Tag: Restore

  • Cornell inks $60M deal with Trump administration to restore funding

    Cornell inks $60M deal with Trump administration to restore funding

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    Dive Brief:

    • Cornell University on Friday struck a deal with the Trump administration, agreeing to pay $60 million and adhere to strict reporting conditions in exchange for having more than $250 million in federal funding reinstated. 
    • In addition to the financial payments, the Ivy League institution will submit expanded undergraduate admissions data to the federal government, and include the U.S. Department of Justice’s July guidance against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as “a training resource” for employees. Cornell’s president will provide regular compliance reports to the administration.
    • In turn, three federal agencies — the DOJ and U.S. departments of Education and Health and Human Services — agreed to close their civil rights investigations into the New York university. Cornell is the fifth university to publicly strike a deal with the Trump administration to restore federal funding.

    Dive Insight:

    Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff on Friday said the deal reverses costly federal funding cuts that caused significant disruption to the university.

    “The months of stop-work orders, grant terminations, and funding freezes have stalled cutting-edge research, upended lives and careers, and threatened the future of academic programs at Cornell,” he said in a statement. 

    Under the deal, Cornell will pay the federal government $30 million over three years. 

    It will pay an additional $30 million over the same period toward agriculture research programs that “directly benefit U.S. farmers through lower costs of production and enhanced efficiency.” Both the agreement and Kotlikoff’s statement emphasized Cornell’s history as a land-grant university.

    Kotlikoff noted that the bargain does not require Cornell to admit wrongdoing, and he said it does not turn over the university’s academic freedoms to the federal government. 

    As part of the deal, the university will report additional admissions data to the Education Department. Once a quarter through 2028, the university will submit undergraduate admissions disaggregated by students’ race, GPA, performance on standardized tests, and major. Much of the criteria align with a Trump administration proposal to dramatically expand the type of admissions data colleges must report.

    The university will also use the DOJ’s wide-ranging anti-DEI guidance as a training resource for faculty and staff. The document labels race-based scholarships and student resources dedicated to specific racial or ethnic groups as illegal and warns colleges they could lose federal grant funding over such practices.  

    Colleges could similarly lose funding if the DOJ decides they are using “facially neutral” criteria as proxies for federally protected characteristics, such as asking job applicants to demonstrate “cultural competence” as a means of assessing someone’s racial or ethnic background.

    The U.S. Department of Education released a similar document in February threatening federal funding over DEI practices. At the time, Kotlikoff called diversity a driver of Cornell’s excellence. The Education Department’s guidance has since been struck down as unconstitutional in federal court.

    On Friday, Cornell said it will continue to conduct an annual campus climate survey, including on the experience of students with shared Jewish ancestry. Questions will include whether students feel welcome on campus and safe to report antisemitism.

    Kotlikoff agreed to provide the Trump administration with quarterly reports demonstrating Cornell’s compliance.

    Cornell’s agreement shares some elements with that signed by the University of Virginia last month. The public flagship similarly agreed to comply with the DOJ’s anti-DEI guidance and provide quarterly compliance reports to the Trump administration. 

    And like Brown University, Cornell agreed to pay money into a cause seemingly unrelated to the charges the Trump administration levied against it — in Brown’s case, $50 million to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island.

    “Today’s deal is a positive outcome that illustrates the value of universities working with this administration,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a Friday statement.

    U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the Cornell deal is an example of the Trump administration forcing colleges to refocus “their attention on merit, rigor, and truth seeking — not ideology.”

    Kotlikoff instead called the deal a reaffirmation of “principles to which we have already independently and publicly committed” and noted that the university already conducts annual campus climate surveys.

    Cornell, he said, “looks forward to resuming the long and fruitful partnership with the federal government.”

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  • Federal judge declines to restore $1B in grants cut by NSF

    Federal judge declines to restore $1B in grants cut by NSF

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    Dive Brief:

    • A federal judge on Wednesday declined to restore more than $1 billion in research grants cut by the National Science Foundation over research related to diversity, equity and inclusion while a lawsuit against the agency goes forward.
    • In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb concluded that the court didn’t have the jurisdiction to temporarily restore the grants and that plaintiffs failed to show they would experience “irreparable harm” from the agency’s new anti-DEI policies while the case proceeds.
    • Cobb cited in part a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that universities and researchers facing mass federal agency cuts must pursue their monetary claims in a separate federal court that handles economic and contractual disputes with the U.S. government.

