Administrators at the University of Missouri told a student organization that it could not proceed with a “Black 2 Class Block Party” because the event qualified as “unlawful discrimination.” Is it possible that students who are not Black complained of being denied access to the annual event in prior years? Probably not. This cancellation is one of numerous examples of how institutions are attempting to comply with the Trump administration’s anti-DEI agenda, as Inside Higher Ed reporter Jessica Blake noted in an article last Friday.
U.S. Department of Education data shows that during the 2023–24 school year, 79 percent of undergraduates on the University of Missouri’s flagship campus were white. Black students were just 5 percent of the undergraduate student body. Put differently, nearly 19,000 students were white and fewer than 1,200 were Black. Numerically, there are not and have never been enough Black students there to create a climate of exclusion for their white counterparts. The same is true among professors—last school year, only 33 of 1,027 tenure-track faculty members at Mizzou were Black, according to statistics published online by the university’s Office of Institutional Research.
Given these demographics, it seems implausible that collegians in the minority have enough power to routinely and unlawfully discriminate against their peers who comprise the majority. This could be confirmed via systematic analyses of discrimination complaints submitted to the university in recent years. When disaggregated by race, the data is unlikely to show that it is overwhelmingly white students who most often experience racism. Surely few, if any, complaints are about encounters with discrimination at Black student organization events.
Activities like Mizzou’s annual welcome-week block party are important for Black students, as most will be expected to successfully navigate spaces where they are the only or one of just a few persons from their racial group in every course they take, sometimes in their entire academic majors. Some will be the lone Black students who live on their residence hall floors. In these and other spaces, too many will be met with racial stereotypes, microaggressions and, at times, explicit racial violence. Black student organization events afford them opportunities to meet others who can affirm their sense of belonging at the institution. They may also meet other Black students who can teach them how to navigate campus environments that are anti-Black and otherwise racist.
The inclusion of “Black” in its title is what made this year’s block party suddenly and presumably discriminatory. Like historically Black colleges and universities, Black culture centers, and African American studies courses, Black student organization events have neither historically nor contemporarily been proven to be spaces that exclude people from other races. Mizzou and universities like it are considerably more likely to find evidence of racial discrimination in predominantly white sorority and fraternity recruitment and member-selection activities, as well as at parties on frat row, than at a student organization event that amplifies black culture.
As previously noted, 5 percent of Mizzou undergraduates are Black. Noteworthy is that Black men are 2 percent of the student body, yet NCAA data shows that they comprised 62 percent of the football team and 56 percent of the men’s basketball team there last academic school year. Despite generating millions of dollars in revenue for the university, these student athletes and their same-race peers are not allowed to have events that have “Black” in the title.
“Black college football and basketball players are the most powerful people of color on campus,” I wrote in a Washington Post article 10 years ago. At that time, Black student athletes at Mizzou threatened to skip a football game that would have resulted in a loss of more than $1 million in revenue. This threat was in response to institutional inaction on racism that Black collegians had long experienced there. Within days, the system president and the chancellor of the Columbia campus both resigned.
Football and basketball players are as powerful there today as they were a decade ago. They can indeed resist anti-DEI efforts that disadvantage them and other students of color. But should they do so in response to a canceled welcome-week block party? Yes, because that one seemingly insignificant event is emblematic of a more expansive demonstration of anti-Blackness on their and other campuses at this time.
The elimination of culturally resonant programs, centers and institutes, and offices denies Black students access to valuable relationships and resources that bolster their first-year transition experiences, sense of belonging, classroom and out-of-class engagement, academic performance, and retention. Some of the most enduring and transformative advancements for Black collegians in U.S. higher education emerged from student activism. Student athletes, student organization leaders and everyday students who are Black, along with allies and supporters from other racial groups, ought to refuse to allow anyone to mischaracterize activities and spaces as discriminatory just because “Black” is in the title.
Working in journalism left Inside Higher Ed’s co-founder Doug Lederman little time to read for anything but information, so last summer, when he stepped away from 90-hour workweeks, he told me he wanted to watch less Netflix. I said, “Friend, you came to the right place.” Recommending reading is pretty much the only area where I can make solid contributions these days.
I started Doug out with things I knew he’d like. Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding was an early favorite. I moved him along to Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, James (Percival Everett, not Henry), Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and loaded him onto the Louise Penny train.
But just before I headed to D.C. last March for his official farewell party, I assigned him a novel I’d been wanting to reread and liked the idea of book-clubbing with him: John Williams’s beautiful and heartbreaking Stoner. I’ve often given Doug a hard time about—well, everything—but especially the fact that he’s never actually been in higher ed. He’s only peered in from outside with a reporter’s magnifying glass, exposing our flaws and fault lines, doing his essential duty as a journalist.
When Doug asked me to work with him as a thought partner to create a newsletter for upper-level administrators, he wanted to bring tough love to leaders. He confessed to having a case of the fuck-its, disappointed that higher ed has been so slow to change and unwilling to take responsibility for some missteps. As we know, disappointment can only come from love, and is much harder for recipients to bear.
I responded in my typically tactful fashion, asking him, “Who the fuck are you to have a case of the fuck-its? Do not speak to me of the fuck-its! Have you had to read millions of pages of academic monographs? Have you heard academics complain that their names were too small on book covers? Have you denied thousands of qualified applicants admission to their dream college, or sat through interminable Faculty Senate meetings group-copyediting policies? Have you taught classes that flop or graduate students who just can’t?”
In other words, I told the co-founder of IHE he had little idea what it was like to be in higher ed, especially from the perspective of a faculty or staff member. Given his role and prominence in the industry, Doug’s attention is always sought after, a high-value treat. In our world, he is beef jerky, not a Milk-Bone.
I thought it time for him to use his leisure reading to get a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be a regular professor. Not an oversize character like Morris Zapp (my old boss, Stanley) or even Lucky Hank Devereaux (or Lucky Jim).
Stoner follows the fictional life and career of an English professor at the University of Missouri in the early part of the last century. Early in the novel, and just before the sinking of the Lusitania, the sharpest of a group of three young academics asks his fellows, “Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University?”
Mr. Stoner “sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive.” Mr. Finch, with his “simple mind,” sees it as “a kind of spiritual sulphur-and-molasses that you administer every fall to get the little bastards through another winter.” Finch goes on, naturally, to become a dean.
But they are both wrong, claims the character named Masters. The university ”is an asylum …. a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, the otherwise incompetent.” His self-diagnosis: ”I’m too bright for the world, and I won’t keep my mouth shut about it.” He concludes, ”But bad as we are, we’re better than those on the outside, in the muck, the poor bastards of the world. We do no harm, we say what we want, and we get paid for it.”
The book, published in 1965, presents characters that feel so current and vibrant you can imagine having a cocktail with them. In the times we now find ourselves, Stoner may become popular again—but not for all the right reasons.
I have friends who have long said they’re done reading things by dead white men. When Doug and I were in college, that was pretty much the entire curriculum, with the exception of the 19th century gals, an Emily Dickinson here, a Frederick Douglass there. This reluctance is understandable, given how long the canon excluded previously silenced voices. Yet, I don’t discriminate. Stoner offers profound insights into institutional structures that persist today.
These thoughts were on my mind as I finished my reread just before our flight to D.C. to celebrate Doug’s retirement next chapter, where institutional structures of a different kind awaited us in marble and glass.
We had half a day before the event and my husband, Toby, and I wanted to be tourists. It had not been my intention to speed-walk through four museums in five hours. (Toby could spend hours in front of one painting, but he loves me and is a good sport.)
My childhood consisted of trips downstate to see grandparents in New York City, which often involved visits to museums. A favorite was the one that hosted the squid and the whale. Unconsciously, I bought into the primate visions described by Donna Haraway about hierarchies—her critique of how science museums construct narratives of power and evolution that shape our understanding.
Fifty years later, I was eager to see what had changed. We started at Natural History, moved on to American History, then African American, and ended up at the Holocaust. In March 2025, this journey was not, it won’t surprise you to learn, an uplifting experience. The museums, like higher education itself, told a complex story of American identity that is now under dire threat.
