The Trump administration says one of its primary goals in education is to expand school choice and put power back in the hands of parents. Yet it has killed the main way to track one of the most rapidly growing options — learning at home.
The Education Department began counting the number of homeschooled children in 1999, when fewer than 2 percent of students were educated this way. Homeschooling rose by 50 percent in the first decade of the 2000s and then leveled off at around 3 percent.
The most recent survey of families took place in 2023, and it would have been the first indication of the growth of homeschooling since the pandemic. The data collection was nearly finished and ready to be released to the public, but in February, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) terminated the contract for this data collection, which is part of the National Household Education Survey, along with 88 other education contracts. Then in March, the federal statisticians who oversee the data collection and could review the final figureswere fired along with almost everyone else at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). As things stand now, this federal homeschool data is unlikely to ever be released.
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“Work on these data files has stopped and there are no current plans for that work to continue,” said a spokesman for the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization that had held the contract to collect and analyze the data before DOGE canceled it.
The loss of this data upset both avid supporters and watchdogs of school choice, particularly now that some states are expanding their Education Savings Account (ESA) programs to transfer public funds directly to families who homeschool their children. Angela Watson, a prominent Johns Hopkins University researcher who runs the Homeschool Research Lab, called it a “massive loss.” Robert Maranto, a professor in the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas, said that in the past, the federal statistics have helped “dispel some of the myths” that homeschooling is “overwhelmingly white,” when, in fact, a more diverse population is learning this way. Maranto also serves as the editor of the Journal of School Choice. The most recent issue was devoted to homeschooling and about half the articles in it cited NCES reports, he said.
“There is a certain irony that a pro-school choice administration would cut objective data that might help increase acceptance of homeschooling,” said Maranto.
It is unclear what will happen to the unreleased 2023 homeschooling data or if the Education Department will ever collect homeschool statistics in the future.
In response to questions about the fate of the homeschooling data, Education Department spokeswoman Madison Biedermann said that its research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, is in possession of the data and that it is “reviewing how all its contractual activities can best be used to meet its statutory obligations.”
Last September, the Education Department released some preliminary statistics from the 2023 survey. It noted a small increase in traditional homeschooling since 2019 but a large increase in the number of students who were enrolled in an online virtual school and learning from home full time. Together, more than 5 percent of U.S. students were learning at home in one of these two ways. Fewer than 4 percent were learning at home in 2019.
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, September 2024 media briefing slide.
Researchers were keen to dig into the data to understand the different flavors of homeschooling, from online courses to microschools, which aretiny schools that often operate in private homes or places of worship. Researchers also want to understand why more parents are opting for homeschooling and which subjects they are directly teaching their children, all questions that are included in the parent survey conducted by the Education Department.
Tracking homeschooling is notoriously difficult. Families who choose this option can be distrustful of government, but this was one of the few surveys that homeschool advocates cited to document the growth in their numbers and they advised the writers of the federal survey on how to phrase questions.
Beginning in 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau also began collecting some data on homeschooling, but those statistics cannot be directly compared with the Education Department data and without a historical record, the census data is less useful, researchers said.It is also unclear if this census data will continue. Some states collect data on homeschooling, but researchers said they do it in different ways, making it impossible to compare homeschooling across states.
Patrick Wolf, a professor of education policy who studies school choice at the University of Arkansas, was also dismayed by the loss of the Education Department’s statistics.
“A federal government agency has been collecting national statistics on education since 1867,” he said. “State and local policy makers and practitioners will be severely challenged in doing their work if they don’t have good data from the feds regarding public schooling, private schooling, and homeschooling. Sending education authority to the states only will work well if the federal government continues to collect and publish comprehensive data on schooling. Otherwise, state and local officials are being asked to fly blind.”
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 Martinez has been an educator in Puerto Rico for 28 years and the principal of the elementary school Escuela de la Communidad Jaime C. Rodriguez for the past seven. She never knows how much money her school in Yabucoa will receive from the government each year because it isn’t based on the number of children enrolled. One year she got $36,000; another year, it was $12,000.
But for the first time as an educator, Caraballo noticed a big difference during the Biden administration. Because of an infusion of federal dollars into the island’s education system, Caraballo received a $250,000 grant, an unprecedented amount of money. She used it to buy books and computers for the library, white boards and printers for classrooms, to beef up a robotics program and build a multipurpose sports court for her students. “It meant a huge difference for the school,” Caraballo said.
Yabucoa, a small town in southeast Puerto Rico, was one of the regions hardest hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017. And this school community, like hundreds of others in Puerto Rico, has experienced near constant disruption since then. A series of natural disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and landslides, followed by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, has pounded the island and interrupted learning. There has also been constant churn of local education secretaries — seven in the past eight years. The Puerto Rican education system — the seventh-largest school district in the United States — has been made more vulnerable by the island’s overwhelming debt, mass emigration and a crippled power grid.
Maraida Caraballo Martinez has been an educator in Puerto Rico for 28 years and is now the principal of an elementary school. Her school has been slated for closure three times because of mass emigration from the island. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Under President Joe Biden, there were tentative gains, buttressed by billions of dollars and sustained personal attention from top federal education officials, many experts and educators on the island said. Now they worry that it will all be dismantled with the change in the White House. President Donald Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the U.S. territory, having reportedly said that it was “dirty and the people were poor.” During his first term, he withheld billions of dollars in federal aid after Hurricane Maria and has suggested selling the island or swapping it for Greenland.
A recent executive order to make English the official language has worried people on the island, where only 1 in 5 people speak fluent English, and Spanish is the medium of instruction in schools. Trump is seeking to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and has already madesweeping cuts to the agency, which will have widespread implications across the island. Even if federal funds — which last year made up more than two thirds of funding for the Puerto Rican Department of Education, or PRDE — were transferred directly to the local government, it would likely lead to worse outcomes for the most vulnerable children, say educators and policymakers. The PRDE has historically been plagued by political interference, widespread bureaucracy and a lack of transparency.
And the local education department is not as technologically advanced as other state education departments, nor as able to disseminate best practices. For example, Puerto Rico does not have a “per pupil formula,” a calculation commonly used on the mainland to determine the amount of money each student receives for their education. Robert Mujica is the executive director of the Puerto Rico Financial Oversight and Management Board, first convened under President Barack Obama in 2016 to deal with the island’s financial morass. Mujica said Puerto Rico’s current allocation of education funds is opaque. “How the funds are distributed is perceived as a political process,” he said. “There’s no transparency and there’s no clarity.”
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In 2021, Miguel Cardona, Biden’s secretary of education, promised “a new day” for Puerto Rico. “For too long, Puerto Rico’s students and educators were abandoned,” he said. During his tenure, Cardona signed off on almost $6 billion in federal dollars for the island’s educational system, leading to a historic pay increase for teachers, funding for after-school tutoring programs, hiring of hundreds of school mental health professionals and the creation of a pilot program to decentralize the PRDE.
Cardona designated a senior adviser, Chris Soto, to be his point person for the island’s education system to underscore the federal commitment. During nearly four years in office, he made more than 50 trips to the island. Carlos Rodriguez Silvestre, the executive director of the Flamboyan Foundation, a nonprofit in Puerto Rico that has led children’s literacy efforts on the island, said the level of respect and sustained interest felt like a partnership, not a top-down mandate. “I’ve never seen that kind of attention to education in Puerto Rico,” he said. “Soto practically lived on the island.”
