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Dive Brief:
Twenty four states and the District of Columbia are seeking to throw out a lawsuit challenging this summer’s delay of K-12 federal grant funding. A joint motion to dismiss was filed Monday by the coalition of states, led by California, and the Trump administration, with both parties agreeing that the balance of the remaining funds be released no later than Oct. 3.
The expected July 1 release of more than $6 billion in fundingwas delayed for several weeks due to a “programmatic review” by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. OMB said an initial review found that “many of these grant programs have been grossly misused to subsidize a radical leftwing agenda.”
The funding delays impacted after-school programs, English learner services, academic supports, migrant student assistance, adult education and professional development. The inaction caused significant financial disruptions just as schools were finalizing staffing and programming for the upcoming school year, according to educators, families, lawmakers and education-related organizations.
Dive Insight:
The states’ lawsuit, State of California, et al. v. Linda McMahon, et al., was filed July 14 and said the “abrupt freeze is wreaking similar havoc on key teacher training programs as well as programs that make school more accessible to children with special learning needs, such as English language learners.”
President Donald Trump, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon and OMB Director Russell Vought are named as defendants in the lawsuit, as are OMB and the U.S. Department of Education.
In a statement Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the assurance by the federal government that it will release the remaining funds resolved the states’ lawsuit.
“The Trump Administration upended school programs across the country when it recklessly withheld vital education funding just weeks before the school year was set to begin,” Bonta said. “Our kids deserve so much better than what this anti-education Administration has to offer, and we will continue to fight to protect them from this President’s relentless attacks.”
The Trump administration has said it wants to close the Education Department and give states more decision-making authority over federal K-12 spending.
The states’ lawsuit said that the funding freeze had violated federal funding statutes and regulations. In addition to the states’ lawsuit, a coalition of 14 school districts, parents, teachers unions and nonprofit organizations also sued the Education Department and OMB for withholding the K-12 federal funds. Both parties in that lawsuit — Anchorage School District, et al. v. U.S. Department of Education, et al. — also filed a joint motion to dismiss that lawsuit on Monday.
That motion said the second tranche of federal funding due to states should be available on or about Oct. 1.
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Dive Brief:
Cornell University leaders expect to begin restructuring the institution’s operations and workforce in phases beginning late this year and continuing into 2026.
In a community update Friday, senior leaders echoed a June message warning of job cuts.“Reducing costs will mean reconsidering how we handle all of our processes, from procurement to technology, and rethinking, in fundamental ways, how we allocate our resources,” they said Friday. “It will also, inevitably, mean reducing our workforce.”
The officials cited inflation, historical staff growth, contractions in federal funding, “significant legal and regulatory expenses,” and “an uncertain and unprecedented federal landscape.”
Dive Insight:
In June, the same group of Cornell leaders — President Michael Kotlikoff, Provost Kavita Bala, Chief Financial Officer Chris Cowen and Provost for Medical Affairs Robert Harrington — told the university community that disruption in the higher education world would “require financial austerity.”
“The spring semester was unlike anything ever seen in higher education, with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research contracts at Cornell terminated or frozen, and serious threats to future research funding, federal financial aid, medical reimbursement, and research cost recovery, along with an anticipated tax on our endowment income, and rapidly escalating legal expenses,” they wrote at the time.
The June message also brought news of a hiring freeze. On Friday, the leaders said hiring restrictions would continue “indefinitely” with “rare exceptions” determined by campus committees.
Cornell was among the 60 institutions that the Trump administration warned in March could face potential sanctions over allegations related to antisemitism.
In April, the administration reportedly froze $1 billion in federal research funding for the university.Administrators said then that they hadn’t received official word from the government about the frozen funds but were hit with dozens of stop-work orders on grant projects. This summer, Bloomberg reported thatCornell was nearing a deal with the Trump administration to restore grant funding that could involve a $100 million payment.
Even before the Trump administration’s actions, Cornell faced budget pressure from rising expenses. For fiscal 2024, the Ivy League institution posted a $175.5 million operating deficit, compared to $23 million surplus the year before.
Cornell’s senior leaders said that to save costs, the university is looking to consolidate operations where it can, seeking “new efficiencies and reducing duplication of work.” And while part of the university’s tradition, its decentralized structure is also a source of significant administrative inefficiencies, they added.
“Part of our task is identifying opportunities to scale and regularize our academic support systems across units with unique characteristics and needs without compromising our institutional excellence,” they said.
That means centralizing operations that are duplicated across colleges and units, which will ultimately lead to a smaller workforce, leaders said. They didn’t note whether those losses would be primarily through layoffs, buyouts, attrition or other means.
Cornell didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
The leaders said they expect to complete an analysis and planning process around the university’s operations this fall.
“These changes will be difficult for our community but are vital for our future,” they added, describing the steps they are taking as “necessary to ensure that Cornell pursues its academic mission sustainably for generations to come.”
For 67 years, the Department of Education has administered grants to universities to create centers devoted to foreign languages and area studies, a field focused on the study of the culture of a particular area or region. Now, those centers are under fire by the Trump administration, which has not released the funding the grantees expected to receive in July.
The grants support what are known as National Resource Centers, which were originally developed as a national security tool to help the U.S. increase its international expertise in the midst of the Cold War and the aftermath of Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik. Since then, their purpose has shifted with the times, now focusing not only on producing scholars but also on community outreach and collaboration with K–12 schools.