I sped through to parse the presentation. How did the curators choose to tell the stories, some of which I know well, and which, as an adult, I would always prefer to read? Since I began my career publishing books in American history at Oxford University Press, I’ve imbibed a decent amount of quality scholarship.
When I became an acquisitions editor at Duke University Press in 1991, I was intrigued by the work of scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, Derrick Bell and other theorists who used narrative to examine how our legal system perpetuated structural inequalities. Most people weren’t reading law journals back then, and it took a while for those ideas to make it into the mainstream
Academe cranked open the curriculum to face historical truths not always self-evident: We are a country built on a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. At times we fell short of the mark, but the arc of the universe is long, and we were taught the direction in which it bends.
Except. The rise to power documented in that last somber building we visited reads to me like a blueprint for what’s happening today. Before I could remember not knowing it, my father drilled into me that what it means to be a Jew is there’s always someone who wants to put you in an oven. That was made tangible by the numbers I saw tattooed on the arm of Great-Grandpa Max.
How much longer will busloads of boisterous students milling around these repositories of culture be able to learn our history? When will the whitewashing take hold so that the ideas contained in the curators’ vision—in the works we’ve published since the latter part of the last century—are mummified?
One of many chilling moments: coming on a small story I knew from the film Who Will Write Our History? Historian Emanuel Ringelblum organized Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939 to document unprecedented actions. He collected materials, placed them in milk cans and buried them throughout the city. The archive known as the Oneg Shabbat is housed in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem.
It was impossible in March not to feel that my colleagues at IHE and other media outlets are busting their butts at a similar task: chronicling the last days of an era of inclusion.
How long before these exhibits come down, replaced by gold toilets in buildings repurposed for hotels and casinos?
Just as the bright shining moment of Camelot disappeared for a previous generation, many of us already look back on Hamilton with nostalgia. A too-quick tour of museums in our nation’s capital filled me with love for America and the things that made us great. When I left, all I felt was grief. What happens if we don’t rise to today’s challenge?
This sobering experience in D.C. brought me back to my conversation with Doug about higher education’s resistance to change. A reading of Stoner should not feel as resonant and familiar as it does. Little about faculty structure and the ethos of academe has evolved in the last century.
Walking through those endangered halls of American memory, what Doug has long been saying to leaders is urgent: We need more than just better storytelling about higher education—we need to fundamentally reimagine it. And we need to do it now.
The buried milk cans of our moment will someday be unearthed. The articles, reports and assessments documenting higher education’s struggles will serve as testimony to what we did—or failed to do—in this critical period. My only hope is that they’ll reveal how colleges and universities finally broke free from institutional inertia to continue to do the work of educating our citizenry toward truth and justice for all.
Note: This reflection was published March 22, 2025, as an issue of The Sandbox. I wanted to share it as part of my new column here for two reasons (and with apologies to subscribers). First, if you’ve been reading the news, you’ll see that I wish I’d been wrong. Just a week after this first came out, the dismantling began. And now we’re seeing a scrubbing of our nation’s history in essential cultural institutions and not just in D.C.
Also, I got a ton of responses from readers thanking me for putting them onto Stoner. So now, you’re welcome, friends.
Rachel Toor is a contributing editor at Inside Higher Ed and the co-founder of The Sandbox, a weekly newsletter that allows presidents and chancellors to write anonymously. She is also a professor of creative writing and the author of books on weirdly diverse subjects. Reach her here with questions, comments and complaints compliments.
Vinson has led the Washington, D.C., HBCU since 2023.
Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Howard University president Ben Vinson III will step down Aug. 31, two years after assuming the role and two weeks after the start of fall classes, university officials announced Friday. Former Howard president Wayne A. I. Frederick will serve as interim president.
“It has been an honor to serve Howard,” Vinson said in a statement. “At this point, I will be taking some time to be with my family and continue my research activities. I look forward to using my experiences as president to continue to serve higher education in the future.”
University officials declined to comment about why Vinson is leaving only two years after he took up the helm. During his tenure, the Washington, D.C.–based HBCU became an R-1 research institution and brought on several high-profile faculty, including journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author Ta-Nehisi Coates and historian Ibram X. Kendi. The university also hosted Kamala Harris’s election night watch party.
But the past year has also brought its share of challenges. In May, the Trump administration proposed cutting Howard’s federal funding by $64 million in fiscal year 2026, bringing it back to its 2021 funding level. Over the summer, the administration took heat from students over surprise bills that appeared on their accounts when the university transitioned to a new student financial platform, and some students turned to crowdfunding to pay those bills.
“On behalf of the Howard University Board of Trustees, we extend our sincere gratitude to Dr. Vinson for his service and leadership as president,” board chair Leslie Hale said in a statement. “We extend our very best wishes to him in his future endeavors.”
Frederick, who served as president of Howard from 2014 to 2023, will remain interim president while the board conducts a nationwide search for a permanent replacement.
Higher education stakeholders have noted that math anxiety can hold students back from pursuing some disciplines or major programs, but a new analysis from Gallup finds that young Americans over all place less importance on math skills compared to the general population.
While over half of all Americans rate math skills as “very important” in their work (55 percent) and personal (63 percent) lives, only 38 percent of young people (ages 18 to 24) said math skills are very important in their work life and 37 percent in their personal life, according to a December survey of 5,100 U.S. adults.
The survey highlights generational divisions in how math skills are perceived, with adults older than 55 most likely to see math as very important compared to younger adults, and Gen Z least likely to attribute value to math skills.
To Sheila Tabanli, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University, the low ratings point to a lack of perceived connection between math skills and career development, despite the clear correlation she sees.
Tabanli said it can be hard to convince many Gen Z and Alpha students that math content is necessary for their daily lives, in part because access to information is so convenient and they can perform calculations on their phones or online.
“We need to transition from focusing too much on the concept, the domain, the content—which we do love as math people, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it for a living—but students don’t see that connection [to employable skills],” Tabanli said.
When asked how important math skills were for the majority of the U.S. workforce, 40 percent of young adults rated having math skills as very important—the lowest rating of nine skills evaluated, including reading, language, technology and leadership, according to Gallup.
Young people also rated the importance of math skills for the general workforce, as compared to their own lives, the lowest of all age cohorts. Adults ages 55 to 64 (71 percent) and 65 and older (68 percent) were most likely to say math is a very important skill for the general workforce.
Most career competencies that colleges and universities teach, such as those by the National Association for Colleges and Employers, focus on broader skills—including critical thinking, leadership, communication and teamwork—as essential for workplace success. Math can teach students how to solve problems and engage with difficult content, which Tabanli argues are just as important for an early-career professional.
One reason a young adult might not rate math skills highly is because many students face undue math anxiety or a skepticism about their own ability to do math, falling into the belief that they’re not “math people,” Tabanli said.
In response, Tabanli believes professors should help students apply computational skills to their daily lives or link content to other classes to encourage students to invest in their math learning. While this may be an additional step for a faculty member to take, Tabanli considers it a disservice to neglect this connection.
Professors can also strive to make themselves and the content more human and approachable by sharing information about their lives, their careers and why they’re passionate about the subject, Tabanli said.
For 67 years, the Department of Education has administered grants to universities to create centers devoted to foreign languages and area studies, a field focused on the study of the culture of a particular area or region. Now, those centers are under fire by the Trump administration, which has not released the funding the grantees expected to receive in July.
The grants support what are known as National Resource Centers, which were originally developed as a national security tool to help the U.S. increase its international expertise in the midst of the Cold War and the aftermath of Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik. Since then, their purpose has shifted with the times, now focusing not only on producing scholars but also on community outreach and collaboration with K–12 schools.
The office responsible for administering the grants—International and Foreign Language Education—was dissolved and its entire staff laid off as part of the March reduction in force at the Department of Education. But it seemed IFLE’s programs, which were authorized under Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965, would live on; they were moved under the ED’s Office of Higher Education Programs, according to an internal communication shared with Inside Higher Ed at the time.
