The recent decision to cancel $400 million in AmeriCorps grants is nothing short of a crisis. With over 1,000 programs affected and 32,000 AmeriCorps and Senior Corps members pulled from their posts, this move will leave communities across the country without critical services.
The cuts will dismantle disaster recovery efforts, disrupt educational support for vulnerable students and undermine a powerful workforce development strategy that provides AmeriCorps members with in-demand skills across sectors including education.
AmeriCorps provides a service-to-workforce pipeline that gives young Americans and returning veterans hands-on training in high-demand industries, such as education, public safety, disaster response and health care. Its nominal front-end investment in human capital fosters economic mobility, enabling those who engage in a national service experience to successfully transition to gainful employment.
As leaders of Teach For America and City Year, two organizations that are part of the AmeriCorps national service network and whose members receive education stipends that go toward certification costs, student loans or future education pursuits, we are alarmed by how this crisis threatens the future of the education and workforce pipelines that power our nation’s progress, and it is deeply personal. We both started our careers as corps members in the programs we now lead.
Aneesh began his journey as a Teach For America corps member teaching high school English in Minnesota. Jim’s path began with City Year, serving at a Head Start program in Boston. We know firsthand that AmeriCorps programs are transformative and empower young people to drive meaningful change — for themselves and their communities.
At Teach For America, AmeriCorps grants are essential to recruiting thousands of new teachers every year to effectively lead high-need classrooms across the country. These teachers, who have a consistent and significant positive impact on students’ learning, rely on the AmeriCorps education awards they earn through their two years of service to pay for their own education and professional development, including new teacher certification fees, costs that in some communities exceed $20,000.
Termination of these grants threatens the pipeline of an estimated 2,500 new teachers preparing to enter classrooms over the summer. At a time when rural and urban communities alike are facing critical teacher shortages, cutting AmeriCorps support risks leaving students without the educators they need and deserve.
City Year, similarly, relies on AmeriCorps to recruit more than 2,200 young adults annually to serve as student success coaches in K-12 schools across 21 states, 29 cities and 60 school districts.
These AmeriCorps members serving as City Year student success coaches provide tutoring and mentoring that support students’ academic progress and interpersonal skill development and growth; they partner closely with teachers to boost student achievement, improve attendance and help keep kids on track to graduate. Research shows that schools partnering with City Year are two times more likely to improve their scores on English assessments, and two to three times more likely to improve their scores on math assessments.
Corps members gain critical workforce skills such as leadership, problem-solving and creative thinking, which align directly with the top skills employers seek; the value of their experience has been reaffirmed through third-party research conducted with our alumni. The City Year experience prepares corps members for success in varied careers, with many going into education.
AmeriCorps-funded programs like Breakthrough Collaborative and Jumpstart further strengthen this national service-to-workforce pathway, expanding the number of trained tutors and teacher trainees while also preparing corps members for careers that make a difference in all of our lives.
Those programs’ trained educators ensure all students gain access to excellent educational opportunities that put them on the path to learn, lead and thrive in communities across the country. And the leaders of both organizations, like us, are AmeriCorps alumni, proof of the lasting effect of national service.
Collectively, our four organizations have hundreds of thousands of alumni whose work as AmeriCorps members has impacted millions of children while shaping their own lives’ work, just as it did ours. Our alumni continue to lead classrooms, schools, districts, communities and organizations in neighborhoods across the country.
The termination of AmeriCorps grants is a direct blow to educators, schools and students. And, at a time when Gen Z is seeking work that aligns with their values and desire for impact, AmeriCorps is an essential on-ramp to public service and civic leadership that benefits not just individuals but entire communities and our country at large.
For every dollar invested in AmeriCorps, $17 in economic value is generated, proving that national service is not only efficient but also a powerhouse for economic growth. Rather than draining resources, AmeriCorps drives real, measurable results that benefit individual communities and the national economy.
Moreover, two-thirds of AmeriCorps funding is distributed by governor-appointed state service commissions to community- and faith-based organizations that leverage that funding to meet local needs. By working directly with state and local partners, AmeriCorps provides a more effective solution than top-down government intervention.
On behalf of the more than 6,500 current AmeriCorps members serving with Teach For America and City Year, and the tens of thousands of alumni who have gone on to become educators, civic leaders and changemakers, we call on Congress to protect AmeriCorps and vital national service opportunities.
Investing in AmeriCorps is an investment in America’s future, empowering communities, strengthening families and revitalizing economies. Let’s preserve the fabric of our national service infrastructure and ensure that the next generation of leaders, educators and community advocates who want to serve our nation have the ability to do so.
Aneesh Sohoni is Teach For America’s new CEO. Previously, he was CEO of One Million Degrees and executive director of Teach For America Greater Chicago-Northwest Indiana. He is a proud alum of Teach For America.
Jim Balfanz, a recognized leader and innovator in the field of education and national service, is CEO and a proud alum of City Year.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
For the last four years, school and public libraries have been drawn into a culture war that seeks to censor, limit and discredit diverse perspectives.
Yet time and time again, as librarians have been encouraged or even directed to remove books that include LGBTQ+, Black, Latino and Indigenous characters or themes or history from their collections, they have said no.
When librarians said no, policy changes were submitted and laws were proposed — all in the name of controlling the library collection.
Some librarians lost their jobs. Some had their lives threatened. Legislators proposed bills that attempt to remove librarians’ legal protections, strive to prevent them from participating in their national professional associations, seek to limit some materials to “adults only” areas in public libraries and threaten the way library work has been done for decades.
Here’s why this is wrong. For generations, libraries have been hubs of information and expertise in their communities. Librarians and library workers aid in workforce development, support seniors, provide resources for veterans, aid literacy efforts, buttress homeschool families —among many other community-enriching services. Your public library, the library in your school and at your college, even those in hospitals and law firms, are centers of knowledge. Restrictions such as book bans impede their efforts to provide information.
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Professional librarians study the First Amendment and understand what it means to protect the right to read. We provide opportunities for feedback from our users so that they have a voice in decision-making. We follow a code of ethics and guidelines to make the best selections for our communities.
It is illegal for a library to purchase pornographic or obscene material; we follow the law established by the Supreme Court (Miller v. California, 1973). That decision has three prongs to determine if material meets the qualifications for obscenity. If the material meets all three, it is considered obscene and does not have First Amendment protection.
But our procedures have been co-opted, abused and flagrantly ignored by a small and vocal minority attempting to control what type of information can be accessed by all citizens. Their argument, that books are not banned if they are available for purchase, is false.
When a book or resource is removed from a collection based on a discriminatory point of view, that is a book ban.
Librarians follow a careful process of criteria to ensure that our personal biases do not intervene in our professional work. Librarians have always been paying attention. In 1939, a group of visionary librarians crafted the Library Bill of Rights to counter “growing intolerance, suppression of free speech and censorship affecting the rights of minorities and individuals.” In 1953, librarians once again came together and created the Freedom to Read Statement, in response to McCarthyism.
You may see a similar censorship trend today — but with the advent of the internet and social media, the speed at which censorship is occurring is unparalleled.
Much of the battle has focused on fears that schoolchildren might discover books depicting families with two dads or two moms, or that high school level books are available at elementary schools. (Spoiler alert: they are not.)
The strategy of this censorship is similar in many localities: One person comes to the podium at a county or school board meeting and reads a passage out of context. The selection of the passage is deliberate — it is meant to sound salacious. Clips of this reading are then shared and re-shared, with comments that are meant to frighten people.
After misinformation has been unleashed, it’s a real challenge to control its spread. Is some subject matter that is taught in schools difficult? Yes, that is why it is taught as a whole, and not in passages out of context, because context is everything in education.
Librarians are trained professionals. Librarians have been entrusted with tax dollars and know how to be excellent stewards of them. They know what meets the criteria for obscenity and what doesn’t. They have a commitment to provide something for everyone in their collections. The old adage “a good library has something in it to offend everyone” is still true.
Thankfully, there are people across the country using their voices to fight back against censorship. The new documentary “Banned Together,” for example, shows the real-world impact of book banning and curriculum censorship in public schools. The film follows three students and their adult allies as they fight to reinstate 97 books pulled from school libraries.
Ultimately, an attempt to control information is an attempt to control people. It’s an attempt to control access, and for one group of people to pass a value judgment on others for simply living their lives.
Libraries focus on the free expression of ideas and access to those ideas. All the people in our communities have a right to read, to learn something new no matter what their age.
