By Derfel Owen, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Janice Kay, Higher Futures.
Generative AI and other new technologies create unprecedented challenges to some of the deepest and longest-held assumptions about how we educate and support students. We start from a position that rejects a defensive stance, attempting to protect current practice from the perceived threat of AI. Bans, restrictions and policies to limit AI use have emerged in an effort to uphold existing norms. Such approaches risk isolating and alienating students who are using AI anyway and will fail to address its broader implications. The point is that AI forces us to reconsider and recapitulate current ways of how we teach, how we help students to learn, how we assess and how we engage and support. Four areas of how we educate require a greater focus:
Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving: Teaching students to evaluate, analyse, and synthesise information while questioning AI-generated outputs.
Creativity and Innovation: Focusing on nurturing original ideas, divergent thinking, and the ability to combine concepts in novel ways.
Emotional Intelligence: Prioritising skills like empathy, communication, and collaboration, essential for leadership, teamwork, and human connection.
Ethical Reasoning: Training students to navigate ethical dilemmas and critically evaluate the ethical implications of AI use in society.
Here we set out some practical steps that can be taken to shift us in that direction.
1. Emphasise Lifelong Learning and Entrepreneurialism
Education should equip students with the ability to adapt throughout their lives to rapidly evolving technologies, professions and industries. Fostering the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn quickly in response to changing demands is essential. A well-rounded education will combine new and established knowledge across subjects and disciplines, building in an assumption that progress is made through interdisciplinary connections and creating space to explore the unknown, what we might not know yet and how we go about finding it.
The transformation of traditional work through AI and automation necessitates that students are fully equipped to thrive in flexible and diverse job markets. Entrepreneurial thinking should be nurtured by teaching students to identify problems, design innovative solutions, and create value in ways that AI can support but not replicate. Leadership development should focus on fostering decision-making, adaptability, and team-building skills, emphasising the inherently human aspects of leadership.
We should be aware that jobs and job skills in an AI world are evolving faster than our curricula. As McKinsey estimates, AI will transform or replace up to 800 million jobs globally, and the stakes are too high for incremental change.
2. Promote Originality and Rigour though Collaboration
AI’s strength lies in the processing speed and the sheer breadth of existing data and knowledge that it can access. It can tell you at exceptional pace what might have taken hours, days or weeks to discover. This should be viewed as a way to augment human capabilities and not as a crutch. Incorporating project-based, collaborative learning with AI will empower students to collaborate to create, solve problems, and innovate while reinforcing their roles as innovators and decision-makers. Working together should be a means of fostering communication skills, but can also be strengthened to encourage, promote and reward creativity and divergent thinking that goes further than conventional knowledge. Students should be encouraged to pursue discovery through critical thinking and verification, exploring unique, self-designed research questions or projects that demand deep thought and personal engagement. These steps will build digital confidence, ensuring students can use AI with confidence and assuredness, are able to test and understand its limitations and can leverage it as a tool to accelerate and underpin their innovation. Examples include generating content for campaigns or portfolio outputs, using AI to synthesise original data, demonstrating Socratic dialogue with AI and its outputs, challenging and critiquing prompts.
3. Redesign Assessments
Traditional assessments, such as essays and multiple-choice tests, are increasingly vulnerable to AI interference, and the value they add is increasingly questionable. To counter this, education should focus on performance-based assessments, such as presentations, debates, and real-time problem-solving, which showcase students’ ability to think critically and adapt quickly. Educators have moved away from such assessment methods in recent years because evidence suggests that biases creep into oral examinations. This needs reevaluating to judge the balance of risk in light of AI advancements. Stereotyping and halo biases can be mitigated and can increase student engagement with the assessment and subject matter. What is the greater risk? Biases in oral assessment? Or generating cohorts of graduates with skills to complete unseen, closed-book exams that are likely to be of limited value in a world in which deep and complex information and instruction can be accessed in a fraction of the time through AI? We must revisit these norms and assumptions.
Collaborative assessments should also be prioritised, using group projects that emphasise teamwork, negotiation, and interpersonal skills. Furthermore, process-oriented evaluation methods should be implemented to assess the learning process itself, including drafts, reflections, and iterative improvements, rather than solely the final outputs. Authenticity in learning outputs can be assured through reflective practices such as journals, portfolios, and presentations that require self-expression and cannot be easily replicated by AI, especially when accompanied by opportunities for students to explain their journey and how their knowledge and approach to a topic have evolved as they learn.
Achieving such radical change will require a dramatic scaling back of the arms race in assessment, dramatic reductions in multiple, modularised snapshot assessments. Shifting the assessment workload for staff and students is required, toward formative and more authentic assessments with in-built points of reflection. Mitigating more labour-intensive assessments, programme-wide assessment should be considered.
4. Encourage understanding of the impact of AI on society, resilience and adaptability
AI will accentuate the societal impact of and concerns about issues such as bias, privacy, and accountability. Utilising AI in teaching and assessment must build an expectation that students and graduates have an enquiring and sceptical mindsets, ready to seek further validation and assurance about facts as they are presented and how they were reached, what data was accessed and how; students need to be prepared and ready to unlearn and rebuild. This will require resilience and the ability to cope with failure, uncertainty, and ambiguity. A growth mindset, valuing continuous learning over static achievement, will help by enhancing their ability to adapt to evolving circumstances. Simulated scenario planning for real-world application of learning will help equip students with the skills to navigate AI-disrupted workplaces and industries successfully.
The new kid on the block, DeepSeek, has the important feature that it is an open-source reasoning model, low cost (appearing to beat OpenAI o1 that is neither open-source nor free) with the benefit that it sets out its ‘thinking’ step-by-step, helpful for learning and demonstrating learning. It is not, however, able to access external reports critical of the Chinese state, de facto showing that Gen AI models are wholly dependent on the large language data on which they are trained. Students need fully to understand this and its implications.