Since then, funding has come through “in fits and starts,” Halina Goldberg, the director of Indiana University’s Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute (REEI), told Inside Higher Ed in an email, though ultimately, the center received all its promised funds for fiscal year 2024–25. REEI was part of the first cohort of NRCs and has been continuously funded by the program since then.
But NRC directors, including Goldberg, are concerned the funds for the upcoming year—the final year of the program’s four-year cycle—may not come through, and that the Trump administration may be planning to demolish the program altogether. NRC leaders have received no notice from ED about whether or when the funds are coming, and some say their contacts at the department have expressed uncertainty about the program’s future.
The funding cuts appear to be caused by the Office of Management and Budget; records show that the agency has not approved appropriations for programs formerly housed in IFLE, including the NRC program, as well as the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, which fund scholarships and stipends for undergraduate and graduate students studying these disciplines. In total, about $85 million was appropriated for IFLE programs for FY 2025–26, including $60 million for NRCs and FLAS.
“We’re just kind of in this holding pattern to learn whether our funds are going to be released or not. And there is some time pressure, because if that fiscal year 2025 funding is not allocated by Sept. 30, which is when the fiscal year, the government fiscal year ends, then it’s gone and we’re without funding,” said Kasia Szremski, associate director for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A Discipline in Crisis
NRC grant recipients worry about what the funding freeze and potential elimination of the program will mean for the disciplines of foreign language and area studies, which have already taken a beating in recent years; many colleges have eliminated such programs as cost-saving measures— including West Virginia University, which gutted nearly all of its language programs in 2023. More recently, the University of Chicago has paused admissions to all its humanities Ph.D. programs, including a slew of language programs, for the coming academic year.
Emanuel Rota, a professor in the Department of French and Italian at Urbana-Champaign who leads the university’s European Union Center, said he was already worried about the future of area studies and foreign language education, but “now I’m terribly scared.”
“I think this seems to be, at this point, slightly part of a trend to provincialize the United States in a way that is troubling for the future of this generation of students, who are, at this point, used to learning from other experiences around the world; knowing about ways of teaching, other ways of learning; establishing collaborations early on; and being able to be multicultural and multilinguistic like their peers around the world,” he said. “And all of a sudden they are told, ‘You only speak one language, you only know one culture and you only know your local environment, and you have to live with that.’”
It also comes amid efforts to quash other forms of cultural education and intercultural exchange. OMB also recently cut funding from a number of State Department exchange programs, according to Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance for International Exchange, which represents organizations that administer such programs.
Larger entities like the Fulbright program are being spared, he said, but the cuts include critical programming aiming at increasing STEM education access for girls around the world, fostering intercultural exchange with students in the Middle East, bolstering the study of foreign affairs in the U.S. and more.
International students and immigration broadly are also being targeted by the Trump administration, which has recently revoked thousands of student visas and increased barriers for overseas students studying in the U.S.
“I think international exchange programs, mobility, the presence of international students on our campuses have long been something that is supported in a bipartisan way, and that has been played out for decades in tangible ways,” Overmann said. “One would be increases in funding in both Democrat and Republican administrations, as well as Congresses. This is something we have seen transcend party lines and those across the political spectrum see that the mobility of our students, of our young professionals—both Americans going abroad and international students and professionals coming here—is something that supports our national security, our diplomatic interests, our influence around the world and our economy, down to very local levels.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has targeted NRCs. In 2018, during his first administration, ED criticized a Middle Eastern studies consortium at Duke University and the University of North Carolina for delivering programs it alleged had “little or no relevance to Title VI.” The programs under scrutiny included a conference about “Love and Desire in Modern Iran” and another focused on film criticism in the Middle East.
“It was probably a harbinger of what’s happening now,” said Brian Cwiek, a former IFLE program officer who lost his job when the office was dissolved. “I think that’s really where a lot of the same folks became intent on shutting down this same program.”
“Congress should wind down so-called ‘area studies’ programs at universities (Title VI of the HEA), which, although intended to serve American interests, sometimes fund programs that run counter to those interests,” Project 2025 reads. “In the meantime, the next Administration should promulgate a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests.”
Outreach at Risk
Although funding may still come through before the September cutoff date, some centers are already feeling the pressure.
At the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, which is home to two National Resource Centers, Kathi Colen Peck was responsible for administering an NRC-funded program focused on providing faculty development to professors at community colleges in upstate New York. Although the center has funding sources outside of ED, the community college program was almost entirely funded by an NRC grant.
The program involved bringing international speakers—a dance instructor from Benin, for example—to give workshops in community college classrooms, as well as administering a fellowship for community college professors to create curricular projects.
Once it became clear this year’s funding wasn’t going to become available when expected, Peck was laid off and the partnerships with community colleges for the upcoming academic year had to be discontinued.
“The intention of [the outreach program] is really to sort of bridge resources and help the community college faculty have connections to the area studies expertise at, for example, Cornell. They’re able to leverage resources at Cornell where they wouldn’t necessarily have access to that in any other circumstances,” she said. “It’s really about trying to help the community college faculty internationalize their curricula.”
At other campuses, cultural events and educational programs that NRC leaders say are immensely valuable to their communities could be on the chopping block. Hilary V. Finchum-Sung, the executive director of the Association for Asian Studies, said that the University of Michigan’s Korean Studies center, for example, hosts a free Korean film series at an off-campus theater that is open to members of the public. It’s an opportunity for members of the Ann Arbor community to see a film they likely never would otherwise—and to glean something new about a culture that they might be unfamiliar with.
On the flip side, NRC programs can sometimes give immigrants a rare chance to connect with their culture on American soil. Szremski, of UIUC’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, said the center has partnered with local libraries to hold a Latin American Story Time Program for about 15 years. At these events, they read children’s stories in English and Spanish, but also in other Latin American languages including Portuguese, Guaraní, Q’anjob’al, and Quechua.
“This is particularly important in Champaign and Urbana, because even though we’re in central Illinois, we have a very large and very vibrant Latino community, many of whom are native speakers of Indigenous languages,” she said.
Once, after a Latin American Story Time event, a library worker once told her, an older woman “came up to her in tears because she was a native Guaraní speaker and had never thought [she would] hear her native language again, really, now that she was living in the United States.”
Cwiek noted that some faculty positions may also be at risk without NRC funding; though the grants usually cover only a small portion of a professor’s salary, that portion may be the difference that allows a college to offer certain world languages.
Scholarship Uncertainty
Students are also in imminent danger of losing scholarships due to the funding pause. Graduate students relying on Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships to fund their education in the new academic year still don’t know whether they will receive that money. Szremski said on Friday that one incoming fellow recently made the choice to withdraw from UIUC and instead study in Colombia for the upcoming academic year due to funding fears. With UIUC’s academic year beginning this week, others were forced to make the decision about whether to come to campus without knowing if they would receive the scholarships they’d been promised. Across the university’s NRCs, 53 students are awaiting FLAS funds.
Other universities are in a similar position. At Cornell, 18 students will be impacted if the money doesn’t come through, according to Ellen Lust, the director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies and a government professor.
These fellowships provide the cultural awareness, understanding and skills that the U.S. “has relied on to be a world leader. Students who benefited from NRC support have gone on to join the US Foreign Service, engage in international business, and educate new generations of global citizens. They have conducted international collaborations and research that that ultimately benefit Americans,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
While the stipends allocated to undergraduate students are not as sizable as those for graduate students, Szremski said those recipients have told her they may have to take out private loans or start part-time jobs to fill the gap created by the missing FLAS money.
The future of these grants remains unclear. The Senate’s appropriations bill maintains funding for IFLE programs, so even if the funding doesn’t come through this year, the program may be able to resume the following year.
But if the NRC and FLAS programs are shuttered permanently, the effects will “be felt for generations to come,” wrote Lust.
“Our current and future students are the foreign service officers, intelligence analysts and CEOs of the future,” she wrote. “Within a generation, US citizens will be ill-equipped to live, work and lead in a global world. They will be outmatched by those from other countries, who speak multiple languages, understand diverse cultures and have built relationships across borders. Ultimately, these policies weaken the US’ global position and will make America less secure and prosperous.”
