When I searched for Sarah McBride’s name on March 12, the first thing I saw was a story about a member of the U.S. Congress calling her “Mr. McBride” in an official hearing.
Ms. McBride is the first congressional representative in United States history to be openly transgender.
Since 18 November 2024, when McBride was elected to Congress, I’ve seen dozens of articles in which the only thing in question is her gender identity. It’s funny that Republicans in the U.S. Congress have made such a fuss over McBride’s gender, while McBride – the only congressperson representing the state of Delaware – has done nothing of the sort.
For someone so polarised and one-dimensional by the media, McBride seems intent on collaboration.
Delawareans have been overwhelmingly supportive of McBride. A University of Delaware poll, which recorded the pre-election numbers, had McBride at 52% of the vote, while her opponent, John Whalen, received 30%. Sarah McBride ended up with a 58% return, which could be considered a landslide.
This starkly contrasted primaries across the country, with many states flipping Republican, that had gone Democrat in 2020.
So, what’s the difference between Delaware and McBride, compared to the rest of the nation?
What voters care about
For starters, Delaware, where I live, is minuscule compared to its sister states. These conditions make Delaware not only ideal grounds to break history on, but also the only place it could have happened for McBride.
Delaware does not boast a large number of gay and trans people. A UCLA poll found that only 4.5% of citizens in Delaware are queer and trans and over half are under voting age. By and large, McBride was elected by a primarily straight electorate.
This election did not contrast with the national sentiment of Democrats. A Pew Research study found that about 64% of Americans believe trans people should be protected from discrimination when it comes to employment, housing, and education. Additionally, democrats had even stronger support of the notion that gender is not assigned at birth.
Simply put, Delaware and McBride are a good fit.
McBride is calm, composed, and focusing on her Delaware constituents more than anything else. In fact, she is the first freshman democrat in the 119th Congress to bring a bill to the floor. A bipartisan bill protecting consumers from credit appraisal scams.
Opposition from Republicans
Some congressional Republicans prefer to call McBride names rather than work to make a stronger nation.
Describing McBride’s welcome to D.C. can be summarized in two words: Political Theatre.
On McBride’s first visit to D.C., she was greeted by a ban on the use of bathrooms in the house by transgender people brought forward by Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace. This pointed attack by Representative Mace didn’t seem to affect McBride, who was more focused on: “Delivering on the issues that keep Delawareans up at night.”
In recent months, McBride has been subject to even more unwarranted scrutiny and misnomers from her republican colleagues.
I spoke with McBride to hear her plans for Delaware, her response to President Trump’s actions, and what she has accomplished thus far in her congressional term.
Jack McConnel: What was your main reason to run for congressional office?
Sarah McBride: So my interest in politics was really rooted in my own journey to authenticity as a young person, as someone growing up here in Delaware, I was scared. I wondered whether the heart of this country was big enough to love someone like me.
And I faced a crisis of hope. And in that crisis of hope, I went searching for solutions and examples of our world becoming kinder and fairer. And I found a little glimmer of hope as I read history books and saw the through line of every chapter was a story of advocates, activists and a handful of courageous and effective elected officials working together to right the wrongs of our past, to address injustice, to bring people from the shadows and the margins of society into the circle of opportunity.
I ultimately decided to run for office, though, in 2019 for the state Senate was really the byproduct of my experience as a caregiver to my husband during his battle with terminal cancer.
Because I know despite the fact that Andy lost his life to cancer, I know how lucky we were. I know how lucky he was to have health insurance that allowed him to get care that prolonged his life. And I know how lucky both of us were to have flexibility with our jobs that allowed him to focus on the full-time job of getting care and me to focus on the full-time job of caring for him.
McConnel: What are you most proud of so far in your term?
McBride: First is that I’ve introduced multiple bipartisan bills.
One with [California Republican] Young Kim that provides consumer protections for Americans against the predatory practices of so-called credit repair organizations.
The second more recently with [Republican] Representative Mike Lawler from New York, which protects farmers and in so doing helps to lower costs for Delawareans at the grocery store by investing in combating avian flu.
McConnel: How do you think the Democratic party should respond to the results of the 2024 election?
McBride: What we can do is we can help to mobilize the public against [President Donald Trump]. Public opinion still matters. We are still under democracy. These people still care about their popularity. They still care about the next election and the goal in this moment as we defend Medicaid in the short run.
The goal in this moment also has to be to make sure that this president, that the public understands the harms that this president is inflicting on people of every political persuasion across the country. As the public mobilizes against this president, it throws sand in the gears of an authoritarian machine that slows it down, that extends the runway of our democracy so that we can get to the next election and get to the next election.
McConnel: How do you plan on responding to these movements?
McBride: Fighting back against that is at the top of my priority list at this moment. In the longer term, obviously, there is an answer to your question, a real effort by this president to illegally and unconstitutionally consolidate power to essentially create absolute power.
I mean, his first step is to employ what’s called the unitary executive theory, which is absolute authority within the executive branch under the purview of Congress. But he’s also clearly trying to undermine the main power of Congress, the power of the purse. He’s questionable about whether he’s going to listen to the Supreme Court and when all is said and done, making sure that we can’t stop every action by this president. The results of the last election give us limited institutional levers.
McConnel: Thank you, Representative McBride.
The main concern McBride reiterated again and again was what she was doing for the Delawareans who elected her. McBride took every opportunity during our interview to highlight the issues most relevant to her constituents. She talked to me about the effort to defund programs Delawareans rely on.
When asked about what the Democratic Party should be doing going forward, McBride said that Democrats have lost the “art of social change” and that they must be willing to meet people where they are and engage in conversations where people disagree. She pointed towards the 2026 midterms as a place to build momentum towards.
McBride said when Democrats try to sound the alarm about everything the president is doing, it dilutes the effect of the message. “We can’t ever go to 10 if we’re always at 10,” she said.
McBride’s goal? Slow down Trump where she can and build support going into 2026.
Questions to consider:
1. In what way does Representative Sarah McBride get treated differently than her Congressional colleagues?
2. What did Delaware voters care about when they voted to elected McBride to Congress?
3. If you were to vote for a government representative, what issues do you most want that person to tackle?
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.
As Education Secretary Linda McMahon was busy dismantling her cabinet department, she vowed to preserve one thing: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card. In early April, she told a gathering of ed tech companies and investors that the national exam was “something we absolutely need to keep,” because it’s a “way that we keep everybody honest” about the truth of how much students across the country actually know.
That was clearly a promise with an asterisk.
Less than two weeks later, on Monday of this week, substantial parts of NAEP came crumbling down when the board that oversees the exam reluctantly voted to kill more than a dozen of the assessments that comprise the Nation’s Report Card over the next seven years.
The main reading and math tests, which are required by Congress, were preserved. But to cut costs in an attempt to appease Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) scrapped a 2029 administration of the Long-Term Trend NAEP, an exam that has tracked student achievement since the 1970s.* Also cut were fourth grade science in 2028, 12th grade science in 2032 and 12th grade history in 2030. Writing assessments, which had been slated for 2032, were canceled entirely. State and local results were also dropped for an assortment of exams. For example, no state-level results will be reported for 12th grade reading and math in 2028, nor will there be district-level results for eighth grade science that year.
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“These are recommendations that we are making with much pain,” said board chair Beverly Perdue, a former North Carolina governor who was appointed to this leadership role in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term. “None of us want to do this.”