The office responsible for administering the grants—International and Foreign Language Education—was dissolved and its entire staff laid off as part of the March reduction in force at the Department of Education. But it seemed IFLE’s programs, which were authorized under Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965, would live on; they were moved under the ED’s Office of Higher Education Programs, according to an internal communication shared with Inside Higher Ed at the time.
Since then, funding has come through “in fits and starts,” Halina Goldberg, the director of Indiana University’s Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute (REEI), told Inside Higher Ed in an email, though ultimately, the center received all its promised funds for fiscal year 2024–25. REEI was part of the first cohort of NRCs and has been continuously funded by the program since then.
But NRC directors, including Goldberg, are concerned the funds for the upcoming year—the final year of the program’s four-year cycle—may not come through, and that the Trump administration may be planning to demolish the program altogether. NRC leaders have received no notice from ED about whether or when the funds are coming, and some say their contacts at the department have expressed uncertainty about the program’s future.
The funding cuts appear to be caused by the Office of Management and Budget; records show that the agency has not approved appropriations for programs formerly housed in IFLE, including the NRC program, as well as the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, which fund scholarships and stipends for undergraduate and graduate students studying these disciplines. In total, about $85 million was appropriated for IFLE programs for FY 2025–26, including $60 million for NRCs and FLAS.
“We’re just kind of in this holding pattern to learn whether our funds are going to be released or not. And there is some time pressure, because if that fiscal year 2025 funding is not allocated by Sept. 30, which is when the fiscal year, the government fiscal year ends, then it’s gone and we’re without funding,” said Kasia Szremski, associate director for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A Discipline in Crisis
NRC grant recipients worry about what the funding freeze and potential elimination of the program will mean for the disciplines of foreign language and area studies, which have already taken a beating in recent years; many colleges have eliminated such programs as cost-saving measures— including West Virginia University, which gutted nearly all of its language programs in 2023. More recently, the University of Chicago has paused admissions to all its humanities Ph.D. programs, including a slew of language programs, for the coming academic year.
Emanuel Rota, a professor in the Department of French and Italian at Urbana-Champaign who leads the university’s European Union Center, said he was already worried about the future of area studies and foreign language education, but “now I’m terribly scared.”
“I think this seems to be, at this point, slightly part of a trend to provincialize the United States in a way that is troubling for the future of this generation of students, who are, at this point, used to learning from other experiences around the world; knowing about ways of teaching, other ways of learning; establishing collaborations early on; and being able to be multicultural and multilinguistic like their peers around the world,” he said. “And all of a sudden they are told, ‘You only speak one language, you only know one culture and you only know your local environment, and you have to live with that.’”
It also comes amid efforts to quash other forms of cultural education and intercultural exchange. OMB also recently cut funding from a number of State Department exchange programs, according to Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance for International Exchange, which represents organizations that administer such programs.
Larger entities like the Fulbright program are being spared, he said, but the cuts include critical programming aiming at increasing STEM education access for girls around the world, fostering intercultural exchange with students in the Middle East, bolstering the study of foreign affairs in the U.S. and more.
International students and immigration broadly are also being targeted by the Trump administration, which has recently revoked thousands of student visas and increased barriers for overseas students studying in the U.S.
“I think international exchange programs, mobility, the presence of international students on our campuses have long been something that is supported in a bipartisan way, and that has been played out for decades in tangible ways,” Overmann said. “One would be increases in funding in both Democrat and Republican administrations, as well as Congresses. This is something we have seen transcend party lines and those across the political spectrum see that the mobility of our students, of our young professionals—both Americans going abroad and international students and professionals coming here—is something that supports our national security, our diplomatic interests, our influence around the world and our economy, down to very local levels.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has targeted NRCs. In 2018, during his first administration, ED criticized a Middle Eastern studies consortium at Duke University and the University of North Carolina for delivering programs it alleged had “little or no relevance to Title VI.” The programs under scrutiny included a conference about “Love and Desire in Modern Iran” and another focused on film criticism in the Middle East.
“It was probably a harbinger of what’s happening now,” said Brian Cwiek, a former IFLE program officer who lost his job when the office was dissolved. “I think that’s really where a lot of the same folks became intent on shutting down this same program.”
“Congress should wind down so-called ‘area studies’ programs at universities (Title VI of the HEA), which, although intended to serve American interests, sometimes fund programs that run counter to those interests,” Project 2025 reads. “In the meantime, the next Administration should promulgate a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests.”
Outreach at Risk
Although funding may still come through before the September cutoff date, some centers are already feeling the pressure.
At the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, which is home to two National Resource Centers, Kathi Colen Peck was responsible for administering an NRC-funded program focused on providing faculty development to professors at community colleges in upstate New York. Although the center has funding sources outside of ED, the community college program was almost entirely funded by an NRC grant.
The program involved bringing international speakers—a dance instructor from Benin, for example—to give workshops in community college classrooms, as well as administering a fellowship for community college professors to create curricular projects.
Once it became clear this year’s funding wasn’t going to become available when expected, Peck was laid off and the partnerships with community colleges for the upcoming academic year had to be discontinued.
“The intention of [the outreach program] is really to sort of bridge resources and help the community college faculty have connections to the area studies expertise at, for example, Cornell. They’re able to leverage resources at Cornell where they wouldn’t necessarily have access to that in any other circumstances,” she said. “It’s really about trying to help the community college faculty internationalize their curricula.”