Navigating these wide-ranging challenges demands robust support for those shaping the student experience—educators, mentors, and assessors. They remain the heart of higher learning, guiding students through an era of unprecedented change. Yet, bridging the gap between established and emerging practices requires more than just adaptation; it calls for a transformation in how we approach learning itself. To thrive in an AI-integrated future, educators must not only enhance their own AI literacy but also foster open, critical dialogues about its ethical and practical dimensions. In this evolving landscape, everyone—students and educators alike—must embrace a shared journey of learning. The traditional role of the academic as the sole expert must give way to a more collaborative, inquiry-driven model. Only by reimagining the way we teach and learn can we ensure that AI serves as a tool for empowerment rather than a force for division.
In a digitally-driven world, artificial intelligence (AI) has become the latest technology that either will save or doom the planet depending on who you speak with. Remember when telephones (the ones that hung on the wall) were dubbed as privacy invaders? Even the radio, television, and VHS tapes were feared at the beginning of their existence. Artificial intelligence is no different, but how can we ease the minds of those educators who have trouble embracing the newest innovation in emerging technologies? A shift in the fundamental mindset of educators and learners will be vitally important as AI becomes more and more commonplace. To guide this transformative learning process, critical thinking will become an invaluable commodity.
The critical thinking model developed by Dr. Richard Paul and Dr. Linda Elder is pragmatic and fosters the critical thinking skills needed to navigate AI. Critical thinking is defined by Paul and Elder as “the art of analyzing and evaluating thought processes with a view to improving them” (Paul and Elder 2020, 9). The key is to teach your students ways to improve their thinking and using the Paul and Elder model can be an effective tool.
Navigating the Disorienting Dilemma
As we reason through this innovative technology, we will question truth and reality. Teaching students to analyze critically the information generated from AI chatbots will become necessary for a progressing society. Determining fact from fiction will be a skill that dedicated educators will train their students to harness in the work they complete.
Mezirow (1994, 224) contended that a transformative learning experience starts with a disorienting dilemma that causes an individual to question their understanding of previous assumptions by critically reflecting, validating the critical reflection with insight, and acting upon the new information. I, like many I assume, believed that artificial intelligence was a far-fetched concept that would only be real in the movies; however, AI is here and large-language models, such as Chat-GPT and Gemini, are only going to get more sophisticated with time. I also realized that once I was exposed to the Paul and Elder model for critical thinking in grad school, I was ignorant. I had my transformative moment when I realized that critical thinking is more complex than I thought and that I would need to step up my thinking game if I wanted to become an advanced thinker. Artificial intelligence will challenge even the most confident thinkers. Determining fact from fiction will be the disorienting dilemma that will lead us on this transformative journey. As educators, three strategies that we can use to support this transformation with students are to step up our thinking game, model critical thinking, and use AI for our benefit.
Step Up Your Thinking Game
An advanced thinker not only poses questions to others but focuses within. Understanding the why behind reasoning, acknowledging personal biases and assumptions, and valuing other’s perspectives are key to developing critical thinking skills. The reason that you and your students choose to use AI should be clear and intentional. AI is a tool that produces instantaneous solutions. The resulting details from AI should be analyzed for accuracy, logic, and bias. Results should be compared with multiple sources to ensure that the information, the conclusions, and the implications are precise and complete. Practicing these strategies fosters the development of intellectual virtues, such as intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy, and intellectual integrity.
Model Critical Thinking
As educators, we serve as leaders. Ultimately, our students look up to us and use our guidance in their learning. By modeling critical thinking with students, you are leading the way to fostering intentional questioning, ethical principles, and reflective practices. A start is to change the focus of your teaching from the expectation that students regurgitate information to focusing on more challenging, thought-provoking content that fosters thinking. AI can be a helpful tool for coming up with ideas, helping to shape lesson plans, and designing activities, but the real work will come from designing authentic questions that students can be trained to ask regardless of what the AI generates, such as:
How can I verify the validity and accuracy of this information?
Does the response represent logical and in-depth details?
Is the information precise, significant, and relevant to the knowledge that I am seeking?
Are perspectives that differ from mine represented or can I recognize bias in the information?
What other questions could be asked to dive deeper and more concisely into the information?
Use AI for Your Benefit
Generating activity ideas or lesson plans, creating rubrics, and assisting with basic writing tasks are three ways to easily get started with an AI chatbot. If the output is not what you expected or is incomplete, continue to give the chatbot more information to drive the chatbot to produce the desired outcome. Once you begin practicing with an AI chatbot, achieving your desired outcomes will become second nature.
Using learning outcomes as the basis for an inquiry provides AI with the information needed to generate an activity or lesson plan in seconds with objectives, timed components, suggestions for implementation, a materials list, closing, and follow-up ideas for the activity. Try typing a statement into an AI chatbot, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, and be amazed at the magic. When formulating your inquiry, remember to start with the end goal in mind and describe to AI the output you want. For example, type “Use this learning outcome to create an activity: (add learning outcome)”. AI will generate a comprehensive activity with all the bells and whistles.
Rubric development can be a cumbersome process; therefore, using AI to generate a rubric for a project that you have poured sweat and tears into creating is a very simple and time-saving process. Ask AI to generate a rubric based on the information and directions that you give your students. If the generated rubric is not the right style or in the right format, simply refocus the AI chatbot by being more explicit in your instructions. For example, you may need to be as specific as “Create an analytic rubric with 100, 90, 80, 70, and 0 as the levels of performance using the following expectations for the assignment (paste directions and outcomes). As always, use your critical thinking skills to evaluate the rubric and edit it to best meet your needs before sharing it with students.
Use AI to assist you with generating clearer and more concise messages. When creating an email, giving student feedback, or writing in general, a quick and easy way to use AI to assist you is to give the command “make this sound better” and plop in your message. When teaching your students to use AI, have them question the output that was generated. For example, “Why is this statement more clear and concise than my original thought” or “What can I learn from how AI changed my verbiage?” Focusing on the “why” of the produced information will be the key to fostering critical thinking with your students.
AI is a resourceful and impactful, yet imperfect tool. Fostering critical thinking with your students will help them develop the skills needed to recognize bias, inaccuracies, and AI hallucinations. With the practice of creating specific instructions and questioning the outcome, students will learn to trust themselves to defend AI-generated information.
