Tag: Trump

  • How Can Unions Defend Worker Power Under Trump 2.0? (Labor Notes)

    How Can Unions Defend Worker Power Under Trump 2.0? (Labor Notes)

    In the December issue: 

    New York’s Working Class Elects a Movement Mayor, by Luis Feliz Leon
    Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and the Democratic nominee, will be New York City’s next mayor, after trouncing former Governor Andrew Cuomo in a primary and general election double whammy. Volunteers were galvanized by Mamdani’s relentless focus on the affordability crisis and principled stand against Israel’s unfolding genocide in Gaza.

    Canadian Postal Workers Strike Again, by Danielle Smith
    Canadian postal workers are back on strike—again—as they fight to save a vital public service. “By staying on the job and continuing to wait for demoralizing offers, we show that we accept this, we’re not going to fight. So we decided we’re going out,” said Nova Scotia letter carrier Basia Sokal. 

    Indiana Casino Dealers Are Bringing Back the Recognition Strike, by Alexandra Bradbury
    There are no clocks in a casino, so the dealers all set their phone alarms for noon. Everyone was a bundle of nerves. Before work, a couple of people threw up.

    But when the cacophony of alarms sounded, everyone lifted their hands in the air, slammed down the lids on their games of baccarat, blackjack, craps, and roulette, and announced they were on strike. “It was more powerful than anything I’ve ever felt in my life,” said dealer Tera Arnold. “I had goosebumps head to toe.”

    PLUS: Articles published so far in our Roundtable Series: How Can Unions Defend Worker Power Under Trump 2.0?, a Stewards’ Corner on welcoming immigrant members into the union, and more! 

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  • Northwestern Settles With Trump Administration

    Northwestern Settles With Trump Administration

    Northwestern University is the sixth to cut a deal with the administration.

    pabradyphoto/Getty Images

    Northwestern University has reached an agreement with the Trump administration to restore federal research funding. The university will pay the federal government $75 million and enact various changes. In return, the federal government will lift a freeze on millions in research funding.

    As part of the settlement, Northwestern agreed to adhere to federal antidiscrimination laws and to not give preferences in admissions, scholarships, hiring or promotion that are based on race, color or national origin; to maintain clear free speech policies; and to mandate antisemitism training for all students, faculty and staff. University officials will also reverse a 2024 deal made with pro-Palestinian student protesters in which Northwestern agreed to provide more support for Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African students and greater financial transparency.

    The settlement also bars Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine from performing “hormonal interventions and transgender surgeries” on minor patients, according to language in the agreement. However, university officials have said that does not reflect a change in practice. Instead the agreement merely codifies that Northwestern will not provide such services.

    Northwestern is now the sixth university to strike a deal with the Trump administration, following settlements with the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Virginia and Cornell University. Of those settlements, Northwestern has the second-highest financial payout at $75 million, trailing only Columbia, which agreed to pay $221 million. Unlike the Brown and Cornell settlements, all of the money will go directly to U.S. government.

    A Path Forward

    Northwestern leadership cast the settlement as a win, despite the $75 million payout.

    “It was the best and most certain method to restore our federal funding both now and in the future,” interim president Henry Bienen said in a video message following the settlement.

    The Trump administration froze $790 million in federal research funding earlier this year amid concerns about alleged antisemitism on campus following pro-Palestinian demonstrations in 2024. Last year, at the height of the protests, then-president Michael Schill struck a deal with pro-Palestinian students, known as the Dearing Meadow agreement, which has now been scuttled. That deal was heavily scrutinized by Congress when Schill testified in May 2024. (Schill would later resign, stepping down this fall amid the standoff over frozen federal research funding.)

    Though Harvard University brought a successful lawsuit against the federal government, prompting a judge to rule in July that a similar funding freeze there was illegal, Northwestern aimed to avoid a costly and protracted legal battle in an effort to quickly restore research dollars.