Soto also worked closely with Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, the president of the teachers union, Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, or AMPR, which resulted in a deal in which educators received $1,000 more a month to their base salary, a nearly 30 percent increase for the average teacher.“It was the largest salary increase in the history of teachers in Puerto Rico,” Bonilla said, though even with the increase, teachers here still make far less money than teachers on the mainland.
One of the biggest complaints Soto said he heard was how rigid and bureaucratic the Puerto Rico Department of Education was, despite a 2018 education reform law that allows for more local control. The education agency — the largest unit of government on the island, with the most employees and the biggest budget — was set up so that the central office had to sign off on everything. So Soto created and oversaw a pilot program in Ponce, a region on the island’s southern coast, focusing on decentralization.
For the first time, the local community elected an advisory board of education, and superintendent candidates had to apply rather than be appointed, Soto said. The superintendent was given the authority to sign off on budget requests directly rather than sending them through officials in San Juan, as well as the flexibility to spend money in his region based on individual schools’ needs.
In the past, that wasn’t a consideration: For example, Yadira Sanchez, a psychologist who has worked in Puerto Rican education for more than 20 years, remembers when a school got dozens of new air conditioners even though it didn’t need it. “They already had functioning air conditioners,” she said, “so that money was lost.”
The pilot project also focused on increasing efficiency. For example, children with disabilities are now evaluated at their schools rather than having to visit a special center. And Soto says he tried to remove politics and increase transparency around spending in the PRDE as well. “You can improve invoices, but if your political friends are getting the work, then you don’t have a good school system,” he said.
A school bus under a tree that fell during Hurricane Maria, which hit the island of Puerto Rico in September 2017. More than a year later, it had not been removed. Credit: Al Bello/Getty Images for Lumix
Under Biden, Puerto Rico also received a competitive U.S. Department of Education grant for $10.5 million for community schools, another milestone. And the federal department started including data on the territory in some education statistics collected. “Puerto Rico wasn’t even on these trackers, so we started to dig into how do we improve the data systems? Unraveling the data issue meant that Puerto Rico can properly get recognized,” Soto said.
But already there are plans to undo Cardona’s signature effort in Ponce. The island’s newly elected governor, Jenniffer González Colón, is a Republican and a Trump supporter. The popular secretary of education, Eliezer Ramos Parés, returned earlier this year to head the department after leading it from April 2021 to July 2023 when the governor unexpectedly asked him to resign — not an unusual occurrence within the island’s government, where political appointments can end suddenly and with little public debate. He told The Hechinger Report that the program won’t continue in its current form, calling it “inefficient.”
“The pilot isn’t really effective,” he said, noting that politics can influence spending decisions not only at the central level but at the regional level as well. “We want to have some controls.” He also said expanding the effort across the island would cost tens of millions of dollars. Instead, Ramos said he was looking at more limited approaches to decentralization, around some human resource and procurement functions. He said he was also exploring a per pupil funding formula for Puerto Rico and looking at lessons from other large school districts such as New York City and Hawaii.
While education has been the largest budget item on the island for years, it’s still far less than any of the 50 states spend on each student. Puerto Rico spends $9,500 per student, compared with an average of $18,600 in the states.
The U.S. Department of Education, which supplements local and state funding for students in poverty and with disabilities, has an outsized role in Puerto Rico schools. On the island, 55 percent of children live below the poverty line, compared with 17 percent in the 50 states; for students in special education, the figures are 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively. In total, during fiscal year 2024, more than 68 percent of the education budget on the island comes from federal funding, compared to 11 percent in U.S. states. The department also administers Pell Grants for low-income students — some 72 percent of Puerto Rican students apply — and supports professional development efforts and initiatives for Puerto Rican children who move back and forth between the mainland and territory.
Linda McMahon, Trump’s new education secretary, has reportedly said that the government will continue to meet its “statutory obligations” to students even as the department shuts down or transfers some operations and lays off staff. The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.
Some say the Biden administration’s pouring billions of dollars into a troubled education system with little accountability has created unrealistic expectations and there’s no plan for what happens after money is spent. Mujica, the executive director of the oversight board, said the infusion of funds postponed tough decisions by the Puerto Rican government. “When you have so much money, it papers over a lot of problems. You didn’t have to deal with some of the challenges that are fundamental to the system.” And he said there is little discussion of what happens when that money runs out. “How are you going to bridge that gap? Either those programs go away or we’re going to have to find the funding for them,” Mujica said.
He said efforts like the one in Ponce to bring decision making closer to where the students’ needs are is “vitally important.” Still, he said he’s not sure the money improved student outcomes. “This was a huge opportunity to make fundamental changes and investments that will yield long-term results. I’m not sure that we’ve seen the metrics to support that.”
Puerto Rico is one of the most educationally impoverished regions, with academic outcomes well below the mainland. On the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, a test that students across the U.S. take, just 2 percent of fourth graders in Puerto Rico were proficient, the highest score ever recorded for the island, and zero percent of eighth graders were. Puerto Rican students don’t take the NAEP for reading because they learn in Spanish, not English, though results shared by Ramos at a press conference in 2022 showed only 1 percent of third graders were reading at grade level.
There are some encouraging efforts. Flamboyan Foundation, the nonprofit in Puerto Rico, has been leading an island-wide coalition of 70 partners to improve K-3 literacy, including through professional development. Teacher training through the territory’s education department has often been spotty or optional.
The organization now works closely with the University of Puerto Rico and, as part of that effort, oversees spending of $3 million in literacy training. Approximately 1,500 or a third of Puerto Rico’s K-5 teachers have undergone the rigorous training. Educators were given $500 as an incentive for participating, along with books for their classrooms and three credit hours in continuing education. “It was a lot of quality hours. This was not the ‘spray and pray’ approach,” said Silvestre. That effort will continue, according to Ramos, who called it “very effective.”
A new reading test for first through third graders the nonprofit helped design showed that between the 2023 and 2024 school years, most children were below grade level but made growth in every grade. “But we still have a long way to go so that this data can get to teachers in a timely manner and in a way that they can actually act on it,” Silvestre said.
Kristin Ehrgood, Flamboyan Foundation’s CEO, said it’s too soon to see dramatic gains. “It’s really hard to see a ton of positive outcomes in such a short period of time with significant distrust that has been built over years,” she said. She said they weren’t sure how the Trump administration may work with or fund Puerto Rico’s education system but that the Biden administration had built a lot of goodwill. “There is a lot of opportunity that could be built on, if a new administration chooses to do that.”
Another hopeful sign is that the oversight board, which was widely protested when it was formed, has cut the island’s debt from $73 billion to $31 billion. And last year board members increased education spending by 3 percent. Mujica said the board is focused on making sure that any investment translates into improved outcomes for students: “Our view is resources have to go into the classroom.”