Dr. Tina Evans earned her Ed.D. in Adult Education from Capella University in 2024. With over 25 years of experience in the education field, she brings deep expertise in higher education curriculum design, technology integration, and evidence-based practices for adult learners. Driven by a passion for critical thinking and a genuine commitment to supporting others, Dr. Evans continues to make a meaningful impact in both her professional and personal spheres.
In a digitally-driven world, artificial intelligence (AI) has become the latest technology that either will save or doom the planet depending on who you speak with. Remember when telephones (the ones that hung on the wall) were dubbed as privacy invaders? Even the radio, television, and VHS tapes were feared at the beginning of their existence. Artificial intelligence is no different, but how can we ease the minds of those educators who have trouble embracing the newest innovation in emerging technologies? A shift in the fundamental mindset of educators and learners will be vitally important as AI becomes more and more commonplace. To guide this transformative learning process, critical thinking will become an invaluable commodity.
The critical thinking model developed by Dr. Richard Paul and Dr. Linda Elder is pragmatic and fosters the critical thinking skills needed to navigate AI. Critical thinking is defined by Paul and Elder as “the art of analyzing and evaluating thought processes with a view to improving them” (Paul and Elder 2020, 9). The key is to teach your students ways to improve their thinking and using the Paul and Elder model can be an effective tool.
Navigating the Disorienting Dilemma
As we reason through this innovative technology, we will question truth and reality. Teaching students to analyze critically the information generated from AI chatbots will become necessary for a progressing society. Determining fact from fiction will be a skill that dedicated educators will train their students to harness in the work they complete.
Mezirow (1994, 224) contended that a transformative learning experience starts with a disorienting dilemma that causes an individual to question their understanding of previous assumptions by critically reflecting, validating the critical reflection with insight, and acting upon the new information. I, like many I assume, believed that artificial intelligence was a far-fetched concept that would only be real in the movies; however, AI is here and large-language models, such as Chat-GPT and Gemini, are only going to get more sophisticated with time. I also realized that once I was exposed to the Paul and Elder model for critical thinking in grad school, I was ignorant. I had my transformative moment when I realized that critical thinking is more complex than I thought and that I would need to step up my thinking game if I wanted to become an advanced thinker. Artificial intelligence will challenge even the most confident thinkers. Determining fact from fiction will be the disorienting dilemma that will lead us on this transformative journey. As educators, three strategies that we can use to support this transformation with students are to step up our thinking game, model critical thinking, and use AI for our benefit.
Step Up Your Thinking Game
An advanced thinker not only poses questions to others but focuses within. Understanding the why behind reasoning, acknowledging personal biases and assumptions, and valuing other’s perspectives are key to developing critical thinking skills. The reason that you and your students choose to use AI should be clear and intentional. AI is a tool that produces instantaneous solutions. The resulting details from AI should be analyzed for accuracy, logic, and bias. Results should be compared with multiple sources to ensure that the information, the conclusions, and the implications are precise and complete. Practicing these strategies fosters the development of intellectual virtues, such as intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy, and intellectual integrity.
Model Critical Thinking
As educators, we serve as leaders. Ultimately, our students look up to us and use our guidance in their learning. By modeling critical thinking with students, you are leading the way to fostering intentional questioning, ethical principles, and reflective practices. A start is to change the focus of your teaching from the expectation that students regurgitate information to focusing on more challenging, thought-provoking content that fosters thinking. AI can be a helpful tool for coming up with ideas, helping to shape lesson plans, and designing activities, but the real work will come from designing authentic questions that students can be trained to ask regardless of what the AI generates, such as:
How can I verify the validity and accuracy of this information?
Does the response represent logical and in-depth details?
Is the information precise, significant, and relevant to the knowledge that I am seeking?
Are perspectives that differ from mine represented or can I recognize bias in the information?
What other questions could be asked to dive deeper and more concisely into the information?
Use AI for Your Benefit
Generating activity ideas or lesson plans, creating rubrics, and assisting with basic writing tasks are three ways to easily get started with an AI chatbot. If the output is not what you expected or is incomplete, continue to give the chatbot more information to drive the chatbot to produce the desired outcome. Once you begin practicing with an AI chatbot, achieving your desired outcomes will become second nature.
Using learning outcomes as the basis for an inquiry provides AI with the information needed to generate an activity or lesson plan in seconds with objectives, timed components, suggestions for implementation, a materials list, closing, and follow-up ideas for the activity. Try typing a statement into an AI chatbot, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, and be amazed at the magic. When formulating your inquiry, remember to start with the end goal in mind and describe to AI the output you want. For example, type “Use this learning outcome to create an activity: (add learning outcome)”. AI will generate a comprehensive activity with all the bells and whistles.
Rubric development can be a cumbersome process; therefore, using AI to generate a rubric for a project that you have poured sweat and tears into creating is a very simple and time-saving process. Ask AI to generate a rubric based on the information and directions that you give your students. If the generated rubric is not the right style or in the right format, simply refocus the AI chatbot by being more explicit in your instructions. For example, you may need to be as specific as “Create an analytic rubric with 100, 90, 80, 70, and 0 as the levels of performance using the following expectations for the assignment (paste directions and outcomes). As always, use your critical thinking skills to evaluate the rubric and edit it to best meet your needs before sharing it with students.
Use AI to assist you with generating clearer and more concise messages. When creating an email, giving student feedback, or writing in general, a quick and easy way to use AI to assist you is to give the command “make this sound better” and plop in your message. When teaching your students to use AI, have them question the output that was generated. For example, “Why is this statement more clear and concise than my original thought” or “What can I learn from how AI changed my verbiage?” Focusing on the “why” of the produced information will be the key to fostering critical thinking with your students.
AI is a resourceful and impactful, yet imperfect tool. Fostering critical thinking with your students will help them develop the skills needed to recognize bias, inaccuracies, and AI hallucinations. With the practice of creating specific instructions and questioning the outcome, students will learn to trust themselves to defend AI-generated information.
Dr. Tina Evans earned her Ed.D. in Adult Education from Capella University in 2024. With over 25 years of experience in the education field, she brings deep expertise in higher education curriculum design, technology integration, and evidence-based practices for adult learners. Driven by a passion for critical thinking and a genuine commitment to supporting others, Dr. Evans continues to make a meaningful impact in both her professional and personal spheres.