    Bienen argued in the video that “suing would have cost time and money that we believe the university could not risk” and the settlement was “the best path forward for us to be able to turn the page.” Despite an endowment valued at more than $14 billion, Bienen said, the university could not afford to sustain its research mission on its own. Had that freeze continued, Bienen said it would “gut our labs, drive away faculty, and set back entire fields of discovery.”

    Northwestern, like other wealthy institutions hit with federal funding freezes, has made a number of cost-cutting moves as it navigated sudden financial challenges related to the research enterprise. Earlier this year Northwestern eliminated 425 jobs as part of overall budget reductions.

    Now the federal funding spigot is set to be turned back on, though officials noted on the university website that “some terminated grants will not be reinstated, specifically those the federal government has cut” and that “these decisions were not specific to Northwestern.”

    The university did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement.

    Northwestern also answered a question that has been hanging over numerous other universities in its settlement communications, stating that it will not sign the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Originally floated to only a few universities before it was opened to all, the compact would provide preferential treatment in federal funding in return for various changes, many of which experts warn would undermine academic freedom. So far, few institutions have expressed interest in the proposal.

    A Landmark Deal

    Federal officials also hailed the settlement with Northwestern as a win.

    “Universities that receive federal funding have a responsibility to comply with the law, including protecting against racial discrimination and antisemitism,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a news release. “We appreciate the significant improvements Northwestern has made and are gratified to reach an agreement that safeguards of rights [sic] of all the university’s applicants, students, and employees.”

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the settlement a landmark deal.

    “The deal cements policy changes that ‘will protect students and other members of the campus from harassment and discrimination,’ and it recommits the school to merit-based hiring and admissions. The reforms reflect bold leadership at Northwestern, and they are a roadmap for institutional leaders around the country that will help rebuild public trust in our colleges and universities,” McMahon said in the DOJ news release that announced the settlement.

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  • Fewer New International Students Enroll at U.S. Colleges Amid Trump Restrictions – The 74

    Fewer New International Students Enroll at U.S. Colleges Amid Trump Restrictions – The 74


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    New international students enrolling at U.S. colleges declined sharply this fall, a concerning development for universities that rely on those students for research, tuition revenue and the diversity they bring to campus culture. It could, however, create more space for U.S. residents at those campuses.

    Enrollments of new international students were down 17% compared to fall 2024, according to a report released Monday by the Institute of International Education, which surveyed more than 800 colleges about their fall 2025 enrollments. The institute, a nonprofit organization based in New York, publishes an annual report that examines the enrollment of international students. 

    The fall data was not broken down by state, so the scale of decline in California is unclear. At USC, which enrolls more international students than any other California college, overall enrollment of international students is down 3% this fall, according to a campus spokesperson. That includes returning and first-time students, so the drop could be much higher for new arrivals. USC this fall enrolls about 12,000 international students, or 26% of its total student population, according to the college. About half of those students are from China. 

    The declines come amid a changing landscape for international students under the Trump administration, which has delayed visa processing, created travel restrictions and pressured some campuses to recruit and admit fewer students from other countries. The colleges surveyed this fall by the institute cited visa application concerns and travel restrictions as top factors in the decline. 

    “We are confronting major headwinds with what I would say are poor policy decisions that the administration is taking. And that is creating a climate for international students that signals that you’re not welcome here,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, a nonprofit for international education and exchange.

    President Donald Trump has said that he wants to lower the number of international students at U.S. colleges to leave more room at those campuses for U.S. students. “It’s too much because we have Americans that want to go there and to other places, and they can’t go there,” he said earlier this year, referencing the number of international students at Harvard and other universities.

    For the full 2024-25 academic year, new international student enrollments were down by 7%, driven by a 15% drop among new international graduate students, compared to 2023-24. However, the number of new undergraduates was up by 5%. Trump took office in January, just before the start of the spring semester at most colleges. 

    In the U.S., students from India were the largest group of international students, accounting for 30.8% of all international students, followed by students from China, with 22.6% of enrollments.