    Dive Insight:

    In April, NSF issued a new statement of priorities asserting that grant awards “should not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.”

    “Research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities,” the agency added. NSF also noted grants related to environmental justice and the study of disinformation would also fall short of the agency’s objectives under the Trump administration. 

    Mass cancellations of previously awarded grants followed. In June, a group of unions and higher education associations — including the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Association of University Professors — sued NSF. 

    They counted 1,600 canceled grants amounting to over $1 billion funding, including many that aimed at broadening participation of women, underrepresented groups and those with disabilities in scientific and technical fields. Commonly appearing typos and boilerplate language in many of the termination notices to researchers showed the mass, automatic nature of the cancellations. 

    “NSF afforded recipients of terminated grants no advance notice, and indeed no process whatsoever, before the terminations,” the complaint stated.

    Plaintiffs argued that NSF’s anti-DEI directive and cancellations violated the law as well as the constitutional principles of separation of powers and due process. Among other things, plaintiffs said the grants carried out NSF’s “statutory directive to support an increase in the participation of underrepresented populations in STEM fields, including women, minorities, and people with disabilities.”

    In her ruling Wednesday, Cobb, a Biden appointee, wrote that her court likely had jurisdiction to decide if NSF’s anti-DEI policies could be applied to future grants. But retroactively restoring the grants that had been canceled, as the plaintiffs had requested, would likely need to be handled by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

    Among other precedents, she cited last month’s Supreme Court ruling in a case against the National Institutes of Health over similar DEI-related grant cancellations at that agency. While the top court declined to block a district court’s order that struck down the NIH’s anti-DEI guidance, it said the plaintiffs must seek relief for the canceled grants in federal claims court.

    Critics of the decision — including justices in the liberal minority — said that the ruling would add new complications and delays while research projects and laboratories suffer. 

    Cobb further concluded that plaintiffs’ argument that their constitutional rights were violated was unlikely to succeed, finding that their claims were instead statutory in nature. There again Cobb cited a recent case against the Trump administration, this one brought by the Global Health Council over mass cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

    Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit, called Cobb’s decision not to block NSF’s terminations disappointing and “a loss for American innovation and excellence.”

    “This case is not over and we are eager to defend the important role the NSF plays in the daily lives of Americans,” the group said in a statement.

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  • SCOTUS Says NIH Doesn’t Have to Restore Canceled Grants

    SCOTUS Says NIH Doesn’t Have to Restore Canceled Grants

    The National Institutes of Health has canceled hundreds of grants that explore topics the Trump administration dislikes.

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    The United States Supreme Court is allowing the National Institutes of Health to cut nearly $800 million in grants, though it left the door open for the researchers to seek relief elsewhere.

    In a 5-to-4 decision issued Thursday, the court paused a Massachusetts district court judge’s June decision to reinstate grants that were terminated because they didn’t align with the NIH’s new ideological priorities. Most of the canceled grants mentioned diversity, equity and inclusion goals; gender identity; COVID; and other topics the Trump administration has banned funding for. The district judge, in ruling against the administration, said he’d “never seen racial discrimination by the government like this.”

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the district court “likely lacked jurisdiction to hear challenges to the grant terminations, which belong in the Court of Federal Claims,” with which Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr., Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh agreed.

    “The reason is straightforward,” Kavanaugh wrote. “The core of plaintiffs’ suit alleges that the government unlawfully terminated their grants. That is a breach of contract claim. And under the Tucker Act, such claims must be brought in the Court of Federal Claims, not federal district court.”

    The court’s emergency order came after more than a dozen Democratic attorneys general and groups representing university researchers challenged the terminations in federal court.

    “We are very disappointed by the Supreme Court’s ruling that our challenge to the sweeping termination of hundreds of critical biomedical research grants likely belongs in the Court of Federal Claims,” the American Civil Liberties Union, which is part of the legal team that is suing the NIH over the grant terminations, wrote in a statement Thursday evening. “This decision is a significant setback for public health. We are assessing our options but will work diligently to ensure that these unlawfully terminated grants continue to be restored.”