Lisa R. Varga is the associate executive director, public policy and advocacy, at the American Library Association.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about book bans was produced byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
UPDATE: The hearing scheduled for May 9 has been postponed until May 16 at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The court will hear two similar motions at the same time and consider whether to temporarily restore the cuts to research and data collections and bring back fired federal workers at the Education Department. More details on the underlying cases in the article below.
Some of the biggest names in education research — who often oppose each other in scholarly and policy debates — are now united in their desire to fight the cuts to data and scientific studies at the U.S. Department of Education.
The roster includes both Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, the first head of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) who initiated studies for private school vouchers, and Sean Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist who studies inequity in education. They are just two of the dozens of scholars who have submitted declarations to the courts against the department and Secretary Linda McMahon. They describe how their work has been harmed and argue that the cuts will devastate education research.
Professional organizations representing the scholars are asking the courts to restore terminated research and data and reverse mass firings at the Institute of Education Sciences, the division that collects data on students and schools, awards research grants, highlights effective practices and measures student achievement.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
Three major suits were filed last month in U.S. federal courts, each brought by two different professional organizations. The six groups are the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), American Educational Research Association (AERA), Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE), National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). The American Educational Research Association alone represents 25,000 researchers and there is considerable overlap in membership among the professional associations.
Prominent left-wing and progressive legal organizations spearheaded the suits and are representing the associations. They are Public Citizen, Democracy Forward and the Legal Defense Fund, which was originally founded by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) but is an independent legal organization. Allison Scharfstein, an attorney for the Legal Defense Fund, said education data is critical to documenting educational disparities and improve education for Black and Hispanic students. “We know that the data is needed for educational equity,” Scharfstein said.
Officers at the research associations described the complex calculations in suing the government, mindful that many of them work at universities that are under attack by the Trump administration and that its members are worried about retaliation.
“A situation like this requires a bit of a leap of faith,” said Elizabeth Tipton, president of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness and a statistician at Northwestern University. “We were reminded that we are the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, and that this is an existential threat. If the destruction that we see continues, we won’t exist, and our members won’t exist. This kind of research won’t exist. And so the board ultimately decided that the tradeoffs were in our favor, in the sense that whether we won or we lost, that we had to stand up for this.”
The three suits are similar in that they all contend that the Trump administration exceeded its executive authority by eliminating activities Congress requires by law. Private citizens or organizations are generally barred from suing the federal government, which enjoys legal protection known as “sovereign immunity.” But under the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, private organizations can ask the courts to intervene when executive agencies have acted arbitrarily, capriciously and not in accordance with the law. The suits point out, for example, that the Education Science Reform Act of 2002 specifically requires the Education Department to operate Regional Education Laboratories and conduct longitudinal and special data collections, activities that the Education Department eliminated in February among a mass cancelation of projects.
The suits argue that it is impossible for the Education Department to carry out its congressionally required duties, such as the awarding of grants to study and identify effective teaching practices, after the March firing of almost 90 percent of the IES staff and the suspension of panels to review grant proposals. The research organizations argue that their members and the field of education research will be irreparably harmed.
Of immediate concern are two June deadlines. Beginning June 1, researchers are scheduled to lose remote access to restricted datasets, which can include personally identifiable information about students. The suits contend that loss harms the ability of researchers to finish projects in progress and plan future studies. The researchers say they are also unable to publish or present studies that use this data because there is no one remaining inside the Education Department to review their papers for any inadvertent disclosure of student data.
The second concern is that the termination of more than 1,300 Education Department employees will become final by June 10. Technically, these employees have been on administrative leave since March, and lawyers for the education associations are concerned that it will be impossible to rehire these veteran statisticians and research experts for congressionally required tasks.
The suits describe additional worries. Outside contractors are responsible for storing historical datasets because the Education Department doesn’t have its own data warehouse, and researchers are worried about who will maintain this critical data in the months and years ahead now that the contracts have been canceled. Another concern is that the terminated contracts for research and surveys include clauses that will force researchers to delete data about their subjects. “Years of work have gone into these studies,” said Dan McGrath, an attorney at Democracy Forward, who is involved in one of the three suits. “At some point it won’t be possible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”
In all three of the suits, lawyers have asked the courts for a preliminary injunction to reverse the cuts and firings, temporarily restoring the studies and bringing federal employees back to the Education Department to continue their work while the judges take more time to decide whether the Trump administration exceeded its authority. A first hearing on a temporary injunction is scheduled on Friday in federal district court in Washington.*
A lot of people have been waiting for this. In February, when DOGE first started cutting non-ideological studies and data collections at the Education Department, I wondered why Congress wasn’t protesting that its laws were being ignored. And I was wondering where the research community was. It was so hard to get anyone to talk on the record. Now these suits, combined with Harvard University’s resistance to the Trump administration, show that higher education is finally finding its voice and fighting what it sees as existential threats.
The three suits:
Public Citizen suit
Plaintiffs: Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) and the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP)
Attorneys: Public Citizen Litigation Group
Defendants: Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and the U.S. Department of Education
Date filed: April 4
Where: U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
A concern: Data infrastructure. “We want to do all that we can to protect essential data and research infrastructure,” said Michal Kurlaender, president of AEFP and a professor at University of California, Davis.
Status: Public Citizen filed a request for a temporary injunction on April 17 that was accompanied by declarations from researchers on how they and the field of education have been harmed. The Education Department filed a response on April 30. A hearing is scheduled for May 9.
Democracy Forward suit
Plaintiffs: American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE)
Attorneys: Democracy Forward
Defendants: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and Acting Director of the Institute of Education Sciences Matthew Soldner
Date filed: April 14
Where: U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Southern Division
A concern: Future research. “IES has been critical to fostering research on what works, and what does not work, and for providing this information to schools so they can best prepare students for their future,” said Ellen Weiss, executive director of SREE. “Our graduate students are stalled in their work and upended in their progress toward a degree. Practitioners and policymakers also suffer great harm as they are left to drive decisions without the benefit of empirical data and high-quality research,” said Felice Levine, executive director of AERA.
Status: A request for a temporary injunction was filed April 29, accompanied by declarations from researchers on how their work is harmed.
Legal Defense Fund suit
Plaintiffs: National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME)
Attorneys: Legal Defense Fund
Defendants: The U.S. Department of Education and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon
Date filed: April 24
Where: U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
A concern: Data quality. “The law requires not only data access but data quality,” said Andrew Ho, a Harvard University professor of education and former president of the National Council on Measurement in Education. “For 88 years, our organization has upheld standards for valid measurements and the research that depends on these measurements. We do so again today.”
Status: A request for a temporary injunction was filed May 2.*
* Correction: This paragraph was corrected to make clear that lawyers in all three suits have asked the courts to temporarily reverse the research and data cuts and personnel firings. Also, May 9th is a Friday, not a Thursday. We regret the error.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
After a five-year pause, the Trump administration is bringing back financial penalties for the many millions of borrowers who are too far behind on their student loan payments. It’s led to confusion and financial uncertainty.
At least 5 million people are in default, meaning they have failed to make payments on their loans for at least nine months — and millions more are projected to join them in the coming months.
The Hechinger Report spoke to student loan experts about what to expect and how to prepare, as well as about a separate effort in Congress to adjust how student loans work.
The Biden administration restarted loan repayments in October 2023. That came without any consequences, however, for about a year. But interest, which had also been frozen since the start of the pandemic, has been piling up for some borrowers since the fall of 2023.
All told, about 43 million federal student loan borrowers owe a total of $1.6 trillion in debt. Starting May 5, those in default face having tax refunds withheld and wages garnished if they don’t start making regular payments.
A college degree can be a path to long-term financial security, but the process of repaying loans can lead to financial hardship for many borrowers. About half of all students with a bachelor’s degree graduate with debt, which averages more than $29,000. And although average debt tends to be lower for graduates of public universities (about $20,000), close to half of people who attend those schools still leave with debt.
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The student loan landscape is likely to change in some way over in the coming months: The Trump administration is expected to push the limits on aggressive collection practices, while Republicans in Congress are determined to adjust repayment options. Here’s what we know about what the Trump administration’s actions mean for student borrowers.
Once you’ve failed to make a loan payment in 270 days, you will probably enter into default. That means, as of May 5, the government can take your federal tax refund and apply it to your debt. Starting in June, the government can also withhold up to 15 percent of any money you receive from Social Security, including disability payments. And later this summer, officials said, they will start the process of taking a cut ofyour paycheck, although borrowers have the right to appeal. Going into default can also harm your credit score, which can make it harder to rent an apartment or borrow money for other reasons, like buying a car.