At other campuses, cultural events and educational programs that NRC leaders say are immensely valuable to their communities could be on the chopping block. Hilary V. Finchum-Sung, the executive director of the Association for Asian Studies, said that the University of Michigan’s Korean Studies center, for example, hosts a free Korean film series at an off-campus theater that is open to members of the public. It’s an opportunity for members of the Ann Arbor community to see a film they likely never would otherwise—and to glean something new about a culture that they might be unfamiliar with.
On the flip side, NRC programs can sometimes give immigrants a rare chance to connect with their culture on American soil. Szremski, of UIUC’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, said the center has partnered with local libraries to hold a Latin American Story Time Program for about 15 years. At these events, they read children’s stories in English and Spanish, but also in other Latin American languages including Portuguese, Guaraní, Q’anjob’al, and Quechua.
“This is particularly important in Champaign and Urbana, because even though we’re in central Illinois, we have a very large and very vibrant Latino community, many of whom are native speakers of Indigenous languages,” she said.
Once, after a Latin American Story Time event, a library worker once told her, an older woman “came up to her in tears because she was a native Guaraní speaker and had never thought [she would] hear her native language again, really, now that she was living in the United States.”
Cwiek noted that some faculty positions may also be at risk without NRC funding; though the grants usually cover only a small portion of a professor’s salary, that portion may be the difference that allows a college to offer certain world languages.
Scholarship Uncertainty
Students are also in imminent danger of losing scholarships due to the funding pause. Graduate students relying on Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships to fund their education in the new academic year still don’t know whether they will receive that money. Szremski said on Friday that one incoming fellow recently made the choice to withdraw from UIUC and instead study in Colombia for the upcoming academic year due to funding fears. With UIUC’s academic year beginning this week, others were forced to make the decision about whether to come to campus without knowing if they would receive the scholarships they’d been promised. Across the university’s NRCs, 53 students are awaiting FLAS funds.
Other universities are in a similar position. At Cornell, 18 students will be impacted if the money doesn’t come through, according to Ellen Lust, the director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies and a government professor.
These fellowships provide the cultural awareness, understanding and skills that the U.S. “has relied on to be a world leader. Students who benefited from NRC support have gone on to join the US Foreign Service, engage in international business, and educate new generations of global citizens. They have conducted international collaborations and research that that ultimately benefit Americans,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
While the stipends allocated to undergraduate students are not as sizable as those for graduate students, Szremski said those recipients have told her they may have to take out private loans or start part-time jobs to fill the gap created by the missing FLAS money.
The future of these grants remains unclear. The Senate’s appropriations bill maintains funding for IFLE programs, so even if the funding doesn’t come through this year, the program may be able to resume the following year.
But if the NRC and FLAS programs are shuttered permanently, the effects will “be felt for generations to come,” wrote Lust.
“Our current and future students are the foreign service officers, intelligence analysts and CEOs of the future,” she wrote. “Within a generation, US citizens will be ill-equipped to live, work and lead in a global world. They will be outmatched by those from other countries, who speak multiple languages, understand diverse cultures and have built relationships across borders. Ultimately, these policies weaken the US’ global position and will make America less secure and prosperous.”
Religious colleges that require students to sign a faith statement cannot be shut out of a Minnesota program that funds the dual enrollment of high school students in the state’s public and private postsecondary institutions, a federal judge ruled Friday.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel’s ruling overturns a Minnesota law prohibiting Christian colleges that participate in the state’s 40-year-old Postsecondary Enrollment Options program from forcing students to pass a religious test. The state Education Department and LGBTQ+ advocates had sought such legislation for years on the grounds that faith statements discriminate against students who are not Christian, straight or cisgender. It finally passed in 2023, under a Democratic State Legislature.
The families of several high school students seeking to earn credits at two Christian institutions in the state, Crown College and the University of Northwestern, then sued, arguing that the law violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom. The ban on faith statements was suspended while the legal battle played out.
“This dispute requires the court to venture into the delicate constitutional interplay of religion and publicly-funded education,” Judge Brasel said in her 70-page ruling. “In doing so, the court heeds the Supreme Court’s instruction that the First Amendment gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.”
Brasel noted in her ruling that the two Christian colleges have received nearly $40 million to cover the costs of the PSEO program since the 2017–18 academic year; she wrote that the University of Northwestern admits about 70 percent of dual-enrollment applicants. Over all, some 60,000 high school students have benefited from PSEO, The Minneapolis Star Tribune noted.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the plaintiffs, applauded the decision.
“Minnesota tried to cut off educational opportunities to thousands of high schoolers simply for their faith. That’s not just unlawful—it’s shameful,” said Becket senior counsel Diana Thomson, according to the Associated Press. “This ruling is a win for families who won’t be strong-armed into abandoning their beliefs, and a sharp warning to politicians who target them.”
From the start, Na’Siah Martin and H’Sanii Blankenship’s July trip to Washington, D.C., was destined to be a riveting stop on the teenagers’ passage to adulthood. There were the scheduled meetings with lawmakers, the monuments, the reflecting pool near where Martin Luther King Jr. broadcast his dream for racial equality 62 summers ago.
For years, the pair have been involved in the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Austin Area, the revered summer and after-school program that was now making it possible for the two blossoming leaders to meet with Texans in Congress and present their game plan for tackling mental health challenges among student-athletes, a struggle both were deeply familiar with.