The board didn’t provide an official explanation for its moves. But the vice chair, Martin West, a Harvard professor of education, said in an interview that the cuts were an effort to save the 2026 assessments. “A moment of reckoning came more quickly because of the pressures on the program to reduce expenses in real time,” he said.
In other words, the board was effectively cutting off the patient’s appendages to try to save the brain and the heart. Despite the sacrifice, it’s still not clear that the gambit will work.
DOGE has been demanding 50 percent cuts to the $190 million a year testing program. Nearly all the work is handled by outside contractors, such as Westat and ETS, and five-year contracts were awarded at the end of 2024. But instead of paying the vendors annually, DOGE has diced the payments into shorter increments, putting pressure on the contractors to accept sharp cuts, according to several former Education Department employees. At the moment, several of the contracts are scheduled to run out of money in May and June, and DOGE’s approval is needed to restart the flow of money. Indeed, DOGE allowed one NAEP contract to run out of funds entirely on March 31, forcing ETS employees to stop work on writing new questions for future exams.
Reading and math tests are scheduled to start being administered in schools in January 2026, and so additional disruptions could derail the main NAEP assessment altogether. NAEP is taken by a sample of 450,000 students who are selected to represent all the fourth and eighth graders in the nation, and each student only takes part of a test. This sampling approach avoids the burden of testing every child in the country, but it requires Education Department contractors to make complicated statistical calculations for the number of test takers and the number of test sections needed to produce valid and reliable results. Contractors must then package the test sections into virtual test booklets for students to take online. The Education Department also must get approval from the federal Office of Management and Budget to begin testing in schools — yet another set of paperwork that is handled by contractors.
A DOGE dilemma
People familiar with the board’s deliberations were concerned that contractors might be pressured to agree to cuts that could harm the quality and the validity of the exam itself. Significant changes to the exam or its administration could make it impossible to compare student achievement with the 2024 results, potentially undermining the whole purpose of the assessment.
Board members were ultimately faced with a dilemma. They could cut corners on the full range of assessments or hope to maintain NAEP’s high quality with a much smaller basket of tests. They chose the latter.
The cuts were designed to comply with congressional mandates. While the Long-Term Trend assessment is required by Congress, the law does not state how frequently it must be administered, and so the governing board has deferred it until 2033. Many testing experts have questioned whether this exam has become redundant now that the main NAEP has a 35-year history of student performance. The board has discussed scrapping this exam since 2017. “The passage of time raises questions about its continued value,” said West.
The writing assessments, originally scheduled for 2032 for grades four, eight and 12, needed an overhaul and that would have been an expensive, difficult process especially with current debates over what it means to teach writing in the age of AI.
The loss of state- and district-level results for some exams, such as high school reading and math, were some of the more painful cuts. The ability to compare student achievement across state lines has been one of the most valuable aspects of the NAEP tests because the comparison can provide role models for other states and districts.
Cost cutting
“Everyone agrees that NAEP can be more efficient,” said West, who added that the board has been trying to cut costs for many years. But he said that it is tricky to test changes for future exams without jeopardizing the validity and the quality of the current exam. That dual path can sometimes add costs in the short term.
It was unclear how many millions of dollars the governing board saved with its assessment cancellations Monday, but the savingsare certainly less than the 50 percent cut that DOGE is demanding. The biggest driver of the costs is the main NAEP test, which is being preserved. The contracts are awarded by task and not by assessment, and so the contractors have to come back with estimates of how much the cancellation of some exams will affect its expenses. For example, now that fourth grade science isn’t being administered in 2028, no questions need to be written for it. But field staff will still need to go to schools that year to administer tests, including reading and math, which haven’t been cut.
Compare old and new assessment schedules
Outside observers decried the cuts on social media, with one education commentator saying the cancellations were “starting to cut into the muscle.” Science and history, though not mandated by Congress, are important to many. ”We should care about how our schools are teaching students science,” said Allison Socol, who leads preschool to high school policy at EdTrust, a nonprofit that advocates for equity in education. “Any data point you look at shows that future careers will rely heavily on STEM skills.”
Socol worries that DOGE will not be satisfied with the board’s cuts and demand more. “It’s just so much easier to destroy things than to build them,” she said. “And it’s very easy, once you’ve taken one thing away, to take another one and another one and another one.”
On April 17, the Education Department announced that the 2026 NAEP would proceed as planned. But after mass layoffs in March, it remained unclear if the department has the capacity to oversee the process, since only two employees with NAEP experience are left out of almost 30who used to work on the test. McMahon might need to rehire some employees to pull it off, but new hiring would contradict the spirit of Trump’s executive order to close the department.
Socol fears that the Trump administration doesn’t really want to measure student achievement. “There is a very clear push from the administration, not just in the education sector, to have a lot less information about how our public institutions are serving the people in this country,” Socol said. “It is a lot easier to ignore inequality if you can’t see it, and that is the point.”
The Education Department did not respond to my questions about their intentions for NAEP. McMahon has been quite forceful in articulating the value of the assessments, but she might not have the final say since DOGE has to approve the NAEP contracts. “What’s very clear is that the office of the secretary does not completely control the DOGE people,” said a person with knowledge of the dynamics inside the Education Department. “McMahon’s views affect DOGE priorities, but McMahon doesn’t have direct control at all.”
The ball is now in DOGE’s court.
Canceled assessments
Long-Term Trend (LTT) assessments in math and reading for 9, 13 and 17 year olds in 2029. (The Education Department previously canceled the 2025 LTT for 17 year olds in February 2025.)
Science: Fourth-grade in 2028, 12th grade in 2032
History: 12th grade in 2030
Writing: Fourth, eighth and 12th grades in 2032
State-level results: 12th grade math and reading in 2028 and 2032, eighth grade history in 2030
District-level results: Eighth-grade science in 2028 and 2032
*Correction: An earlier version of this sentence incorrectly said that two administrations of the Long-Term Trend NAEP had been scrapped by the governing board on April 21. Only the 2029 administration was canceled by the board. The 2025 Long-Term Trend NAEP for 17 year olds was canceled by the Education Department in February. Nine- and 13-year-old students had already taken it by April.
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.
When you’re looking for research on four-day school weeks or how to teach fractions, or trying to locate an historical document, such as the landmark Coleman Report of 1966, you might begin with Google. But the reason that high-quality research results pop up from your Google search is because something called ERIC exists behind the scenes.
ERIC stands for Education Resources Information Center and it is a curated online public library of 2.1 million educational documents that is funded and managed by the U.S. Education Department. The collection dates back to the 1960s and used to be circulated to libraries through microfiche. Today it’s an open access website where anyone can search, read online or download material. Neither a library card nor login credentials are needed. It is used by an estimated 14 million people a year. (I am one of them.) If you’re familiar with MedLine or PubMed for health care studies, this is the equivalent for the field of education.
This critical online library catalog is supposed to continue operating under a five-year contract that runs through 2028. Initially, ERIC was spared from the department’s mass contract cancellations in February. But according to Erin Pollard Young, the sole Education Department employee who managed ERIC until her job was eliminated in March, the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE has since refused to approve disbursement of money that has already been authorized by Congress for the upcoming year.
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ERIC is scheduled to run out of money on April 23. After that date, no new documents can be added. “The contract, from my understanding, would die,” Pollard Young said in an interview.