Can I go back to school to avoid repaying my loans?
Some influencers on social media have recommended enrolling in school as a way to delay making payments. It’s true that most loans are deferred while you’re in school, meaning you wouldn’t have to pay while you’re taking classes, but you may also add to what you already owe if you spend more time in college. Unless you’re confident a new certificate or degree will boost your income, delaying repayment and increasing what you owe could make paying off your loans even more difficult.
I can’t afford to repay my loan. What should I do?
There are other options. One type links your monthly payments to what you earn. These income-based repayment plans can shrink your monthly loan bill. There is also a graduated repayment plan that can lower your payments initially, after which they increase every two years. A third option is an extended repayment plan, which lowers your monthly payments but adds months or years to the time it will take to pay off your loans. The government’s Loan Simulator is one way to find options available to you.
Where can I go if I need help?
The Education Department’s Default Resolution Group can help provide advice for borrowers who are already in default. The Federal Student Aid call center is set up to answer questions. Borrowers can also reach out to their loan servicers for guidance.
What’s the difference between loan deferment, loan forbearance and default?
Loan deferment: The Education Department may grant a loan deferment for several reasons, including when a borrower is experiencing an extreme economic hardship or is unemployed. That means the borrower can temporarily stop paying off the loan without any financial penalties; in the case of subsidized undergraduate loans, interest doesn’t keep accruing during that time.
Forbearance: A loan forbearance also allows a borrower to stop payments, or make smaller ones, without any penalties. However, interest usually keeps building on all loans during that time.
Default: If a borrower is in default, it means they have failed to make payments for at least 270 days without permission. That’s when the government can begin to garnish tax refunds, Social Security benefits and wages, and a borrower’s credit score will drop.
I’ve heard income-driven repayment plans are in trouble. Is that true?
There are several types of income-driven repayment plans, which are meant to keep payments affordable. The Biden administration’s Saving for a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan is on hold because of legal challenges from Republican-led states. That plan previously offered eligible borrowers a repayment plan with lower monthly payments and a quicker path to loan forgiveness than other previously available options. But borrowers can still enroll in the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) plan and other income-based repayment options, in which payments are capped at 10 percent of a borrower’s income, or the Income-Contingent Repayment Plan, which requires payments of up to 20 percent of income and allows full repayment more quickly. Congressional Republicans hope to eliminate several of these plans in favor of just one income-based repayment plan, but it’s unclear if that bill will pass the Senate.
What’s happening with the court cases challenging the SAVE program?
Courts have effectively paused the SAVE plan. The 8 million borrowers who are enrolled don’t have to make payments, and interest will not be added while the court decides the case. With those payments paused, borrowers in this group who are intending to seek loan forgiveness for working in public service are also not making progress toward that goal. If Congress eliminates the SAVE program or the courts officially kill it, those borrowers would need to enroll in a different repayment plan.
Does Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) still exist?
Yes, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is still available. Borrowers should still be eligible if they are in an income-driven repayment plan and make regular payments for 10 years. They must work for the federal, state or local government — teachers and firefighters are eligible, for example — or for qualifying nonprofit organizations, such as some health care clinics or foster care agencies. The goal of PSLF is to encourage graduates to pursue careers that may pay less than jobs with private companies but which benefit their communities or the country as a whole.
The Trump administration issued an executive order in March aimed at limiting which organizations’ jobs could qualify for PSLF — for instance, a nonprofit could be excluded if the government decides it is “supporting terrorism,” engaging in civil disobedience or aiding undocumented immigrants in violation of federal law. So far, it’s unclear what the effect will be.
What other changes might be in store for student loans?
As part of the federal budget process, congressional Republicans have proposed a slew of changes to student loans that some policymakers worry will make borrowing more expensive for students — especially those in graduate programs.
The proposals include changes to:
Subsidized loans: Congressional Republicans want to get rid of subsidized loans for undergraduates, which would mean interest would accrue while a student was in college. They also want to cap total undergraduate borrowing at $50,000.
Grad Plus: They also want to end the Grad Plus program, which allows students to borrow money to cover the cost of graduate school. Student advocates worry that this would push more students into the private student loan market, which has fewer protections for borrowers.
Income-driven repayment: One proposal would simplify income-driven repayment into one option and prevent interest from causing student debt to balloon for students in income-driven repayment plans.
The proposed changes are included in the federal budget bill and may undergo many revisions as Congress figures out its spending priorities for the year.
This story about student loan repayment was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Oklahoma wants some of its less-expensive universities to cut travel and operational costs, consolidate departments and reduce energy use — all in the name of saving money.
Already, earning a degree at one of these regional institutions is relatively inexpensive for students, costing in total as much as $15,000 less per year than bigger state universities in Oklahoma. And the schools, including Southeastern Oklahoma State University and the University of Central Oklahoma, graduate more teachers and nurses than those research institutions. Those graduates can fill critically needed roles for the state.
Still, state policymakers think there are more efficiencies to be found.
Higher education is one of the specific areas targeted by a new state-run agency with a familiar name, with the goal of “protecting our Oklahoma way of life,” Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said in the first DOGE-OK report this spring. The Oklahoma Division of Government Efficiency, created around the same time as the federal entity with a similar title, counts among its accomplishments so far shifting to automated lawn mowers to cut grass at the state capital, changing to energy-efficient LED lighting and cutting down on state government cell phone bills. The Oklahoma governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment about this effort.
Oklahoma is one of about a dozen states that has considered an approach similar to the federal DOGE, though some state attempts were launched before the Trump administration’s. The federal Department of Government Efficiency, established the day Trump took office on Jan. 20, has commanded deep cuts to federal spending and the federal workforce, with limited justification.
As academia becomes a piñata for President Donald Trump and his supporters, Republican state lawmakers and governors are assembling in line: They want to get their whacks in too.
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Beyond Oklahoma, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched FL DOGE in February, with a promise to review state university and college operations and spending. Republicans in the Ohio statehouse formed an Ohio DOGE caucus. One of the Iowa DOGE Task Force’s three main goals is “further refining workforce and job training programs,” some of which are run through community colleges, and its members include at least two people who work at state universities.
The current political environment represents “an unprecedented attack on higher education,” said Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and general counsel for the American Association of University Professors.
The state-level scrutiny comes atop those federal job cuts, which include layoffs of workers who interact with colleges, interdepartmental spending cuts that affect higher education and the shrinking of contracts that support research and special programs at colleges and universities. Other research grants have been canceled outright. The White House is pursuing these spending cuts at the same time as it is using colleges’ diversity efforts, their handling of antisemitism and their policies about transgender athletes to force a host of changes that go beyond cost-cutting — such as rules about how students protest and whether individual university departments require more supervision.
Florida Atlantic University students Zayla Robinson, Aadyn Hoots and Meadow Swantic (from left to right) sit together at the Boca Raton campus. Swantic objects to Florida’s efforts to dictate what subjects universities can or can’t teach: “You can’t erase history.” Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
Higher education, which relies heavily on both state dollars and federal funding in the form of student loans and Pell grants, research grants and workforce training programs, faces the prospect of continued, and painful, budget cuts.
“Institutions are doing things under the threat of extinction,” Dubal said. “They’re not making measured decisions about what’s best for the institution, or best for the public good.”
For instance, the Trump administration extracted a number of pledges from Columbia University as part of its antisemitism charge, suspending $400 million in federal grants and contracts as leverage. This led campus faculty and labor unions to sue, citing an assault on academic freedom. (The Hechinger Report is in an independent unit of Teachers College.) Now Harvard faces a review of $9 billion in federal funding, also over antisemitism allegations, and the list of universities under similar scrutiny is only growing.
Budget cuts are nothing new for higher education — when a recession hits, it is one of the first places state lawmakers look to cut, in blue states or red. One reason: Public universities can sometimes make up the difference with tuition increases.
What DOGE brings, in Washington and statehouses, is something new. The DOGE approach is engaging in aggressive cost-cutting that specifically targets certain programs that some politicians don’t like, said Jeff Selingo, a special adviser to the president at Arizona State University.
“It’s definitely more political than it is fiscal or policy-oriented,” said Selingo, who is also the author of several books on higher education.
“Universities haven’t done what certain politicians wanted them to do,” he added. “This is a way to control them, in a way.”