But two weeks before their arrival on Capitol Hill, President Donald Trump’s administration threw one of many curveballs lobbed during the first months of his second term. The U.S. Department of Education notified state education officials on the last day of June that it would pause the disbursement of nearly $7 billion in funds for teacher development, support for students learning English, and before- and after-school programs predominantly serving low-income families, pending a review of how schools had put the money to use. That notice went out a day before states expected to begin receiving the money.
For Texas, it meant a potential loss of nearly $670 million. For Martin and Blankenship, it potentially meant losing the Boys and Girls Club, a space that has aided their growth as both leaders and individuals. Martin, 18, graduated from Navarro Early College High School in June and has participated in the club since elementary school. Blankenship, a 17-year-old incoming senior at the same school, has participated in the club for about as long as Martin.
The focus of their trip immediately broadened: They now wanted to convince federal lawmakers that cutting the funds would harm Texas kids.
“These programs aren’t just for fun,” Blankenship said. “They actually give us resources, help us grow into adults instead of just coming here and just goofing around and stuff like that. These programs, they help us cope with things we need to cope with.”
The education funding freeze was typical of the Trump administration. In recent months, it has also cut billions of dollars in food assistance and health care for families in poverty; frozenbillions in grants and contracts financially supporting universities; canceled billions for foreign aid and public broadcasting stations; laid off thousands of employees working in critical federal agencies; and sought to overhaul the U.S. immigration landscape through actions like attempting to end birthright citizenship.
Those cuts and changes have often been sweeping and abrupt, disrupting federally funded services and programs serving large swaths of people of color, people with disabilities, low-income families, LGBTQ+ Americans and immigrants. And they have come at the same time the administration has moved to lower taxes for some of America’s wealthiest households.
“We can’t look at just the cuts to education in isolation,” said Weadé James, senior director of K-12 education policy at the Center for American Progress. “I think what we’re witnessing is really the undoing of a lot of progress, and also actions that are really going to keep a lot of families trapped in cyclical and generational poverty.”
Boys and Girls Club director Jacob Hernandez watches club members play spades at Navarro Early College High School. Credit: Montinique Monroe for The Texas Tribune
Ongoing changes to the country’s educational landscape are only one part of Trump’s larger goals to eliminate what the second-term president has deemed “wasteful” spending and crack down on anything he views as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. A large piece of his efforts involve closing the Department of Education and sending “education back to the states,” though most decisions about education and public school funding already happen at the state and local levels.
“Teachers will be unshackled from burdensome regulations and paperwork, empowering them to get back to teaching basic subjects. Taxpayers will no longer be burdened with tens of billions of dollars of waste on progressive social experiments and obsolete programs,” Trump Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement earlier this year. “K-12 and college students will be relieved of the drudgery caused by administrative burdens—and positioned to achieve success in a future career they love.”
The disarray has resulted in profound consequences for Texas, one of the largest and most diverse states in the nation, home to more than 9,000 school campuses and 5.5 million students — the majority of whom live in low-income households and come from Hispanic and Black families. Public schools serve as a safety net for many of them. They are one of the few places where some children have consistent access to meals, where working-class parents know their kids will be taken care of.
The prospect of federal cuts to school programs triggered a wave of concern across the state. For 44-year-old Clarissa Mendez, it jeopardized the after-school program her two daughters attend while she works as a nurse in Laredo.
“I’m on shaky grounds right now because I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Mendez said last month. “I understand there has to be cuts. I understand the government needs to find out how to save money. But why does it have to affect us and our kids?”
For Gay Hibbitts, a 57-year-old trying to become a certified teacher in rural Throckmorton, the worries began months earlier.
Earlier this year, the federal government cut roughly $400 million from a program that helps teaching candidates like her pay for their education as they gain hands-on classroom experience. That left participating rural districts with one of two options: cover the costs at a time when schools are financially struggling to make ends meet, or get rid of their preparation programs during a teacher shortage.
In both scenarios, Hibbitts said, children would pay the price.
“They’re the main ones that are going to suffer,” she said.
For as long as Martin and Blankenship can remember, they have each helped raise their younger siblings, a responsibility that has been rewarding but stressful. On the one hand, Martin said, her siblings look up to her, and her academic success has motivated them to do well in school. On the other hand, Blankenship said, taking on adult responsibilities at an early age meant missing out on the type of exhilarating childhood experiences many kids desire.
Since joining the Boys and Girls Club, the program has provided them the space to be kids.
They receive tutoring and time to finish homework. They go to live sporting events, watch movies and listen to music — SZA some days, Lauryn Hill on others. They play sports, cards and board games. They can earn scholarships. They find mentorship.
“We’re the future adults, so I feel like if you help us now with programs like this, that make us happy, that give us stress relief, that let us be kids, because we can’t be kids at home, I feel like that’ll equate to happier adults,” Martin said.
Na’Siah Martin, left, and H’Sanii Blankenship traveled to Washington, D.C., in July and had a chance to discuss with lawmakers the Trump administration’s pause on roughly $7 billion in federal funding, which threatened to shutter the Boys and Girls Club. Credit: Montinique Monroe for The Texas Tribune
Neither Martin nor Blankenship enjoys public speaking. Martin actually fears it. But with the Austin Boys and Girls Club’s future in jeopardy, they decided to lean into the discomfort and use the face time with lawmakers and their staffers to make a case for the after-school program.
The pair and several other clubmates sat down with the staff of Texas Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. They also met with Rep. Greg Casar, an Austin Democrat. The kids wore blue polo shirts with the words “America Needs Club Kids” etched in white. Martin, rocking a black one-button blazer, led the way.
