost of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh this spring will become the sixth public campus in that state to be shuttered since 2023, after a long enrollment slide. “We’ve had this institution for 60 years in our community, and now it’s gone.”
Not only students are affected. In many rural counties, “there really isn’t a lot beyond the university,” Nelson said. “So that’s going to be devastating for the economy. It’s going to kill jobs. It’s going to be one more strike against them when they are competing with other communities with more amenities.”
Attempts to close these campuses attract the intervention of politicians, who have more control over whether public than private nonprofit colleges in their districts close. After all, “they own the place,” said Dan Greenstein, former chancellor of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, who — after that state’s enrollment fell by nearly one-fifth — led a reconfiguration that resulted in six previously separate public universities there being merged into two systems.
Even trying to rename a public university can have political consequences. When Augusta State University in Georgia was combined with Georgia Health Sciences University to become Georgia Regents University, there was a local outcry over the fact that “Augusta” was no longer in the name. Within two years, the merged school had yet another new name: Augusta University.
“Public institutions are complex structures,” said Ricardo Azziz, who led that consolidation, served as president of the resulting institution and now heads the Center for Higher Education Mergers and Acquisitions at the Foundation for Research and Education Excellence. “They’re influenced by politics. They’re influenced by elected officials.”
When the proposal to close campuses in Vermont was met with public and political resistance, state planners backed down and decided instead to merge them, laying off staff and cutting programs. That did not go well, either, and resulted in raucous public meetings, votes of “no confidence,” plans that were announced and then rescinded and a revolving door of presidents and chancellors. Only now, in its second year, has the process gotten smoother.
Alarm bells started sounding about problems in Vermont’s state universities before the Covid-19 pandemic. With the nation’s third-oldest median age, after Maine and New Hampshire, according to the Census Bureau, the state had already seen its number of young people graduating from high school fall by 25 percent over the previous decade.
Enrollment at the public four-year and community college campuses — not including the flagship University of Vermont, which is separate — was down by more than 11 percent. A fifth of the rooms in the dorms were empty. And with the birthrate in the state lower than it was before the Civil War, there was no rebound in sight.
These trends have contributed to the closings of six of Vermont’s in-person undergraduate private, nonprofit colleges and universities since 2016.
“We’d be keeping our head in the sand if we didn’t think that those same forces were going to affect our public higher education system,” said Jeb Spaulding, who, as chancellor at the time, merged two of Vermont’s five state colleges, in Johnson and Lyndon, in 2018.
The red ink continued to flow. Two years later, just after Covid hit, Spaulding recommended that three of the five public campuses be shut down altogether — Johnson and Lyndon, plus Vermont Technical College in Randolph.
“What we needed to do was save the Vermont State Colleges System as a whole,” which has 145 buildings for fewer than 5,000 students, Spaulding recalled. That same problem of excess capacity is affecting higher education nationwide.
“It was well known that we had too much bricks and mortar for the number of traditional-type students that were going to be available in Vermont,” Spaulding said. “We saw all that coming, and we had started a process of educating people and working on what would be a realistic public-sector consolidation plan so that we could actually put our resources into having a smaller constellation, but well financed and up to date.”
The reaction to the plan was explosive, even in the midst of a pandemic. At socially distanced drive-by protests, critics brandished signs that said: “Start Saving: Fire Jeb.” Within four days, the proposal to close campuses was withdrawn. A week after that, Spaulding resigned.
“I guess I didn’t realize that in the public realm, you can’t make the kind of difficult decisions that if you were at a private institution you would have to make,” he recounted. “When the politics got involved, then it became clear to me that there was no way that I was going to be able to get that through.”
Instead of closing the campuses, the state decided to combine them with the other two, in Castleton and Williston, all under one umbrella renamed Vermont State University, or VTSU. In exchange, the blended institutions would be required to cut spending to help reduce a deficit estimated at the time to be about $22 million.
That decision was almost as contentious. As in Georgia, even the name was controversial. Alumni petitioned in vain for the new system to be called Castleton University instead of Vermont State, to preserve the legacy of the state’s oldest and the nation’s 18th-longest-operating higher education institution, founded in 1787, instead of demoting it to “Castleton Campus.”
Beth Mauch, who as chancellor has overseen VTSU and Vermont’s community college campuses since January, said she gets this kind of sentiment. “There are community members who have had these institutions in their community. There are folks who are alumni of these institutions who remember them in a certain way,” said Mauch. “Really, they are in the fabric of a community.”