Researchers will have to challenge grant terminations in federal claims court.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | SDI Productions/E+/Getty Images
Hope is fading that federally funded researchers whose grants were terminated by the National Institutes of Health earlier this year will be able to resume their work as planned.
On Thursday, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that any legal challenges to the grant terminations should be litigated in the Court of Federal Claims, not the federal district court system they’ve been moving through for months.
It’s the latest twist in federally funded researchers’ legal fight to claw back nearly $800 million in medical research grants—though accounting for the multiyear grants that the NIH is refusing to fulfill puts that figure closer to $2 billion—the NIH terminated for running afoul of the Trump administration’s ideological priorities. Many of the grants funded programs that advanced diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and research projects focused on topics such as LGBTQ+ health, vaccine hesitancy and racial disparities.
Researchers sued the NIH in April and got a win in June when a federal district court judge in Massachusetts ordered the agency to reinstate the grants immediately. Although the NIH has since reinstated many of those grants, Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard University and former lawyer who’s been tracking grant cancellations, told Inside Higher Ed that after Thursday’s ruling those reinstated grants will “almost certainly” be re-terminated. If that happens, “I don’t think they’ll get their money back.”
That’s in part because the Supreme Court said researchers will have to re-file their lawsuits in federal claims court, which generally doesn’t have the power to issue injunctive relief that could keep grant money flowing during the litigation process. And it could take months or even years for the claims court to decide if researchers are owed damages.
“Nobody has that kind of time. The nature of research is that you can’t just stop and restart it many months later,” said Delaney. “Folks have already had to do that once and many aren’t able to—they’ve had to lay off staff and lost contact with study participants. This additional delay probably renders the research unviable going forward.”
Trump ‘Always Wins’
Delaney is among numerous experts and advocates who say the decision is both a blow to the scientific research enterprise and the latest evidence that the Supreme Court is inclined to interpret the law to favor the Trump administration’s whims.
“Make no mistake: This was a decision critical to the future of the nation, and the Supreme Court made the wrong choice,” the Association of American Medical Colleges said in a statement. “History will look upon these mass NIH research grant terminations with shame. The Court has turned a blind eye to this grievous attack on science and medicine, and we call upon Congress to take action to restore the rule of law at NIH.”
Jeremy Berg, who served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that while “many (but not all) grants from the lawsuits that had been terminated have been reinstated at this point,” the big question the Supreme Court’s ruling raises now “is whether NIH will start to re-terminate them.”
Although a 5-4 majority did agree on Thursday that the district can review NIH’s reasoning for the terminations and kept in place a court order blocking the guidance that prompted the cancellations, Berg said the mixed ruling is “potentially very damaging” because redirecting the case to a different court means “the stay blocking the required reinstatements could go into effect.”
He added that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent sums up his interpretation of the ruling’s implications. “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: That one, and this Administration always wins.”
That’s how Samuel Bagenstos, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Michigan and former general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services, interpreted the decision, too.
“The message the courts sent yesterday is very strong that they are going to let the Trump administration shut down the grants right now and remit grantees to the really uncertain process of going to the Court of Federal Claims and potentially getting damages in the future,” he said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed Friday.
“But that’s really cold comfort for the grantees,” Bagenstos added. “If they can’t get the grants restarted right now, they probably can’t continue their research projects, and the prospect of maybe getting damages in the future doesn’t keep those research projects alive. It’s a bad sign for the entire research community.”
The NIH is far from the only federal agency that has canceled federal research grants that don’t align with the Trump administration’s ideologies. The National Science Foundation, the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Humanities are all facing legal challenges in federal district courts after freezing or canceling grants.
And the Supreme Court’s ruling on the NIH’s terminations has implications for those cases, as well.
“The message seems to be pretty clear that if you have an ongoing grant that’s been terminated and you want to go to court to keep the money flowing, you’re out of luck,” Bagenstos said. “It’s got very bleak implications for all researchers who are depending on continuing the flow of federal grants.”
From the start, Na’Siah Martin and H’Sanii Blankenship’s July trip to Washington, D.C., was destined to be a riveting stop on the teenagers’ passage to adulthood. There were the scheduled meetings with lawmakers, the monuments, the reflecting pool near where Martin Luther King Jr. broadcast his dream for racial equality 62 summers ago.
For years, the pair have been involved in the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Austin Area, the revered summer and after-school program that was now making it possible for the two blossoming leaders to meet with Texans in Congress and present their game plan for tackling mental health challenges among student-athletes, a struggle both were deeply familiar with.
But two weeks before their arrival on Capitol Hill, President Donald Trump’s administration threw one of many curveballs lobbed during the first months of his second term. The U.S. Department of Education notified state education officials on the last day of June that it would pause the disbursement of nearly $7 billion in funds for teacher development, support for students learning English, and before- and after-school programs predominantly serving low-income families, pending a review of how schools had put the money to use. That notice went out a day before states expected to begin receiving the money.
For Texas, it meant a potential loss of nearly $670 million. For Martin and Blankenship, it potentially meant losing the Boys and Girls Club, a space that has aided their growth as both leaders and individuals. Martin, 18, graduated from Navarro Early College High School in June and has participated in the club since elementary school. Blankenship, a 17-year-old incoming senior at the same school, has participated in the club for about as long as Martin.
The focus of their trip immediately broadened: They now wanted to convince federal lawmakers that cutting the funds would harm Texas kids.
“These programs aren’t just for fun,” Blankenship said. “They actually give us resources, help us grow into adults instead of just coming here and just goofing around and stuff like that. These programs, they help us cope with things we need to cope with.”
The education funding freeze was typical of the Trump administration. In recent months, it has also cut billions of dollars in food assistance and health care for families in poverty; frozenbillions in grants and contracts financially supporting universities; canceled billions for foreign aid and public broadcasting stations; laid off thousands of employees working in critical federal agencies; and sought to overhaul the U.S. immigration landscape through actions like attempting to end birthright citizenship.
Those cuts and changes have often been sweeping and abrupt, disrupting federally funded services and programs serving large swaths of people of color, people with disabilities, low-income families, LGBTQ+ Americans and immigrants. And they have come at the same time the administration has moved to lower taxes for some of America’s wealthiest households.
“We can’t look at just the cuts to education in isolation,” said Weadé James, senior director of K-12 education policy at the Center for American Progress. “I think what we’re witnessing is really the undoing of a lot of progress, and also actions that are really going to keep a lot of families trapped in cyclical and generational poverty.”
Boys and Girls Club director Jacob Hernandez watches club members play spades at Navarro Early College High School. Credit: Montinique Monroe for The Texas Tribune
Ongoing changes to the country’s educational landscape are only one part of Trump’s larger goals to eliminate what the second-term president has deemed “wasteful” spending and crack down on anything he views as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. A large piece of his efforts involve closing the Department of Education and sending “education back to the states,” though most decisions about education and public school funding already happen at the state and local levels.
“Teachers will be unshackled from burdensome regulations and paperwork, empowering them to get back to teaching basic subjects. Taxpayers will no longer be burdened with tens of billions of dollars of waste on progressive social experiments and obsolete programs,” Trump Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement earlier this year. “K-12 and college students will be relieved of the drudgery caused by administrative burdens—and positioned to achieve success in a future career they love.”
The disarray has resulted in profound consequences for Texas, one of the largest and most diverse states in the nation, home to more than 9,000 school campuses and 5.5 million students — the majority of whom live in low-income households and come from Hispanic and Black families. Public schools serve as a safety net for many of them. They are one of the few places where some children have consistent access to meals, where working-class parents know their kids will be taken care of.
The prospect of federal cuts to school programs triggered a wave of concern across the state. For 44-year-old Clarissa Mendez, it jeopardized the after-school program her two daughters attend while she works as a nurse in Laredo.
“I’m on shaky grounds right now because I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Mendez said last month. “I understand there has to be cuts. I understand the government needs to find out how to save money. But why does it have to affect us and our kids?”
For Gay Hibbitts, a 57-year-old trying to become a certified teacher in rural Throckmorton, the worries began months earlier.