The current pressure on Florida colleges extends far beyond budget matters. DeSantis has criticized college campuses as “intellectually repressive environments.” In 2021, Florida state lawmakers passed a law, signed by the governor, to fight this perceived ideological bent by requiring a survey of public university professors and students to assess whether there is enough intellectual diversity on campus.
A diversity-themed bus transports students at the University of Central Florida’s Orlando campus. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
At New College in Sarasota, DeSantis led an aggressive cultural overhaul to transform the college’s atmosphere and identity into something more politically conservative. The governor has cited Hillsdale College, a conservative private Christian institution in Michigan, as a role model.
Faculty and students at New College sued. Their complaints included allegations of academic censorship and a hostile environment for LGBTQ+ students, many of whom transferred elsewhere. One lawsuit was ultimately dropped. Since the takeover, the college added athletics programs and said it has attracted a record number of new and transfer students.
Across America, Republicans control both the legislature and the governor’s mansion in 23 states, compared with 15 states fully controlled by Democrats. In those GOP-run states, creating a mini-DOGE carries the potential for increased political might, with little oversight.
In Florida, “state DOGE serves as an intimidation device,” one high-ranking public university administrator told The Hechinger Report. The administrator, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said “there’s also just this atmosphere of fear.”
In late March, university presidents received a letter signed by the “DOGE Team” at the governor’s office. The letter promised a thorough review by FL DOGE officials, with site visits and the expectation that each college appoint a designated liaison to handle FL DOGE’s ongoing requests.
The letter highlighted some of the items FL DOGE might request going forward, including course codes, descriptions and syllabi; full detail of all centers established on campus; and “the closure and dissolution of DEI programs and activities, as required by law.”
The student union at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, launched FL DOGE in February, promising to review state university and college operations and spending. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
The state did not respond to a question about whether FL DOGE is designed to attack higher education in the state. Molly Best, the deputy press secretary, noted that FL DOGE is now up and running, and cities and counties are also receiving letters requesting certain information and that the public will be updated in the future.
DOGE in Florida also follows other intervention in higher education in the state: Florida’s appointed Board of Governors, most of whom are chosen by the governor, removed dozens of courses from state universities’ core curriculum to comply with the Stop WOKE Act, a state law that took effect in 2022. The law, which DeSantis heavily promoted, discourages the teaching of concepts such as systemic racism or sexism. The courses removed from Florida’s 12 state universities were primarily sociology, anthropology and history courses.
“You can’t erase history,” said Meadow Swantic, a criminal justice major at Florida Atlantic University, a public institution, in an interview at its Boca Raton campus. “There’s certain things that are built on white supremacy, and it’s a problem.”
Fellow Florida Atlantic student Kayla Collins, however, said she has noticed some professors’ liberal bias during class discussions.
“I myself have witnessed it in my history class,” said Collins, who identifies as Republican. “It was a great history class, but I would say there were a lot of political things brought up, when it wasn’t a government class or a political science class.”
At the University of Central Florida in Orlando, political science major Liliana Hogan said she had a different experience of her professors’ political leanings.
“You hear ‘people go to university to get woke’ or whatever, but actually, as a poli-sci student, a lot of my professors are more right-wing than you would believe,” Hogan said. “I get more right-leaning perspectives from my teachers than I would have expected.” Hogan said.
Another UCF student, Johanna Abrams, objected to university budget cuts being ordered by the state government. Abrams said she understands that tax dollars are limited, but she believes college leaders should be trusted with making the budget decisions that best serve the student body.
“The government’s job should be providing the funding for education, but not determining what is worthy of being taught,” Abrams said.
Whatever their missions and attempts at mimicry, state-level DOGE entities are not necessarily identical to the federal version.
For instance, in Kansas, the Committee on Government Efficiency, while inspired by DOGE, is in search of ideas from state residents about ways to make the state bureaucracy run better rather than imposing its own changes. A Missouri Senate portal inspired by the federal DOGE works in a similar way. Yet the federal namesake isn’t taking suggestions from the masses to inform its work.
And at the federal level, then-DOGE chief Elon Musk in February emailed workers, asking them to respond “to understand what they got done last week,” he posted on X. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Employees were asked to reply with a list of five accomplishments.
The Ohio DOGE Caucus noted explicitly it won’t be doing anything like that.
“We’re not going to be emailing any state employees asking them to give us five things they worked on throughout the week,” Ohio state Rep. Tex Fischer, a Republican, told a local radio station. “We’re really just trying to get like-minded people into a room to talk about making sure that government is spending our money wisely and focusing on its core functions that we all agree with.”
Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, securely on Signal at NirviShah.14 or via email at shah@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Here’s a true story from North Carolina. Two elementary school children under the age of 10 waited for their parents to come home. We know they cleaned the dishes; the house was immaculate when someone finally came.
The children did not attend school for a number of days. After three days, someone from their school reached out to a community member with concern for their well-being.
While they were home alone instead of in school, the children made their own food and drank water. Their parents, who had been detained by ICE, had nurtured these skills of independence, so the children were not yet hungry or thirsty when someone finally came.
Similar scenes are likely happening across the U.S. as President Trump aggressively steps up efforts to deport undocumented immigrants. The new policies sweeping the nation deeply affect and harm our children.
Teachers: This is the moment when we need to rise to the occasion, because children are being wronged in uncountable ways. Protections that allow them to express their gender identities are under threat. Their rights to learn their diverse histories and understand the value of their communities are being chipped away bit by bit.
These threats, one at a time, layer after layer, amount to profound harm. So let us be especially vigilant.
The responsibility to challenge these threats cannot fall solely on the shoulders of individual teachers. We must have systems in place that allow us to swiftly raise concerns about student well-being.
Schools, districts, and states must provide resources and structures — like wellness checks, counseling and communication with community services — that allow us to act swiftly when the safety of our students is at risk.
As public servants, we must live out our charge to protect and advocate for the children we serve by taking immediate action to ensure their safety in whatever ways we are able. That means actively noticing when students are missing and when they are struggling.
Public education has long wrestled with the role of politics in schools. No matter how we answer questions about political content, educators have been unified in the goal of nurturing children’s thinking and flourishing.
Our state constitution and many others’ declare that all children are entitled to a “sound basic education,” and our professional responsibilities extend to their safety. In North Carolina, the first category of thecode of ethics for educators pertains to professional ethical commitments to students.
To uphold these professional commitments, the educator “protects students from conditions within the educator’s control that circumvent learning or are detrimental to the health and safety of students.”
This protection must be more than theoretical. When our students are at risk, we have our constitutional guarantees and ethical commitments.
The brutal example of the children whose parents were taken away is one of many. We cannot fathom all that the children needed to know in order to survive those harrowing few days alone in their home. We do know they were ready.
We can assume that perhaps they read their favorite books or calculated measurements while cooking themselves dinner, utilizing skills they learned in our classrooms. What we do know is that the knowledge taught to them by their families and community ensured their safety.
The community member who ultimately went to check in on the missing students used a “safe word” — one that the children had been taught to listen for before ever opening their door to a stranger.
The children did not open the door until that word was spoken. Hearing that word, they reportedly asked: “Are Mommy and Daddy OK? ICE?”
These are the lessons young children are living by today. Safe words to protect themselves from adults who prey on their families. Skills of survival to hide at home, cooking and caring for themselves without seeking help from others if they find themselves alone.
A protective silence now envelops all the children in the community where those parents were seized. An example has been made and now those in their community are hiding in fear or fleeing. The idea that this example is a model to be followed is a transgression of our ethical compact to care for these children, who are no longer in school, due to their fear, hiding with family members.
Recognizing, acting on and speaking back to this injustice is precisely the sort of resistance and professionalism that binds our practice as educators. It is what we write of today.
The children were ready. Educators need to be as well.
We must use our voices to illuminate the harm being done to the children we know, honor and teach. Let us replace silences with spoken truths about their power and ours to survive and to resist; let us live out the expectation that public service must be enacted with humanity.
We have a professional responsibility to not look away. This is not just a moral argument. We are their teachers, and we must ask: How will the students in my classroom survive? And how can we help them?
Simona Goldin is a research professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina. Debi Khasnabis is a clinical professor at the University of Michigan’s Marsal School of Education.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Patricia McGuire has always been an outspoken advocate for her students at Trinity Washington University, a small, Catholic institution that serves largely Black and Hispanic women, just a few miles from the White House. She’s also criticized what she calls “the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on freedom of speech and human rights.”