    Earlier this month, higher education associations and others urged the court to uphold the district court’s order, arguing that the terminations have “squandered” government resources and halted potentially lifesaving research.

    “The magnitude of NIH’s recent actions is unprecedented, and the agency’s abrupt shift from its longstanding commitments to scientific advancement has thrown the research community into disarray,” the groups wrote in an Aug. 1 brief. “This seismic shock to the NIH research landscape has had immediate and devastating effects, and granting a stay here will ensure that the reverberations will be felt for years to come.”

    Chief Justice John Roberts, who often sides with the conservative justices, joined liberal justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in a dissent.

    “By today’s order, an evenly divided Court neuters judicial review of grant terminations by sending plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief,” Jackson wrote. “Neither party to the case suggested this convoluted procedural outcome, and no prior court has held that the law requires it.”

    However, Barrett joined Roberts, Jackson, Sotomayor and Kagan in agreeing that the district court can review NIH’s reasoning for the terminations, and the justices kept in place a court order blocking the guidance that led to cancellations.

    “It is important to note that the Supreme Court declined to stay the District Court’s conclusion that the NIH’s directives were unreasonable and unlawful,” the ACLU said in a statement. “This means that NIH cannot terminate any research studies based on these unlawful directives.”

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  • Judge orders NSF to restore cut funding to UCLA

    Judge orders NSF to restore cut funding to UCLA

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    Dive Brief:

    • A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the National Science Foundation to restore potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research grants to the University of California. 
    • Researchers at the university system in June brought a class-action lawsuit against NSF and other federal agencies over their termination of $324 million in funding, and quickly won a temporary injunction restoring the grants.
    • This week, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin concluded NSF violated that order by cutting funding to the University of California, Los Angeles in late July over allegations related to antisemitism and other concerns. An NSF spokesperson said in an email Wednesday the agency has reinstated UCLA’s funding in response to the order.

    Dive Insight:

    On June 4, several University of California researchers sued President Donald Trump and his administration over mass cuts to research funding spearheaded by the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. 

    Plaintiffs argued that the funding cuts violated key constitutional principles, including separation of powers, freedom of speech and right to due process, in addition to multiple federal statutes. 

    “Before President Trump took office, federal agency grant making proceeded under the authority of Congress, which created agencies through its constitutionally assigned exclusive legislative power, and appropriated taxpayer funds for specific public purposes that the agencies were tasked to execute,” the researchers said in their complaint.

    They added that after taking office, Trump “attempted to seize direct control of federal agencies by bypassing Congress and upending the statutory and regulatory system under which federal agencies have historically and legally operated.”

    Later that month, Lin concluded that the researchers would likely win their case on its merits and issued a preliminary injunction directing the Trump administration to restore terminated funding to University of California institutions and barring agencies from cutting their funding without grant-specific explanations.

    But in late July, NSF “indefinitely suspended” numerous grants to UCLA, as attorneys for the plaintiffs noted in court filings. In the suspension notices, the agency cited allegations of widespread campus antisemitism and “illegal race-based preferences in admissions” — claims now common in the administration’s attacks on higher education. 

    The University of California system last week entered negotiations with the Trump administration in an effort to restore more than half a billion dollars in total research funding. When announcing the talks, UC President James Milliken called the UCLA cuts “a death knell for innovative work” that “do nothing to address antisemitism.”

    The funding cuts came shortly after the U.S. Department of Justice alleged UCLA had violated civil rights law by failing to adequately address antisemitism.

    The Los Angeles Times put the figure of NSF’s cut funding to UCLA specifically at $300 million. As one UCLA professor recounted in court papers filed Monday, the indefinite suspension orders had immediate and permanent effects, including stalled research and the loss of a potential graduate student worker to another project. 

    NSF argued in court that its indefinite suspensions did not violate Lin’s earlier injunction, which the agency said applied to grant terminations. But in Tuesday’s order, Lin concluded that the two terms were equivalent in practice. 