Earlier this year, the federal government cut roughly $400 million from a program that helps teaching candidates like her pay for their education as they gain hands-on classroom experience. That left participating rural districts with one of two options: cover the costs at a time when schools are financially struggling to make ends meet, or get rid of their preparation programs during a teacher shortage.
In both scenarios, Hibbitts said, children would pay the price.
“They’re the main ones that are going to suffer,” she said.
For as long as Martin and Blankenship can remember, they have each helped raise their younger siblings, a responsibility that has been rewarding but stressful. On the one hand, Martin said, her siblings look up to her, and her academic success has motivated them to do well in school. On the other hand, Blankenship said, taking on adult responsibilities at an early age meant missing out on the type of exhilarating childhood experiences many kids desire.
Since joining the Boys and Girls Club, the program has provided them the space to be kids.
They receive tutoring and time to finish homework. They go to live sporting events, watch movies and listen to music — SZA some days, Lauryn Hill on others. They play sports, cards and board games. They can earn scholarships. They find mentorship.
“We’re the future adults, so I feel like if you help us now with programs like this, that make us happy, that give us stress relief, that let us be kids, because we can’t be kids at home, I feel like that’ll equate to happier adults,” Martin said.
Na’Siah Martin, left, and H’Sanii Blankenship traveled to Washington, D.C., in July and had a chance to discuss with lawmakers the Trump administration’s pause on roughly $7 billion in federal funding, which threatened to shutter the Boys and Girls Club. Credit: Montinique Monroe for The Texas Tribune
Neither Martin nor Blankenship enjoys public speaking. Martin actually fears it. But with the Austin Boys and Girls Club’s future in jeopardy, they decided to lean into the discomfort and use the face time with lawmakers and their staffers to make a case for the after-school program.
The pair and several other clubmates sat down with the staff of Texas Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. They also met with Rep. Greg Casar, an Austin Democrat. The kids wore blue polo shirts with the words “America Needs Club Kids” etched in white. Martin, rocking a black one-button blazer, led the way.
“I gotta let these people know,” she thought.
Erica Peña is responsible for taking care of about 400 kids as she coordinates Hebbronville Elementary’s summer and after-school programs. Working with an assistant and about 25 paid volunteers, the 37-year-old often stays after hours — sometimes as late as 7 p.m. — depending on when parents can leave work to get there.
Peña breaks the after-school schedule into blocks. The first hour is for tutorials and worksheets, the later hours are usually for more fun activities like arts and crafts, kickball and cooking.
But shortly after the federal education funds were paused, the district notified Peña that it could no longer afford to keep her or the program.
“I cried, to be honest,” Peña said. “I was very upset, because I love my job, I love my students, and a lot of it is about them.”
Clarissa Mendez and her daughters Catiana Ester Mendez, left, and Catalaya Avaneh Mendez pose for a photo at their home in Hebbronville on July 30, 2025. Credit: Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
Hebbronville, in far South Texas, is home to about 4,300 mostly Hispanic Texans, one-third of whom live below the poverty line. The town has no H-E-B or Walmart. The local health clinic is often busy. The town has a few day care centers, but they can get pricey.
For the average Texas family, child care is financially out of reach. The median annual cost sits at $10,706 a year — or $892 each month. That’s more than one-fourth of the average cost for in-state tuition at a four-year public college, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Access to no-cost options, like the Hebbronville after-school program, has positive effects on student attendance, behavior and learning, multiplestudies have found over the years. Such programs also keep families from having to choose between leaving their children unattended or taking time off work to stay home.
“That has a direct impact on future economic prospects for that entire family,” said Jenna Courtney, CEO of the Texas Partnership for Out of School Time, a youth advocacy organization.
Mendez, the 44-year-old Hebbronville mother with two daughters, commutes about an hour to and from Laredo every weekday to make it to her job as a nurse. She goes in at 9 a.m. and gets out at 5 p.m. Her husband operates heavy equipment and has an unpredictable work schedule.
After picking up her daughters, Mendez cooks for them and spends some time with them before she starts working from home for an additional three to four hours. The after-school program Mendez’s daughters attend allows her to save some money on daycare costs. Credit: Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
The after-school program “gives me enough time to get to town to pick them up,” she said. But with the district planning to shutter operations, Mendez needed to find care providers who could look after her children until 6-6:30 p.m., when she gets home. She pays about $1,000 a month for that service during the summer when the school program is out of session. It would likely cost her another $800 per month during the academic year.
“That’s a big chunk of our money,” Mendez said.
Without the program, she would need to find a second job.
“We’ll do what we gotta do,” she added. “But I don’t understand.”
Catalaya Avaneh Mendez plays with her sister Catiana Ester Mendez as their mother watches them at her home. The Trump administration recently froze funding that benefits after-school programs, placing financial stress on parents such as the Mendez. They would have to find and pay for daycare for their children if those programs ended. Credit: Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
Hibbitts, the 57-year-old from Throckmorton, recently joined a federally funded program that would allow her to support students in her rural hometown between Abilene and Wichita Falls. It places aspiring full-time teachers in classrooms under the supervision of more seasoned teachers and provides financial assistance for their education and living expenses.
In exchange, the district gets to retain educators familiar with the community and eager to teach.
Based on her own experience as a Throckmorton student in the 1970s, Hibbitts knows the monumental role teachers can play in a child’s life.
“They were almost like your second mother,” she said.
Texas has the largest rural population of any state in the country. Of its roughly 5.5 million students, 13% attend class on a rural campus. Those schools often have to educate their students with less: Less access to the internet and technology, less staffing, and less money to pay and retain teachers.
Educator Gay Hibbitts, left, speaks with her mentor, Amy Dick, a secondary social studies teacher, inside a classroom at Throckmorton Collegiate ISD on July 29, 2025. Hibbitts was part of a federally funded educator preparation program serving about 30 participants across 11 rural Texas districts. Credit: Desiree Rios for The Texas Tribune
Texas lawmakers have acknowledged that rural teachers often do not make as much as their urban and suburban counterparts, and that many have left the profession because of a lack of support. Public schools over time have also grown more reliant on hiring unlicensed educators, a trend playing out more profoundly in the rural parts of Texas.
In response, state officials recently passed laws aimed at raising teacher pay, particularly in rural schools, and enhancing teacher preparation programs.
During her first year in the Throckmorton program, Hibbitts learned how to incorporate state learning standards into lesson plans. She learned how to keep students engaged. She helped a child who struggled academically and acted out at the beginning of the school year become a “model student” who thrived in reading by the year’s end.
Then, one Sunday afternoon in April, her superintendent called her.
The Trump administration had abruptly cut the federal dollars that helped schools fund educator preparation initiatives like the one she was participating in. It would affect about 30 people across 11 rural districts in Texas.
Hibbitts was one of them.
Hibbitts participates in a safety training at Throckmorton Collegiate ISD. The funding for Hibbitts’ educator preparation program, which covered her two years of college and training costs, was cut on April 25 under the Trump administration, leaving her uncertain about her future. Credit: Desiree Rios for The Texas Tribune
In Hebbronville, Mendez and Peña each had to confront their own harsh realities. Mendez would have to search for child care in a community with few affordable options. Peña, the after-school program coordinator, would have to find a new job.
In Austin, Martin and Blankenship had trouble picturing life without the Boys and Girls Club.
Club leaders began preparing a memo to notify parents about the funding uncertainty and what it could mean for their kids. Nothing had come of the Republican, Democratic and legal efforts seeking the release of the frozen funds. The Texas kids who spoke with congressional lawmakers and staff at the U.S. Capitol hadn’t heard anything either. When the administration would make a decision about the funds was anyone’s guess.
When Blankenship got the news, he sprinted out of his room in excitement and told his mom. The moment was just as surreal for Martin.
“Knowing that it could have been me, my story, or any other club kids’ story,” Martin said, “it made me happy. But it was like, ‘Dang. I was a part — we were a part of that.’”
Peña, the Hebbronville Elementary program coordinator, was relieved. The mood in her group chat with people from the district’s after-school programs was “pretty ecstatic.” They all cried. Getting the funds meant they no longer had to look for new jobs, and parents like Mendez wouldn’t have to go searching for a place to take care of their kids after school.