In her 36 years as president, though, McGuire told me, she has never felt so isolated, a lonely voice challenging an agenda she believes “demands a vigorous and loud response from all of higher education. “
It got a little bit louder this week, after Harvard University President Alan Garber refused to capitulate to Trump’s demands that it overhaul its operations, hiring and admissions. Trump is now calling on the IRS to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
The epic and unprecedented battle with Harvard is part of Trump’s push to remake higher education and attack elite schools, beginning with his insistence that Harvard address allegations of antisemitism, stemming from campus protests related to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza following attacks by Hamas in October 2023.
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Garber responded that “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue” — words that Harvard faculty, students and others in higher education had been urging him to say for weeks. Students and faculty at Brown and Yale are asking their presidents to speak out as well.
Many hope it is the beginning of a new resistance in higher education. “Harvard’s move gives others permission to come out on the ice a little,” McGuire said. “This is an answer to the tepid and vacillating presidents who said they don’t want to draw attention to themselves.”
Harvard paved the way for other institutions to stand up to the administration’s demands, Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, noted in an interview with NPR this week.
Stanford University President Jonathan Levin immediately backed Harvard, noting that “the way to bring about constructive change is not by destroying the nation’s capacity for scientific research, or through the government taking command of a private institution.”
Former President Barack Obama on Monday urged others to follow suit.
A minuscule number of college leaders had spoken out before Harvard’s Garber, including Michael Gavin, president of Delta College, a community college in Michigan; Princeton University’s president, Christopher Eisgruber; Danielle Holley of Mount Holyoke; and SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. Of more than 70 prominent higher education leaders who signed a petition circulated Tuesday supporting Garber, only a handful were current college presidents, including Michael Roth of Wesleyan, Susan Poser of Hofstra, Alison Byerly of Carleton, David Fithian of Clark University, Jonathan Holloway of Rutgers University and Laura Walker of Bennington College.
Speaking out and opposing Trump is not without consequences: The president retaliated against Harvard by freezing $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard.
Many higher ed leaders think it’s going to take a bigger, collective effort fight for everything that U.S. higher education stands for, including those with more influence than Trinity Washington, which has no federal grants and an endowment of just $30 million. It’s also filled with students working their way through school.
About 15 percent are undocumented and live in constant fear of being deported under Trump policies, McGuire told me. “We need the elites out there because they have the clout and the financial strength the rest of us don’t have,” she said. “Trinity is not on anyone’s radar.”
Some schools are pushing back against Trump’s immigration policies, hoping to protect their international and undocumented students. Occidental College President Tom Stritikus is among the college presidents who signed an amicus brief this month detailing concerns about the administration’s revocation of student and faculty visas and the arrest and detention of students based on campus advocacy.
“I think the real concern is the fear and instability that our students are experiencing. It is just heartbreaking to me,” Stritikus told me. He also spoke of the need for “collective action” among colleges and the associations that support them.
The fear is real: More than 210 colleges and universities have identified 1,400-plus international students and recent graduates who have had their legal status changed by the State Department, according to Inside Higher Ed. Stritikus said Occidental is providing resources, training sessions and guidance for student and faculty.
Many students, he said, would like him to do more. “When I’m around students, I’m more optimistic for our future,” Stritikus said. “Our higher education system has been the envy of the world for a very long time. Clearly these threats to institutional autonomy, freedom of expression and the civil rights of our community put all that risk.”
Back at Trinity Washington, McGuire said she will continue to make calls, talk to other college presidents and encourage them to take a stronger stand.
“I tell them, you will never regret doing what is right, but if you allow yourself to be co-opted, you will have regret that you caved to a dictator who doesn’t care about you or your institution.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Higher education is under siege from the Trump administration. Those opposing this siege and the administration’s attacks on democracy would do well to heed the wise advice of Benjamin Franklin given just prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776: “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
This is particularly true right now for college and university presidents.
College presidents come from a tradition based on the importance of ideas, of fairness, of speaking the truth as they understand it, whatever the consequences. If they don’t speak out, what will later generations say when they look back at this dark, dark time?
The idea that Trump’s attacks on higher education are necessary to combat antisemitism is the thinnest of covers, and yet only a very few college presidents have been brave enough to call this what it is.
The president and those around him don’t care about antisemitism. Trump said people who chanted “Jews will not replace us” were “very fine people”; he dined with avowed antisemites like Nick Fuentes and Ye (Kanye West).
Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed the California wildfires of 2018 on space lasers paid for by Jewish bankers. Robert Kennedy claimed that Covid “targeted” white and Black people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. The Proud Boys pardoned by Trump for their part in the January 6 insurrection have routinely proclaimed their antisemitism; they include at least one member who has openly declared admiration for Adolf Hitler.
Fighting antisemitism? That was never the motive for the Trump administration’s attacks on colleges and universities. The motive was — and continues to be — to discipline and tame institutions of higher learning, to bring them to heel, to turn them into mouthpieces of a single ideology, to put an end to the free flow of ideas under the alleged need to combat “wokeism.”
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Columbia University has been a prime target of the Trump administration’s financial threats. I’ve been a university provost. I’m not naïve about the tremendous damage the withholding of federal support can have on a school. But the fate of Columbia should be a cautionary tale for those who think keeping their heads down will help them survive. (The Hechinger Report is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based at Teachers College, Columbia University.)
Columbia was more than conciliatory in responding to concerns of antisemitism. The administration suspended two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, for holding rallies that allegedly included “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”
They suspended four students in connection with an event featuring speakers who “support terrorism and promote violence.”
They called in police to dismantle the encampment created to protest the War in Gaza. Over 100 protesters were arrested.
They created a Task Force on Antisemitism, and accepted its recommendations. They dismissed three deans for exchanging text messages that seemed to minimize Jewish students’ concerns and referenced antisemitic tropes.
President Minouche Shafik resigned after little more than a year in office. (Last week, the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, also resigned.) In September 2024, the ADL reports, the university went so far as to introduce “new policies prohibiting the use of terms like ‘Zionist’ when employed to target Jews or Israelis.”
None of this prevented the Trump administration from cancelling $400 million worth of grants and contracts to Columbia — because responding to antisemitism was never the real impetus for the attack.
Was Marjorie Taylor Greene asked to renounce antisemitism as a condition for her leadership in Congress?
Was Robert Kennedy asked to renounce antisemitism in order to be nominated for a Cabinet position?
Were the Proud Boys asked to renounce antisemitism as a condition for their pardoning?
This is an attack on higher education as a whole, and it requires a collective defense. Columbia yesterday. Harvard today, your school tomorrow. College presidents cannot be silent as individual schools are attacked. They need to speak out as a group against each and every incursion.
They need to pledge to share resources, including financial resources, to resist these attacks; they should mount a joint legal resistance and a joint public response to an attack on any single institution.
These days, as many have observed, are much like the dark days of McCarthyism in the 1950s. In retrospect, we wonder why it took so long for so many to speak up.
Today we celebrate those who had the moral strength to stand up right then and say, “No. This isn’t right, and I won’t be part of it.”
The politicians of the Republican Party have made it clear they won’t do that, though most of them understand that Trumpism is attacking the very values — freedom, democracy, fairness — that they celebrate as “American.”
They have earned the low opinion most people have of politicians. But college and university presidents should — and must — take a stand.
Rob Rosenthal is John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University.
This story about higher education and the Trump administration was produced byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’sweekly newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
NORMAN, Okla. — Sometimes, Jakob Topper teaches his Christian faith to his 6-year-old daughter using children’s Bible stories illustrated with teddy bears. Other days, he might use her kid-friendly Bible featuring Precious Moments figures as characters. One thing he knows for sure: The King James version is not on the reading list, given some of its adult themes of sexual assault and incest.
As a parent and a Baptist pastor, Topper opposes Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction’s mandate to put a King James Version Bible in every grade 5–12 classroom. The father of three is also not keen on the state’s newly proposed social studies standards that would require biblical lessons starting in first grade.
“I want the Bible taught to my daughter, and I want to be the one who chooses how that’s done,” said Topper, who also has a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old and is pastor of NorthHaven Church in Norman, a university town. “If we’re talking about parental choice, that’s my choice. I don’t want it to be farmed out to anyone else.”