    “NSF may have re-labeled its action a ‘suspension,’ but it is a distinction without a difference in this case,” Lin wrote. “After all, a terminated grant can be reinstated, just as a suspension can be ‘lifted.’ And a suspension, if it is of indefinite length, is functionally identical to a termination from the researcher’s perspective.”

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  • Higher ed groups ask Supreme Court to preserve lower court order to restore NIH grants

    Higher ed groups ask Supreme Court to preserve lower court order to restore NIH grants

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    Dive Brief: 

    • The American Council on Education and other major higher education associations are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve a lower court’s ruling that ordered the National Institutes of Health to reinstate funding for hundreds of canceled grants. 
    • In June, a federal judge vacated NIH directives to nix grant funding for research related to diversity, equity and inclusion. The Trump administration quickly appealed the decision and asked the Supreme Court in July to pause the lower court’s order while an appeals court considers the case. 
    • Eight higher ed groups — including ACE, the Association of American Universities and the Association of American Medical Colleges — argued in legal filings Friday that allowing NIH to cancel the grants again would destabilize the nation’s biomedical research and waste government funding on projects forced to stop midstream. 

    Dive Insight: 

    President Donald Trump signed several executive orders shortly after beginning his second term that prompted the NIH cancellations. One ordered federal agencies to terminate all “equity-related” grants “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” and another directed them to end federal funding for “gender ideology,” which the administration defined as the idea that gender exists on a spectrum. 

    Civil rights groups have noted that anti-LGBT groups use the term “gender ideology” to cast being transgender as a political movement rather than a fundamental identity. And the American Medical Association has said that “trans and non-binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression.”

    The Trump administration canceled vast sums of scientific research funding following those orders. In NIH’s case, the agency often informed researchers of the terminations by saying their work “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

    The moves quickly drew legal challenges. 

    Researchers and unions argued in an April lawsuit that the move was “a reckless and illegal purge to stamp out NIH-funded research that addresses topics and populations that they disfavor.” A coalition of states also filed a lawsuit that month challenging the terminations. 

    U.S. District Judge William Young agreed with their arguments, ordering NIH in June to restore the plaintiff’s canceled grants. According to a Monday press release from ACE, the order impacted roughly 1,200 grants — though that is only a fraction of the awards that the agency has terminated.

    Since the order only covered the plaintiffs’ grants, ACE and other higher ed groups have also asked NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, in a July 29 letter, to reinstate the other awards canceled under the anti-DEI directives —  “in the spirit of fairness and consistency.” 

    The Trump administration has appealed Young’s decision. So far, federal officials have asked both Young and the appellate court to block the order to reinstate the grants while the appeals process plays out. Both rejected that request. 

    Then last month, the Trump administration took it to the Supreme Court. 

    The higher education groups noted in their legal filings that grant applications undergo rigorous scientific review before NIH accepts them. 

    “In recent months, however, the Executive Branch has jettisoned NIH’s scientific decisionmaking via agencywide directives that mandated the termination en masse of NIH grants deemed related to disfavored political topics,” their Friday filing argued. 

    If those terminations are allowed to stand during the appeals process, critical medical research into diseases like Alzheimer’s and diabetes will be ground to a halt, they said. The groups noted some researchers have had to abandon projects halfway through and lay off staff and students with knowledge of the work. 

    The Trump administration, meanwhile, has argued to the Supreme Court that Young didn’t have jurisdiction to order NIH to reinstate the grants, arguing instead that the matter should proceed in the Court of Federal Claims. In its emergency request, it pointed to the Supreme Court’s April ruling that allowed the U.S. Department of Education to maintain a freeze on $65 million in canceled grant funding for teacher training. 

    In that ruling, the court’s unsigned majority opinion said the government likely wouldn’t be able to recover the funding once disbursed and added that the grant recipients would not “suffer irreparable harm” if a lower court’s order to reinstate the grants was put on hold during the appeals process. 

    The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to make a similar ruling in the NIH case.

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  • Researchers “Cautiously Optimistic” NIH Will Restore Grants

    Researchers “Cautiously Optimistic” NIH Will Restore Grants

    Months after individual researchers, advocacy groups and a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general filed two lawsuits against the National Institutes of Health for terminating hundreds of active research grants misaligned with the Trump administration’s ideologies, some scientists are hopeful that the agency will soon restore the grants and allow them to resume their research.