When a white teacher at Decatur High School used the n-word in class in 2022, students walked out and marched in protest. But Reyes Le wanted to do more.
Until he graduated from the Atlanta-area school this year, he co-led its equity team. He organized walking tours devoted to Decatur’s history as a thriving community of freed slaves after the Civil War. Stops included a statue of civil rights leader John Lewis, which replaced a Confederate monument, and a historical marker recognizing the site where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed for driving with an out-of-state license.
Reyes Le, a Decatur High graduate, sits at the base of Celebration, a sculpture in the town’s central square that honors the city’s first Black commissioner and mayor. (Linda Jacobson/The 74)
But Le feared his efforts would collapse in the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion. An existing state law against “divisive concepts” meant students already had to get parent permission to go on the tour. Then the district threw out two non-discrimination policies April 15.
“I felt that the work we were doing wouldn’t be approved going into the future,” Le said.
Decatur got snared by the U.S. Department of Education’s threat to pull millions of dollars in federal funding from states and districts that employed DEI policies. In response, several organizations sued the department, calling its guidance vague and in violation of constitutional provisions that favor local control. Within weeks, three federal judges, including one Trump appointee, blocked Education Secretary Linda McMahon from enforcing the directives, and Decatur promptly reinstated its policies.
The reversal offers a glimpse into the courts’ role in thwarting — or at least slowing down — the Trump education juggernaut. States, districts, unions, civil rights groups and parents sued McMahon, and multiple courts agreed the department skirted the law in slashing funding and staff. But some observers say the administration is playing a long game and may view such losses as temporary setbacks.
“The administration’s plan is to push on multiple fronts to test the boundaries of what they can get away with,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “Cut personnel, but if needed, add them back later. What’s gained? Possible intimidation of ‘deep state’ employees and a chance to hire people that will be ‘a better fit.’ ”
A recent example of boundary testing: The administration withheld nearly $7 billion for education the president already approved in March.
But the move is practically lifted from the pages of Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for Trump’s second term. In that document, Russ Vought, now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, argues that presidents must “handcuff the bureaucracy” and that the Constitution never intended for the White House to spend everything Congress appropriated.
The administration blames Democrats for playing the courts. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller accused “radical rogue judges” of getting in the president’s way.
The end result is often administrative chaos, leaving many districts unable to make routine purchases and displaced staff unsure whether to move on with their lives.
While the outcome in the lower courts has been mixed, the Supreme Court — which has looked favorably on much of Trump’s agenda — is expected any day to weigh in on the president’s biggest prize: whether McMahon can permanently cut half the department’s staff.
In that case, 21 Democratic attorneys general and a Massachusetts school district sued to prevent the administration from taking a giant step toward eliminating the department.
“Everything about defunding and dismantling by the administration is in judicial limbo,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. As a supporter of eliminating the department, he lamented the slow pace of change. “If the Supreme Court allows mass layoffs, though, I would expect more energy to return to shrinking the department.”
The odds of that increased last week when the court ruled that mass firings at other agencies could remain in effect as the parties argue the case in the lower courts.
While the lawsuits over the Education Department are separate, Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the National Center for Youth Law, said the ruling is “clearly not a good sign.” His case, filed in May, focuses on cuts specifically to the department’s Office for Civil Rights, but the argument is essentially the same: The administration overstepped its authority when it gutted the department without congressional approval.
Solicitor General John Sauer, in his brief to the Supreme Court, said the states had no grounds to sue and called any fears the department couldn’t make do with a smaller staff merely “speculative.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon defended her cuts to programs and staff before a House education committee June 4. (Sha Hanting/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)
Even if the Supreme Court rules in McMahon’s favor, its opinion won’t affect previous rulings and other lawsuits in progress against the department.
Here’s where some of those key legal battles stand:
COVID relief funds
McMahon stunned states in late March when she said they would no longer receive more than $2 billion in reimbursements for COVID-related expenses. States would have to make a fresh case for how their costs related to the pandemic, even though the department had already approved extensions for construction projects, summer learning and tutoring.
On June 3, a federal judge in Maryland blocked McMahon from pulling the funds.
Despite the judicial order, not all states have been paid.
The Maryland Department of Education still had more than $400 million to spend. Cherie Duvall-Jones, a spokeswoman, said the agency hasn’t received any reimbursements even though it provided the “necessary documentation and information” federal officials requested.
The cancellation forced Baltimore City schools to dip into a reserve account to avoid disrupting tutoring and summer school programs.
Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, declined to comment on why it had yet to pay Maryland or how much the department has distributed to other states since June.
Mass firings
In the administration’s push to wind down the department, McMahon admits she still needs staff to complete what she calls her “final mission.” On May 21, she told a House appropriations subcommittee that she had rehired 74 people. Biedermann wouldn’t say whether that figure has grown, and referred a reporter to the hearing video.
“You hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon testified. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.”
The next day, a federal district court ordered her to also reinstate the more than 1,300 employees she fired in March, about half of the department’s workforce. Updating the court on progress, Chief of Staff Rachel Oglesby said in a July 8 filing that she’s still reviewing survey responses from laid off staffers and figuring out where they would work if they return.
Student protestors participate in the “Hands Off Our Schools” rally in front of the U.S. Department of Education on April 4 in Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)
But some call the department’s efforts to bring back employees lackluster, perhaps because it’s pinning its hopes on a victory before the Supreme Court.
“This is a court that’s been fairly aggressive in overturning lower court decisions,” said Smith, with the National Center for Youth Law.
His group’s lawsuit is one of two challenging cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, which lost nearly 250 staffers and seven regional offices. They argue the cuts have left the department unable to thoroughly investigate complaints. Of the 5,164 civil rights complaints since March, OCR has dismissed 3,625, Oglesby reported.
In a case brought by the Victim Rights Law Center, a Massachusetts-based advocacy organization, a federal district court judge ordered McMahon to reinstate OCR employees.
Even if the case is not reversed on appeal, there’s another potential problem: Not all former staffers are eager to return.