Norman, a central Oklahoman city of about 130,000, is an epicenter of resistance to the Bible mandate that the state superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, announced last June. Opposition here has come from pastors, religion professors, students, parents, teachers, school board members and the school district superintendent, among others. The prevailing philosophy among Norman residents, who are predominantly Christian, is that they do not want the state — and namely, Walters — mandating how children should be taught scriptures. They want their children to learn from holy books at home or in church.
Pastor Jakob Topper, of NorthHaven Church, says he prefers to teach his children about the Bible rather than placing that responsibility on teachers. Credit: Mike Simmons for The Hechinger Report
Many residents see Walters’s pitch as a play for national attention, given his abundance of social media posts praising Donald Trump, who campaigned on returning prayer to schools and as president has established a White House Faith Office and a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias.” In September, Walters proposed spending $3 million to buy 55,000 copies of the Bible that has been endorsed by the president and for which he receives royalties. More recently, Walters — who in February clashed with his state’s governor for proposing that public schools track students’ immigration statuses — made media lists as a possible candidate for Trump’s education secretary. He was not picked.
But beyond Walter’s national aspirations, the Bible mandate also seems like an attempt at one-upmanship, with other states angling to infuse Christianity into public schools. Louisiana, for instance, is in a court battle over its push for Ten Commandments posters in schools. Texas fought off Democratic opposition to approve an optional Bible-infused curriculum and financial incentives for school districts that use the materials. A slew of states have passed or promoted similar measures, including ones allowing chaplains to act as counselors in schools. Unsurprisingly, Walters, too, has advocated for displaying the Ten Commandments in every classroom and also has backed the conversion of a private virtual Catholic school into a charter school; the Supreme Court plans to hear oral arguments on the case on April 30.
It goes without saying that Walters’s crusade is multifaceted. But fundamentally, all of his efforts amount to teaching the Bible “in inappropriate ways in public schools,” said Amanda Tyler, author of “How to End Christian Nationalism” and executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a Washington, DC–based organization of attorneys, ministers, and others who advocate for religious freedom. “He’s saying you can’t be a good American citizen if you don’t understand the Bible,” she added. “It’s this merger of American and Christian identities, the idea that only Christians are true Americans.”
On March 10, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dealt a blow to Walters’s plans: It issued a temporary stay prohibiting the state’s department of education from purchasing 55,000 Bibles with certain characteristics and from buying Bible-infused lessons and material for elementary schools.
The stay stems from a lawsuit led by Americans United for Separation of Church and State on behalf of 32 plaintiffs, including parents, clergy, students and teachers. The group, which is suing Walters, claims the Bible mandate violated the state’s prohibition against using state funds for religious purposes and the state’s own statutes allowing local district control over curriculum.
As of now, until the court issues a final ruling, its decision marks a victory in Americans United’s attempt to stop Walters, said Alex Luchenitser, the organization’s associate legal director: “It protects the separation of church and state. It protects the religious freedom of students.” Speaking about the court’s stay, Walters, through spokeswoman Grace Kim, said in a statement: “The Bible has been a cornerstone of our nation’s history and education for generations. We will continue fighting to ensure students have access to this foundational text in the classroom.”
Oklahoma Supreme Court, pictured in the state Capitol building, in March issued a stay that would prohibit the state education department from purchasing Bibles and Bible-infused lessons for elementary students. Credit: Sue Ogrocki/ Associated Press
Meanwhile, Walters was also sued separately last summer by a parent in Locust Grove who contended the mandate violated the state and federal constitutions. The state education department has denied the claims of both suits and contended in legal briefs that using the Bible for its secular value does not violate the state’s constitution.
Walters’s mandate has also sparked concern because of the proposed social studies standards that followed. The standards, which were initially released in December and would require legislative approval, mention the Bible and its historical impact more than 40 times. Several of the standards attempt to erroneously frame the Bible, and specifically the Ten Commandments, as the foundation of American law. Biblical scholars from the University of Oklahoma and elsewhere believe these standards promote the long-standing trope of Christian nationalism, which is premised in part on the false idea that the nation’s founding documents stemmed from the Bible. (The founders were Bible readers, but not necessarily fans of the same versions or holy texts in general. In fact, Thomas Jefferson cut up pages of the Bible to remove mention of miracles or the supernatural.)
For example, Walters’s standards would require students in first grade to learn about David and Goliath, as well as Moses and the Ten Commandments, because the standards cite them as influences on the American colonists and others. Second graders would be asked to “identify stories from Christianity that influenced the American colonists, Founders, and culture, including the teachings of Jesus the Nazareth (e.g. the ‘Golden Rule,’ the Sermon on the Mount).”
“These new standards,” said a news release from the state department of education, “reflect what the people of Oklahoma — and all across America — have long been demanding of their public schools: a return to education curricula that upholds pro-family, pro-American values.” (Walters’s press office, despite repeated requests, did not make the state superintendent available for an interview.)
Critics in Oklahoma and elsewhere see Walters’s Bible mandate as part of a broader Christian nationalist movement. “I think Oklahoma is the test case for the nation,” said Dawn Brockman,a Norman school board member.
Walters, though, has been steadfast in his belief that the mandate is legal and critical for the education of Oklahomans. In the fall, after Americans United sued, Walters wrote on X: “The simple fact is that understanding how the Bible has impacted our nation, in its proper historical and literary context, was the norm in America until the 1960s and its removal has coincided with a precipitous decline in American schools.”
But nothing is simple about the history of the Bible in America’s schools. When public schools started to open in the 1800s, some required regular Bible readings. From the beginning, that practice was controversial: Schools typically favored the King James Version, pitting Protestants against Catholics, and riots over school Bible readings broke out from the 1840s into the 1870s, said Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By 1930, 36 states allowed Bible reading to be a requirement or an option, but another dozen banned such activities.
A few decades later, a Pennsylvania family sued their school district for heeding the state’s 1949 law requiring the reading of 10 Bible verses and the recitation of prayers at the start of each school day. In 1963, just a year after a similar opinion, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring in-school Bible readings and prayers was unconstitutional. After those rulings, daily teaching from the Bible, for the most part, was halted, Chancey said, but backlash continued, with critics charging that removing prayer and Bible readings from schools had led to a decline in the morality of schoolchildren.
In subsequent decades, the Supreme Court ruled against clergy-led prayer and prayer over the loudspeakers at football games in several school-related cases. But in a seeming reversal, in 2022, the high court ruled in favor of allowing a football coach to conduct midfield, postgame prayers, shifting the legal landscape. The majority’s opinion on the football coach’s prayer has prompted politicians and states to further test the limits of the separation of church and state. In February, lawmakers in Idaho and Texas even proposed measures to allow daily Bible readings in public schools again.
Darcy Pippins, who teaches Spanish at Norman High School, said she doesn’t feel qualified to teach about the Bible. Credit: Mike Simmons for The Hechinger Report
In Norman, many teachers reacted to news of the Bible mandate with concern and fear. Spanish teacher Darcy Pippins,who is in her 27th year at Norman High, said she sometimes teaches about Catholicism because it is the religion of the Spanish-speaking world. But putting a Bible in every classroom and teaching from it is different. “I just don’t feel comfortable,” said Pippins, also a parent. “I’m not qualified to teach and to incorporate the Bible into what I teach.’’
Other teachers, said Brockman, the school board member, worried about professional repercussions were they not to follow the mandate, given that Walters had already targeted at least one Norman teacher in the past for objecting to bans on particular books.
Nick Migliorino, the public school system’s superintendent since 2017, was the first superintendent in the state to publicly oppose the Bible mandate. When asked about it in a July interview with a local paper, he responded: “I’m just going to cut to the chase on that. Norman Public Schools is not going to have Bibles in our classrooms, and we are not going to require our teachers to teach from the Bible.”
Other superintendents followed, and by late July, at least 17 school district leaders said they had no plans to change curriculum in response to the Bible mandate, according to a report by StateImpact Oklahoma.
In an interview at his district’s headquarters, Migliorino emphasized that his school system already teaches how different religions affect history. Bibles, he noted, are accessible to students through the library. Migliorino added that the state superintendent had no authority to make school districts follow the mandate and that it would result in pushing Christianity on students.
“It’s a captive audience, and that is not our role to push things onto kids,” he said. “Our role is to educate them and to create thinkers.”