Hibbitts is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in general studies with an emphasis in education and a minor in psychology at West Texas A&M. Credit: Desiree Rios for The Texas Tribune
Hibbitts, meanwhile, wasn’t immediately able to bask in the good news, as it did not restore the federal funds for her district’s teacher preparation program. But in early August, her supervisor notified her that the program was officially back up and running for the 2025-26 school year. The news cleared the way for the 57-year-old to graduate at the end of the year and to start teaching full time by the next.
“This has been life changing for somebody of my age, to be able to step up and to step into the world of education,” Hibbitts said. “I’m finishing my dream. And as my kids like to say, ‘Mom, you’re going to be 58 years old walking the stage.’”
Still, she recognizes that so much uncertainty around federal funding means there is no guarantee others will get the same chance.
Uncertainty is what Peña also keeps coming back to.
“It just gets me upset with the administration, because, why? What was the purpose of the freeze? Why did you do that? You’re hurting people, not just adults, but children,” Peña said. “It’s like in a divorce, you don’t want to put the children in the middle. If something were to happen between parents, you never put children in the middle. And by doing that, you put children in the middle.”
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
Despite the summer heat, Toyia Diab came out to the Summer on the Block at Pulaski Elementary-Middle School to learn what it had to offer the four grandchildren she had in tow.
The family made their way to about a dozen tables snaking around the lawn on the side of the school. Diab listened to staff from the Detroit school district detail all of its resources over the pulsing base of loud music.
Diab’s family was one of many the Detroit Public Schools Community District courted this summer as part of its efforts to retain families and boost enrollment. With the loss of more than 92,000 students in the last 20 years, district officials devote some of the summer break each year to getting word out about what the city’s schools have to offer.
This year, the districtramped up efforts. It sent 40 people to canvas communities and held 19 events to create excitement about the start of school — nearly double that of previous years. It also started new initiatives, such as putting up billboards around the city. In all, the school system budgeted around $3.5 million for marketing this year. School starts Aug. 25.
Though the district has “done a fairly good job” of recruiting new students in previous years, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told school board members at a meeting earlier this month that the main challenge is keeping them.
As a result, this year the school system also has focused on reenrollment rates. Those numbers have become a metric the district uses to “hold schools accountable,” Vitti said, though he didn’t share how many students the district typically loses during the school year.
“We have emphasized … the need to improve customer service and parent engagement, so that parents feel more welcome,” he said. “And we fight harder to keep students at the schools that they’re at, rather than having more of an attitude of, ‘Well, if you don’t like it here, then you can find another school.’”
Sharlonda Buckman, assistant superintendent of family and community engagement, told Chalkbeat the district has seen a lot of “good signs” for this school year because of the number of people her office reached in the summer.
“It’s noticeable for me, and I’ve been at this for a long time,” she said. “We’ll see what that boils down to, in terms of enrollment.”
This year, Buckman said nearly 5,000 people went to the Summer on the Block events, parties held at schools that both serve as a vehicle to sell families on sending their kids to the district and connect them with free resources.
“As a parent, you have to bring your kids to school every day in order to get the education that they need,” Diab said at the Pulaski back-to-school event. “But then you’ll find some schools, they just don’t have enough resources to keep them interested to come to school, to stay in school.”
All of the district’s summer efforts produced 532 leads on parents interested in enrolling their kids by mid-August. Around 80 of those students completed enrollment, according to the district.
Though initial enrollment numbers are up, officials say, the full impact of the district’s efforts won’t be known until the end of the 2025-26 school year.
Myriad factors have affected enrollment in DPSCD
Boosting student numbers has been among the district’s top priorities for years.
The numbers of students attending schools are crucial for districts in Michigan, where school funding is tied to enrollment.
High student mobility rates, or the rate at which kids move to different homes, contribute to the district’s difficulty in keeping children enrolled. Chronic absenteeism rates also have a direct impact on enrollment.
When DPSCD was created and the school system began being phased out of emergency management in the 2017-18 school year, enrollment shot up to more than 50,800 from 45,700 during the 2016-17 school year.
The district has struggled to move the needle much since, especially after drops during pandemic-era school closures and the years that followed.
At the beginning of this month, there were 50,890 students enrolled in the district, Vitti said at the board meeting.
“We have about 1,400 more students than we did at the end of the year enrolled in DPSCD as of today, and about 500 more as compared to the first day of school,” he said, adding that “ “enrollment is trending in a positive direction.”
Early enrollment numbers for the district are usually higher than official headcounts made in October. The number of students recorded on “Count Day” is used by the state to calculate funding for districts.
Making the case for DPSCD face-to-face
Three days before the Summer on the Block at Pulaski, more than 20 people squeezed into a sun-filled classroom at the Detroit School of Arts.
The group was contracted by the district to canvas homes in areas where attendance is low compared to the number of school-aged children living there.
This summer, the district sent canvassers to more than 78,000 homes to inform families about its schools and programs.
The group at the School of Arts was gathered to get their assignments for the day. They waited to pick up hand-out materials, including fliers listing Summer on the Block dates and pamphlets highlighting programs at application schools.
To get the energy up in the classroom before they headed out, the canvassers stood up to form a circle. Buckman, the assistant superintendent, asked them to share what they heard door-knocking.
“We’re getting a good response in terms of some of those students coming back to the district,” said one woman.
Others expressed residents’ hesitations to open their doors or to give their contact information for the district to follow up with them.
Laura Gomez, who has been canvassing for three years, said through a translator that this summer has been different in southwest Detroit, which is home to many immigrant and newcomer families.
“There are some people that are really happy we’re going out to the houses because that way they don’t have to leave their home because they don’t feel safe,” she said.
After the canvassers broke out into teams, they drove to the areas they were assigned to for the day.
Tanya Shelton and her son, David, arrived in the Crary St. Mary’s neighborhood in the northwest corner of the city.
“We’ll ask them what school district are they in, and if they are interested in DPSCD, we give some information on it,” she said as she made her way down a long block adjacent to the Southfield Freeway.
In her conversations with families, Shelton said the district’s free school lunches piqued their interest. Other canvassers said parents were interested in learning more about the academic interventionists available to students.
Most of the doors Shelton knocked on that day, though, went unanswered. She left the district’s literature at dozens of houses.
Families weigh programming, academics, and transportation in selecting schools
At Pulaski’s Summer on the Block Alexa Franco-Garcia saw more students signing up to attend the school than she has in past years.
“Right now, I have three enrollment packets in my hand, so that means they’ve completed enrollment,” she said during a break from talking with families.
Another three parents left their contact information and said they would return the paperwork the next day.
Considering it was about 30 minutes into the event, that was a strong number, said Franco-Garcia, who works in the Office of Family and Community Engagement.
In her time working in the district, Franco-Garcia has learned what kinds of questions families ask: They want to know about the curriculum, extracurricular activities, and class sizes. They wonder whether their children will be supported in special education and if they will get a bus ride to school.
Most of the sign-ups at the Pulaski event were for kindergartners who were new to the district, Franco-Garcia said.
There were 457 students enrolled in prekindergarten by the beginning of August, according to the district, up about 10 compared to the same time last year.
Diab, the grandmother, brought four kids ages 5 to 12 out to learn more about the school. They heard about the district’s community health hubs, parent academy, and mental health resources.
Teachers from the school gathered around a welcome table ready to answer questions as Principal Tyra R. Smith-Bell floated around talking with parents.
The fresh produce boxes, ice cream truck, free books, and kids’ activities also enticed more than 350 people to come – many more than in previous years, Buckman said.
Linn Flake was the first second-grader of the day to enroll at Pulaski, said Franco-Garcia. It would be his first experience at a neighborhood school, she added.
His mom, Roxanne Flake, chose DPSCD over the charter school Linn went to last year.
“I just wanted a different start,” she said.
The charter school didn’t provide transportation, said Flake, which was an inconvenience because she doesn’t currently have a car. But the Detroit school district offered bus service for Linn to Pulaski, the mother said.
Diab said she had more research to do before her family committed to Pulaski.