    Last week, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the NIH to restore the roughly 900 grants named in the lawsuits, including many focused on studying vaccine hesitancy, LGBTQ+ health and diversity, equity and inclusion in the medical field. U.S. District Judge William Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, ruled the terminations void and unlawful, stating during a hearing that in all his years on the bench he’d “never seen” discrimination by the government to this extent.

    Although Science reported Thursday morning that the NIH has internally communicated plans to restore those grants “as soon as practicable”—and also cease further grant terminations—researchers say they still don’t know when they can expect to get the money they were promised.

    “Since the ruling, we are really encouraged,” said Heidi Moseson, a plaintiff in one of the cases and a senior researcher at Ibis Reproductive Health. “But we haven’t heard anything from the NIH about our grants being reinstated, and we don’t have a window into what that process looks like.”

    Back in March, Moseson received a letter from the agency terminating her grant, which was aimed at improving the accuracy of data collected in sexual and reproductive health research for all people, including those who identify as transgender and gender diverse. The award “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” the letter said. “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.”

    The NIH did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment on its specific plans for restoring the terminated grants.

    Appeal Anxiety

    Moseson said each week that goes by with the grant on pause “is another week where people are not being appropriately screened into clinical care and research that would be relevant for their bodies, leading to missed preventative care or, conversely, unnecessary preventive care.”

    While her team is ready to resume their research as soon as the NIH restores the funding in accordance with the judge’s ruling, she’s bracing for further disruptions ahead, depending on what happens with the appeals process.

    On Monday, the NIH filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. It also filed a motion to stay the judge’s order to restore the grants while pending the appeal, but Young denied that motion on Tuesday, noting that a stay “would cause irreparable harm to the plaintiffs.”

    “This is a case in equity concerning health research already bought and paid for by the Congress of the United States through funds appropriated for expenditure and properly allocated during this fiscal year,” the judge wrote. “Even a day’s delay further destroys the unmistakable legislative purpose from its accomplishment.”

    The following day, Michelle Bulls, a senior NIH official who oversees extramural funding, told staffers in an email that the agency must restore funding for the hundreds of projects identified by the plaintiffs, Science reported. “Please proceed with taking action on this request as part of the first phase of our compliance with the court’s judgment,” Bulls wrote, noting that “additional information is forthcoming.”

    Noam Ross, executive director at rOpenSci, a nonprofit that supports reproducible open research, and co-founder of the website Grant Watch, which is tracking grant terminations, put out a call for information on LinkedIn Wednesday about any grants the NIH has restored. But he told Inside Higher Ed Thursday afternoon that he has yet to receive any verified reports of restored NIH grants.

    Shalini Goel Agarwal, counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit focused on combating perceived authoritarian threats, and one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said Thursday morning that she also had not yet heard of any researchers getting grant money the NIH previously terminated.

    Though it’s not clear what could come of the government’s effort to appeal Young’s ruling, “at this moment the judge’s order is in effect and the NIH should be returning money to the researchers whose grants were terminated,” she said. “NIH should right now be undoing the effects of its directives.”

    ‘Cautiously Optimistic’

    Katie Edwards, a social work professor at the University of Michigan and a plaintiff in one of the cases, said that as of Thursday afternoon, she had yet to receive any communication from the NIH about its plans to restore her numerous multiyear grants.

    Edwards, whose research focuses on Indigenous and LGBTQ+ youth, said that delaying the grants much longer will undermine the research she’s already started, to the detriment of public health research.

    “For some of our studies, it’s just a matter of weeks before they’ll be really hard if not impossible to restart. I’m feeling a lot of anxiety,” she said. “We’re in a waiting phase, but I’m trying to be cautiously optimistic.”

    Despite the uncertainty of what’s ahead, she did get some reassuring news from the NIH on Thursday. The agency notified her that it approved her bid for a new three-year, $710,000 grant to develop and evaluate a self-defense program for adult women survivors of sexual violence. Like many other applications for new grants, the application had been in limbo for months. “So something (good??) is going on there!” she said in an email.