“I have applied for other jobs, but I’d prefer to have certainty about my employment with OCR before making a transition,” said Andy Artz, who was a supervising attorney in OCR’s New York City office until the layoffs. “I feel committed to the mission of the agency and I’d like to be part of maintaining it if reinstated.”
DEI
An aspect of that mission, nurtured under the Biden administration, was to discourage discipline policies that result in higher suspension and expulsion rates for minority students. A 2023 memo warned that discrimination in discipline could have “devastating long-term consequences on students and their future opportunities.”
But according to the department’s Feb. 14 guidance, efforts to reduce those gaps or raise achievement among Black and Hispanic students could fall under its definition of “impermissible” DEI practices. Officials demanded that states sign a form certifying compliance with their interpretation of the law. On April 24, three federal courts ruled that for now, the department can’t pull funding from states that didn’t sign. The department also had to temporarily shut down a website designed to gather public complaints about DEI practices.
The cases, which McMahon has asked the courts to dismiss, will continue through the summer. In court records, the administration’s lawyers say the groups’ arguments are weak and that districts like Decatur simply overreacted. In an example cited in a complaint brought by the NAACP, the Waterloo Community School District in Iowa responded to the federal guidance by pulling out of a statewide “read-In” for Black History Month. About 3,500 first graders were expected to participate in the virtual event featuring Black authors and illustrators.
The department said the move reflected a misunderstanding of the guidance. “Withdrawing all its students from the read-In event appears to have been a drastic overreaction by the school district and disconnected from a plain reading of the … documents,” the department said.
Desegregation
The administration’s DEI crackdown has left many schools confused about how to teach seminal issues of American history such as the Civil Rights era.
It was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that established “desegregation centers” across the country to help districts implement court-ordered integration.
In 2022, the Biden administration awarded $33 million in grants to what are now called equity assistance centers. But Trump’s department views such work as inseparable from DEI. When it cancelled funding to the centers, it described them as “woke” and “divisive.”
Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a Clinton appointee, disagreed. He blocked McMahon from pulling roughly $4 million from the Southern Education Foundation, which houses Equity Assistance Center-South and helped finance Brown v. Board of Education over 70 years ago. His order referenced President Dwight Eisenhower and southern judges who took the ruling seriously.
“They could hardly have imagined that some future presidential administration would hinder efforts by organizations like SEF — based on some misguided understanding of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ — to fulfill Brown’s constitutional promise to students across the country to eradicate the practice of racial segregation.”
He said the center is likely to win its argument that canceling the grant was “arbitrary and capricious.”
Raymond Pierce, Southern Education Foundation president and CEO, said when he applied for the grant to run one of the centers, he emphasized its historical significance.
“My family is from Mississippi, so I remember seeing a ‘colored’ entrance sign on the back of the building as we pulled into my mother’s hometown for the holidays,” Pierce said.
Trump’s Justice Department aims to dismiss many of the remaining 130 desegregation orders across the South. Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has said the orders force districts to spend money on monitoring and data collection and that it’s time to “let people off the hook” for past discrimination.
But Eshé Collins, director of Equity Assistance Center-South, said the centers are vital because their services are free to districts.
“Some of these cases haven’t had any movement,” she said. “Districts are like ‘Well, we can’t afford to do this work.’ That’s why the equity assistance center is so key.”
Eshé Collins, director of Equity Assistance Center-South and a member of the Atlanta City Council, read to students during a visit to a local school. (Courtesy of Eshé Collins)
Her center, for example, works with the Fayette County schools in Tennessee to recruit more Black teachers and ensure minority students get an equal chance to enroll in advanced classes. The system is still under a desegregation order from 1965, but is on track to meet the terms set by the court next year, Collins said. A week after Friedman issued the injunction in the foundation’s case, Ruth Ryder, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs, told Collins she could once again access funds and her work resumed.
Research
As they entered the Department of Education in early February, one of the first moves made by staffers of the Department of Government Efficiency was to terminate nearly $900 million in research contracts awarded through the Institute for Education Sciences. Three lawsuits say the cuts seriously hinder efforts to conduct high-quality research on schools and students.
Kevin Gee from the University of California, Davis, was among those hit. He was in the middle of producing a practice guide for the nation on chronic absenteeism, which continues to exceed pre-pandemic levels in all states. In a recent report, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus said the pandemic “took this crisis to unprecedented levels” that “warrant urgent and sustained attention.” Last year’s rate stood at nearly 24% nationally — still well above the 15% before the pandemic.
Gee was eager to fully grasp the impact of the pandemic on K-3 students. Even though young children didn’t experience school closures, many missed out on preschool and have shown delays in social and academic skills.
Westat, the contractor for the project, employed 350 staffers to collect data from more than 860 schools and conduct interviews with children about their experiences. But DOGE halted the data collection midstream — after the department had already invested about $44 million of a $100 million contract.
Kevin Gee, an education researcher at the University of California, Davis, had to stop his research work when the Trump administration cancelled grants. (Courtesy of Kevin Gee)
“The data would’ve helped us understand, for the first time, the educational well-being of our nation’s earliest learners on a nationwide scale in the aftermath of the pandemic,” he said.
The department has no plans to resurrect the project, according to a June court filing. But there are other signs it is walking back some of DOGE’s original cuts. For example, it intends to reissue contracts for regional education labs, which work with districts and states on school improvement.
“It feels like the legal pressure has succeeded, in the sense that the Department of Education is starting up some of this stuff again,” said Cara Jackson, a past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, which filed one of the lawsuits. “I think … there’s somebody at the department who is going through the legislation and saying, ‘Oh, we actually do need to do this.’ ”
Mental health grants
Amid the legal machinations, even some Republicans are losing patience with McMahon’s moves to freeze spending Congress already appropriated.
In April, she terminated $1 billion in mental health grants approved as part of a 2022 law that followed the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The department told grantees, without elaboration, that the funding no longer aligns with the administration’s policy of “prioritizing merit, fairness and excellence in education” and undermines “the students these programs are intended to help.”