Betty A. Rosa, education commissioner and president of the University of the State of New York and a member of the oversight board, said leadership churn in Puerto Rico drives its educational instability. Every new leader is invested in “rebuilding, restructuring, reimagining, pick your word,” she said. “There is no consistency.” Unlike her New York state position, the Puerto Rican education secretary and other positions are political appointments. “If you have permanent governance, then even when the leadership changes, the work continues.”
Ramos, who experienced this instability when the previous governor unexpectedly asked to resign in 2023, said he met McMahon, the new U.S. secretary of education, in Washington, D.C., and that they had a “pleasant conversation.” “She knows about Puerto Rico, she’s concerned about Puerto Rico, and she demonstrated full support in the Puerto Rico mission,” he said. He said McMahon wanted PRDE to offer more bilingual classes, to expose more students to English. Whether there will be changes in funding or anything else remains to be seen. “We have to look at what happens in the next few weeks and months and how that vision and policy could affect Puerto Rico,” Ramos said.
Ramos was well-liked by educators during his first stint as education secretary. He will also have a lot of decisions to make, including whether to expand public charter schools and close down traditional public schools as the island’s public school enrollment continues to decline precipitously. In the past, both those issues led to fierce and widespread protests.
Soto says he’s realistic about the incoming administration having “different views, both ideologically and policywise,” but he’s hopeful the people of Puerto Rico won’t want to go back to the old way of doing things. “Somebody said, ‘You guys took the genie out of the bottle and it’s going to be hard to put that back’ as it relates to a student-centered school system,” Soto said.
Cardona, whose grandparents are from the island, said Puerto Rico had seen “academic flatlining” for years. “We cannot accept that the students are performing less than we know they are capable of,” he told The Hechinger Report, just before he signed off as the nation’s top education official. “We started change; it needs to continue.”
Principal Carabello’s small school of 150 students and 14 teachers has been slated for closure three times already, though each time it has been spared in part because of community support. She’s hopeful that Ramos, with whom she’s worked previously, will turn things around. “He knows the education system,” she said. “He’s a brilliant person, open to listen.”
Escuela de la Communidad Jaime C. Rodriguez is a Montessori school in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, that did not have any sports facilities for its students. It recently began work on a multipurpose sports center, made possible by federal funds under former President Joe Biden. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
But the long hours of the past several years have taken a toll on her. She is routinely in school from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. “You come in when it’s dark and you leave when it’s dark,” she said. There have been many new platforms to learn and new projects to implement. She wants to retire but can’t afford to. After decades of the local government underfunding the pension system, allowances that offset the high price of goods and services on the island were cut and pension plans were frozen.
Now instead of retiring with 75 percent of her salary, Carabello will receive only 50 percent, $2,195 a month. She is entitled to Social Security benefits, but it isn’t enough to make up for the lost pension. “Who can live with $2,000 in one month? Nobody. It’s too hard. And my house still needs 12 years more to pay.”
Carabello, who is always so strong and so optimistic around her students, teared up. But it’s rare that she allows herself time to think about herself. “I have a great community. I have great teachers and I feel happy with what I do,” she 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.
Effective March 14, the Institute of International Education (IIE) announced that it had been forced to furlough the majority of EducationUSA staff and employees of other ECA-funded programs, as it struggles to maintain operations under the Trump administration.
“Over the past several weeks, IIE has been impacted by a myriad of external changes, requiring us to quickly adapt and to respond to the evolving needs of multiple stakeholders.
“Numerous factors, including Executive Orders, program suspensions, and changes in the payments and processes of the US Department of State have impacted our operations,” IIE’s EducationUSA team wrote in a staff update.
The US State Department’s flagship study abroad network added that it had taken the “difficult but necessary” step of dismissing all but two domestic staff members to maintain operations. Regional managers outside the US will also have limited scope, said EducationUSA.
The organisation emphasised that the program had not been cancelled or cut, but that funding remained frozen, limiting the institute’s ability to retain full staffing levels.
It is unclear how many employees have been affected in total, let alone when or even whether their jobs will resume.
Further programs implicated in the furloughs include the Fulbright, Humphrey and Gilman scholarships, which rely on funding from the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) that was frozen by the State Department on February 12 and has not yet resumed.
Intended as a temporary 15-day pause on federal funding, the Trump administration provided no rationale for the freeze, with stakeholders warning the measure threatened the survival of US study abroad.
For decades, EducationUSA has been a cornerstone of global engagement
Fanta Aw, NAFSA
In a public statement, IIE said it regretted the workforce reduction but that it remained “hopeful that this is temporary and that we will be able to resume full staffing levels soon”.
“Our priority is to ensure that students and scholars continue to be able to have life-changing international educational opportunities,” it added.
There has been an outpouring of support from colleagues, facing unprecedented challenges under the Trump administration, which recently cut 50% of Education Department staff and proposed a ban on all Chinese study visas, alongside the financial freeze crippling study abroad.
“This is another pivotal moment for international education in the US,” said NAFSA CEO Fanta Aw: “For decades, EducationUSA has been a cornerstone of global engagement, providing students, families, and institutions worldwide with trusted, reliable guidance on US higher education.”
“We must do all we can to preserve and strengthen this critical program,” wrote Aw on LinkedIn.
With a network of over 430 international student advising centres across more than 175 countries and territories, the impact of staff furloughs at EducationUSA will be widespread, with operations largely ceasing across the globe.
Abrupt cuts in federal funding for life saving medical research. Confusing and misleading new guidance about campus diversity programs. Cancellation, without due process, of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants and contracts held by a major university. Mass layoffs at the Education Department, undermining crucial programs such as federal student aid.
All of this, and more, in the opening weeks of the second Trump administration.
The president has made clear that colleges and universities face a moment of unprecedented challenge. The partnership the federal government forged with American higher education long ago, which for generations has paid off spectacularly for our country’s civic health, economic well-being and national security, appears in the eyes of many to be suddenly vulnerable.
America must not permit this partnership to weaken or dissolve. No nation has ever built up its people by tearing down its schools. Higher education builds America — and together, we will fight to ensure it continues to do so.
Some wonder why more college and university presidents aren’t speaking out. The truth is, many of them fear their institutions could be targeted next.
They are also juggling immense financial pressures and striving to fulfill commitments to teaching and research.
But the American Council on Education, which I lead, has always stood up for higher education. We have done it for more than a century, and we are doing it now. We will use every tool possible — including litigation, advocacy and coalition-building — to advance the cause.
ACE is the major coordinating body for colleges and universities. We represent institutions of all kinds — public and private, large and small, rural and urban — with a mission of helping our members best serve their students and communities.
Let me be clear: We welcome scrutiny and accountability for the public funds supporting student aid and research. Our institutions are subject to state and federal laws and must not tolerate any form of discrimination, even as they uphold freedom of expression and the right to robust but civil protest.
We also know we have much work to do to raise public confidence in higher education and the value of a degree.
However, we cannot allow unwarranted attacks on higher education to occur without a vigorous and proactive response.
When the National Institutes of Health announced on Feb. 7 a huge cut in funding that supports medical and health research, ACE joined with the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and a number of affected universities in a lawsuit to stop this action.
ACE has almost never been a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the federal government, but the moment demanded it. We are pleased that a federal judge has issued a nationwide preliminary injunction to preserve the NIH funding.