“I gotta let these people know,” she thought.
Erica Peña is responsible for taking care of about 400 kids as she coordinates Hebbronville Elementary’s summer and after-school programs. Working with an assistant and about 25 paid volunteers, the 37-year-old often stays after hours — sometimes as late as 7 p.m. — depending on when parents can leave work to get there.
Peña breaks the after-school schedule into blocks. The first hour is for tutorials and worksheets, the later hours are usually for more fun activities like arts and crafts, kickball and cooking.
But shortly after the federal education funds were paused, the district notified Peña that it could no longer afford to keep her or the program.
“I cried, to be honest,” Peña said. “I was very upset, because I love my job, I love my students, and a lot of it is about them.”
Clarissa Mendez and her daughters Catiana Ester Mendez, left, and Catalaya Avaneh Mendez pose for a photo at their home in Hebbronville on July 30, 2025. Credit: Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
Hebbronville, in far South Texas, is home to about 4,300 mostly Hispanic Texans, one-third of whom live below the poverty line. The town has no H-E-B or Walmart. The local health clinic is often busy. The town has a few day care centers, but they can get pricey.
For the average Texas family, child care is financially out of reach. The median annual cost sits at $10,706 a year — or $892 each month. That’s more than one-fourth of the average cost for in-state tuition at a four-year public college, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Access to no-cost options, like the Hebbronville after-school program, has positive effects on student attendance, behavior and learning, multiplestudies have found over the years. Such programs also keep families from having to choose between leaving their children unattended or taking time off work to stay home.
“That has a direct impact on future economic prospects for that entire family,” said Jenna Courtney, CEO of the Texas Partnership for Out of School Time, a youth advocacy organization.
Mendez, the 44-year-old Hebbronville mother with two daughters, commutes about an hour to and from Laredo every weekday to make it to her job as a nurse. She goes in at 9 a.m. and gets out at 5 p.m. Her husband operates heavy equipment and has an unpredictable work schedule.
After picking up her daughters, Mendez cooks for them and spends some time with them before she starts working from home for an additional three to four hours. The after-school program Mendez’s daughters attend allows her to save some money on daycare costs. Credit: Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
The after-school program “gives me enough time to get to town to pick them up,” she said. But with the district planning to shutter operations, Mendez needed to find care providers who could look after her children until 6-6:30 p.m., when she gets home. She pays about $1,000 a month for that service during the summer when the school program is out of session. It would likely cost her another $800 per month during the academic year.
“That’s a big chunk of our money,” Mendez said.
Without the program, she would need to find a second job.
“We’ll do what we gotta do,” she added. “But I don’t understand.”
Catalaya Avaneh Mendez plays with her sister Catiana Ester Mendez as their mother watches them at her home. The Trump administration recently froze funding that benefits after-school programs, placing financial stress on parents such as the Mendez. They would have to find and pay for daycare for their children if those programs ended. Credit: Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
Hibbitts, the 57-year-old from Throckmorton, recently joined a federally funded program that would allow her to support students in her rural hometown between Abilene and Wichita Falls. It places aspiring full-time teachers in classrooms under the supervision of more seasoned teachers and provides financial assistance for their education and living expenses.
In exchange, the district gets to retain educators familiar with the community and eager to teach.
Based on her own experience as a Throckmorton student in the 1970s, Hibbitts knows the monumental role teachers can play in a child’s life.
“They were almost like your second mother,” she said.
Texas has the largest rural population of any state in the country. Of its roughly 5.5 million students, 13% attend class on a rural campus. Those schools often have to educate their students with less: Less access to the internet and technology, less staffing, and less money to pay and retain teachers.
Educator Gay Hibbitts, left, speaks with her mentor, Amy Dick, a secondary social studies teacher, inside a classroom at Throckmorton Collegiate ISD on July 29, 2025. Hibbitts was part of a federally funded educator preparation program serving about 30 participants across 11 rural Texas districts. Credit: Desiree Rios for The Texas Tribune
Texas lawmakers have acknowledged that rural teachers often do not make as much as their urban and suburban counterparts, and that many have left the profession because of a lack of support. Public schools over time have also grown more reliant on hiring unlicensed educators, a trend playing out more profoundly in the rural parts of Texas.
In response, state officials recently passed laws aimed at raising teacher pay, particularly in rural schools, and enhancing teacher preparation programs.
During her first year in the Throckmorton program, Hibbitts learned how to incorporate state learning standards into lesson plans. She learned how to keep students engaged. She helped a child who struggled academically and acted out at the beginning of the school year become a “model student” who thrived in reading by the year’s end.
Then, one Sunday afternoon in April, her superintendent called her.
The Trump administration had abruptly cut the federal dollars that helped schools fund educator preparation initiatives like the one she was participating in. It would affect about 30 people across 11 rural districts in Texas.
Hibbitts was one of them.
Hibbitts participates in a safety training at Throckmorton Collegiate ISD. The funding for Hibbitts’ educator preparation program, which covered her two years of college and training costs, was cut on April 25 under the Trump administration, leaving her uncertain about her future. Credit: Desiree Rios for The Texas Tribune
In Hebbronville, Mendez and Peña each had to confront their own harsh realities. Mendez would have to search for child care in a community with few affordable options. Peña, the after-school program coordinator, would have to find a new job.
In Austin, Martin and Blankenship had trouble picturing life without the Boys and Girls Club.