“We’re gonna come here and we’re gonna figure everything out – ask questions, all of that stuff, and then if it’s the right fit for them, then we’re gonna put them in,” she said.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
As a “pink-collar profession” — a nickname given to women-dominated occupations — teaching has historically paid less than comparable fields requiring a higher education degree, and in Philadelphia, the push to close the wage gap could lead to a strike by the end of the month.
Salaries for Philly teachers — roughly 70 percent of whom are women — begin at $54,146. That’s far below the median earnings of Pennsylvania college graduates. Now, concern over pay has become a sticking point between the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) and the School District of Philadelphia as they negotiate a new contract, with the current collective bargaining agreement expiring August 31.
The PFT in June voted to authorize its executive board to initiate a strike if the union and the district don’t agree on a new contract by then. With the deadline imminent and no deal in sight, schools may open on August 25 only for teachers to appear on picket lines within days. A strike could leave working parents in a lurch, scrambling for childcare — a task moms usually have to complete. Many Philly teachers, however, are also parents and demanding higher salaries to better provide for their families.
PFT President Arthur Steinberg pointed out that even suburban teachers with less education often out-earn Philadelphia’s top-performing educators by up to $22,000.
Amid ongoing negotiations, Steinberg appeared with School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington at a welcome event for new teachers on Wednesday.
“We are optimistic about a successful conclusion by the end-of-the-month deadline, and it’s important to us that all of our employees feel seen, valued and heard,” said Watlington, who called Steinberg a “tough negotiator.”
To reach an agreement, Steinberg said, “There’s significant work that has to be done, but it’s doable.”
“Our schools are not safe, they’re not healthy for anybody to work in or go to school in,” chemistry teacher Kate Sundeen told local news station ABC 6. “We have a hard time with teacher retention and a hard time attracting new talent.”
On Friday, the national bus tour of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) will arrive in West Philadelphia to support the PFT ahead of a possible strike. The event will be the last of six strike preparation events that have taken place before the teachers head back to work on Monday, a week before the first day of school.
Join our zero2eight Substack community for more discussion about the latest news in early care and education. Sign up now.
The U.S. military faced a new threat to national security toward the end of the 20th century. This threat affected the recruitment and retention of our nation’s armed forces, reducing their capacity to defend the denizens of the United States and our interests overseas.
The threat wasn’t the Cold War; it wasn’t tension in the Middle East; and it wasn’t international or domestic terrorism.
The threat was a lack of affordable, accessible, high-quality child care.
The makeup of the armed forces changed following the shift from a national draft to an all-volunteer military after the war in Vietnam. More service members had families in the late 1970s and 1980s — many of them with young children. And many more of those families included two working parents than in previous decades.
The child care crisis faced by the military 40 to 50 years ago was similar to the one civilians face today. More families with working parents increased the demand for child care. Thousands of children languished on waitlists, forcing families to consider forms of supervision that lacked consistent standards for safety, teacher training, student/teacher ratios, and curricula. Teachers were poorly compensated, and turnover was high.
Back then, as now, parents couldn’t afford the fees necessary to cover the costs of addressing these challenges, and limited public investment wasn’t enough to fill the gap.
Graphic by Lanie Sorrow
Because the child care crisis was seen as a threat to the collective future of Americans, elected officials took action. Congress passed the Military Child Care Act of 1989, which put a priority on affordability, accessibility, and quality in child care for service members.
With the end of child care stabilization efforts that were undertaken during the pandemic, North Carolinians now face a similar threat to our own collective future. The military’s approach offers lessons for where we can go from here, in our communities and across our state.
An experiment in universal child care
The Military Child Care Act wasn’t the first time the military had taken the lead on child care. During World War II, women entered the workforce in massive numbers, filling the roles of men who were drafted to serve in the military. This raised the question of who would care for children when both parents were working outside the home to defend American interests.
Congress responded with the Lanham Act of 1940, creating a nationwide, universal child care system to support working families with children through age 12. Federal grants were issued to communities that demonstrated their need for child care related to parents working in the defense industry.
The program distributed $1.4 billion (in 2025 dollars) between 1943 and 1946 to more than 600 communities in 47 states. The grants could be used to build and maintain child care facilities, train and compensate teachers, and provide meals to students.
In his 2017 analysis of the Lanham Act’s outcomes for mothers and children, Chris M. Herbst, of Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs, found that “the Lanham Act increased maternal employment several years after the program was dismantled.”
An image of Rosie the Riveter from a 1943 issue of the magazine Hygeia (published by the American Medical Association) demonstrating the need for child care.
Herbst also found that “children exposed to the program were more likely to be employed, to have higher earnings, and to be less likely to receive cash assistance as adults.”
One lesson Herbst took from his research was that the Lanham Act was successful because of the broad support it received from parents, advocates for education and women, and employers. He noted: “Each group was committed to its success because something larger was at stake.”
Today’s military-operated child care model
While the Lanham Act was a short-lived national experiment that hasn’t received much study, the military’s child care program since adoption of the Military Child Care Act of 1989 has become a widely acclaimed model for publicly subsidized early care and learning, serving about 200,000 children each year.
Four categories of child care are available through military-operated child care programs: Child Development Centers (CDCs), Family Child Care (FCC), 24/7 Centers, and School Aged Care (SAC). The official military child care website describes each program type:
Child Development Centers (CDCs) — CDCs provide child care services for infants, pretoddlers, toddlers, and preschoolers. They operate Monday through Friday during standard work hours, and depending on the location offer full-day, part-day, and hourly care.
Family Child Care (FCC) — Family child care is provided by qualified child care professionals in their homes. Designed for infants through school agers, each FCC provider determines what care they offer, which may include full-day, part-day, school year, summer camp, 24/7, and extended care.
24/7 Centers — 24/7 Centers provide child care for infants through school age children in a home-like setting during both traditional and non-traditional hours on a regular basis. The program is designed to support watch standers or shift workers who work rotating or non-traditional schedules (i.e., evenings, overnights, and weekends).
School Aged Care (SAC) — School age care is facility-based care for children from the start of kindergarten through the end of the summer after seventh grade. This program type operates Monday through Friday during standard work hours. SAC programs provide both School Year Care and Summer Camp.
Requirements for military-operated child care programs are typically more stringent than state requirements. For one thing, they must be accredited by one of the following: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), National Early Childhood Program Accreditation (NECPA), the Council on Accreditation (COA), or the National Accreditation Commission (NAC).
For context, the requirements for licensed child care in North Carolina are relatively stringent compared with other states, but still fall below the requirements for NAEYC accreditation, which is widely recognized as the national standard. Only 110 programs in our state are NAEYC-accredited — many of which are Head Start or military-operated programs — out of about 5,300 total state-licensed programs.
Military-operated child care programs offer families hourly, part-day, full-day, extended, or overnight care, plus afterschool and summer programs.
The maximum rate is on par with the national average for civilian child care in 2023, meaning that almost every family using military-operated child care programs is paying less than the national average for typically higher-quality early care and learning.
The Department of Defense budgeted about $1.8 billion for child care in 2024 — about 0.2% of its $841.4 billion total budget.
Military child care in North Carolina
In addition to military-operated child care programs, service members may be eligible for Military Child Care in Your Neighborhood (MCCYN), a fee assistance program for families who can’t access military-operated child care. MCCYN pays a portion of the cost of enrolling children in early care and learning programs that meet the military’s high-quality standards in their community.
North Carolina is one of 19 locations where military families may be eligible for MCCYN-PLUS, which expands the MCCYN program to child care programs that participate in state or local Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) in places where nationally accredited care is not available.
Both programs rely on the availability of high-quality child care in civilian communities. That’s a challenge in North Carolina, which was already facing a child care shortage before the pandemic. Our state has lost almost 6% of licensed child care programs since February 2020, with more expected to close because stabilization grants have ended.
According to the NC Military Affairs Commission, there are 12 military bases and more than 130,000 active-duty military members in North Carolina, giving us the fourth-largest active-duty military population in the nation.