When the Education Department issued a “Dear Colleague” letter Feb. 14 that raised questions about whether campus programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion would be permissible under federal law, ACE organized a coalition of more than 70 higher education groups calling for the department to rescind the letter.
We raised concerns about the confusion the letter was causing. We pointed out that the majority opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts in the Students for Fair Admissions case acknowledged that diversity-related goals in higher education are “commendable” and “plainly worthy.”
We invited the department to engage with the higher education community to promote inclusive and welcoming educational environments for all students, regardless of race or ethnicity or any other factors. We remain eager to work with the department.
Unfortunately, in recent days the administration has taken further steps we find alarming.
ACE denounced the arbitrary cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts with Columbia University. Administration officials claimed their action was a response to failures to adequately address antisemitism at Columbia, though it bypassed well-established procedures for investigating such allegations. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College, Columbia University.)
Ultimately, this action will eviscerate academic and research activities, to the detriment of students, faculty, medical patients and others.
Make no mistake: Combating campus antisemitism is a matter of utmost priority for us. Our organization, along with Hillel International and the American Jewish Committee, organized two summits on this topic in 2022 and 2024, fostering important dialogue with dozens of college and university presidents.
We also are deeply concerned about the letter the Trump administration sent to Columbia late last week that makes certain demands of the university, including a leadership change for one of its academic departments. To my mind, the letter obliterated the boundary between institutional autonomy and federal control. That boundary is essential. Without it, academic freedom is at risk.
Meanwhile, layoffs and other measures slashing the Education Department’s workforce by as much as half will cause chaos and harm to financial aid and other programs that support millions of students from low- and middle-income families. We strongly urge the administration to change course and Congress to step in if it does not.
Despite all that has happened in the past several weeks, we want President Trump and his administration to know this: Higher education is here for America, and ready to keep building. Colleges and universities have long worked with the government in countless ways to strengthen our economy, democracy, health and security. We cannot abandon that partnership. We must fortify it.
Ted Mitchell is president of the American Council of Education in Washington, D.C.
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.
This week I dug into how the Trump administration’s anti-climate blitz is hampering schools’ and colleges’ ability to green their operations, plus a new report on the California wildfires’ impact on students. Thank you for reading, and reply to this email to be in touch. — Caroline Preston
LeeAnn Kittle helps oversee the Denver public school district’s work to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2050.
In January, her job got a lot tougher.
Denver expected to receive tax credits via the Inflation Reduction Act for an additional 25 electric school buses. President Donald Trump attempted to freeze clean energy funds through the IRA in his first days in office. Kittle, the district’s executive director of sustainability, also considered applying for tax credit-like payments for energy-efficient heat pumps for the district’s older buildings that lack air conditioning. And she’d intended to apply this spring for a nearly $12 million grant through Renew America’s Schools, a Department of Energy program to help schools become more energy efficient. Staff working on that program have left and its future is uncertain.
“I think we’re all in shock,” said Kittle. “It’s like someone put us in a snow globe and shook us up, and now we’re asked to stand straight. And it’s like I don’t know how to stand straight right now.”
Since January, the Trump administration has launched a broadside against efforts to reduce gases that cause climate change, including by freezing clean energy spending, slashing environmental staff and research, scrubbing the words “climate change” from websites, and rethinking decades of science showing the harms of global warming to human health and the planet. Experts and education leaders say those actions — some of which have been challenged in court — are disrupting, but not extinguishing, efforts by schools and colleges to curtail their emissions and reduce their toll on the planet.
Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
At the start of the year, the State University of New York was awarded $15 million to buy 350 electric vehicle charging stations. “We have yet to see the dollars,” said its chancellor, John B. King Jr. A webinar on the Department of Transportation grant program, which is funded by the bipartisan infrastructure act, was canceled. “It’s been radio silence,” said Carter Strickland, the SUNY chief sustainability officer.
The SUNY system, which owns a staggering 40 percent of New York State’s public buildings, had also planned to apply for IRA payments for a variety of projects to electrify campuses, reduce pollution and improve energy efficiency. In November, it applied for approximately $1.45 million for an Oneonta campus project that uses geothermal wells to provide heating and cooling. It still expects to get that money since the project is complete and the IRA remains law, but it can no longer count on payments for newer projects, King said.
“What the IRA did was turbocharged everything and gave many more players the ability to see themselves as part of a clean energy economy,” said Timothy Carter, president of Second Nature, a group that supports climate work in higher education. But the confusion that the Trump administration has sowed — even though the IRA has not been repealed — means both K-12 and higher education institutions are reconsidering clean energy projects.
There’s no count of how many colleges have sought funding through the IRA and bipartisan infrastructure act-funded programs, said Carter, but the work is spread across red and blue states, and some education systems have dozens of projects under construction. The University of California system, for example, filed applications for more than 70 projects, including a $1 billion project to replace UC Davis’s leaky and inefficient heating and cooling system and a project at UC Berkeley to phase out an old power plant and replace it with a microgrid.
“We remain hopeful that funding will be provided per the program provisions,” David Phillips, associate vice president for capital programs at the University of California, wrote in an email.
Sara Ross, co-founder of Undaunted K12, which helps school districts green their operations, said her group tells school leaders that for now, “energy tax credits are still the law of the land.”
But she expects those credits could be eliminated in the new tax bill that Congress is negotiating this year.
In the past, entities that begin construction on projects before any changes in a new law go into effect have been grandfathered in and still received that money, she said. “No promises,” Ross said, but historically that’s how such tax credit scenarios have worked. She said some school districts are speeding up projects to beat that possible deadline, while others are abandoning them.
There is some political movement to preserve clean energy tax credits. Roughly 85 percent of the private-sector dollars that have gone into clean energy projects are in GOP-led districts, according to a report last year. Some GOP lawmakers have advocated for maintaining that funding, which has contributed to a surge in renewable energy jobs.
Steven Bloom, assistant vice president of government relations with the American Council on Education, said that gives supporters of the IRA some hope. But he said that many higher education institutions are facing so much pain and uncertainty from other Trump administration actions, like the National Institutes of Health’s plan to slash overhead payments and investigations into alleged antisemitism, that unfortunately “climate investments may get pushed down the ladder of priorities in the near term.”
Another important vehicle for greening schools, the Renew America’s Schools grant program, was started in 2022 with $500 million for school districts. Many of the Department of Energy staff working on that effort have left, Ross said, and some school districts have not heard back about the status of funding for their projects.
In Massachusetts, the Lowell school district won a prize through the Renew America program that could unlock up to $15 million to help the district improve its aged facilities. The district’s facilities for the most part lack air conditioning and schools have been closed on occasion due to high temperatures.
Katherine Moses, the city of Lowell’s sustainability director, wrote in an email that the district had so far pocketed $300,000 that it is using for energy audits to identify inefficiencies and lay the groundwork for a larger investment. It’s unclear what could happen beyond that and if the district will receive more money. She said Lowell is proceeding according to the requirements of the grant “until we hear otherwise from DOE.”
More than 3,400 school districts have applied for money through programs created under the bipartisan infrastructure law and the IRA to electrify school buses. After a federal judge ruled against the administration’s freeze on clean energy spending, grants through those programs appear to have been unfrozen and districts have been able to access payments, said Sue Gander, director of the electric school bus initiative with the nonprofit World Resources Institute.