“After 60 years of gathering hard to find education literature and sharing it broadly, the website could stop being updated,” Pollard Young posted on LinkedIn. “Yes, the data are backed up in so many places, and the website will likely remain up for a while. But without constant curation and updating, so much information will be lost.”
Parents, teachers, researchers and education policymakers are all affected. “Defunding ERIC would limit public access to critical education research, hindering evidence-based practices and informed policy decisions vital for the advancement of American education,” emailed Gladys Cruz, a superintendent of a school district called Questar III BOCES outside of Albany, New York, and a past president of the AASA, The School Superintendents Association.
Proposal to halve the cost
Pollard Young said that before she left the Education Department, she was frantically working to comply with a DOGE demand to slash ERIC’s annual budget by half, from $5.5 million to $2.25 million. The cuts were painful. She would have to cut 45 percent of the journals added to the database each year.The public help desk would be eliminated. And Pollard Young had agreed to personally take on the extra task of directly communicating with 1,500 publishers, something that had been handled by AEM Education Services, a vendor that collects, analyzes and manages data for the government.
These proposed cuts did not satisfy DOGE. Pollard Young said she received an email reply in all caps, “THIS IS NOT APPROVED,” with a request for more information. Pollard Young submitted the additional information but never received a response. She lost access to her work email about a week later on March 11, the day that Pollard Young and more than 1,300 other Education Department employees lost their jobs in a mass firing.
Pollard Young was the only Education Department employee who was involved with ERIC on a daily basis. She oversaw a team of 30 contractors at AEM Education Services, which did most of the work. Adding documents to the digital library involves many steps, from determining their importance to cataloging and indexing them. It is the metadata, or descriptive tags, that AEM inserts behind the scenes that allows documents on ERIC to be discoverable and rise to the top on Google searches. But the public can also search directly on the ERIC website.
“Fun fact,” Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the Data Quality Campaign, an organization that advocates for data-driven decision making in schools, posted on LinkedIn. “Over the 20 years that DQC has been around we’ve had some poorly designed websites with atrocious search functions. I often couldn’t find resources I wrote! But could always find them on ERIC. Huge resource.”
The bulk of the collection consists of academic journal articles. Many are full text PDFs that would otherwise be inaccessible behind paywalls. ERIC also contains books, federal, state and local government reports and doctoral dissertations.
Gray literature
One of its gems is the large amount of “gray literature,” which Pollard Young described as unpublished studies from private research organizations and school district reports that are not cataloged in EBSCO, a private database of academic documents. That’s another reason that Google and AI cannot simply replace this curated ERIC collection. “In education so much research is produced outside of journals,” said Pollard Young. “Big, important RCTs [randomized controlled trials] are in white papers,” or special reports.
In response to specific questions about the future of ERIC, the Education Department responded more broadly about the need to restructure the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), where ERIC is managed. “Despite spending hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds annually, IES has failed to effectively fulfill its mandate to identify best practices and new approaches that improve educational outcomes and close achievement gaps for students,” said Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications, in an emailed statement. “The Department is actively evaluating how to restructure IES with input from existing leadership and expert stakeholders so that the Institute provides states with more useful data to improve student outcomes while maintaining rigorous scientific integrity and cost effectiveness.”
It is still possible that DOGE will approve the reduced budget proposal this week before the money runs out. But there will be no one at the Education Department to oversee it or communicate with publishers. “Best case scenario, ERIC operates at half of its budget,” Pollard Young posted on LinkedIn.
Like other Education Department employees who were fired in March, Pollard Young is on administrative leave until June. But she said she is willing to risk potential retaliation from the administration and speak on the record about the threat to ERIC, which she had managed for more than a dozen years.
“I am aware of what some of the consequences are,” said Pollard Young. “But to me, it is important for the field to know that I am doing everything in my power to save ERIC and also for the country to understand what is happening. As I’m talking to people across the country, it is clear that they don’t fully understand what is happening in D.C. Hopefully we can put some pressure on it so we can keep the funding or bring it back.”
This story about ERIC was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.
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.
The Supreme Court over the next two weeks will hear two cases that have the potential to erode the separation of church and state and create a seismic shift in public education.
Mahmoud v. Taylor, which goes before the court on April 22, pits Muslim, Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox families, as well as those of other faiths, against the Montgomery County school system in Maryland. The parents argue that the school system violated their First Amendment right of free exercise of religion by refusing to let them opt their children out of lessons using LGBTQ+ books. The content of the books, the parents say, goes against their religious beliefs.
Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, which will be argued on April 30, addresses whether the St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School should be allowed to exist as a public charter school in Oklahoma. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa had won approval for the charter school from the state charter board despite acknowledging that St. Isidore would participate “in the evangelizing mission of the Church.”
The state’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, later overruled the approval, saying the school could not be a charter because charter schools must be public and nonsectarian. The petitioners sued and ultimately appealed to the Supreme Court, claiming Drummond violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause by prohibiting a religious entity from participating in a public program.
Teachers unions, parents groups and organizations advocating for the separation of church and state have said that rulings in favor of the plaintiffs could open the door for all types of religious programs to become part of public schooling and give parents veto rights on what is taught. In the most extreme scenario, they say, the rulings could lead to the dismantling of public education and essentially allow public schools to be Sunday schools.
At issue in both cases is the question of whether the First Amendment rights of parents and religious institutions to the free exercise of religion can supersede the other part of the amendment, the establishment clause, which calls for the separation of church and state.
“I think a chill wind is blowing, and public education as we know it is in extreme jeopardy of becoming religious education and ceasing to exist,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an advocacy organization that has filed an amicus brief in the St. Isidore case. “The whole idea is to have churches take control of education for American children. It’s about money and power.”
For some conservative lawmakers, evangelical Christian groups and law firms lobbying for more religiosity in the public square, decisions in the petitioners’ favor would mean religious parents get what they have long been owed — the option of sending their children to publicly funded religious schools and the right to opt out of instruction that clashes with their religious beliefs.
“If we win this case, it opens up school choice across the country,” said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, an Orlando, Florida-based conservative Christian legal firm that has filed a brief supporting the petitioners in both cases. “I see school choice as a reaction to the failed system in the public schools, which is failing both in academia but also failing in the sense they are pushing ideology that undermines the parents and their relationship with their children.”
By taking the cases, the Supreme Court once again inserts itself in ongoing culture wars in the nation, which have been elevated by presidential orders threatening to take away funding if schools push diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and state laws banning teaching on various controversial subjects. Legal scholars predict that the Supreme Court will lean toward allowing St. Isidore and the opt-outs for parents because of how the justices ruled inthreecases between 2017 and 2022. In each case, the justices decided that states could not discriminate against giving funds or resources to a program because it was religious.
Of the two cases, St. Isidore likely could have the greatest impact because it is attempting to change the very definition of a public school, say opponents of the school’s bid for charter status. Since charter schools first started in the 1990s, they have been defined as public and nonsectarian in each of the 46 state statutes allowing them, according to officials at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Today,charter schools operate in 44 states, Guam, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., andserve roughly 7.6 percent of all public school students.
“It would be a huge sea change if the court were to hold they were private entities and not public schools bound by the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause,” said Rob Reed, the alliance’s vice president of legal affairs.