The secretary told Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in June that she would “rebid” the grants, but some schools don’t want to wait. Silver Consolidated Schools in New Mexico, which lost $6 million when the grant was discontinued, sued her on June 20th. Sixteen Democrat-led states filed a second suit later that month.
The funds, according to Silver Consolidated’s complaint, allowed it to hire seven mental health professionals and contract with two outside counseling organizations. With the extra resources, the district saw bullying reports decline by 30% and suspensions drop by a third, according to the district’s complaint. Almost 500 students used a mental health app funded by the grant.
A judge has yet to rule in either case, but Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and other members of a bipartisan task force are holding McMahon to her word that she’ll open a new competition for the funds.
“These funds were never intended to be a theoretical exercise — they were designed to confront an urgent crisis affecting millions of children,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement. “With youth mental health challenges at an all-time high, any disruption or diversion of resources threatens to reverse hard-won progress and leave communities without critical supports.”
They call it a “path to opportunity,” but for millions of students and their families, American higher education is just Flirtin’ with Disaster—a gamble with long odds and staggering costs. Borrowers bet their future on a credential, universities gamble with public trust and private equity, and the system as a whole plays chicken with economic and social collapse. Cue the screeching guitar of Molly Hatchet’s 1979 Southern rock anthem, and you’ve got a fitting soundtrack to the dangerous dance between institutions of higher ed and the consumers they so aggressively court.
The Student as Collateral
For the last three decades, higher education in the United States has increasingly behaved like a high-stakes poker table, only it’s the students who are holding a weak hand. Underfunded public colleges, predatory for-profits, and tuition-hiking private universities all promise upward mobility but deliver it only selectively. The rest? They leave the table with debt, no degree, or both.
Colleges market dreams, but they sell debt. Americans now owe more than $1.7 trillion in student loans. And while some elite schools can claim robust return-on-investment, most institutions below the top tiers produce increasingly shaky value propositions—especially for working-class, first-gen, and BIPOC students. For them, education is often less an elevator to the middle class than a trapdoor into a lifetime of wage garnishment and diminished credit.
Institutional Recklessness
Universities themselves are no saints in this drama. Fueled by financial aid dollars, college leaders have expanded campuses like land barons—building luxury dorms, bloated athletic programs, and administrative empires. Meanwhile, instruction is increasingly outsourced to underpaid adjuncts, and actual student support systems are skeletal at best.
The recklessness isn’t limited to for-profits like Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, and the Art Institutes, all of which collapsed under federal scrutiny. Even brand-name nonprofits—think USC, NYU, Columbia—have been exposed for enrolling students into costly, often ineffective online master’s programs in partnership with edtech firms. The real product wasn’t the degree—it was the debt.
A Nation at the Brink
From community colleges to research universities, institutions are now being pushed to their financial and ethical limits. The number of colleges closing or merging has skyrocketed, especially among small private colleges and rural campuses. Layoffs, like those at Southern New Hampshire University and across public systems in Pennsylvania, Oregon, and West Virginia, show that austerity is the new norm.
But the real disaster is systemic. The American college promise—that hard work and higher ed will lead to security—is unraveling in real time. With declining enrollments, aging infrastructure, and increasing political pressure to defund or control curriculum, many schools are shifting from public goods to privatized risk centers. Even state flagship universities now behave more like hedge funds than educational institutions.
Consumers or Victims?
One of the cruelest ironies is that students are still told they are “consumers” who should “shop wisely.” But education is not like buying a toaster. There’s no refund if your college closes. There’s no protection if your degree is devalued. And there’s no bankruptcy for most student loan debt. Even federal forgiveness efforts—like Borrower Defense or Public Service Loan Forgiveness—are riddled with bureaucratic landmines and political sabotage.
In this asymmetric market, the house almost always wins. Institutions keep the revenue. Third-party contractors keep their profits. Politicians collect campaign checks. And the borrowers? They’re left flirtin’ with disaster, hoping the system doesn’t collapse before they’ve paid off the last dime.
No Exit Without Accountability
There’s still time to change course—but it will require radical rethinking. That means:
Holding institutions and executives accountable for false advertising and financial harm.
Reining in tuition hikes and decoupling higher ed from Wall Street’s expectations.
Fully funding community colleges and public universities to serve as real social infrastructure.
Expanding debt cancellation—not just piecemeal forgiveness—for those most harmed by a failed system.
Ending the exploitation of adjunct labor and restoring the academic mission.
Otherwise, higher education in the U.S. will continue on its reckless path, a broken-down system blasting its anthem of denial as it speeds toward the edge.
As the song goes:
“I’m travelin’ down the road and I’m flirtin’ with disaster… I got the pedal to the floor, my life is runnin’ faster.”
So is the American student debt machine—and we’re all strapped in for the ride.
Sources:
U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid Portfolio
“The Trillion Dollar Lie,” Student Borrower Protection Center
The Century Foundation, “The High Cost of For-Profit Colleges”
Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Education, Higher Ed Dive
National Center for Education Statistics
Molly Hatchet, Flirtin’ with Disaster, Epic Records, 1979
Plans for a new accreditor, announced by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in June, are becoming a reality.
The Florida Board of Governors voted Friday afternoon to create a controversial new accrediting agency, in coordination with five other state university systems. The decision came after about an hour of heated discussion between board members and the State University System of Florida’s chancellor regarding details of the plan.
Chancellor Raymond Rodriguez argued that the new accreditor, called the Commission for Public Higher Education, would eliminate the bureaucracy that comes with existing accrediting agencies and focus specifically on the needs of public universities.
“The Commission for Public Higher Education will offer an accreditation model that prioritizes academic excellence and student success while removing ideological bias and unnecessary financial burdens,” he said. “Through the CPHE, public colleges and universities across the country will have access to an accreditation process that is focused on quality, rooted in accountability and committed to continuous improvement.”
But before voting in favor of the motion, board members repeatedly pushed back, arguing that the plans for starting an accreditor from scratch were half-baked. They raised a litany of questions about how the CPHE would work in practice.