Club leaders began preparing a memo to notify parents about the funding uncertainty and what it could mean for their kids. Nothing had come of the Republican, Democratic and legal efforts seeking the release of the frozen funds. The Texas kids who spoke with congressional lawmakers and staff at the U.S. Capitol hadn’t heard anything either. When the administration would make a decision about the funds was anyone’s guess.
When Blankenship got the news, he sprinted out of his room in excitement and told his mom. The moment was just as surreal for Martin.
“Knowing that it could have been me, my story, or any other club kids’ story,” Martin said, “it made me happy. But it was like, ‘Dang. I was a part — we were a part of that.’”
Peña, the Hebbronville Elementary program coordinator, was relieved. The mood in her group chat with people from the district’s after-school programs was “pretty ecstatic.” They all cried. Getting the funds meant they no longer had to look for new jobs, and parents like Mendez wouldn’t have to go searching for a place to take care of their kids after school.
Hibbitts is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in general studies with an emphasis in education and a minor in psychology at West Texas A&M. Credit: Desiree Rios for The Texas Tribune
Hibbitts, meanwhile, wasn’t immediately able to bask in the good news, as it did not restore the federal funds for her district’s teacher preparation program. But in early August, her supervisor notified her that the program was officially back up and running for the 2025-26 school year. The news cleared the way for the 57-year-old to graduate at the end of the year and to start teaching full time by the next.
“This has been life changing for somebody of my age, to be able to step up and to step into the world of education,” Hibbitts said. “I’m finishing my dream. And as my kids like to say, ‘Mom, you’re going to be 58 years old walking the stage.’”
Still, she recognizes that so much uncertainty around federal funding means there is no guarantee others will get the same chance.
Uncertainty is what Peña also keeps coming back to.
“It just gets me upset with the administration, because, why? What was the purpose of the freeze? Why did you do that? You’re hurting people, not just adults, but children,” Peña said. “It’s like in a divorce, you don’t want to put the children in the middle. If something were to happen between parents, you never put children in the middle. And by doing that, you put children in the middle.”
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has determined that George Mason University violated federal civil rights law by using race as a factor in hiring and promotion decisions, the agency announced on Friday.
The finding concluded that GMU violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, and national origin in federally funded education programs. The university now has 10 days to accept a proposed resolution agreement or risk losing federal funding.
Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said President Gregory Washington led “a university-wide campaign to implement unlawful DEI policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race.”
“You can’t make this up,” Trainor said in a statement, noting that Washington had previously called for removing “racist vestiges” from campus in 2020.
The investigation, launched in July 2025, stemmed from complaints filed by multiple GMU professors who alleged the university adopted preferential treatment policies for faculty from “underrepresented groups” between 2020 and the present.
Federal investigators said that they found several problematic practices. As recently as fall 2024, they argue that the university’s website stated it “may choose to waive the competitive search process when there is an opportunity to hire a candidate who strategically advances the institutional commitment to diversity and inclusion.”
The current Faculty Handbook also requires approval from the “Office of Access, Compliance, and Community” – previously called the “Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” until GMU renamed it in March 2025 – before extending job offers.
One high-level administrator told investigators that Washington “created an atmosphere of surveillance” regarding hiring decisions related to diversity objectives.
Under the proposed resolution agreement, Washington must personally issue a statement and apology to the university community, acknowledging the discriminatory practices. The university must also revise hiring policies, conduct annual training, and remove any provisions encouraging racial preferences.
GMU must post the presidential statement prominently on its website and remove any contradictory materials. The university would also be required to maintain compliance records and designate a coordinator to work with federal officials.
George Mason University, located in Fairfax, Virginia, enrolls approximately 39,000 students and receives federal funding that could be at risk if the violations are not resolved.
George Mason officials said that they are reviewing the specific resolution steps proposed by the Department of Education.
“We will continue to respond fully and cooperatively to all inquiries from the Department of Education, the Department of Justice and the U.S. House of Representatives and evaluate the evidence that comes to light,” the university said in a statement. “Our sole focus is our fiduciary duty to serve the best interests of the University and the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
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The U.S. Department of Education is proposing to remove a requirement for states to collect and report on racial disparities in special education, according to a notice being published in the Federal Register on Friday.
The data collection is part of the annual state application under Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The application provides assurances that the state and its districts will comply with IDEA rules as a condition for receiving federal IDEA funding.
The data collection for racial overrepresentation or underrepresentation in special education — known as significant disproportionality — helps identify states and districts that have racial disparities among student special education identifications, placements and discipline. About 5% of school districts nationwide were identified with significant disproportionality in the 2020-21 school year, according to federal data.
The Education Department said it wants to remove the data collection because the agency anticipates it will reduce paperwork burdens for the states. According to several state Part B applications filed earlier this year, the significant disproportionality data collection adds more hours in paperwork duties.
For example, Florida’s application said it records an average of 25 additional hours for responses reporting data related to significant disproportionality in any given year, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Alabama’s and Oregon’s applications also cite an additional 25 hours each for the collections.
The department has not said it wants to rescind or pause the significant disproportionality regulation, a rule known as Equity in IDEA, which was last updated in 2016.
However, under the first Trump administration, the rule became a hot button issue when then-U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said its implementation would be delayed.
The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a nonprofit supportive of education rights for students with disabilities, sued the Education Departmentand won, and by April 2019, the rule was back in full effect.