A victory for St. Isidore could lead to religious-based programs seeping into several aspects of public schooling, said Steven Green, a professor of both law and history and religious studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
“The ramification is that every single time a school district does some kind of contracting for any kind of service or curricular issues, you’re going to find religious providers who will make the claim, ‘You have to give me an opportunity, too,’” Green said.
St. Isidore’s appeal to the Supreme Court is part of an increasing push by the religious right to use public funds for religious education, said Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and author of a 2024 book on school vouchers. Because of previous court decisions, several voucher programs across the country already allow parents to use public money to send their children to religious schools, he said.
“What’s going to happen if the court says a public school can be run by a religious provider?” Cowen asked. “It almost turns 180 degrees the rule that voucher systems play by right now. Right now, they’re just taking a check. They’re not public entities.”
The effect of a St. Isidore victory could be devastating, he added. “It would be one more slippery slope to really kicking down the wall between church and state,” Cowen said.
Jim Campbell, chief legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing St. Isidore’s bid to become a charter, discounted the idea that a St. Isidore win would fundamentally change public schools. Like Staver, he views St. Isidore as simply providing another parental option. “We’re not asking the state to run a religious school,” Campbell said. “These are private entities that run the schools. This is a private organization participating in a publicly funded program.”
Opponents of religious charter schools question whether St. Isidore would have to play by the same rules as public schools.
“How are they going to handle it when there’s a teacher who has a lifestyle that doesn’t align with Catholic school teaching? They’re talking out of both sides of the mouth,” said Erika Wright, an Oklahoma parent and plaintiff in a lawsuit protesting a Bible in the classroom mandate by Oklahoma’s state superintendent of instruction. She also joined an amicus brief against St. Isidore’s formation.
“As a taxpayer, I should not be forced to fund religious instruction, whether it’s through a religious charter school or a Bible mandate,” Wright said. “I shouldn’t be forced to fund religious indoctrination that doesn’t align with my family’s personal beliefs.”
Notably, in the Montgomery County parents’ case going before the court, parents use similar reasoning to support their right to opt out of instruction. “A school ‘burdens’ parents’ religious beliefs when it forces their children to undergo classroom instruction about gender and sexuality at odds with their religious convictions,” the parents’ brief said.
The school district in 2022 adopted several books with LGBTQ+ themes and characters as part of the elementary language arts curriculum. Initially, families were allowed to opt out. But then the school system reversed its policy, saying too many students were absent during the lessons and keeping track of the opt-outs was too cumbersome. The reversal led to the lawsuit.
Historically, school districts have given limited opt-outs to parents who, for example, do not want their child to read a particular book, but the Montgomery County parents’ request is broader, said Charles C. Haynes, a First Amendment expert and senior fellow for religious liberty at the Freedom Forum in Washington, D.C. The parents are asking to exclude their children from significant parts of the curriculum for religious reasons.
“If the court sides with the parents, I think the next day, you’re going to have parents across the country saying, ‘I want my kids to opt out of all the references to fill-in-the-blank.’ … It would change the dynamic between public schools and parents overnight,” Haynes said.
Sarah Brannen, author of “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” one of the LGBTQ+ books Montgomery County schools adopted, sees major logistical issues if the school system loses. “Allowing parents to interfere in the minutia of the curriculum would make their already difficult jobs impossible,” she said.
Colten Stanberry, a lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty representing the Montgomery County parents, disagreed. School systems manage to balance different student needs all the time, he said.
A triumph for the Montgomery County families and St. Isidore would cause much more than logistical issues, said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. It could lead to a public education system where parents can pick a school based on religious beliefs or try to change a traditional public school’s curriculum by opting out of lessons in droves.
“For us to be a strong democracy, then we necessarily need to learn about all of us. To separate us flies in the face of why we were founded,” Pringle said.
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.
The Labour Party was elected to government last year on a promise to reduce net migration. Their victory in the 2024 General Election followed a period in which net migration to the UK peaked at 906,000 and public concerns over migration began to rise again for the first time since the Brexit referendum.
Unsurprisingly, Number 10 views progress on this issue as central to their re-election prospects. Precisely how the government will look to do this is still unclear, yet recent weeks have seen growing speculation over an immigration white paper which is expected to land pretty soon.
White paper
A new approach to immigration is needed. Too often, immigration policy has been dictated by the release of the latest migration figures and so the development of a white paper on immigration in and of itself is no bad thing. Moreover, it provides the government with an opportunity to take a more strategic approach to migration policy.
Prior to the election, the Labour Party committed to a different style of governing which would end ‘sticking plaster’ politics. But how to apply this longer-term view to immigration policy? To be judged as successful, any new approach to immigration would need to see net migration reduced given their manifesto commitment. As such, tough choices need to be made about where further reforms could be made to reduce the overall number of people coming to the UK.
This creates some obvious risks for UK universities given the importance of international students to the financial sustainability of our sector. Universities UK (UUK) has been clear that, over the long-term, international recruitment should not be the answer to the financial sustainability of higher education institutions. Instead, we need to work with government on a long-term plan, secure increased investment, and explore new approaches to efficiency and transformation in the sector.
In the absence of a long-term plan to address the underfunding of the higher education sector, any new approach to immigration would, at the very least, need to enable universities to continue to attract international students to study in the UK to prevent current financial challenges from deteriorating further.
Three tests
This is no easy task, but it is possible. So, what could a different course of action on migration policy actually look like? I think there are three clear things we need:
1. A joined up, coordinated approach.
2. Look forward not back, (as the Labour Party once encouraged us to do).
3. Draw a line between temporary and permanent migration.
The left-hand ought to know what the right-hand is doing
The starting point of any new immigration policy ought to be based on having a joined-up and co-ordinated approach. This may seem obvious but would be a welcome change.
The key opportunity for the new government is to use their immigration white paper to finally align migration policy with wider government objectives. Based on what the Home Secretary has outlined, at least part of this would be to create much greater join-up between the UK’s visas and skills systems so that immigration is not used as an alternative to training or tackling workforce problems, thereby reducing overall net migration. This is a good start, but the white paper offers an opportunity to go further.
Under previous administrations, there was a distinct lack of coordination and coherence in policy and strategy. This can be seen most clearly in the development of an International Education Strategy – which set an explicit aim of government policy to grow the number of international students coming to the UK, but which then came up against a Home Office who had been instructed to curb the growth in international students.
Don’t use the rear-view mirror
With a clear joined-up strategy, the government should then look to shift the focus of immigration policy away from retrospective net migration trends, towards focussing on future forecasts, thereby creating a more realistic timeframe to achieve their strategy.
It is quite clear that reducing net migration is going to continue to be the focus of government policy. Yet as we have seen, annual net migration focuses too much on short-term migration trends – be it the increase of people coming from Ukraine, or Hong Kong – and doesn’t focus enough on the anticipated impact of recent policy – such as changes to dependant’s which has led a dramatic reduction in the UK’s attractiveness as a study destination in certain countries.
By shifting towards long-term projections (measured over a rolling 5-year average), the government could then create the political space to actually achieve their wider objectives. For example, providing a longer-term timeframe to work with employers to implement skills and training initiatives to support those roles where recruitment is primarily met through immigration.
Any future forecast would, inevitably, be subject to changes and revisions but it would represent a far better metric than basing government policy on retrospective and highly volatile net migration trends from the previous year.