    In the 2024-25 academic year in California, the largest share of international students were from China, and they made up 35.4% of enrollments, followed by students from India at 20.9%. Overall enrollment of international students in California was down 1.1% in 2024-25. 

    USC enrolled the most international students of any California university, followed by four University of California campuses: Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego and Irvine. According to the report, the total number of enrolled international students were: 12,020 at Berkeley, 10,769 at UCLA, 10,545 at San Diego, and 7,638 at Irvine.

    Across the state, international students make up about 7% of enrollments at four-year colleges, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. They make up a large share of graduate students, accounting for 31% of graduate students at UC campuses, 15% at private nonprofit universities, and 12% at California State University campuses. 

    Freya Vijay, 20, a third-year student from Canada studying business administration at USC, said she always planned to come to the United States for college. 

    “In terms of business and just the economy, you have Wall Street, you have New York, Chicago, L.A., and San Francisco, all these big cities that dominate what’s going on in the world,” she said. “So immediately, in terms of opportunity, my mind was set on the States.” 

    In addition to visa and travel restrictions, the Trump administration has directly requested — or threatened, as some have called it — California campuses to limit enrollments of international students. The administration’s compact offer to USC last month would have forced the university to cap international enrollment at 15% for undergraduates and limit enrollment from any one country to 5%.

    USC has since rejected the compact, which also would have required the university to make a number of other changes, including committing to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” 

    Separately, in a settlement proposal to UCLA, the Trump administration calls on the campus to ensure that “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” are not admitted. UCLA is still in negotiations with the administration and has not yet reached a deal. The Trump administration has charged the campus with antisemitism and civil rights violations. 

    Even amid the turmoil, experts say they expect California universities to continue recruiting international students. Julie Posselt, a professor of education at USC’s Rossier School of Education, noted that at research universities, much of the research is being carried out by international graduate students. 

    “Especially in STEM fields, international students are really central to the research functions of universities,” Posselt said. “Enrolling international students is not optional. It is absolutely a part of the fabric of what makes universities great.” 

    On top of that, colleges have financial incentives to enroll international students. That’s especially true at UC campuses, which charge international students and students from other states much higher rates of tuition than California residents. In the 2026-27 academic year, new international and out-of-state undergraduates at UC will pay nearly $52,000 in tuition, more than triple what in-state students will be charged. Nonresidents in graduate programs also generally pay higher rates than residents.

    Facing pressure from the state Legislature to make more room for California residents, UC in 2017 passed a policy to cap nonresident enrollment at 18%, with a higher percentage allowed for campuses that were already above that mark. But the system still gets significant tuition revenue from nonresidents, including international students, which UC says supports the system’s core operations and helps to lower the cost of attendance for California residents.  

    In a Nov. 10 interview with Fox News, Trump seemed to acknowledge the importance of international students, saying colleges might “go out of business” without them.

    “You don’t want to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country — destroy our entire university and college system — I don’t want to do that,” he said. 

    International students also bring diverse perspectives and “a richness to the campus culture,” said Stett Holbrook, a spokesperson for the University of California system. “That’s something we really appreciate and try to cultivate.”

    At USC, the presence of international students from more than 130 countries means there are “innumerable opportunities at USC to encounter different perspectives” and “experience new cultures,” a spokesperson said in a statement. 

    Vijay, the USC student from Canada, said she regularly boasts about USC to friends, adding that she hopes attending remains an option for other international students. 

    “I always think it’s just such a great opportunity and that no international student should ever take it for granted,” she said. “I wish other internationals could experience it.”

    This story was originally published on EdSource.