Denise Marshall, CEO of COPAA said in a Thursday email to K-12 Dive that the proposal to remove the Equity in IDEA federal data collection was “yet another unlawful attempt by the Administration to shirk its obligations under the law to students of color.”
Marshall added that the data collection fulfills a critical role in enforcing the significant disproportionality requirement in IDEA. The collection allows states and districts to examine the data, determine if there is racial disproportionality, and develop measures to address the problem. Marshall points out that IDEA does not declare significant disproportionality unlawful. Rather, the law and regulations provide a method for states and districts to address systemic racial disproportionality in special education.
Robyn Linscott, director of education and family policy at The Arc, an organization that advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said that even if in the future there is no longer a data collection for significant disproportionality at the federal level, the information would still need to be collected by states and districts as required by IDEA.
But the loss of the central repository of information on significant disproportionality in schools will make it more difficult for advocacy groups and technical assistance centers to support school and district efforts to reduce racial disparities in special education.
In the absence of the data being available at the federal level, it will be “much more difficult” for people not within a state education agency to be able to access the data, Linscott said.
Correction: A previous version of this article erred in spelling out the IDEA acronym. It stands for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. We have updated our story.
The latest NASFAA survey shows financial aid services moving in the wrong direction.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post/Getty Images | MauMyHaT/iStock/Getty Images | subtik/E+/Getty Images
Complaints about the Office of Federal Student Aid’s operations have increased significantly over the past few months, according to the latest edition of a survey from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. Challenges that were once just kinks behind the scenes are evolving to become student-facing issues on the front line, the association says.
The share of institutions reporting disruptions to communication, responsiveness or processing timelines rose from 59 percent in May to 72 percent in July. Meanwhile, the share of aid offices reporting student confusion about the process increased from 32 percent to 51 percent.
“I wasn’t overly surprised” by the data, said NASFAA president Melanie Storey. “But it was largely a disappointment that the trajectory is moving in the wrong direction.”
She added that the new loan caps and repayment plan changes detailed in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act could compound the damage, creating long-term consequences for college attainment rates.
Given the “fissures and cracks around trust in higher education, we need to eliminate barriers and support students clearly and consistently—and that includes helping them figure out how they’re going to finance their higher education,” Storey said. “If this trajectory continues, I’m really concerned about the decisions that students and families are going to be able to make to enroll in postsecondary education.”
An Education Department official called the NASFAA report inaccurate and accused the organization of “peddling a false narrative to preserve the status quo.”
“It is an embarrassment for NASFAA to release a ‘survey’ that blatantly parrots falsehoods and is not representative of the higher education community nor the American people’s overwhelming charge for change,” deputy press secretary Ellen Keast said in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “While NASFAA stands idly by ready to see us fail, the Trump Administration has just launched the earliest FAFSA form ever, which they are well aware of and decided to ignore.”
Storey responded that NASFAA has tried repeatedly to partner with the administration in their “shared goal of serving students,” applauding efforts such as FAFSA beta testing.
But to dismiss the survey results as “fabricated or political undermines the expertise of those working directly with students every day, eager to deliver on the promise of postsecondary education, and shows that the administration is not interested in working with experts in the field to achieve the best results for students; instead, it is focused on advancing its own agenda,” she said.
Worsening Outcomes
It’s been an eventful few months for the FSA. Mass layoffs throughout the department, first announced in March, quickly faced legal challenges; in May, a district court temporarily blocked the executive action. But any hopes that the staffing shortage would be resolved were squashed when the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s ruling in July. And while the justices have yet to hear the full case or issue a final ruling, the order allows Education Secretary Linda McMahon to proceed with the pink slips.
Storey said that some of the increased frustration and concern higher ed officials expressed in the survey may be related to timing; the district court ruling spurred cautious optimism in May, which had largely tanked by July. Similarly, the repercussions of staffing shortages were not necessarily evident in May but are now becoming clear. She also noted that the mounting discontent could simply be a reflection of the cyclical nature of student aid and the imminent start of the new academic year.
Either way, the survey suggests that FSA operations are flagging, and many NASFAA members say it’s preventing them from properly processing aid. For example, 63 percent of institutions that have submitted their E-App—a form that must be completed and approved in order to receive federal aid—said their submission had yet to be processed in July.
Department officials argue that this data is biased due to NASFAA’s survey method. They point specifically to the sample size, saying that the 500 institutions represented are predominantly nonprofit or public institutions, reflecting only a sliver of the more than 5,000 that FSA works with—and are the ones most likely to harbor anti-Trump sentiments.
The department also described the survey’s questions as biased toward the negative and said it was conducted just as the department finished updating its Partner Connect Portal to address various complaints, meaning the results don’t accurately reflect the new changes.
But Storey stood by her view that most of the challenges financial aid offices face today are the same as those they reported in May, only worse, and with longer delays in response time.
For example, previous Inside Higher Ed reporting shows that when students hit a wall and cannot log in to the FAFSA application portal, college advisers struggle to reach the central processing system that manages user IDs. While a department spokesperson said all help lines remain fully open, multiple college and NASFAA representatives say they have been unable to get through at certain times.
The latest survey shows this is still a major problem. More than half of institutions reported issues with federal call centers, and more than 40 percent cited problems with the National Student Loan Data System. In addition, over a third flagged disruptions with student loan servicing. Collectively, the NASFAA report said, these failures affect colleges’ ability to resolve aid issues for students in real time.