Separate the temporary from the permanent
A final welcome change would be for the government to distinguish more between ‘temporary’ and ‘permanent’ migration. After all, while many migrants do settle in the UK, many others do not and have little intention of doing so.
This applies to many international students. They may stay for a few years after their studies, but very few end up remaining in the UK for the long-term and get settlement. Rather than taking students out of net migration – which would only serve to highlight the contribution which international students do make to net migration while ignoring the impact which students do have on housing and local services – the government should look to place greater focus on different types of visas being granted to those coming to the UK.
There are lots of ways this could be done, but focussing more on those visa routes which lead to settlement (or ‘indefinite leave to remain’) would help improve public understanding of migration and better reflect the fact that many migrants included in the net migration stats do not contribute significantly to the long-term population of the UK.
Concerns about immigration are unlikely to go away anytime soon, but the opportunity for a better approach is there for the taking.
Many parts of the world – particularly across the Anglosphere – are currently seeing higher levels of net migration, and how countries respond is an issue facing many governments.
With aging societies, slowing rates of economic growth, not to mention an increasing number of people displaced due to climate change, conflict, and natural disasters, immigration will continue to be high on the political agenda.
Through their immigration white paper, the new UK government has a clear opportunity to address this challenge head on and take a different approach to previous administrations and, in doing so, demonstrate that well-managed immigration can be – and indeed is – a force for good.
In developing a more joined-up approach, while focussing on future projections – rather than retrospective trends – and which makes a clearer distinction between temporary and permanent migration, the UK government could go a long way to developing a more sensible approach to immigration policy.
The opportunity is there, the question is whether the government will take it.
Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement had little in it for the sector to celebrate.
The Office for Budget Responsibility,(who provide independent analysis of the country’s finances), downgraded 2025 growth forecasts from two per cent to one per cent.
For all the flurry of pro-growth activity since the election, the growth outlook to 2029 is basically unchanged. Economic growth and the much desired fiscal headroom (which gives the Government capacity for extra spending) still seem unlikely to materialise.
For universities who are hoping for a crumb of additional funding at some point in the future, there was nothing to settle their nerves about the increasingly difficult financial position the Government finds itself in.
Winners and losers
It’s safe to say that some sectors are doing better than others. Defence is clearly one of the winners. Starmer’s commitment to increase defense spending (made before the Spring Statement) to 2.5 per cent of GDP from April 2027 was a significant one. The measures taken to generate the fiscal headroom to pay for it- particularly cutting overseas development aid, and slashing welfare budgets – were not particularly popular ones. This is not an era of win-win policy choices – but boosting defence spending is a critical part of what Starmer’s government sees as a core responsibility: to position Britain as a steady hand in an unstable world.
The continuation of the war in Ukraine, renewed conflict in the middle east, and a second Trump presidency, renewed trade wars and global volatility all point towards this being the difficult but correct choice to make.
A significant uplift to its budget is the sort of things the higher education sector can only dream of. The increase to defence spending is not only massive, it’s also moderately popular. In a new Public First/Stonehaven poll, which looked at the trade offs the Government will need to make in the current era of hard choices, we found it which has moderate public support: 57 per cent back the uplift.
There is an opportunity for the higher education sector here that they may be reluctant to take. Universities are a relatively silent partner in the UK’s defense capabilities, despite the fact this is a clear area of opportunity. Defense companies are increasingly avoiding campuses for graduate recruitment after a rising wave of student protests – the Times reported that 20 companies have been advised against attending on campus events because of security fears.
Who will defend the defenders?
Many universities are trying to balance their industrial R&D and skills partnerships with the defense sector with a growing generational divide in attitudes towards the defense industry. Negative perceptions of the defense sector are particularly entrenched among Gen Z. Just under a fifth (17 per cent) of the general population say that they would be ashamed to work for the defense industry – but this rises to 31 per cent of 18-24 year olds. Nearly a third of 18-34 year olds say their friends would judge them if they worked in the defense industry. Going too hard on defence and being seen to be doing too much may risk a knock-on impact on student recruitment.
The increased investment in defense and security isn’t just about more soldiers and sailors and more ships and planes. It includes commitments on research and skills, and a ringfenced post of 10 per cent of the uplift for “novel technologies”. Increasingly, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) will become a major strategic procurer and funder in advanced research and development across the UK, which presents an increasingly rare and hard won opportunity for UK universities – and one where the public opinion is more balanced.
Talking about the role for university led R&D which boosts national security is a reputation win for the sector as a whole. In our large-scale research with the Campaign for Science and Engineering, which explored what the UK public think and feel about R&D, we found a strong preference for investment in new defensive technologies over more military personnel – a view broadly shared across all ages, and across the political spectrum
When we asked what the highest priority should be to improve national security, investment in R&D was the joint second most popular option, behind tackling cyber attacks and misinformation.
Hard choices
The defense sector as a whole might be an unpopular thing to talk about on campus. But there is a significant government investment being made in defense spending, and a clear moral and social argument that we live in a time when increasing the capacity and capability of our national security systems is the right thing to do. We know there is broad public support for this investment going towards research and development, and that there are significant skills gaps across our defense sector, impacting our broader defense and security offering.
In a time when politicians are making hard choices, university leaders need to be doing the same.
The modern armed services need highly skilled graduates in a range of roles – not just as professional soldiers, sailors or pilots but also in a myriad of supporting roles such as cyber security, communications, quantum technology, logistics, engineering, advanced manufacturing, foreign languages, and diplomacy. And equally too, the government will need academics and university research labs to step up, in partnership with businesses, to help design and roll out technologies that will support this expanded defence effort. This is both an economic case and a moral case – and one that universities should seize.
And if this is an opportunity which universities shy away from, they may be waiting a long time for the next economic windfall to come their way.
After weeks of uncertainty, two tribal colleges have been told they can hire back all employees who were laid off as part of the Trump administration’s deep cuts across the federal workforce in February, part of a judge’s order restoring some federal employees whose positions were terminated.
Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, widely known as SIPI, in New Mexico lost about 70 employees in mid-February amid widespread staffing cuts to federal agencies. While most of the nation’s 37 tribal colleges and universities are chartered by American Indian tribes, Haskell and SIPI are not associated with individual tribes and are run by the federal government.
About 55 employees were laid off and 15 accepted offers to resign, according to a lawsuit filed last month by tribes and students. The colleges were forced to cancel or reconfigure a wide range of services, from sports and food service to financial aid and classes. In some cases, instructors were hired by other universities as adjuncts and then sent back to the tribal colleges to keep teaching.
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It was not clear this week when and if the workers would return, whether the employees who resigned would also be offered their jobs back, or if the government would allow colleges to fill vacancies. Both colleges said some employees had turned down the offers.
The Bureau of Indian Education, which runs the colleges, declined to answer questions except to confirm the laid-off workers would be offered jobs with back pay to comply with a judge’s order that the government reverse course on thousands of layoffs of probationary employees. But the agency also noted the jobs would be available “as the White House pursues its appeals process,” indicating possible turmoil if an appeals court reinstates the layoffs.
Both colleges said the bureau also has refused to answer most of their questions.
SIPI leaders were told last week that the positions were being restored, said Adam Begaye, chairman of the SIPI Board of Regents. The 270-student college lost 21 employees, he said, four of whom decided to take early retirement. All but one of the remaining 17 agreed to return, Begaye said.
The chaos has been difficult for those employees, he said, and the college is providing counseling.