Some wanted to hash out the details of the would-be accreditor’s governance structure before voting. According to the CPHE business plan, the Florida governing board would incorporate the accreditor as a nonprofit in Florida and serve as its initial sole member, using a $4 million appropriation from the Florida Legislature for start-up costs. (Other systems are expected to put in similar amounts.) A board of directors, appointed by all the university systems, would be responsible for accrediting decisions and policies.
But multiple BOG members worried that the roles of the governing board and board of directors were not clearly delineated.
“With us as the sole member, it appears, or could appear, to stakeholders that the accreditor lacks independence from the institution being accredited,” said board member Kimberly Dunn.
Alan Levine, vice chair of the Board of Governors, called for a clear “proverbial corporate veil” between the two in corporate documents.
“Our role is not to govern or direct the activities of this body,” Levine said of CPHE. “It has to be independent or it won’t even be approvable by the Department of Education.”
Board member Ken Jones pressed for greater detail on the governing board’s “fiduciary or governance obligation to this new entity.”
“I’m in support of this … I really believe this is the right path,” he said. “I just want to be sure that we all go in, eyes wide-open, understanding what is our responsibility as a BOG? … We’re breaking new ground here, and we’re doing it for the right reasons. But I want to be sure that when the questions come—and I’m sure they certainly will—that we’ve got the right answers.”
Members asked questions about the accreditor’s future cybersecurity and IT infrastructure, as well as its associated costs. Some asked whether accreditors have direct access to universities’ data systems and raised concerns about potential hacking and the board’s liability; they were given reassurance that colleges themselves report their data. Some board members also asked for budget projections of what CPHE would cost.
“I have an internal, unofficial estimation around the funds and revenues, but nothing I’d be prepared and comfortable to put forward publicly,” said Rachel Kamoutsas, the system’s chief of staff and corporate secretary, who fielded questions about the initiative.
The answers didn’t seem to fully satisfy the governing board.
“I do think the chancellor and team have a lot of work to do to continue to educate this board, to be blunt,” said BOG chair Brian Lamb, “because a lot of the questions that we’re asking—forecast, IT, infrastructure, staffing—every last one of those are appropriate.”
He emphasized to other board members, however, that voting in favor of the motion would jump-start the process of incorporating the new accreditor and provide seed money for it. But, he added, “not a penny is going anywhere until we have an agreed-upon document on how this money will be spent.”
Accreditation expert Paul Gaston III, an emeritus trustees professor at Kent State University, raised similar questions in an interview with Inside Higher Ed.
“The credibility of accreditation really is directly related to whether the public can accept it is an authoritative source of objective evaluation that is in the public interest,” he said. “And the question that I would ask as a member of the public is, how will an accreditor that is created by and that is answerable to the institutions being evaluated achieve that credibility?”
Despite all the pushback, the BOG ultimately voted unanimously to approve the measure. Now CPHE can file for incorporation, establish its Board of Directors and set out on the multiyear process of securing recognition from the Department of Education.
The U.S. Department of Education announced it will no longer allow federal funds to support career, technical, and adult education programs for undocumented students, rescinding a nearly three-decade-old policy that permitted such access.
The department said it is rescinding a 1997 “Dear Colleague Letter” from the Clinton administration that allowed undocumented immigrants to receive federal aid for career, technical, and adult education programs. The interpretive rule, published in the Federal Register, clarifies that federal programs under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act and the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act are “federal public benefits” subject to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon stated that “under President Trump’s leadership, hardworking American taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for illegal aliens to participate in our career, technical, or adult education programs or activities”.
The policy change affects access to dual enrollment programs, postsecondary career and technical education, and adult education programs. The department said it will send letters to postsecondary schools and adult education programs clarifying that undocumented immigrants cannot receive federal aid and may take enforcement actions against schools that do not comply by August 9.
Augustus Mays, vice president of partnerships and engagement at EdTrust, a Washington-based education equity advocacy organization, condemned the decision.
“This move is part of a broader, deeply disturbing trend,” Mays said. “Across the country, we’re seeing migrant communities targeted with sweeping raids, amplified surveillance, and fear-based rhetoric designed to divide and dehumanize.”
Mays argued the change “derails individual aspirations and undercuts workforce development at a time when our nation is facing labor shortages in critical fields like healthcare, education, and skilled trades”. He noted the decision compounds existing barriers, as undocumented students are already prohibited from accessing federal financial aid including Pell Grants and student loans.
The department maintains that the Clinton-era interpretation “mischaracterized the law by creating artificial distinctions between federal benefit programs based upon the method of assistance,” a distinction the department says Congress did not make in the 1996 welfare reform law.
The change comes as President Trump proclaimed February 2025 as Career and Technical Education Month, stating his administration will “invest in the next generation and expand access to high-quality career and technical education for all Americans”.
Career and technical education programs served approximately 11 million students in 2019-20, with about $1.3 billion in federal funds supporting such programs through the Department of Education in fiscal year 2021.
The interpretive rule represents the department’s current enforcement position, though officials indicated they do not currently plan enforcement actions against programs serving undocumented students before August 9.
EdTrust called on policymakers, education leaders, and community advocates to oppose the change.
“We must fight for a country where every student, regardless of where they were born, has access to the promise of education and the dignity of opportunity,” Mays said.
Abstract: In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) of 1995, the Department is proposing an extension without change of a currently approved information collection request (ICR).
Clarification of Federal Public Benefits under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
Abstract: The U.S. Department of Education (Department) issues this interpretation to revise and clarify its position on the classification of certain Department programs providing “Federal public benefits,” as defined in Title IV of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), Public Law 104-193. The Department concludes that the postsecondary education programs and “other similar benefit” programs described within this interpretive rule, including adult…
Abstract: This notice sets forth the agenda, time, and instructions to access the National Assessment Governing Board’s (hereafter referred to as the Board or Governing Board) standing committee meetings and quarterly Governing Board meeting. This notice provides information to members of the public who may be interested in attending the meetings and/or providing written comments related to the work of the Governing Board. The meetings will be held either in person and/or virtually, as noted below….