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  • St. Augustine’s expresses interest in Trump compact — with big caveats

    St. Augustine’s expresses interest in Trump compact — with big caveats

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    Dive Brief:

    • Saint Augustine’s University told the U.S. Department of Education that it wants to “participate in and help shape” the Trump administration’s proposed compact that seeks to control a range of academic and operational policies in exchange for preferential access to federal funding.
    • However, leaders from the historically Black institution caveated their support over concerns that aspects of the compact as written “risk unintended consequences that would impede our ability to serve students effectively.”
    • “Despite these concerns, Saint Augustine’s University remains eager to participate as a constructive partner and early-engagement institution,” the leaders of the private North Carolina university said in a letter obtained by Fox News. They requested “a dialogue process” with the Education Department to facilitate “mission-sensitive accommodations” for HBCUs.

    Dive Insight:

    Last month, the Trump administration offered nine high-profile research colleges a deal — priority for federal grants in exchange for enacting a wide range of policies aligning with the president’s higher education goals.

    Some of the compact’s terms, while unprecedented, are straightforward, such as freezing tuition rates for five years, requiring standardized testing for undergraduate applicants, and capping international students’ share of undergraduate enrollment at 15%. 

    Others go beyond cut-and-dry policy changes, such as publicly auditing the viewpoints of employees and students and potentially changing or ending campus units that purposefully “punish” or “belittle” conservative ideas.

    Seven of the initially invited colleges rejected the deal, and, as of Thursday afternoon, the remaining two have yet to publicly accept or decline the offer.

    But a few colleges have sought to take their place after President Donald Trump appeared to open the compact offer to all higher ed institutions. 

    Saint Augustine’s letter makes it the third college — and the first HBCU — to publicly express interest in the bargain.

    The New College of Florida — in a move in line with its conservative makeover under Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — became the first college to publicly volunteer to sign the compact on Oct. 27. The following day, Valley Forge Military College offered to accept the deal as well, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

    But unlike New College and the military college, Saint Augustine’s did not give the proposed compact a full-throated endorsement.

    Neither the Education Department nor the university responded to questions Thursday.

    Verjanis Peoples, the university’s newly appointed interim president, and Sophie Gibson, chair of its board of trustees, warned that the compact as written is “not compatible with the statutory mission and federal mandate under which HBCUs operate.”

    “Because our mission is not ornamental but foundational, we cannot implement requirements that would directly conflict with our identity as a Historically Black University or undermine our ability to serve the populations for whom we were created,” they wrote in their letter, which Fox News reported as being sent to the Education Department on Wednesday.

    Peoples and Gibson cited a handful of the compact’s provisions, including one requiring signatories to not consider race, sex, religion and other characteristics “explicitly or implicitly” in admissions or financial aid. 

    The pair said the restriction, “while well intentioned,” conflicts with Title III of the Higher Education Act, which in part provides colleges grant funding and establishes a program meant to strengthen HBCUs. The Trump administration’s proposed deal would also run contrary to “the explicit purpose of HBCUs to expand access for Black students and historically marginalized communities,” they said.

    The compact said it would grant exceptions for religious and single-sex institutions to limit admissions based on religious belief and sex, respectively, but did not address HBCUs.

    Other elements of the Trump administration’s proposal could also hinder HBCUs, Peoples and Gibson said. 

    These colleges typically maintain smaller endowments and would have a difficult time absorbing the costs of a tuition freeze. A cap on international enrollment would disproportionately hit HBCUs, which have “global partnerships across the African diaspora,” they said.

    Saint Augustine’s leaders also flagged a compact provision that would require colleges to adopt definitions of gender and sex in step with Trump’s executive order saying the federal government would only recognize two sexes, male and female, that cannot be changed. These definitions have been rebuked by the scientific and medical communities.

    HBCUs could face operational challenges if they adopt this language given their “inclusive campus policies shaped by both community needs and regulatory frameworks,” the letter said.

    “Such provisions would unintentionally force HBCUs to choose between compliance and survival, a position that is neither feasible nor consistent with congressional intent,” Peoples and Gibson said.

    Should the Trump administration take Saint Augustine’s up on its offer, the embattled university could gain a financial lifeline amidst ongoing operational turmoil.