Oklahoma already has a 2010 measure allowing school districts to offer elective Bible classes and to give students the latitude to pick the biblical text they prefer to use. But unlike Walters’s mandate, it allows for different biblical perspectives, said Alan Levenson, chair of Judaic history at the University of Oklahoma and a biblical scholar. Even still, there has never been widespread interest in a Bible elective in Norman, said Jane Purcell, the school system’s social studies coordinator. Nor was there much interest in such a class when she taught in Florida. Since 2006, at least a dozen states have passed laws promoting elective Bible classes.
This may be, in part, because educators worry about potential issues with teaching Bible courses, said Purcell: “It’s very easy for it to appear to be proselytizing.”
Walters, for his part, has not taken any of this pushback in stride. At a July 31 state board of education meeting, he lashed out against “rogue administrators” who opposed him, saying of the left: “They might be offended by it, but they cannot rewrite our history and lie to our kids.”
After the public schools superintendent publicly rejected Walters’s mandate, community members and teachers in Norman expressed relief. Meg Moulton, a realtor and mother of three, came to a July board meeting to thank the superintendent in person. “I’m a Christian mama,” she said. “I love teaching my kids about God. I love going to church.”
But, she added, “Ryan Walters’s mandate makes it so that teachers and students who may not be Christians…[or] who may believe something different, are going to be essentially forced to learn something that they may not believe in.”
Students and others I met with at a popular Norman coffee shop said they were concerned about how Walters’s mandate could affect religious minorities, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. “What Ryan Walters is trying to push goes in line with a lot of trends of kind of pushing back against LGBTQ,” said Isandro Moreno,a 17-year-old senior at Norman High.
Phoebe Risch, a 17-year-old senior at Norman North, the town’s other public high school, said Walters’s mandate was part of what motivated her to restart her high school’s Young Democrats club and recruit roughly 30 members. Risch, already upset about her state’s readiness to ban abortion following the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade, fears that requiring Bible-based instruction could lead to the promotion of the idea that women are submissive. “As a young woman, the implications of implementing religion into our schools is a little scary,” she said, “especially because Oklahoma is already a very conservative state.”
Among the half dozen teens attending a confirmation class in December at Oklahoma City Reform temple B’nai Israel, most opposed the mandate, except for one. She said she supported it as long as the classroom teacher was careful and encouraged critical thinking.
One teen recounted tearily how, during class the previous week, a friend had drawn a swastika on her paper as a taunt. “Stuff like that is so normalized,” she said. “It’s antisemitism. If that’s so normalized, normalizing Christianity further, it’s just worse.”
Imad Enchassi, an imam who oversees an Oklahoma City mosque and also chairs the Islamic Studies department at Oklahoma City University, said he worries that Superintendent Ryan Walter’s policies will further isolate Muslim children. Credit: Mike Simmons for The Hechinger Report
Imad Enchassi, an imam who oversees an Oklahoma City mosque and serves as chair of Islamic studies at Oklahoma City University, echoed similar fears for the Muslim community. “We’re already experiencing Islamophobia. Muslim kids who wear the headscarf already have been told they’re going to hell because they don’t believe in the Bible or they don’t believe in Jesus,” he said. “When curriculum mandates one religion over the other, that will further isolate our children.”
Some Oklahomans, though, do support the mandate. And at one of the state board of education meetings where Walters touted it, three residents expressed support for the idea — during public comment — as did at least one board member. That board member said he thought biblical literacy was important, while other supporters see the Bible mandate as a way to instill morality in the public schools. Ann Jayne,a 62-year-old resident of Edmond, about 15 miles north of Oklahoma City, makes a point of letting Walters know on his Facebook page that she’s praying for him, because she believes public schools need to instill Christian values. “I think we need church in the state,” she said. “I don’t see a problem with God being back in the school. Nobody is forcing them to become a Christian.”
Since last summer, Walters’s efforts to push Christianity have only become bolder. In mid-November, he announced the opening of the Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, which would, among other things, investigate alleged abuses against religious freedom and patriotic displays. Two days later, he announced that he was sending 500 Bibles to Advanced Placement government classes. He also emailed superintendents around the state with the order to show their students a one-minute-and-24-second video announcing the religious liberty office and praying for newly elected President Trump.
At a Christmas parade in Norman in early December, some residents called the video embarrassing, with many superintendents, including Norman’s, having declined to show it. However, while many residents seem to abhor the Bible mandate, they do not agree on how religion should be handled in public life. Despite some religious diversity and some liberal leanings common in a university town, Norman skews religiously conservative. That dichotomy means many residents see the Bible as so sacrosanct that they don’t want it taught in schools, yet they see no problem with other Christian-oriented school activities.
In some cases, residents like school board member Brockman, who is also a former teacher and lawyer with training on the First Amendment, have objected to school promotion of the religious aspects of Christmas. When she was a teacher at one of Norman’s two high schools, she asked to stop the playing of overtly religious Christmas songs in the halls during passing periods. She saw it as a “gentle reminder that the Supreme Court says we need to remain neutral on religion.” Her wish was granted. “They took it down with some consternation and played the Grinch in my honor.”
Residents have also quibbled over what to call the parade featuring Santa each December. Should it be called the Norman holiday or Christmas parade? It’s now known as the Norman Christmas Holiday Parade. In early December, the city’s mix of liberal and conservative influences shone through the glitz during the parade. The Knights of Columbus float had a sign that said “Merry CHRISTmas.” Norman’s Pride organization participated, with its human angels wearing wings lit up in rainbow colors.
Tracey Langford, watching the parade from the back of her SUV, was dressed in a red stocking cap and a red sweatshirt that read “Santa, define good,” a jab at the fact that she is a lawyer who cares about legal definitions. To her, the Bible mandate is a clear violation of separation of church and state.“Every home here has a Bible…. We don’t need to spend a dollar to get a Bible in every classroom,” said Langford, a lawyer at the University of Oklahoma and a parent of a first grader in Norman schools and a 15-year-old in a private school.
Traci Jones, a parent of both a Norman sixth grader and fifth grader, likewise asked, “Who’s supposed to be teaching these kids the Bible? Is it just a random person? What if it’s an atheist or someone who has totally different beliefs than me?” As a nondenominational Christian, she added, “I think it’s wack to ask these poor teachers to teach that.”
What happens next may ultimately be decided in a courtroom. There is no sign yet when final opinions may be issued in either lawsuit.
State lawmakers at recent appropriation hearings said they were worried about the directive’s constitutionality, and in fact, in March, the Senate Appropriations’ Education Subcommittee said it did not consider Walters’s $3 million request to purchase Bibles. The next day Walters announced he was launching a national campaign with a country singer to get Bibles donated to Oklahoma schools. (The legislature gets the final word on the Bible purchases, a line item in the education budget, and the standards, which the state board of education approved in late February.) Meanwhile, the fate of religion’s place in public schools on a national level likely will rest with the Supreme Court, with various lawsuits against state measures promoting Christianity making their way through the court system.
A Ten Commandments monument that sat on Oklahoma State Capitol grounds until the state Supreme Court ruled its presence violated the separation of church and state. It now is at the headquarters of a conservative lobbying group. Credit: Linda K. Wertheimer for The Hechinger Report
In Norman, Jakob Topper, Kyle Tubbs and other Baptist pastors I met with at the headquarters of a statewide Baptist church organization were increasingly aghast at Walters’s mixing of religion and politics. Rick Anthony, pastor of Grace Fellowship, a Baptist church, centered his November 17 sermon on such concerns. “Almost comically, we’ve heard this week about a video made that was ordered to be shown to all children in the public schools and then sent to their parents,” he said. “Our question is…where are our voices as our political leaders cozy up to faith leaders, all the while destroying our faith institutions?”
Kaily Tubbs, Tubbs’s wife and a fifth grade teacher in Norman schools, said the mandate conflicts with her personal belief on how faith should be handled in schools. She spoke also as a mother of a kindergartener and a third grader, both in Norman schools. “Our faith is really important to us,” she said. “I don’t want it to be used as a prop in a classroom.”
Topper said that at his church, the majority of his congregation believes in separation of church and state. He said he is aware of the religious diversity that exists in his town, too, and has both Muslim and Jewish neighbors. Like Anthony, he spoke with his congregation about Walters’s mandate, though in an informal weeknight meeting at his church, rather than as part of a formal sermon. “I wish,” he said, “that Jesus was left out of schools and left for the religious realm.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
President Donald Trump promises he’ll make American schools great again. He has fired nearly everyone who might objectively measure whether he succeeds.