Once the delays start to hit students—which is happening more and more often, according to NASFAA’s report—it could leave them without access to loans and therefore unable to pay their bills and stay enrolled. Although colleges can grant students extensions for tuition payments or on-campus housing fees, they can’t change when off-campus rent or childcare payments are due. Situations like these often force students to take a job and attempt to pay off their debt with some college but no degree.
So unless FSA addresses its shortcomings, Storey said, the impact could be far-reaching.
“It’s a compounding of issues and uncertainties that I think could have a long-lasting and significant impact on postsecondary enrollment and financing,” she said.
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A dozen states and their school districts are more vulnerable to federal funding rollbacks than others in K-12 because of their higher proportions of high-need districts and students living in poverty, according to an analysis from nonprofit group Education Resource Strategies.
Another risk factor for the 12 states is their higher dependency on federal funding: 16% of Alaska’s total education revenue, for example, came from the federal government in 2021-22. Nationally, 13.7% of public school funding came from the federal government that school year, according to USA Facts.
According to ERS, there are 12 states that meet all three risk factors: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.
In addition to the three risk factors reviewed by ERS, states and public schools are facing myriad other funding pressures, including federal fiscal delays and cutbacks, the end of COVID-19 emergency aid and competition from school choice options.
Although most funding for public schools comes from local and state coffers, reductions in federal revenue could lead to school-level impacts, including staff reductions or program cancellations, ERS said.
3 risk factors
In its analysis, ERS considered three risk factors that would make states more vulnerable to federal funding cuts. The first is ahigher reliance on federal funds as a percentage of total education revenue.
While federal funding has an impact on all states, those where federal funds exceed 10% of total K-12 revenue could be more vulnerable, ERS analysts said.
The analysis considered all federal funding directed to public K-12 districts, including Medicaid reimbursements and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. The analysis did not consider federal pandemic emergency funding.
The second risk factor is the percentage of districts in a state serving students living in poverty.
Districts serving a high proportion of students living in poverty rely the most on federal funding, as federal grants support low income students and districts.
The ERS analysis said states that have more than 30% of districts defined as “high-need” means that many districts would be impacted by reductions or disruptions in federal funding. A high-need district is one in which more than 20% of students live in poverty.
In Louisiana, for example, 81% of the state’s 69 public school districts qualify as high-need, which could be a challenge for Louisiana should Congress reduce federal funding for FY 2026, ERS said.
The third risk factor is the percentage of students attending a high-need district. The analysis measured this as a risk factor if more than 20% of a state’s students attend a high-need district. For those states, many families would be impacted by any federal budget reductions, even if a family is not low income.
ERS points out, however, that even if a state has a lower number of high-need districts, those few districts could be serving a large number of students. For example, only 12% of New York’s districts are considered high-need, but because New York City — a high-need district — serves more than 1 million students, 52% of the state’s students are served by a high-need district.
An ‘unprecedented level of uncertainty’
“It’s important for stakeholders to understand the challenges that schools and districts might face if federal funding cuts do happen, and to recognize that the impact will be different” depending on the risk factors, said Betty Chang, managing partner at ERS.
“Districts are facing a pretty unprecedented level of uncertainty when it comes to their financial forecast,” Chang added.
Congress is currently considering the budget for fiscal year 2026. President Donald Trump has proposed funding the U.S. Department of Education at $66.7 billion, and the Senate Appropriations Committee recommended $79 billion, or about $300 million more than current budget. The federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
Last month, the release of $6.2 billion in federal grant funding for several programs, such as English learning and after-school, was delayed as the White House’s Office of Management and Budget conducted a review to ensure compliance with Trump’s directives. The funding limbo caused some districts to reduce staff and cancel programs, according to educators and lawmakers.
A Moody’s Ratings report released last month, meanwhile, said districts that have strong budget managementand the capacity to increase revenue, as well as access to state funding, will be on stronger financial footing to adjust to federal policy changes.
Judge Stephanie Gallagher declared in the Thursday ruling that the Department of Education broke the law when it tried to withhold grant funding from institutions that practiced DEI based on one of the president’s executive orders and a related guidance letter.
In her opinion, Gallagher focused less on the legality of the attempt to ban DEI itself, but rather the process through which the president and secretary of education tried to do so.
“This court takes no view as to whether the policies at issue in this case are good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair. But, at this stage too, it must closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires. Here, it did not,” the judge wrote. “By leapfrogging important procedural requirements, the government has unwittingly run headfirst into serious constitutional problems.”
That said, she did explain the ways Trump’s policy violated the Constitution, saying, “The government cannot proclaim that it ‘will no longer tolerate’ speech it dislikes because of its ‘motivating ideology’—that is a ‘blatant’ and ‘egregious’ violation of the First Amendment.”
Gallagher’s decision followed a motion for summary judgment that was filed by the plaintiffs, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association, after they won a preliminary injunction that blocked parts of Trump’s anti-DEI policy since April. (Gallagher was appointed by Trump during his first presidency in 2018.)
Since the Education Department’s anti-DEI guidance was enjoined, the Trump administration has made other attempts to block the same academic practices. Most recently, the Department of Justice published a nine-page memo that stated that DEI is unlawful and discriminatory.
Still, AFT president Randi Weingarten viewed the ruling as a “huge win” against Trump’s “draconian attacks on the essence of public education.”
“This decision rightly strikes down the government’s attempt to dictate curriculum, and, in so doing, upholds the purpose and promise inherent in our public schools,” Weingarten said in a news release.