“We want to make sure they have an easy adjustment, no matter what they’ve endured,” Begaye said.
The chairman of Haskell’s Board of Regents, Dalton Henry, said he was unsure how many of the 50 lost employees were returning. Like SIPI, Haskell was forced after the layoffs to shift job responsibilities and increase the workload for instructors and others.
Haskell was reviewed by accreditors in December, and Henry said he was worried how the turmoil would affect the process. Colleges and universities must be accredited to offer federal and state financial aid and participate in most other publicly funded programs.
Henry declined to discuss his thoughts on the chaos, saying there was nothing the college could do about it.
“Whatever guidance is provided, that’s what we have to adhere to,” he said. “It’s a concern. But at this point, it’s the federal government’s decision.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs declined to make the presidents of the two colleges available for interviews.
Tribal colleges and universities were established to comply with treaties and the federal trust responsibility, legally binding agreements in which the United States promised to fund Indigenous education and other needs. But college leaders argue the country has violated those contracts by consistently failing to fund the schools adequately.
In the federal lawsuit claiming the Haskell and SIPI cuts were illegal, students and tribes argued the Bureau of Indian Education has long understaffed the colleges. The agency’s “well-documented and persistent inadequacies in operating its schools range from fiscal mismanagement to failure to provide adequate education to inhospitable buildings,” plaintiffs claimed.
Sen. Jerry Moran and Rep. Tracey Mann, both Kansas Republicans, said before Trump took office that they plan to introduce a bill shifting Haskell from federal control to a congressional charter, which would protect the university from cuts across federal agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Education.
“[F]or the last few years the university has been neglected and mismanaged by the Bureau of Indian Education,” Moran said in a written statement in December. “The bureau has failed to protect students, respond to my congressional inquiries or meet the basic infrastructure needs of the school.”
The February cuts brought rare public visibility to tribal colleges, most of which are in remote locations. Trump’s executive orders spurred outrage from Indigenous communities and a flurry of national news attention.
“We’re using this chaos as a blessing in disguise to make sure our family and friends in the community know what SIPI provides,” said Begaye, the SIPI board president.
The uncertainty surrounding the colleges’ funding has left a lasting mark, said Ahniwake Rose, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which advocates for tribal colleges. But she added she was proud of how the schools have weathered the cuts.
“Indian country is always one of the most resourceful and creative populations,” she said. “We’ve always made do with less. I think you saw resilience and creativity from Haskell and SIPI.”
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.
Maraida Caraballo Martínez es educadora en Puerto Rico desde hace 28 años y directora de la Escuela de la Comunidad Jaime C. Rodríguez desde hace siete. Nunca sabe cuánto dinero recibirá del gobierno cada año porque no se basa en el número de niños matriculados. Un año recibió 36.000 dólares; otro año, 12.000 dólares.
Pero por primera vez como educador, Caraballo notó una gran diferencia durante la administración Biden. Gracias a una inyección de fondos federales en el sistema educativo de la isla, Caraballo recibió una subvención de 250.000 dólares, una cantidad de dinero sin precedentes. La utilizó para comprar libros y ordenadores para la biblioteca, pizarras e impresoras para las aulas, reforzar el programa de robótica y construir una pista polideportiva para sus alumnos. “Esto significó una gran diferencia para la escuela”, dijo Caraballo.
Yabucoa, un pequeño pueblo del sureste de Puerto Rico, fue una de las regiones más afectadas por el huracán María en 2017. Y esta comunidad escolar, como cientos de otras en la isla, ha experimentado trastornos casi constantes desde entonces. Una serie de desastres naturales, como huracanes, terremotos, inundaciones y deslizamientos de tierra, seguidos de la pandemia de coronavirus en 2020, han golpeado la isla e interrumpido el aprendizaje. También ha habido una rotación constante de secretarios de educación locales: siete en los últimos ocho años. El sistema educativo puertorriqueño -el séptimo distrito escolar más grande de Estados Unidos- se ha vuelto más vulnerable debido a la abrumadora deuda de la isla, la emigración masiva y una red eléctrica paralizada.
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Bajo la presidencia de Joe Biden, se produjeron tímidos avances, respaldados por miles de millones de dólares y una atención personal sostenida por parte de altos funcionarios federales de educación, dijeron muchos expertos y educadores de la isla. Ahora les preocupa que todo se desmantele con el cambio en la Casa Blanca. El presidente Donald Trump no ha ocultado su desdén por el territorio estadounidense, habiendo dicho supuestamente que estaba “sucio y que la gente era pobre.” Durante su primer mandato, retuvo miles de millones de dólares en ayuda federal tras el huracán María y ha sugerido vender la isla o cambiarla por Groenlandia.
Una reciente orden ejecutiva para hacer del inglés el idioma oficial ha preocupado a los habitantes de la isla, donde solo 1 de cada 5 personas habla inglés con fluidez, y el español es el idioma de instrucción en las escuelas. Trump está tratando de eliminar el Departamento de Educación de EE.UU. y ya ha hecho recortes radicales a la agencia, lo que tendrá implicaciones en toda la isla. Incluso si los fondos federales -que el año pasado representaron más de dos tercios del financiamiento del Departamento de Educación de Puerto Rico, o DEPR- se transfirieran directamente al gobierno local, probablemente traerían peores resultados para los niños más vulnerables, dicen los educadores y expertos en políticas públicas. Históricamente, el DEPR ha estado plagado de interferencias políticas, burocracia generalizada y falta de transparencia.
Maraida Caraballo Martínez ha sido educadora en Puerto Rico durante 28 años y ahora es directora de una escuela primaria. Su escuela ha estado a punto de cerrar tres veces debido a la emigración masiva de la isla. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Y el departamento de educación local no está tan avanzado tecnológicamente como otros departamentos de educación estatales, ni es tan capaz de difundir las mejores prácticas. Por ejemplo, Puerto Rico no dispone de una “fórmula por alumno”, un cálculo utilizado habitualmente en el continente para determinar la cantidad de dinero que recibe cada estudiante para su educación. Roberto Mujica es el director ejecutivo de la Junta de Supervisión y Gestión Financiera de Puerto Rico, convocada por primera vez bajo la presidencia de Barack Obama en 2016 para hacer frente al marasmo financiero de la isla. Mujica dijo que la actual asignación de fondos educativos de Puerto Rico es opaca. “Cómo se distribuyen los fondos se percibe como un proceso político”, dijo. “No hay transparencia ni claridad”.
En 2021, Miguel Cardona, Secretario de Educación de Biden, prometió “un nuevo día” para Puerto Rico. “Durante demasiado tiempo, los estudiantes y educadores de Puerto Rico fueron abandonados”, dijo. Durante su mandato, Cardona aignó casi 6.000 millones de dólares federales para el sistema educativo de la isla, lo que se tradujo en un aumento salarial histórico para los profesores, financiamiento para programas de tutoría extraescolar, la contratación de cientos de profesionales de salud mental escolar y la creación de un programa piloto para descentralizar el DEPR.