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UK higher education is pulled between its lofty ambitions for transformative learning and the managerialism that sometimes constrains their realisation. This tension defines the contemporary Higher Education workplace, where the mantras of “more with less” and “highly regulated freedom” collide with the desire for rich, personalised student experiences amidst fiscal belt-tightening, quantification, and standardisation. Bubbling through the cracks in any long-term political or economic vision for the sector is a professional identity steeped in ambivalence of purpose and position, one whose contradictions are nowhere rendered more vividly than in England’s higher and degree apprenticeships (HDAs). Conceived to braid university learning with workplace productivity, HDAs promise the best of both worlds yet must be delivered within one of the most prescriptive funding and inspection regimes in UK higher education. This provision also sits amidst a precarious and volatile political landscape, with continuous changes to funding rules, age limits and eligibility of different levels of study, and ‘fit’ within a still poorly defined skills and lifelong learning landscape.
At the heart of this ongoing policy experiment stands an until-recently invisible workforce: Higher Education Tripartite Practitioners (HETP). These quiet actors emerged as a series of pragmatic institution level responses to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA, now subsumed into the Department of Education) related to progress reviews involving the provider, apprentice, and employer. Yet, as we argued in our paper at the SRHE International Conference in December last year, they have evolved into nuanced, often misunderstood boundary-spanners who simultaneously inhabit academia, industry, and compliance. Part coach, part conduit, part compliance specialist, they facilitate developmental conversations, broker cultural differences, and ensure every clause of the ESFA rulebook is honoured. The quality of this brokerage is decisive; without it even the most carefully designed apprenticeship fractures under audit pressure.
Consider the core activities of HETPs. Much of their time is spent in close personal engagement with apprentices – fostering professional growth, guiding reflective practice, and offering pastoral support traditionally associated with mentoring. They encourage apprentices to think holistically, integrate theory with workplace reality, and map long-term career aspirations. Almost simultaneously, they must document progress reviews, monitor the evidence of every single hour of learning, and tick every regulatory box along a journey from initial skills analysis through to end point assessment.
This duality produces a daily oscillation between inspiring conversations and tedious paperwork. The tension is palpable and exhausting, revealing a deeper struggle between two visions of education: one expansive, transformative, and relational; the other restrictive, measurable, and dominated by compliance. Fuller and Unwin’s expansive–restrictive continuum maps neatly onto this predicament, underscoring how universities are urged by policymakers to deliver high-skilled graduates for economic growth while simultaneously squeezed by intensifying regulation and managerial oversight.
Little wonder, then, that HETPs describe their roles with the language of complexity, ambiguity, and invisibility. They are neither purely academic nor purely administrative. Instead, they occupy a liminal institutional space, mediating competing demands from employers, regulators, apprentices, and colleagues. Esmond captures the resulting “subaltern” status of these practitioners, whose contributions remain undervalued even as they shoulder the brunt of institutional attempts to innovate without overhauling legacy systems.
Their experiences lay bare the contradictions of contemporary university innovation. Institutions routinely trumpet responsiveness to labour-market need yet bolt new programmes onto structures optimised for conventional classroom delivery, leaving HETPs to reconcile expansive educational ideals with restrictive managerial realities. The role becomes a flashpoint: universities ask boundary-spanners to maintain quality, build relationships, and inspire learners within systems designed for something else entirely.
Yet amidst these tensions lies opportunity. The very ambiguity of the HETP role highlights the limits of existing support systems and points towards new professional identities and career pathways. Formal recognition of boundary-spanning expertise – relationship-building, negotiation, adaptability – would allow practitioners to progress without abandoning what makes their contribution distinctive. Communities of practice could break the apprenticeship echo-chamber and enrich the wider HE ecosystem, while institutional investment in bespoke professional development would equip practitioners to navigate the inherent tensions of their work.
Senior leadership must also acknowledge the strategic value of these hidden roles, reframing them not as incidental administrative burdens but as essential catalysts for integrated educational practice. Making such roles visible and valued would help universities reconcile expansive aspirations with regulatory realities and signal genuine commitment to reshaping education for contemporary challenges.
Policymakers and regulators, too, have lessons to learn. While accountability has its place, overly rigid compliance frameworks risk stifling innovation. Trust-based, proportionate regulation – emphasising quality, transparency, and developmental outcomes – would free practitioners to focus on learning rather than bureaucratic survival. The current neo-liberal distrust that imagines only regulation can safeguard public value inflates compliance costs and undermines the very economic ambitions it seeks to serve.
Ultimately, the emergence of HETPs challenges HE institutions to decide how serious they are about bridging academic learning and workplace practice. Recognising and empowering these quiet brokers would signal a genuine commitment to integrated, expansive education – an education capable of meeting economic demands without losing sight of deeper human and intellectual aspirations. HETPs are far more than practitioners managing checklists; they are a critical juncture at which universities must choose either to treat boundary-spanning labour as a stop-gap or to embrace the complexity and potential it represents.
Dr Phil Power-Mason is Head of Department for Strategic Management at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, where he leads a diverse portfolio spanning executive education, apprenticeships and professional doctorates. A practice-focussed academic with a passion for innovative workforce development, Phil has overseen significant growth in the school’s business apprenticeships, MBA, and generalist provision, while nurturing cross-sector partnerships and embedding work-aligned learning at every level. With a research background in educational governance and strategy, he is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and co-convenor of national apprenticeship knowledge networks. Phil’s research and sector leadership focus on emerging pedagogic and HE workforce practices, driving collaborative solutions that meet employer, learner and university needs. An invited speaker at national forums and a frequent contributor to sector conferences and publications, he remains committed to transforming vocational and work-ready learning practice for the future. (herts.ac.uk)
Dr Helen Charlton is Associate Professor of Work Aligned Learning and Head of Executive Education at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, where she leads the school’s business apprenticeships, executive CPD and distance-learning programmes. After almost a decade steering apprenticeship design and compliance, she stays keenly attuned to each fresh regulatory tweak – and the learning opportunities it provides. A former senior HR manager in the arts and not-for-profit sectors, Helen holds a Doctorate in Education and an MSc in Human Resource Management, is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE, a Chartered MCIPD, and a Chartered Manager and Fellow of the CMI. Her research examines how learners, employers and universities negotiate the tripartite realities of degree apprenticeships. (northumbria.ac.uk)