But rebates for electric buses are still stalled, she said. Districts are submitting forms to receive rebates, she said, “but there’s no communication coming back to them through the system about the status of their award or any indication that any payment that may have been requested is being provided.”
The Transportation and Energy departments and the Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the Clean School Bus Program, did not respond by deadline to requests for comment for this article.
King, of SUNY, noted that climate change is already negatively affecting young people and contributing to worsening disasters like floods and fires. For some faculty, staff and students, the backtracking from climate action at the federal level is stirring disappointment and fear, he said. “There is this very intense frustration that as a society we are stopping efforts to deal with what is truly an existential threat.”
Contact Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CPreston.83 or via email at [email protected].
This story about clean energy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our climate and education newsletter.
What I’m reading:
My colleague Neal Morton traveled to northwest Colorado for a story on how phasing out coal-powered plants affects school budgets and career prospects for graduates. School districts haven’t done enough to plan for those changes or prepare students for alternate careers, he writes, and renewable energy projects are not popping up fast enough to smooth the financial pain.
Some 725,000 students at more than 1,000 schools faced school closures during the California wildfires in January, according to a new report from Undaunted K12 and EdTrust. The fire had a disproportionate impact on students living in poverty and from underrepresented backgrounds, the report says: Three-quarters of the affected students came from low-income households, and 66 percent were Hispanic.
The U.S. Coast Guard Academy removed the words “climate change” from its curriculum, reports Inside Climate News. The academy falls under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, whose new director, Kristi Noem, issued a directive in February to “eliminate all climate change activities and the use of climate change terminology in DHS policies and programs.”
Schools with satisfactory heating systems reduce student absences by 3 percent and suspensions by 6 percent, and record a 5 percent increase in math scores, according to a study by researchers at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Schools with satisfactory cooling systems see an increase of 3 percent in reading scores.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CPreston.83 or via email at [email protected].
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 layoffs of half of the employees of the U.S. Department of Education clearly demonstrate the Trump administration’s follow-through on one of Project 2025’s mandates, which intends to eliminate the resources, protections and opportunities that millions of children and families across this nation rely on.
It is evident that the White House will not stop until it wipes out the most basic protections and supports for the American people, including the youngest children. The first step was the attempt to defund Head Start and Early Head Start, impacting 800,000 young children across the nation. This order was halted by a federal judge in Washington, thanks to the lawsuits filed by Democracy Forward and attorneys general from 23 states.
The mass layoffs will severely hamper the department’s ability to execute on its core responsibilities. This move is a direct assault on millions of students, teachers and families. It is clearly a precursor to dismantling the department without congressional consent, which would have an even more devastating impact. The department serves and protects the most vulnerable children and young adults, ensuring that they have equal access to education. This includes:
26 million students from low-income backgrounds — more than half of all K-12 students — who rely on the department for reasonable class sizes; school meals; tutoring; afterschool and summer programs; school supplies such as laptops and books; parent engagement programs; and, in some cases, transportation
9.8 million students enrolled in rural schools
7.4. million students with disabilities
5 million English learners
1.1 million students experiencing homelessness
87 million college students who receive Pell Grants and student loans
The department was created in 1980 with a single, crucial purpose: to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation. Its creation followed decades of systemic inequities that left children in disadvantaged communities without the same learning opportunities as their more privileged peers. The department’s work has been a critical safeguard against discrimination in schools, whether on the basis of race, disability, gender or income.
Without the federal government’s intervention and oversight, the more than 13 million children who live in poverty would be even more vulnerable to systemic inequities. The department ensures that federal dollars are distributed to those students most in need, ensuring that underserved children have the same opportunities for success as their wealthier peers. Without the federal oversight and the department’s support, these students will fall even further behind, and the national achievement gap will grow wider.
The federal government is the only entity that can ensure a baseline level of educational equity across the entire nation. The department holds states accountable for ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live or what their socioeconomic status may be, receive a quality education. If this accountability is removed, the children most at risk — those in underfunded schools, children of color, children with disabilities, English learners and those experiencing homelessness — will be the first to suffer. These children would be denied the critical services and protections they need to succeed in school and in life.
Moreover, the president’s plan to turn education policy over to the states would completely dismantle the federal safety net that ensures that the most vulnerable children are not left behind. Each of the 50 states has different priorities, resources and political climates. While some might be able to provide excellent educational opportunities, others will leave children behind, particularly in rural or economically disadvantaged areas. Inequities between states could widen to an intolerable degree, and the resulting lack of uniform educational standards would only further disadvantage the children who need the most help.
To be clear, the department cannot be dissolved at the whim of a sitting president. Under the Constitution, only an act of Congress can create or dismantle a federal agency. The president does not have the unilateral power to eliminate an entire federal institution that serves the educational needs of millions of children across this country. Attempting to do so would not only undermine the law, but also inflict tremendous harm to the very foundation of America’s educational system.
The idea that dismantling the department could somehow improve that system is not only misguided, but dangerously naïve.
It’s vital that we, as a nation, recognize the long-term damage this action would cause. The attempt to dismantle the Department of Education is not just an attack on a government agency — it is an attack on the future of America’s children.
To parents across the country: This policy is not only unconstitutional — it is a grave threat to your children’s future. Whether your child is in a classroom in New York, Los Angeles or a small town in the Midwest, the U.S. Department of Education has worked to ensure that their educational opportunities are protected, funded and regulated. A president who seeks to eliminate this essential agency is jeopardizing the future of every single student in America.
This is why we must all rise up and make our voices heard. We must demand that our leaders stop this dangerous plan in its tracks, that they fix what isn’t working and that they use this opportunity to reimagine public education and invest in a more effective, equitable system that gives all children the opportunity to succeed.
Nueve días después de que el presidente Donald Trump firmara órdenes ejecutivas con medidas enérgicas contra la inmigración ilegal, Damaris Alvarado-Rodríguez decidió cerrar un aula en una de sus guarderías en Filadelfia.
A pesar de tener tarjetas de residencia, las maestras de ese salón de clases, en donde atienden a niños y niñas que tienen un año de edad, estaban demasiado nerviosas para ir a trabajar. Desde que Trump tomó posesión, sus funcionarios se han enfocado en Filadelfia y otras denominadas ciudades santuario donde se limita la cooperación en la aplicación de las leyes de inmigración. Los agentes de inmigración han estado presentes constantemente en los vecindarios donde están situados los tres centros de Alvarado-Rodríguez.
“Tengo mucho miedo de cómo esto va a afectar a nuestros niños, familias y personal”, dijo.
En un programa de cuidado infantil familiar en Albuquerque, Nuevo México, Maggie, de 47 años, quien fue abogada antes de emigrar desde México hace 10 años, también ha visto los rápidos efectos de las órdenes ejecutivas. Cinco de los 12 niños a su cuidado dejaron de presentarse. Maggie dijo a través de un intérprete que los padres deciden dejar a sus hijos pequeños con hermanos mayores o abuelos en lugar de con ella, es decir, que salen de casa solo para trabajar y así estar fuera del alcance de las autoridades lo más posible. (The Hechinger Report no utiliza los nombres completos de algunos de los entrevistados porque temen por su seguridad).