    In recent years, Saint Augustine’s has had its accreditation revoked, then reinstated, then revoked again. The university is operating as an accredited institution this fall because of a preliminary court injunction temporarily reversing the latest revocation.

    The university’s accreditor, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, has raised concerns over its finances and governance.

    Saint Augustine’s has attempted different tactics to address its ongoing budget issues, including pursuing land lease deals, taking out loans and drastically cutting its workforce.

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  • MAGA Trump Influencers TARGET Gen Z in Extremist GOP TAKEOVER (Political Punk)

    MAGA Trump Influencers TARGET Gen Z in Extremist GOP TAKEOVER (Political Punk)

    The MAGA movement is recruiting a new generation… and they’re doing it through the manosphere. From Nick Fuentes to Andrew Tate, a growing army of Trump-aligned influencers is targeting Gen Z boys who feel left behind… promising power, purpose, and belonging while feeding resentment and hate. This isn’t random… it’s a strategy. The “alpha” pipeline is reshaping the Republican Party from the inside out, one lonely teenager at a time. Watch how these extremist influencers are using religion to turn alienation into political weaponry… and building Trump’s future GOP.

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  • Are Elite Neoliberals and Trump Singing from the Same Sheet of Music?

    Are Elite Neoliberals and Trump Singing from the Same Sheet of Music?

    The silence of America’s elite is deafening. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Yale professor and corporate leadership expert, does not hesitate to call it out. In a recent email, he warned that the nation’s corporate, academic, and religious leaders—once the backbone of moral and civic accountability—are now “smugly, safely, silently on the sidelines,” while authoritarian forces surge.

    “Nope,” Sonnenfeld wrote, “but it’s high time for the neo whiners to get off their lazy, cowardly butts and follow the courageous path of activists across sectors and fields from the 1960s and 1970s. It took nine years to get the No Kings rallies going. Shameful.”

    He recalls an era when activism cut across sectors: interfaith clergy, college presidents—from elite universities to small faith-based institutions and HBCUs—trade union leaders, professional associations, environmentalists, and human rights advocates all marched together. Blue state treasurers and attorneys general held corporations accountable; red state officials sometimes applied pressure from the opposite side. CEOs, Sonnenfeld reminds us, are mostly “hired hands, stewards of other people’s money” who respond to engaged stakeholders. Without pressure, they retreat into inaction.

    Today, the chorus of accountability is eerily silent. Clergy barely speak out. University presidents remain cautious. Activists blog while the nation teeters. Sonnenfeld’s indictment is clear: where once there was collective courage, there is now passivity—an effective alignment with the very forces undermining democracy.

    In practical terms, elite inaction has consequences. Trump and his allies wield influence not only through electoral politics but by exploiting institutional inertia. By failing to mobilize, elites—through default inaction—allow a political agenda that often mirrors their own neoliberal priorities to advance unchecked: deregulation, tax favoritism, corporate consolidation, and a shrinking social safety net.

    Sonnenfeld’s challenge is urgent: Will today’s corporate boards, clergy, and academic leaders rise to the occasion, reclaim the moral authority they once wielded, and demand accountability from those they employ and fund? Or will the next generation of Americans grow up seeing democracy as a performance, not a lived responsibility?

    The 1960s and 1970s were not perfect, but they demonstrated what cross-sectoral solidarity could achieve. Today, silence is complicity. In a nation at moral and political crossroads, elites cannot afford to play it safe. History is watching—and so is the rest of the world.

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  • Students face dropout risk in Trump cuts – Campus Review

    Students face dropout risk in Trump cuts – Campus Review

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  • Trump Can’t “Blanket” Deny UC Grants or Demand Payout

    Trump Can’t “Blanket” Deny UC Grants or Demand Payout

    A judge ordered federal agencies Friday to end their “blanket policy of denying any future grants” to the University of California, Los Angeles, and further ruled that the Trump administration can’t seek payouts from any UC campus “in connection with any civil rights investigation” under Titles VI or IX of federal law.