In January 2025, Fayetteville Technical Community College hosted the state’s first N.C. Military Community Childcare Summit, organized by the North Carolina Department of Military and Veteran Affairs (NCDMVA) to discuss the problem that military communities are having with access to community-based child care.
The first N.C. Military Community Childcare Summit in January 2025.( Katie Dukes/EdNC)
The summit culminated in a screening of Take Care, a documentary about North Carolina’s child care crisis produced by the state Department of Health and Human Services and featuring EdNC’s early childhood reporter, Liz Bell.
The issues of spouse resilience and child care are inextricably linked for Angie Mullennix, who works for The Honor Foundation at Fort Bragg, helping members of the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) transition to careers in the private sector after their military service.
Mullennix served in the U.S. Army for four years after high school and has previously worked for the Department of Public Instruction as the state military liaison. Her husband recently retired from the SOF himself. They have two teenage children.
“If you look at the number of military spouses in North Carolina who have degrees and credentials and could be in the workforce, from nurses to lawyers, lots of them are staying at home,” Mullennix said.
“A big reason why about 40% of (military) spouses do not work is because of child care not being available to them,” Mullennix said, noting that lack of child care is also a barrier to workforce participation among the civilian population.
When Mullennix’s children were under the age of 5, she used hourly child care on base, which was available at no cost when her husband was away on assignment.
“You ask any parent in the world, I don’t care who they are, there’s nothing more important than their child’s safety — then their education,” Mullennix said. “And yet, the two things we think are the most important, we put (their providers) at the lowest pay and ask them to do quality care.”
That’s what sets military child care apart from civilian early care and learning for Mullennix: high quality standards and higher pay for early childhood educators, including benefits. She sees lessons in this for North Carolina.
“You gotta pay them to keep them, there’s no secret behind that,” Mullennix said. “If you pay them high, you can also set the standards really high.”
And because workforce participation — and military readiness — is directly tied to the accessibility and affordability of high-quality child care, not investing in it threatens our collective future.
“North Carolina, or any state that doesn’t offer child care, is shooting itself in the foot,” Mullennix said.
Lessons from military child care
Policymakers at every level who are seeking to end the child care crisis can learn much from the military child care model. One report on the topic offers these lessons:
Do not be daunted by the task. It is possible to take a woefully inadequate child care system and dramatically improve it.
Recognize and acknowledge the seriousness of the child care problem and the consequences of inaction.
Improve quality by establishing and enforcing comprehensive standards, assisting providers in becoming accredited, and enhancing provider compensation and training.
Keep parent fees affordable through subsidies.
Expand the availability of all kinds of care by continually assessing unmet need and taking concrete action steps to address it.
Commit the resources necessary to get the job done.
Both agreed these are the right takeaways for policymakers across North Carolina to consider.
Lesson 1: Do not be daunted by the task
Gale Perry said the top lesson for her is: “Start where you are, know that change is possible, and have a goal post in mind.”
She pointed out that the military’s goal wasn’t a fully publicly funded child care system. It was a system that acknowledged Americans’ values around the role of parents in raising young children — and paying for their care and education. But also that their employers and the government “have a role in offsetting that cost, so that we can ensure that child care is quality, and it is stable, and that the families can actually afford it.”
Smith said there was no “silver bullet” when she and her colleagues were tasked with solving the military’s child care crisis in the 1990s — and there isn’t one for the civilian child care crisis today.
We had to redo the standards, we had to look at the workforce, we had to look at the health and safety issues, we had to look at the fees and how we could bring those fees down. We had to look at the infrastructure of all of it. We’ve got to start thinking about the interconnectedness of all of these things if we’re going to be successful in this country.
Smith said people think that because she worked for the secretary of defense, “I could just tell all the bases what to do, and that would magically happen, which is so not true. It wasn’t just like we could give an order and everybody jumped.”
She said you just have to start where you are, and move up.
Lesson 2: Acknowledge the seriousness of the problem and the consequences of inaction
“The military understood very early the link between people getting to work and child care,” Smith said.
As the military shifted away from relying on conscription and became a more welcoming workplace for women, the need for child care became evident. Smith described working on a base where children were routinely left in cars when their parents were unexpectedly called into work.
“So (military leaders) really got the connection to their guys going to work very quickly, and I think that we still haven’t all understood that in this country,” Smith said, though she notes businesses have started making that connection since the pandemic.
“The other thing the military understood was that a pilot is every bit as important as the mechanic who works on the plane, and so they invest in all of their people,” Smith said.
She and her team had to design a program that worked for everyone, or it wouldn’t work for anyone.
Lesson 3: Improve quality
Smith said quality was of critical importance when she was designing the military’s child care system in the 1990s, especially after child abuse and neglect scandals that came to light in the 1980s.
She and her team studied the child care standards of all 50 states and created a set of military standards that fell squarely in the middle. Then they set about training the 22,000 early childhood educators they already had — most of whom were military spouses — to meet those standards.
That was a six-month training program. Then there was an 18-month training to get them to move beyond those standards toward national accreditation. They hired highly qualified trainers to work with educators at each site.
“And if you didn’t do it, guess what? You’re fired!” Smith said.
There was an incentive to participate in the training, beyond keeping their jobs — higher compensation.
“Maybe some were grumpy about it, but we didn’t have to fire people,” Smith said.
North Carolina already has some tools in place to help educators advance their education and improve their compensation, specifically through the WAGE$ and TEACH programs — both of which were highlighted in the report that identified these lessons.
“(The military) realized they had to get serious about quality and quality standards. And I would say that’s a lesson for us now, particularly in a climate that is deregulatory,” Gale Perry said. “And while I’m for sensible regulatory reform, I think we have to be really thoughtful about not wanting stacks of child deaths in child care sitting on a desk waiting to be investigated.”
Lesson 4: Keep parent fees affordable through subsidies
Smith said that while designing the military’s child care program, she and her team figured out that there was no way parents could afford the actual cost of high-quality child care. So they set up a subsidized system that would provide a 50% match — on average — to parents’ fees, paid directly to child care programs.
“We had to, on average, match parent fees dollar-for-dollar, with the higher-income people paying more and the lower-income paying less,” Smith said. “So a major, for example, would pay two-thirds of the cost, and a private would pay one-third, but the average was 50/50.”
Smith pointed out that we’re already subsidizing child care in ways that are hidden — through the public benefits and social programs that early childhood educators often rely on because of low compensation, and through lack of workforce participation.
Lesson 5: Expand the availability of all kinds of care
Gale Perry said the military’s model really stands out to her for its ability to assess unmet needs and take action to improve.
“In the early 2000s when there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were a lot of deployments of National Guard and Reserve who did not live on post and did not have access to on-post child care,” Gale Perry said. “That is really when the military got in the business of thinking about, how do we help build capacity and make child care accessible for military families off post?”
That’s when the MCCYN came about, subsidizing high-quality early care and learning in a broader array of settings in the communities where service members live.
Smith said that the Military Child Care Act was originally targeted toward child care centers, but she recalls briefing the assistant secretary of defense on the potential effects of that strategy when they were designing the system:
I remember saying we need to apply all of this to family child care, to school-aged care, to part-day preschools, because if we don’t, all the parents are going to have a demand on these centers that we can’t meet, right? Because if you lower the cost in the centers and you improve the quality, why would somebody go to another place when they get it cheaper and better over here?
She made the case for educators in every setting getting the same access to training and the same level of compensation, because that’s what would work best for everyone.
“Everything applies to everybody,” Smith said. “And I think that was one of the smartest policy decisions we made.”
Lesson 6: Commit the resources necessary to get the job done
“There was this perception that we just had a lot of money and we threw it at” child care, Smith said. But that wasn’t the case.
“When they passed the Military Child Care Act, it didn’t come with an appropriation,” Gale Perry said. “So they had to fight equally hard for the funding, and a lot of the funding actually ended up coming from local base commanders making the decision to invest in child care.”
Now the military submits a budget request to Congress each year, and depends on those appropriations.
For state and local policymakers seeking to solve the civilian child care crisis without public investment, the woman credited with solving the military’s own child care crisis 35 years ago has a message.
“It’s gonna cost. There’s no way it doesn’t cost,” Smith said.