“Los padres dijeron: ‘Vamos a esperar a que las cosas se calmen’”, dijo Maggie.
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En Estados Unidos, 1 de cada 5 trabajadores de cuidado infantil es inmigrante. En ciudades grandes como Nueva York, los inmigrantes constituyen más del 40 % de la fuerza laboral de cuidado infantil. En Los Ángeles, es de casi el 50 %.
“En la economía del cuidado infantil, los inmigrantes son la columna vertebral de este trabajo”, afirma Erica Phillips, directora ejecutiva de la Asociación Nacional de Cuidado Infantil Familiar. Estos educadores de la primera infancia se “dedican a prestar uno de los servicios más esenciales y con mayor impacto para los niños pequeños de todo el país”.
Los expertos opinan que las órdenes ejecutivas de Trump amenazan dicha columna vertebral. Entre otros cambios, las órdenes amplían las normas sobre qué inmigrantes pueden ser deportados rápidamente, sin tener una audiencia; exigen que algunos no ciudadanos se registren y presenten huellas dactilares; y limitan los permisos de trabajo.
Un patio de recreo en uno de los centros de cuidado infantil que Damaris Alvarado-Rodríguez dirige en Filadelfia. Alvarado-Rodríguez recientemente cerró una de las aulas porque varios maestros tenían miedo de ir a trabajar debido a posibles redadas de ICE. Credit: Image provided by Damaris Alvarado-Rodriguez
Varios proveedores de cuidado infantil dijeron que la situación parece más grave que en años anteriores. La actual administración ha establecido cuotas diarias de aprehensiones de inmigrantes, lo que ha producido arrestos de más inmigrantes por día que el promedio bajo la administración anterior. Esto incluyea muchos sin antecedentes penales, que no eran el blanco de la ejecución de la ley bajo el expresidente Joe Biden. Asimismo, Trump ha impulsado medidas para terminar con el estatus legal de millones de personas pues propuso eliminar la ciudadanía por nacimiento.
Estados Unidos no puede permitirse perder personal de cuidado infantil. Hay ya muchos programas que tienen problemas crónicos de rotación de trabajadores, lo que puede crear inestabilidad en las vidas de los niños y niñas a su cuidado. Las tasas de rotación en el sector de cuidado infantil son 65 % más altas que el promedio en otros sectores. Los salarios bajos (una trabajadora promedio de cuidado infantil gana 13,07 dólares la hora) dificultan la contratación de personal. A menudo, los cuidadores carecen de prestaciones y pueden ganar más al trabajar en restaurantes de comida rápida o en venta minorista. La pandemia debilitó la fuerza laboral, algo que se ha tardado en reponer. Para lidiar con la escasez de cuidadores infantiles, varios estados han intentado aprobar leyes que permitan a los adolescentes trabajar en dichas aulas.
“Ya estamos empezando desde un punto en el que no hay suficiente cuidado infantil, los programas están en apuros y la fuerza laboral ya está viviendo un estrés increíble”, dijo Lea Austin, directora ejecutiva del Centro para el Estudio del Empleo en el Cuidado Infantil de la Universidad de California en Berkeley. “Solo podemos esperar que esto vaya a devastar aún más todo el ecosistema de cuidado y educación temprana”.
El país lleva mucho tiempo recurriendo a los inmigrantes para los trabajos de cuidado, incluido el cuidado infantil y otras labores como el cuidado de personas mayores. Los inmigrantes tienen mayor probabilidad de servir como cuidadores de “amistades, familiares y vecinos” al asumir acuerdos informales de atención donde hay flexibilidad y que son más populares entre padres de familia.
Al desempeñar estas funciones de cuidado, los inmigrantes permiten que otros padres puedan trabajar. Se calcula que hay 142.000 inmigrantes indocumentados que trabajan como niñeras y asistentes de atención personal o de salud en el hogar en todo el país, lo que crea “un efecto multiplicador de productividad en toda la economía”, según una investigación del Center for American Progress. En la ciudad de Nueva York, la mayoría de las 14.000 niñeras de la ciudad son inmigrantes.
En el norte de California, Adriana, una joven de 27 años que emigró de México hace dos años, dijo que quiere empezar a trabajar y que recientemente le ofrecieron un empleo en una compañía grande. No obstante, primero necesita encontrar una guardería para su bebé de 3 meses, y le preocupa que los funcionarios de inmigración la separen de su bebé. “Tengo miedo, sobre todo porque parece que podrán entrar en mi lugar de trabajo”, dijo a través de un intérprete. “Me preocupa dejar a mi bebé solo”.
El Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas de EE. UU. (ICE, por sus siglas en inglés) no respondió a las múltiples solicitudes de comentarios. Una de las órdenes ejecutivas de Trump, firmada poco después de haber asumido el cargo, anuló las restricciones que impedían que ICE realice redadas en escuelas y programas de cuidado infantil.
Las tarjetas rojas que ofrecen algunos programas de cuidado infantil y escuelas, como estas en un centro en Texas, tienen como objetivo ayudar a las familias a comprender sus derechos en caso de ser detenidas por agentes de inmigración. Credit: Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
La política de inmigración puede tener un efecto paralizador en las comunidades, lo que hace que los inmigrantes eviten trabajos que podrían aumentar su visibilidad ante las autoridades, dijo Chris Herbst, profesor asociado de la Universidad Estatal de Arizona, que estudió el impacto de la política en el cuidado infantil entre 2008 y 2014. Debido a que el sistema de cuidado infantil de Estados Unidos depende tanto del trabajo de los inmigrantes, “los impactos son instantáneos”, añadió.
En Albuquerque, Ana dirige un programa de cuidado infantil que atiende a 50 familias del área, la mayoría de las cuales son ciudadanas estadounidenses. Ana se fue de México en 2020 con su esposo y su hijo pequeño cuando la violencia aumentó en su estado natal de Sinaloa, y ahora le preocupa que la puedan deportar. Ese tipo de preocupación la comparte su personal: tres de sus 14 empleados han dejado de ir a trabajar por miedo a las redadas de inmigración.
Recientemente, Ana y su esposo reunieron algunas pertenencias en caso de ser detenidos. Para prepararse, también han considerado certificar un documento de tutela encargando a su hijo de 3 años, que es ciudadano estadounidense, así como de su hijo de 8 años, que no es ciudadano, a un familiar. “Lo que nos motiva es mejorar la situación de nuestras familias, vivir en mejores lugares y aumentar las oportunidades para nuestros hijos”, dijo. “Esperamos que [los funcionarios de inmigración] persigan a los delincuentes y no intenten seguir o perseguir a personas que son buenas y trabajadoras”.
Elida Cruz dirige un programa de cuidado infantil en el centro de California donde atiende a los hijos de trabajadores migrantes. Cruz opina que el miedo es palpable en algunos de los padres de familia; tanto ella como su esposo reparten víveres y transportan a los pequeños hacia y desde su programa de cuidado infantil para que los padres puedan limitar su tiempo fuera de casa. Su esposo escogió una palabra clave con una familia, la cual pronuncia tres veces para que los padres sepan que es seguro abrir la puerta.