    Other cases moving through the courts also look promising for federally funded researchers eager to get their grants restored.

    On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities had also unlawfully terminated grants that had already been awarded to researchers in the University of California’s 10-campus system. The judge, a Biden appointee, ordered the government to restore them, adding that she is weighing extending the order to 13 other federal agencies, including the NIH.

    “Many of the cases that are making their way through the courts share claims that are being made about the illegality of the federal government’s actions,” said Olga Akselrod, counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in one of the suits against the NIH. “Any time we have a win in one of these cases it’s an important statement of the applicable law, and that’s relevant for all of the cases that are proceeding.”

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  • Using Technology to Restore Trust in Testing

    Using Technology to Restore Trust in Testing

    • Francesca Woodward is Group Managing Director for English at Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

    Anyone who has ever taken English language tests to advance in their studies or work knows how important it is to have confidence in their accuracy, fairness and transparency. 

    Trust is fundamental to English proficiency tests. But at a time of digital disruption, with remote testing on the rise and AI tools evolving rapidly, the integrity of English language testing is under pressure.

    Applied proportionally and ethically, technology can boost our trust in the exam process –adapting flexibly to test-takers’ skill levels, for instance, or allowing quicker marking and delivery of results. The indiscriminate use of technology, however, is likely to have unintended and undesirable consequences.

    Technology is not the problem. Overreliance on technology can be. A case in point is the shift to remote language testing that removes substantial human supervision from the process.

    During the pandemic, many educational institutions and test providers were forced to move to online-only delivery. Universities and employers adapted to the exceptional circumstances by recognising results from some of those newer and untried providers.

    The consequences of rushed digital adoption are becoming clear. Students arriving at UK universities after passing newer at-home tests have been found to be poorly equipped, relative to their peers – and more prone to academic misconduct. Students were simply not being set up to succeed.

    Some new at-home tests have since been de-recognised by universities amid reports that they have enabled fraud in the UK. Elsewhere, students have been paying proxies to sit online exams remotely. Online, videos explaining how to cheat on some of the newer tests have become ubiquitous.

    So how can universities mitigate against these risks, while ensuring that genuine test-takers thrive academically?

    When it comes to teaching and learning a language – as well as assessing a learner’s proficiency – human expertise cannot be replaced. This is clear to experts – including researchers at Cambridge, which has been delivering innovation in language learning and testing for more than a century. 

    Cambridge is one of the forces behind IELTS, the world’s most trusted English test. We also deliver Cambridge English Qualifications, Linguaskill and other major assessments. Our experience tells us that people must play a critical role at every step of teaching, assessment and qualification.

    While some may be excited by the prospect of an “AI-first” model of testing, we should pursue the best of both worlds – human oversight prioritised and empowered by AI. This means, for instance, human-proctored tests delivered in test centres that use tried and proven tech tools.

    In language testing – particularly high-stakes language testing, such as for university or immigration purposes – one size does not fit all. While an online test taken at home may be suitable and even secure for some situations for some learners, others prefer or need to be assessed in test centres, where help is on hand and the technology can be consistently relied upon. For test-takers and universities, choice and flexibility are crucial.

    Cambridge has been using and experimenting with AI for decades. We know in some circumstances that AI can be transformative in improving users’ experience. For the highest stakes assessments, innovation alone is no alternative to real human teaching, learning and understanding. And the higher the stakes, the more important human oversight becomes.

    The sector must reaffirm its commitment to quality, rigour and fairness in English language testing. This means resisting shortcuts and challenging providers that are all too ready to compromise on standards. It means investing in human expertise. It means using technology to enhance, not undermine, trust.

    This is not the time to “move fast and break things”. Every test provider, every university and every policymaker must play their part.

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  • Will Trump’s school discipline order drive wider disparities or ‘restore common sense’?

    Will Trump’s school discipline order drive wider disparities or ‘restore common sense’?

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    A new White House executive order calling for “common sense” in school discipline policies by removing practices based on “discriminatory equity ideology” will drive even wider racial disparities in discipline than currently exist, critics say.