Cardona designó a un asesor principal, Chris Soto, para que fuera su persona de contacto con el sistema educativo de la isla, subrayando el compromiso del gobierno federal con la isla. Durante casi cuatro años en el cargo, Soto realizó más de 50 viajes a la isla. Carlos Rodríguez Silvestre, director ejecutivo de la Fundación Flamboyán, una organización sin fines de lucro de Puerto Rico que ha dirigido los esfuerzos de alfabetización infantil en la isla, dijo que el nivel de respeto e interés sostenido hicieron sentir que se trataba de una asociación, no un mandato de arriba hacia abajo. “Nunca había visto ese tipo de atención a la educación en Puerto Rico”, afirmó. “Soto prácticamente vivía en la isla”.
Soto también trabajó estrechamente con Víctor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, presidente del sindicato de maestros, la Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, o AMPR, lo que dio lugar a un acuerdo por el que los educadores recibieron 1.000 dólares más al mes en su salario base, un aumento de casi el 30% para el maestro promedio. “Fue el mayor aumento salarial en la historia de los maestros de Puerto Rico”, dijo Bonilla, aunque incluso con el aumento, los maestros de aquí siguen ganando mucho menos dinero que sus colegas en el continente.
Una de las mayores quejas que Soto dijo haber escuchado fue lo rígido y burocrático que era el Departamento de Educación de Puerto Rico, a pesar de una ley de reforma educativa de 2018 que permite un mayor control local. La agencia de educación -la unidad de gobierno más grande de la isla, con la mayor cantidad de empleados y el mayor presupuesto- estaba configurada de manera que la oficina central tenía que aprobar todo. Así que Soto creó y supervisó un programa piloto en Ponce, una región en la costa sur de la isla, enfocado en la descentralización.
Por primera vez, la comunidad local eligió un consejo asesor de educación, y los candidatos a superintendente tuvieron que postularse en lugar de ser nombrados, dijo Soto. El superintendente recibió autoridad para aprobar directamente las solicitudes presupuestarias en lugar de enviarlas a través de funcionarios de San Juan, así como flexibilidad para gastar el dinero en su región en función de las necesidades de cada escuela.
En el pasado, eso no se tenía en cuenta: Por ejemplo, Yadira Sánchez, psicóloga que lleva más de 20 años trabajando en la educación puertorriqueña, recuerda cuando una escuela recibió docenas de aires acondicionados nuevos aunque no los necesitaba. “Ya tenían aires acondicionados que funcionaban”, dice, “así que ese dinero se perdió”.
El proyecto piloto también se centró en aumentar la eficiencia. Por ejemplo, ahora se evalúa a los niños discapacitados en sus colegios, en lugar de tener que acudir a un centro especial. Y Soto dice que también intentó eliminar el uso de influencias y aumentar la transparencia en torno al gasto en el PRDE. “Puedes mejorar las facturas, pero si tus amigos políticos son los que se quedancon los trabajos, entonces no tienes un buen sistema escolar”, dijo.
Bajo el mandato de Biden, Puerto Rico también recibió una subvención competitiva o grant del Departamento de Educación de EE.UU. por valor de 10,5 millones de dólares para escuelas comunitarias, otro hito. Y el departamento federal empezó a incluir datos sobre el territorio en algunas estadísticas educativas recopiladas. “Puerto Rico ni siquiera figuraba en estos indicadores, así que empezamos a preguntarnos cómo mejorar los sistemas de datos. Desentrañar el problema de los datos significó que Puerto Rico puede ser debidamente reconocido”, dijo Soto.
Pero ya hay planes para deshacer el esfuerzo de Cardona en Ponce. La recién elegida gobernadora de la isla, Jenniffer González Colón, es republicana y partidaria de Trump. El popular secretario de Educación, Eliezer Ramos Parés, regresó a principios de este año al frente del departamento tras dirigirlo desde abril de 2021 hasta julio de 2023, cuando la gobernadora le pidió inesperadamente que dimitiera, algo nada inusual en el gobierno de la isla, donde los nombramientos políticos pueden terminar de repente y con poco debate público. Ramos dijo a The Hechinger Report que el programa no continuará en su forma actual, calificándolo de “ineficiente”.
“El programa piloto no es realmente eficaz”, dijo, señalando que la política puede influir en las decisiones de gasto no sólo a nivel central, sino también a nivel regional. “Queremos tener algunos controles”. También dijo que ampliar la iniciativa a toda la isla costaría decenas de millones de dólares. En su lugar, Ramos dijo que estaba estudiando enfoques más limitados de la descentralización, en torno a algunas funciones de recursos humanos y adquisiciones. Dijo que también estaba explorando una fórmula de financiación por alumno para Puerto Rico y estudiando las lecciones de otros grandes distritos escolares como la ciudad de Nueva York y Hawai.
Un autobús escolar bajo un árbol que cayó durante el huracán María, que azotó la isla de Puerto Rico en septiembre de 2017. Más de un año después, no había sido retirado. Credit: Al Bello/Getty Images for Lumix
El Departamento de Educación de EE.UU., que complementa la financiación local y estatal para los estudiantes en situación de pobreza y con discapacidades, tiene un papel desproporcionado en las escuelas de Puerto Rico. En la isla, el 55% de los niños viven por debajo del umbral de la pobreza, frente al 17% en los 50 estados; en el caso de los estudiantes de educación especial, las cifras son del 35% y el 15%, respectivamente. En total, durante el año fiscal 2024, más del 68 por ciento del presupuesto de educación en la isla procede de fondos federales, frente al 11 por ciento en los estados de EE UU. El departamento también administra las becas Pell para estudiantes de bajos ingresos -alrededor del 72 por ciento de los estudiantes puertorriqueños las solicitan- y apoya los esfuerzos de desarrollo profesional y las iniciativas para los niños puertorriqueños que van y vienen entre el continente y el territorio.
Linda McMahon, la nueva secretaria de Educación de Trump, ha dicho supuestamente que el Gobierno seguirá cumpliendo sus “obligaciones legales” con los estudiantes aunque el departamento cierre o transfiera algunas operaciones y despida personal. El Departamento de Educación de Estados Unidos no respondió a las solicitudes de comentarios para esta historia.
Algunos dicen que el hecho de que la administración Biden haya vertido miles de millones de dólares en un sistema educativo en problemas con escasa rendición de cuentas ha creado expectativas poco realistas y no hay un plan para lo que ocurre después de que se gasta el dinero. Mujica, director ejecutivo de la junta de supervisión, dijo que la infusión de fondos pospuso la toma de decisiones difíciles por parte del gobierno puertorriqueño. “Cuando se tiene tanto dinero, se tapan muchos problemas. No tienes que enfrentarte a algunos de los retos que son fundamentales para el sistema”. Y afirmó que apenas se habla de lo que ocurrirá cuando se acabe ese dinero. “¿Cómo se va a llenar ese vacío? O desaparecen esos programas o tendremos que encontrar la financiación para ellos”, dijo Mujica.
Dijo que esfuerzos como el de Ponce para acercar la toma de decisiones a donde están las necesidades de los estudiantes es “de vital importancia”. Aún así, dijo que no está seguro de que el dinero haya mejorado los resultados de los estudiantes. “Esta era una gran oportunidad para hacer cambios fundamentales e inversiones que produzcan resultados a largo plazo. No estoy seguro de que hayamos visto las métricas que lo respalden”.