Cruz, como muchas otras proveedoras de cuidado infantil, ha intentado educar a las familias inmigrantes sobre sus derechos al compartir con ellas recursos disponibles y entregarles “tarjetas rojas” que aconsejan a las personas sobre qué hacer si se les acercan agentes de inmigración. Además de preocuparse por los efectos en las familias y los niños, le preocupa qué sucederá si dichas familias se van. “Financieramente, sería la devastación de mi negocio”, dijo. “Tendría que cerrar. Me quedaría sin clientes, sin niños”, añadió. “Nuestros negocios se van a hundir porque todos dependemos de los trabajadores del campo”.
Puede que solo sea cuestión de tiempo: incluso los niños pequeños a su cargo parecen estar conscientes de que las cosas podrían cambiar en cualquier momento. “Es desgarrador ver las caritas de los niños, llenas de miedo”, dijo. Un niño preguntó si los agentes de inmigración vendrían a su centro.
Cruz le dijo lo único que se le ocurrió, aunque sabía que era una mentira piadosa.
“Le dije: ‘¿Sabes por qué no van a venir aquí? … Porque ni siquiera tienen nuestra dirección, así que no saben que estamos aquí, mijo’”.
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Linda McMahon said she stands firmly behind President Donald Trump’s calls to gut the U.S. Department of Education at her confirmation hearing to lead the department.
But she promised to work with Congress to do so — acknowledging some limits on the president’s authority as Trump seeks to remake the government through executive orders. And she tried to reassure teachers and parents that any changes would not jeopardize billions in federal funding that flows to high-poverty schools, special education services, and low-income college students.
“We’d like to do this right,” McMahon said. “It is not the president’s goal to defund the programs, it is only to have it operate more efficiently.”
Trump has called the Education Department a “con job” and said that McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive and billionaire Republican donor, should work to put herself out of a job. McMahon called this rhetoric “fervor” for change.
The Trump administration’s chaotic approach to spending cuts so far raise questions about whether McMahon’s statements — an effort to neutralize the most significant criticism of plans to get rid of the Education Department — will prove true over time.
Thursday’s hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, punctuated by occasional protests, served as a referendum of sorts on the value of the Education Department. Republicans said it had saddled schools with red tape without improving student outcomes. Democrats said the department protects students’ civil rights and funds essential services.
Democrats also pressed McMahon on Trump’s threats to withhold federal funding from schools that violate his executive orders and on the details of a potential reorganization — questions that McMahon largely deflected as ones she could better answer after she takes office.
“It’s almost like we’re being subjected to a very elegant gaslighting here,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire.
Even as Trump has called for the Education Department to be eliminated and schooling to be “returned to the states,” he’s also sought to expand its mission with executive orders threatening the funding of schools that employ diversity, equity, and inclusion practices or teach that racism and discrimination were part of America’s founding. The federal government is barred by law from setting local curriculum, as Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska pointed out during the hearing.
In a tense exchange, Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who’s championed school desegregation and diversity efforts in education, asked McMahon how schools would know if they were running a program that violates Trump’s executive order seeking to root out “radical indoctrination” in K-12 schools. Many schools have no idea what’s allowed, Murphy said, because the order doesn’t clearly define what’s prohibited.
But McMahon would not say that running affinity groups for students from certain racial or ethnic backgrounds, such as a Black engineers club or an after-school club for Vietnamese American students, was permitted. She also would not say whether schools might put their federal funding at risk by teaching an African American history class or other ethnic studies program.
“That’s pretty chilling,” Murphy said. “You’re going to have a lot of educators and a lot of principals and administrators scrambling right now.”
Later in the confirmation hearing, McMahon agreed schools should teach “the good, the bad, and the ugly” parts of U.S. history, and that it’s up to states, not the Department of Education, to establish curriculum.
McMahon’s record on DEI has sometimes been at odds with the Trump administration. She backed diversity issues when she served on the Connecticut State Board of Education, the Washington Post reported.
During her hearing, McMahon said DEI programs are “tough,” because while they’re put in place to promote diversity and inclusion, they can have the opposite effect. She pointed to examples of Black and Hispanic students attending separate graduation ceremonies — though those are typically held to celebrate the achievements of students of color, not to isolate them.
McMahon told the committee that many Americans are experiencing an educational system in decline — she pointed to sobering national test scores, crime on college campuses, and high youth suicide rates — and said it was time for a renewed focus on teaching reading, math, and “true history.”
“In many cases, our wounds are caused by the excessive consolidation of power in our federal education establishment,” she said. “So what’s the remedy? Fund education freedom, not government-run systems. Listen to parents, not politicians. Build up careers, not college debt. Empower states, not special interests. Invest in teachers, not Washington bureaucrats.”
Republican Senators reiterated these themes, arguing that bureaucrats in Washington had had their chance and that it was time for a new approach.
They asked McMahon about Trump administration priorities such as expanding school choice, including private school vouchers, and interpreting Title IX to bar transgender students from restrooms and sports teams aligned with their gender identities.
McMahon said she was “happy” to see the Biden administration’s rules on Title IX vacated, and she supported withholding federal funds from colleges that did not comply with the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law.
Teachers unions and other critics of McMahon have said she lacks the proper experience to lead the Education Department, though McMahon and others have pointed to her time serving on the Connecticut State Board of Education, as a trustee of Sacred Heart University, and her role as chair of the America First Policy Institute, where she advocated for private school choice, apprenticeships, and career education.
McMahon also ran the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first administration. Her understanding of the federal bureaucracy is an asset, supporters say.
Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, said McMahon’s background made her uniquely suited to tackle the pressing challenges facing the American education system today.
McMahon said multiple times that parents of children with disabilities should not worry about federal funding being cut for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, though she said it was possible that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would administer the money instead of the Education Department.
But it appeared that McMahon had limited knowledge of the rights outlined in IDEA, the landmark civil rights law that protects students with disabilities. And she said it was possible that civil rights enforcement — a large portion of which is related to complaints about children with disabilities not getting the services to which they’re entitled — would move to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Dismantling the education department by moving key functions to other departments is a tenet of Project 2025, the playbook the conservative Heritage Foundation developed for a second Trump administration. Most of these functions are mandated in federal law, and moving them would require congressional approval.
McMahon struggled to articulate the goals of IDEA beyond saying students would be taken care of and get the assistance and technology they need.
“There is a reason that the Department of Education and IDEA exist, and it is because educating kids with disabilities can be really hard and it takes the national commitment to get it done,” Hassan, the New Hampshire senator, said. “That’s why so many people are so concerned about this proposal to eliminate the department. Because they think kids will once again be shoved aside, and especially kids with disabilities.”
McMahon also could not name any requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal law that replaced No Child Left Behind. ESSA requires states to identify low-performing schools and intervene to improve student learning, but it gives states more flexibility in how they do so than the previous law.
McMahon seemed open to reversing some of the cuts enacted by the U.S. DOGE Service, the cost-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk.