Beth Mauch, chancellor of the Vermont State University system and the state’s community college campuses. “Really, they are in the fabric of a community,” Mauch says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
That close relationship between the universities and their communities only resulted in additional friction when 23 full-time faculty positions were cut, out of the then-existing 208. So were an equal number of administrators and staff. Not only were there more beds and buildings than were needed for the number of students, there were too many faculty compared to other comparably sized universities, a planning document said.
Neighbors of the campuses, and their elected representatives, didn’t see it that way.
“The people that work at the colleges are local. Everyone knows people that work at these colleges,” said Billie Neathawk, a librarian at what was formerly Castleton University for more than 25 years, and a union officer. “They’re related to people. Especially in a small state like Vermont, everybody knows everybody.”
The layoffs went through anyway. There were also cuts to majors. Ten academic programs were eliminated, 10 others changed locations and still others were consolidated. That meant students at any campus could take the remaining courses in a format combining in-person and online instruction that the system dubbed “In-Person Plus.”
Lilly Hudson is a junior at Vermont State University, whose consolidation means some programs are being offered online. Hudson prefers learning in a classroom but liked being able to take a class online from another campus that wasn’t available on hers. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
Lilly Hudson, a junior at Castleton, said she prefers learning in a classroom. “It’s just such a difference to be able to see people and meet your professors and go in person,” said Hudson, who is majoring in early education. But she was also able to take a class online from another campus that wasn’t available on hers.
That can be an underappreciated upside to mergers, said Greenstein, now managing director of higher education practice at the consulting firm Baker Tilly. “You can only run as many programs, majors and minors as you can enroll students into,” he said. But by merging institutions and letting students take courses from other campuses online, “now they can go from 20 programs to 80 or 90.”
While that seemed a step forward, the consolidated university’s inaugural president, Parwinder Grewal, next announced that, to cut costs, its libraries would go all-digital and give away their books, the Randolph campus would no longer field intercollegiate sports teams, and athletics on the Johnson campus would move from the NCAA to the less prestigious U.S. Collegiate Athletic Association.
This proved another blunder in a state so fond of its libraries that it has the nation’s highest per-capita number of library visits, and where rural communities rally around even Division 3 athletics. Faculty and staff unions and student government associations on every campus voted “no confidence” in the university’s administration. Athletes transferred away. Grewal was loudly booed when he met with students.
“There was a hot streak there where, every email, we were, like, now what’s going on?” said Raymonda Parchment, a student who was halfway toward her bachelor’s degree at the time.
Raymonda Parchment, who just graduated from Vermont State University, is grateful that a plan to close some public campuses was reversed. “If you can’t afford to go out of state for college, and you can’t afford to pay for maybe a dorm for a couple of years, where does that leave you if there’s no school within commuting distance?” she asks. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
The library and athletics decisions were eventually reversed, too, and Grewal was out before he’d served a full year. But the damage was done. When the new university finally debuted, at the start of the 2023-24 school year, freshman enrollment was down by about 14 percent from what it had been at the separate campuses the year before.
“I know a lot of friends whose programs were consolidated and shuffled around,” said Parchment, in an otherwise empty study room on the snow-covered Johnson campus. “That was probably the biggest change for students that had direct impact on them. Some people’s programs don’t exist anymore. Some people’s programs have been moved to a different campus.”
Vermont is still working out the kinks, said Bergh, the system’s current president, who was the president of private, nonprofit Cazenovia College in New York when it closed in 2023.
Although first-year enrollment went up about 14 percent this fall, he said, “We’re still surfacing places where our systems aren’t talking to each other as well as they should be, and that we need to correct.”
Parchment likes that it’s easier now to move from one campus in the system to another, without having to go through the red tape of the transfer process. She graduated at the end of the fall semester after moving from Castleton to Johnson to be closer to an internship.
And no campuses were ultimately closed, as had been proposed — a relief to students, prospective students and community members, Parchment said. “Because if you can’t afford to go out of state for college, and you can’t afford to pay for maybe a dorm for a couple of years, where does that leave you if there’s no school within commuting distance?”
Hudson, the Castleton student, whose father is a sixth-generation farrier — a specialist in trimming, cleaning and shoeing horses’ hooves — agreed.
The campuses are “in the middle of an area where there’s a lot of rural towns,” she said. Keeping them in operation means that students nearby who want to go to college “don’t have to pick up their lives and move.”
But Spaulding, the former chancellor, warned that public higher education budget and enrollment problems aren’t likely to subside, in Vermont or many other states.
“I don’t think the storm is over by any stretch of the imagination.”
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