    Rather than being common sense, the directive would “permit school discipline practices that target and punish students of color and students with disabilities at disproportionate rates,” said Denise Forte, president and CEO of EdTrust, in a statement Thursday, a day after President Donald Trump signed the order. EdTrust, a nonprofit, works with school systems to close opportunity gaps for students of color and students from low-income backgrounds.

    Additionally, EdTrust in a separate Thursday statement to K-12 Dive said, “When the dust settles from the education chaos being created by Trump administration, students — especially students from low-income backgrounds, students of color, students with disabilities, English learners, and students in rural areas — will be worse off, and the Trump administration wants to make sure we don’t have the data and research to prove it.”

    Dan Losen, senior director of education at the National Center for Youth Law, said the Trump administration is creating a false dichotomy that schools either need harsh discipline practices or they deal with out-of-control and unsafe student behaviors.

    The reality, Losen said, is that well-trained educators and administrators have many approaches to reducing student misconduct that are evidence-based. “Many schools and superintendents are aware that the best antidote to violence, to drug involvement, to gang involvement, is to try to find ways to keep more kids in school,” Losen said.

    Closing racial gaps in school discipline has been a priority at the local, state and national levels for many years. Schools have also shunned strict zero-tolerance discipline policies in favor of responsive and restorative practices and other approaches that help students examine their behavior and make amends to those harmed. 

    Supporters of alternatives to suspending or expelling students — or what’s called “exclusionary discipline” — say those different approaches help keep students connected to school and reduce the school-to-prison pipeline. They also note that alternative strategies help reduce racial disparities in school discipline. 

    The U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection found that even though Black students represented 15% of K-12 student enrollment in the 2021-22 school year, they accounted for 19% of students who were secluded and 26% who were physically restrained. And while Black children accounted for 18% of preschool enrollment, 38% received one or more out-of-school suspensions, and 33% were expelled. 

    In the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, schools have reported an uptick in mental health and disruptive behaviors in students. In fact, 68% of respondents said behavioral disruptions have increased since the 2019-20 school year in an EAB survey of school employees published in 2023.

    At the same time, schools said they lack the funding and staffing to adequately address students’ mental health needs. Furthermore a 2024 Rand Corp. report found that challenging student behaviors contribute to teacher burnout.

    On Thursday, the departments of Education, Homeland Security, Justice, and Health and Human Services issued a resource for K-12 threat assessment practices to help prevent school violence and create a safe school environment. 

    The order’s expectations

    Student discipline policies are set at the school or district level. However, the federal government can issue guidance and hold schools accountable for discriminatory practices.

    The executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Wednesday lays out a timeline of expectations for U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon. In one month, McMahon, along with the U.S. attorney general, is to issue school discipline guidance that reminds districts and states of their obligations under Title VI to protect students against racial discrimination. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in federally funded programs.

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  • Judge Orders Education Dept. to Restore Teacher Prep Grants

    Judge Orders Education Dept. to Restore Teacher Prep Grants

    A federal judge in Maryland this week ordered the U.S. Department of Education to reinstate numerous grants that support teacher-preparation programs.

    The department canceled the $600 million in grants last month as part of a wider effort to slash federal funding and eliminate programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. In response, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the National Center for Teacher Residencies and the Maryland Association of Colleges for Teacher Education challenged the cuts, arguing in a lawsuit that the grant terminations were illegal.

    On Monday, U.S District Judge Julie Rubin ordered the department to restore funding for the Supporting Effective Educator Development program, the Teacher Quality Partnership program and the Teacher and School Leader incentive program within five business days. That order comes after a federal judge last week directed the department to reinstate canceled grants in eight states.

    “We are thrilled that the court has ruled in favor of preserving funding for TQP, SEED, and TSL grants, which have a transformative impact on our nation’s education system,” AACTE president and CEO Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy said in a news release.

    The order also blocks the department from terminating any other TQP, SEED or TSL grant awards “in a manner this court has determined is likely unlawful as violative of the Administrative Procedure Act,” which instructs courts to “hold unlawful and set aside final agency actions” deemed “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

    The judge asked both the department and the plaintiffs to file a status report within seven business days showing compliance with the order.

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