    The ruling also prohibits the Department of Justice and federal funding agencies from withholding funds, “or threatening to do so, to coerce the UC in violation of the First Amendment or Tenth Amendment.” In all, the order, if not overturned on appeal, stops the administration’s attempt to pressure UCLA to pay $1.2 billion and make multiple other concessions, including to stop enrolling “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” and stop “performing hormonal interventions and ‘transgender’ surgeries” on anyone under 18 at its medical school and affiliated hospitals.

    The administration’s targeting of the UC system came to the fore on July 29. That’s when the DOJ said its months-long investigations across the system had so far concluded that UCLA violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its response to alleged antisemitism at a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment.

    Federal agencies—including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Department of Energy—quickly began freezing funding; UC estimated it lost $584 million. But UC researchers sued and, even before Friday’s ruling, U.S. District Court judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered the restoration of almost all of the frozen funding.

    Friday’s ruling came in a case filed this fall by the American Association of University Professors, the affiliated American Federation of Teachers and other unions. Lin again was the judge.

    “Defendants did not engage in the required notice and hearing processes under Title VI for cutting off funds for alleged discrimination,” she wrote.

    “With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratchetting [sic] up Defendants’ pressure campaign,” she wrote. “And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how Defendants’ actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system. They describe how they have stopped teaching or researching topics they are afraid are too ‘left’ or ‘woke,’ in order to avoid triggering further funding cancellations by Defendants. They also give examples of projects the UC has stopped due to fear of the same reprisals. These are classic, predictable First Amendment harms, and exactly what Defendants publicly said that they intended.”

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  • Courses Studying Trump Proliferate, Risking President’s Ire

    Courses Studying Trump Proliferate, Risking President’s Ire

    Donald Trump’s second term in office continues to confound onlookers. Yet a growing number of universities around the world are offering courses for students to try to make sense of the mercurial president.

    The University of Pennsylvania has launched Climate and Environment Journalism: Truth-Telling in the Trump Era through its English department and American Conservatism From Taft to Trump for political science students. The New School’s Donald Trump as History module will aim to explore the “Trump phenomenon” and how it alters views of U.S. history, while the University of Washington offers a special Trump in the World module.

    Universities outside the U.S. are also involved. First run in 2017, Trumpism: An American Biography is an optional module for second-year history students at the University of Sheffield, which explores how U.S. history can shed light on the present.

    Andrew Heath, lecturer in U.S. history at Sheffield, told Times Higher Education that part of the module’s purpose was to get students thinking about the history of terms such as populism that are “often thrown around in the media to make sense of Trump and Trumpism,” and to encourage them to think critically about the way that comparisons are invoked.

    But teaching about such a fast-moving political situation is not easy. “It’s a module that always poses challenges—readings can quickly feel dated; teaching it in an election year last time around was harder. Every iteration of the unit needs significant updating,” added Heath.

    Christopher Breem, managing director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Pennsylvania State University, said it is always hard to teach about something going on in the present. But this is often what students are most interested in because they recognize that it is important to them and their future to understand it, he said.

    “I think if you are up front with students that there are unavoidable risks associated with teaching any subject in real time, they accept that.”

    Breem, who taught a course on Trump’s unorthodox campaign in 2016, said there are positive sides to it as well, allowing lecturers the opportunity to talk about populism in U.S. history, and about similar populist movements throughout the world.

    “If you use Trump as an opportunity to talk about where we are and how we got here, you can end up with a really good class.”

    The University of East Anglia is offering an optional module on MAGA: Donald Trump and Twenty-First Century America, University College Dublin has a Trump’s America option, and the University of Southern Denmark has one on U.S. society under Trump.

    During the first Trump presidency, some academics came under an intense national spotlight for their courses that explicitly referenced him. One professor who previously taught a course mentioning Trump said the whole experience was “unpleasant,” with staff and the university receiving numerous phone calls and emails.