She said, if confirmed, she would look into whether staff who’d been placed on administrative leave — including some who investigate civil rights complaints — should return. She also said she’d assess the programs that were cut when DOGE terminated 89 contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences and 29 training grants.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, said her office had heard from a former teacher who developed an intensive tutoring strategy that was used in a dozen schools in the state. The teacher had a pending grant application to evaluate the program and its effect on student outcomes, and the teacher worried it would be in jeopardy. Collins asked if the department should keep collecting that kind of data so it could help states determine what’s working for kids.
“I’m not sure yet what the impact of all of those programs are,” McMahon said. “There are many worthwhile programs that we should keep, but I’m not yet apprised of them.”
The Senate education committee is scheduled to vote on McMahon’s confirmation on Feb. 20.
This story was produced by Chalkbeat and reprinted with permission.
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.
Over 7,000 of these student and exchange visitors that overstayed their visas came from India, house representatives heard in a committee hearing on immigration enforcement in the US on January 22.
“Thirty-two countries have student/exchange visitor overstay rates of higher than 20%,” Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the anti-immigration think-tank, the Center for Immigration Studies, told the committee.
However, sector leaders have argued that Vaughan’s testimony contained “some serious and inaccurate generalisations” and relied on “faulty statistics for her claim about the student visa overstay rate,” according to NAFSA‘s director of immigration policy, Heather Stewart.
“International students are the most tracked non-immigrants in the US and a clear and comprehensive understanding of student visa misuse is needed if the field is to arrive at effective and appropriate solutions,” said Stewart.
After India, Vaughan highlighted China, Colombia and Brazil as each having more than 2,000 of their citizens overstay student/exchange visas in 2023, urging Congress to eliminate OPT and impose penalties for institutional sponsors, among a host of regulations.
“The F and M visa categories have [the] highest overstay rates of any of the broad categories of temporary admission,” Vaughan told committee members, with F visas used for academic study and M visas for vocational study.
According to recent DHS figures, the total overstay rate for student and exchange visitors in 2023 was 3.67% with a suspected in-country overstay rate of 2.86%, dropping slightly to 2.69% solely for F-1 students, with all metrics excluding Mexico and Canada.
Countries with highest student/exchange overstay rates by numbers (2023):
Country
Suspected in-country overstays
Total overstays
Total overstay rate
India
5,818
7,081
4.67%
China
3,012
5,255
2.1%
Colombia
2,792
3,223
8.29%
Brazil
1,692
2,198
4.6%
Source: US Homeland Security Entry/Exit Overstay Report FY 2023
While India, China, Colombia and Brazil recorded the largest numbers of student overstays in 2023, their overstay rate as a percentage of overall student populations in the US were relatively low.
It is perhaps unsurprising that India and China, whose combined student populations made up 54% of total international enrolments at US institutions in 2023/24, also saw the highest levels of visa overstays.
Country
Total overstay rate
Equatorial Guinea
70.18%
Chad
55.64%
Eritrea
55.43%
Congo (Kinshasa)
50.06%
Djibouti
43.75%
Burma
42.17%
Yemen
40.92%
Sierra Leone
35.83%
Congo (Brazzaville)
35.14%
Togo
35.05%
Global (excl. Mexico + Canada)
3.67%
Source: US Homeland Security Entry/Exit Overstay Report FY 2023
Notably, the ‘in-country overstay rate’ refers to the percentage of individuals suspected to still be physically present in the US after their visa expired, while the ‘total overstay rate’ includes both those still in the country and those who may have eventually left after overstaying their visa, but were not recorded as departing.
Sector members have raised concerns about the “troubling” scale of the problem uncovered by the report, ranging from benign violations of legitimate students to “cases of wilful fraud”, said Eddie West and Anna Esaki-Smith, two leading US educators.
NAFSA, however, has disputed the figures as “unreliable”, claiming that the report “overstates” the issue and urged stakeholders to take caution when taking the figures out of context.
Indeed, DHS concedes that “infrastructural, operational and logistical challenges” in the exit environment make it difficult to identify students who do not depart via air or who transition from F-1 status to H-1B, legal permanent residency and other statuses.
What’s more, DHS data revealed a 42% decline in the suspected overstay rate for student and exchange visitors across a 15-month period ending in January 2024, indicating a lag time for the system to register students’ changing situations.
“Not only do visa issuance policies need to be adjusted and interior enforcement boosted, in addition Congress should amend the law in several important ways,” Vaughan told the hearing.
In a statement raising some concern about Vaughan’s testimony, she recommended that “the concept of dual intent should not apply to student visa applicants”.
Under current law, it does not.
While the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program has been widely proven to benefit American workers as well as international graduates, Vaughan blamed the initiative for spawning “an industry of diploma mills and fake schools”, calling for it to be eliminated or “much, much more closely regulated”.
Vaughan also recommended stricter regulations on H1-B specialty occupation visas, a move which Stewart warned would “immediately” make the US look less attractive to international students who “strongly consider” post-study employment opportunities when deciding where to study abroad.
During Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he surprised some of the sector.
The second-time US president spoke out in support of the H1-B visa during his presidential campaign amid a row about the work pathway among prominent Republicans.
The US is the only one out of the ‘Big Four’ study destinations – US, UK, Australia and Canada – to publish data on international student overstay rates.
A fact sheet on the order pledged to take “forceful and unprecedented steps” to “combat the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and in our streets” since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” the fact sheet said.
Its direct order to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathisers on college campuses” has sparked fear among international students who participated in the pro-Palestine protests that swept US college campuses last year.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called the order a “dishonest, overbroad and unenforceable attack on both free speech and the humanity of Palestinians”.
“Free speech is a cornerstone of our Constitution that no president can wipe away with an executive order,” it said, adding that the protests had been “overwhelmingly peaceful”.
To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you
Trump Administration
The order pledges immediate action, “using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence”.
Its third section sets out specific measures to “combat campus antisemitism”, requiring agency leaders to recommend to the White House within 60 days all civil and criminal powers that can be used to combat antisemitism.
It requires attorney generals to submit a full analysis of court cases involving K-12 schools, colleges and universities and alleged civil rights violations associated with pro-Palestinian protests. If warranted, such reports could lead to the removal of “alien students and staff”.
While US institutions are required to report to immigration services any information deemed relevant to student visa determinations, federal efforts to impose an obligation to investigate and report on students are unprecedented and would raise serious legal questions, according to O’Melveny law practice.
The measures have alarmed many students and faculty on colleges campuses, but experts have said that the directive would likely draw legal challenges for violating free speech rights protected by the Constitution.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) issued a statement welcoming the Trump Administration’s commitment to “combatting antisemitism vigorously”.
Student visa holders “who have been found to provide material support or resources to designated terror organisations – as defined by the Supreme Court and distinguished from the exercise of free speech – are clearly in violation of the law and are therefore unworthy of the privilege of being in this country,” said AJC.
However, many pro-Palestinian protesters denied supporting Hamas, saying that they were demonstrating against Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 47,000, according to health authorities.
In a letter representing students from the University of California’s 10 campuses, students argued that the order inaccurately conflated “pro-Palestine advocacy with antisemitism” and set a “scary precedent of censorship for the student community”.
The threat of visas being revoked and students being removed was heightened after legislation was passed earlier this month allowing immigration officers to carry out raids in “sensitive locations” including churches, schools and college campuses that were formerly protected.