This week’s mass layoffs by his secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, of more than 1,300 Department of Education employees delivered a crippling blow to the agency’s ability to tell the public how schools and federal programs are doing through its statistics and research branch. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is now left with fewer than 20 federal employees, down from more than 175 at the start of the second Trump administration, according to my reporting. It’s not clear how the institute can operate or even fulfill its statutory obligations set by Congress.
IES is modeled after the National Institutes of Health and was established in 2002 during the administration of former President George W. Bush to fund innovations and identify effective teaching practices. Its largest division is a statistical agency that dates back to 1867 and is called the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which collects basic statistics on the number of students and teachers. NCES is perhaps best known for administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tracks student achievement across the country. The layoffs “demolished” the statistics agency, as one former official characterized it, from roughly 100 employees to a skeletal staff of just three.
“The idea of having three individuals manage the work that was done by a hundred federal employees supported by thousands of contractors is ludicrous and not humanly possible,” said Stephen Provasnik, a former deputy commissioner of NCES who retired early in January. “There is no way without a significant staff that NCES could keep up even a fraction of its previous workload.”
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Even the new acting commissioner of education statistics, a congressionally mandated position, was terminated with everyone else on March 11 after just 15 days on the job, according to five former employees. Chris Chapman replaced Biden-appointee Peggy Carr, who was suddenly removed on Feb. 24 without explanation before her congressionally designated six-year term was to end in 2027. It was unclear who, if anyone, will serve as the commissioner after Chapman’s last day on March 21. (Chapman did not respond to an email for comment.) Meanwhile, the chief statistician, Gail Mulligan, was put on administrative leave until her early retirement on April 1.* There is apparently no replacement to review the accuracy of figures reported to the public.
Two offices spared
Only two IES offices were untouched by this week’s layoffs: the National Center for Special Education Research, an eight-person office that awards grants to study effective ways to teach children with disabilities, and the Office of Science, a six-person office that reviews research for quality, accuracy and validity. It was unclear why they were spared. Other areas of the Education Department that fund and oversee education for children with disabilities also had relatively lighter layoffs.
A draft of an executive order to eliminate the Education Department was prepared in early March, but Trump hadn’t signed it as of this week. Instead, McMahon said on Fox News that she began firing employees as a “first step” toward that elimination. Former department employees believe that McMahon and her team decided which offices to cut. Weeks before her confirmation, about a half dozen people from McMahon’s former think tank, the right-wing America First Policy Institute, were inside the department and looking at the bureaucracy, according to a former official at the Education Department. The Education Department did not respond to my email queries.
The mass firings this month were preceded by a Feb. 10 onslaught, when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency terminated much of the work that is overseen by these education research and statistics units. Most of the department’s research and data collections are carried out by outside contractors, and nearly 90 of these contracts were canceled, including vital data collections on students and teachers. The distribution of roughly $16 billion in federal Title I aid to low-income schools cannot be calculated properly without this data. Now, the statisticians who know how to run the complicated formula are also gone.
‘Five-alarm fire’
The mass firings and contract cancellations stunned many. “This is a five-alarm fire, burning statistics that we need to understand and improve education,” said Andrew Ho, a psychometrician at Harvard University and president of the National Council on Measurement in Education, on social media.
Former NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley, who ran the education statistics unit from 2010 to 2015, described the destruction as “surreal.” “I’m just sad,” said Buckley. “Everyone’s entitled to their own policy ideas, but no one’s entitled to their own facts. You have to share the truth in order to make any kind of improvement, no matter what direction you want to go. It does not feel like that is the world we live in now.”
The deepest cuts
While other units inside the Education Department lost more employees in absolute numbers, IES lost the highest percentage of employees — roughly 90 percent of its workforce. Education researchers questioned why the Trump administration targeted research and statistics. “All of this feels like part of an attack on universities and science,” said an education professor at a major research university, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.
That fear is well-founded. Earlier this month the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal contracts and grants with Columbia University, blaming the university’s failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism during campus protests last year over Israeli attacks on Gaza. Among them were four research grants that had been issued by IES, including an evaluation of the effectiveness of the Federal Work-Study program, which costs the government $1 billion a year. That five-year study was near completion and now the public will not learn the results. (The Hechinger Report is an independent news organization at Teachers College, Columbia University.)
Tom Brock, executive director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, said he had been cautiously optimistic that he could successfully appeal the cancellation of his $2.8 million in education research grants. (He planned to argue that Teachers College is a separate entity from the rest of Columbia with its own president and board of trustees and it was not affected by student protests to the same degree.) But now the IES office that issued the grants, the National Center for Education Research, has lost its staff. “I’m very discouraged,” said Brock. “Even if we win on appeal, all the staff have been laid off. Who would reinstate the grant? Who would we report to? Who would monitor it? They have completely eliminated the infrastructure. I could imagine a scenario where we would win on appeal and it can’t be put into effect.”
Active contracts
Many contracts with outside organizations for data collection and research grants with university professors remain active. That includes the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tracks student achievement, and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which collects data on colleges and universities. But now there are almost no employees left to oversee these efforts, review them for accuracy or sign future contracts for new data collections and studies.
“My job was to make sure that the limited public dollars for education research were spent as best as they could be,” said one former education official who issued grants for the development of new innovations. “We make sure there’s no fraud, waste and abuse. Now there’s no watchdog to oversee it.”
The former official asked to remain anonymous as did more than a dozen other former employees whom I talked to while reporting this story. Some explained that the conditions of their termination, called a “reduction in force” or “RIF,” could mean losing their severance if they talked to the press. The terminated employees are supposed to work from home until their last day on March 21, and they described having limited access to their work computer systems. That is stymying efforts to wind down their work with their colleagues and outside contractors in an orderly way. One described how she had to take a cellphone picture of her termination notice on her laptop because she could no longer save or send documents on it.
So far, there has been no sign of protest among congressional Republicans, even though some of the cuts affect data and researchthey have mandated. A spokesman for Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and chairman of the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, directed me to Cassidy’s statement on X. “I spoke to @EDSecMcMahon and she made it clear this will not have an impact on @usedgov ability to carry out its statutory obligations. This action is aimed at fulfilling the admin’s goal of addressing redundancy and inefficiency in the federal government.”
Following the law
In theory, a skeletal staff might be able to fulfill the law, which is often “ambiguous,” said former NCES commissioner Buckley. For example, the annual report to Congress on the condition of education could be as short as one page. Laws mention several data collections, such as ones on financial aid to college students and on the experiences of teachers, but often don’t specify how often they must be produced. Technically, they could be paused for many years without running afoul of statutes.
The remaining skeleton crew could award contracts to outside organizations to do all the work and have them “supervise themselves,” said Buckley. “I’m not advocating that oversight be pushed out to contractors, but you could do it in theory. It depends on your tolerance for contracting out work.”
NAEP anxiety
Many are anxious about the future of NAEP, also known as the Nation’s Report Card. Even before the firings, William Bennett, Education Secretary under President Ronald Reagan, penned an open letter along with conservative commentator Chester Finn in The 74, urging McMahon to preserve NAEP, calling it “the single most important activity of the department.”
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat who chairs the National Governors Association, is especially concerned. In an email, Polis’ spokesman emphasized that Polis believes that “NAEP is critical.” He warned that “undercutting data collection and removing this objective measuring stick that helps states understand and improve performance will only make our efforts more difficult.”
Though much of the test development and administration is contracted out to private organizations and firms, it is unclear how these contracts could be signed and overseen by the Education Department with such a diminished staff. Some officials suggested that the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which sets NAEP policy, could take over the test’s administration. But the board’s current staff doesn’t have the testing or psychometrics expertise to do this.
In response to questions, board members declined to comment on the future of NAEP and whether anyone in the Trump administration had asked them to take it over. One former education official believes there is “apparently some confusion” in the Trump administration about the division of labor between NAGB and NCES and a “misunderstanding of how work gets done in implementing” the assessment.
Mark Schneider, a former IES director who is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said he hoped that McMahon would rebuild NCES into a modern, more efficient statistical agency that could collect data more cheaply and quickly, and redirect IES’s research division to drive breakthrough innovations like the Defense Department has. But he conceded that McMahon also cut some of the offices that would be needed to modernize the bureaucracy, such as the centralized procurement office.
So far, there’s no sign of Trump’s or McMahon’s intent to rebuild.
* Clarification: An earlier version of this story said that Mulligan had been terminated, but she revised a social media post about her status after publication of this story to clarify that she was not subject to the “reduction in force” notice.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