    “The university took my information off the website, and we had a police officer outside of the classroom,” the professor said. “I turned on my house alarm during the day. Frightened, I turned down opportunities for press interviews.”

    The academic, who wished to remain anonymous, said it was hard to keep up with the constant change and disruption of the Trump administration but that students were very engaged.

    And they said academics have a professional and ethical responsibility to talk about Trump’s policies in classes, if it is related to course content, but should “tread carefully on how public you make it.”

    However, Richard Lazarus, professor of law at Harvard University and course director for a module on environmental law under Trump, said he had “zero” worries about drawing the ire of the administration.

    “We are not advocates who use our classes to tell students what action they should take. We are teachers and scholars who inform our students, give them the skills to think in a rigorous, disciplined way, and with integrity. They then decide how to use their skills.”

    Other new courses for this year include the People’s Guide to Trumpism at the University of San Francisco and Trump vs. Science at Hampshire College.

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  • Will Trump policies exacerbate the special education teacher shortage?

    Will Trump policies exacerbate the special education teacher shortage?

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    Teacher preparation experts fear ongoing special education teacher shortages will worsen as the Trump administration continues to downsize the U.S. Department of Education.

    Along with mass layoffs at the federal agency, proposals to consolidate federal grants for training special educators are fueling concerns that these moves will exacerbate critical staffing issues. 

    During the 2024-25 school year alone, 45 states reported shortages in special education — the most frequently reported shortage area nationwide, according to Learning Policy Institute. The other most common shortages reported by states include science (41), math (40), language arts (38), world languages (35) and career and technical education (33), LPI found. 

    A wave of layoffs in October at the Education Department that decimated most of the Office of Special Education Programs — a decision that is currently tied up in the courts — sent shockwaves throughout the special education community. OSEP helps administer and oversee the distribution of federal funds through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 

    One of the grants impacted by these changes in particular is IDEA Part D for personnel development to improve services for children with disabilities.

    The IDEA Part D personnel development grants received $115 million in federal appropriations during fiscal year 2024. Under the Trump administration’s FY 26 proposal, that same program would be zeroed out, and the newly allocated funds would go to IDEA Part B programs into a single state block grant program. 

    The budget proposal stated that even with this consolidation of funds, “states would continue to meet key IDEA accountability and reporting requirements aimed at ensuring a free appropriate public education is available to all students with disabilities and protecting the rights of those students and their families.”

    Regardless, there’s minimal support in Congress for this kind of state block grant program, as both the House and Senate appropriations committees have rejected the measures in their budget planning for FY 26.  

    These IDEA Part D funds are typically awarded for five years to state education agencies, school districts, higher education institutions and nonprofits. 

    On top of challenges for OSEP to oversee the IDEA Part D personnel preparation funds while it is shortstaffed, experts and advocates say the Trump administration’s budget proposal to consolidate IDEA Part D into state block grants will harm teacher prep programs’ ability to train high-quality special educators.    

    The changes this year are of particular concern for Laurie VanderPloeg, associate executive director for professional affairs at the Council for Exceptional Children, who said the absence of IDEA Part D preparation program funds could reduce the number of special education teacher candidates in educator preparation programs. 

    Even at current enrollment levels in special education teaching programs, VanderPloeg said, there’s still not enough people in the pipeline to meet the demands in the field.  

    “So with the reduction in enrollment in the educator prep programs, it’s going to reduce our national flexibility with being able to fill all of the open positions with good, qualified personnel,” said VanderPloeg, who also served as director of OSEP during the first Trump administration. 

    The uncertainty around IDEA Part D grant funds is also hanging over the heads of educator preparation programs, leaving many wondering how long these federal dollars dedicated to training special educators will last, VanderPloeg said. If these grants are disrupted, she said, there could be other implications for teaching candidates currently enrolled in programs that benefit from the funds. 

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