Puerto Rico es una de las regiones más empobrecidas desde el punto de vista educativo, con unos resultados académicos muy inferiores a los del continente. En la parte de matemáticas de la Evaluación Nacional de Progreso Educativo, o NAEP, una prueba que realizan los estudiantes de todo EE.UU., sólo el 2% de los alumnos de cuarto curso de Puerto Rico calificaron como competentes, la puntuación más alta jamás registrada en la isla, y el 0% de los alumnos de octavo curso lo fueron. Los estudiantes puertorriqueños no hacen la prueba NAEP de lectura porque aprenden en español, no en inglés, aunque los resultados compartidos por Ramos en una conferencia de prensa en 2022 mostraron que sólo el 1% de los estudiantes de tercer grado leían a nivel de grado.
Hay algunos esfuerzos alentadores. La Fundación Flamboyán ha liderado una coalición de 70 socios en toda la isla para mejorar la alfabetización de los niños de preescolar a tercer grado, entre otras cosas mediante el desarrollo profesional. La formación del profesorado a través del departamento de educación del territorio ha sido a menudo irregular u opcional.
La organización trabaja ahora en estrecha colaboración con la Universidad de Puerto Rico y, como parte de ese esfuerzo, supervisa el gasto de 3 millones de dólares en formación para la alfabetización. Aproximadamente 1.500 profesores de Puerto Rico (un tercio de los maestros de Kinder a 5º grado) han recibido esta rigurosa formación. Los educadores recibieron 500 dólares como incentivo por participar, además de libros para sus aulas y tres horas de formación continua. “Fueron muchas horas de calidad. No ha sido el método de ‘rociar (con un poco de agua) y rezar’”, dijo Silvestre. Ese esfuerzo continuará, según Ramos, que lo calificó de “muy eficaz”.
Una nueva prueba de lectura para alumnos de primero a tercer grado que la organización sin fines de lucro ayudó a diseñar mostró que entre los años escolares 2023 y 2024, la mayoría de los niños estaban por debajo del nivel del grado, pero hubo avances en los resultados en todos los grados. “Pero aún nos queda un largo camino por recorrer para que estos datos lleguen a los profesores a tiempo y de forma que puedan actuar en consecuencia”, dijo Silvestre.
Kristin Ehrgood, Directora General de la Fundación Flamboyán, afirma que es demasiado pronto para ver resultados espectaculares. “Es realmente difícil ver una tonelada de resultados positivos en un período tan corto de tiempo con la desconfianza significativa que se ha construido durante años”, dijo. Dijo que no estaban seguros de cómo la administración Trump podría trabajar o financiar el sistema educativo de Puerto Rico, pero que la administración Biden había construido una gran cantidad de buena voluntad. “Hay muchas oportunidades que podrían aprovecharse, si una nueva administración decide hacerlo”.
Otra señal esperanzadora es que la junta de supervisión, que fue muy protestada cuando se formó, ha reducido la deuda de la isla de 73.000 a 31.000 millones de dólares. Y el año pasado los miembros de la junta aumentaron el gasto en educación en un 3%. Mujica dijo que la junta se centra en asegurarse de que cualquier inversión se traduzca en mejores resultados para los estudiantes: “Nuestra opinión es que los recursos tienen que ir a las aulas”.
Betty A. Rosa, comisionada de educación y presidente de la Universidad del Estado de Nueva York y miembro de la Junta de Supervisión, afirmó que la inestabilidad educativa en Puerto Rico se debe a los cambios en el liderazgo. Cada nuevo líder se dedica a “reconstruir, reestructurar, reimaginar, elija la palabra que elija”, dijo. “No hay coherencia”. A diferencia de su cargo en el estado de Nueva York, el Secretario de Educación de Puerto Rico y otros cargos son nombramientos políticos. “Si tienes un gobierno permanente, aunque cambie el liderazgo, el trabajo continúa”.
Ramos, que vivió esta inestabilidad cuando el anterior gobernador pidió inesperadamente su dimisión en 2023, dijo que se reunió con McMahon, la nueva secretaria de Educación de EE.UU., en Washington, D.C., y que mantuvieron una “agradable conversación”. “Ella sabe de Puerto Rico, se preocupa por Puerto Rico y demostró total apoyo en la misión de Puerto Rico”, dijo. Dijo que McMahon quería que el DEPR ofreciera más clases bilingües, para exponer a más estudiantes al inglés. Queda por ver si habrá cambios en la otorgación de fondos o cualquier otra cosa. “Tenemos que ver lo que ocurre en las próximas semanas y meses y cómo esa visión y esa política podrían afectar a Puerto Rico”, dijo Ramos.
La Escuela de la Comunidad Jaime C. Rodríguez es una escuela Montessori de Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, que carecía de instalaciones deportivas para sus alumnos. Recientemente comenzó las obras de un centro deportivo polivalente gracias a los fondos federales otorgados por la administración del presidente Biden. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Ramos fue muy apreciado por los educadores durante su primera etapa como Secretario de Educación. También tendrá que tomar muchas decisiones, como ampliar las escuelas charter y cerrar las escuelas públicas tradicionales, ya que la matriculación en las escuelas públicas de la isla sigue disminuyendo vertiginosamente. En el pasado, ambas cuestiones provocaron protestas feroces y generalizadas.
Soto es realista y cree que la nueva administración tendrá “puntos de vista diferentes, tanto ideológica como políticamente”, pero confía en que el pueblo de Puerto Rico no quiera volver a la antigua forma de hacer las cosas. “Alguien dijo: ‘Ustedes sacaron al genio de la botella y va a ser difícil volver a ponerlo’ en lo que se refiere a un sistema escolar centrado en el estudiante”, dijo Soto.
Cardona, cuyos abuelos son oriundos de la isla, dijo que Puerto Rico había experimentado un “estancamiento académico” durante años. “No podemos aceptar que los estudiantes rindan menos de lo que sabemos que son capaces”, dijo a The Hechinger Report, justo antes de despedirse como máximo responsable de educación del país. “Empezamos el cambio; tiene que continuar.
La pequeña escuela de la directora Carabello, con 150 alumnos y 14 profesores, ha estado a punto de cerrarse ya tres veces, aunque en todas ellas se ha salvado en parte gracias al apoyo de la comunidad. Carabello confía en que Ramos, con quien ya ha trabajado anteriormente, cambie las cosas. “Conoce el sistema educativo”, afirma. “Es una persona brillante, abierta a escuchar”.
Pero las largas jornadas de los últimos años le han pasado factura. Suele estar en la escuela de 6:30 a.m. a 6:30 p.m. “Entras cuando anochece y te vas cuando anochece”, dice. Ha habido muchas plataformas nuevas que aprender y nuevos proyectos que poner en marcha. Quiere jubilarse, pero no puede permitírselo. Tras décadas en las que el gobierno local no financió suficientemente el sistema de pensiones, se recortaron los subsidios que compensaban el alto precio de los bienes y servicios en la isla y se congelaron los planes de pensiones.
Ahora, en lugar de jubilarse con el 75% de su salario, Carabello recibirá sólo el 50%, 2.195 dólares al mes. Tiene derecho a prestaciones de la Seguridad Social, pero no son suficientes para compensar la pensión perdida. “¿Quién puede vivir con 2.000 dólares en un mes? Nadie. Es demasiado duro. Y mi casa aún necesita 12 años más para pagarse”.
A Carabello, siempre tan fuerte y optimista con sus alumnos, se le saltaron las lágrimas. Pero es raro que se permita tiempo para pensar en sí misma. “Tengo una gran comunidad. Tengo grandes profesores y me siento feliz con lo que hago”, afirma.
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