In the Assault on Education Research, Students are the Victims

For students with disabilities, thinking about life after high school can feel scary, like they’re standing on the edge of a cliff. It was special educator John Curley’s job to help them prepare and build confidence about the future by developing the skills they needed for a smooth entry into the world of self-sufficiency.

He led a pilot program at Newton South High School in Newton, Mass., called Charting My Path for Future Success, where he and three other special educators worked with students to build skills and develop plans for college, technical schools or careers.

“Our main message was ‘you can do this, and we are going to help get you there,’” says Curley. “The program was empowering and student driven, and our students were motivated and ready to take that next step to move away from home. They needed a plan and a toolkit to catapult them because they didn’t know how to do it on their own.”

“Students Were Devastated”

If the pilot was successful, it could have been scaled to other high schools around the country to help millions of graduating high schoolers with disabilities successfully transition into adulthood. But on Feb. 10, the Trump administration cancelled Charting My Path and 88 other Education Department contracts and gutted the department's research division, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

“Our students and instructors were devastated at the news,” Curley says. “Students were confused at the sudden ending of the program, and their families were angry.” 

America's high schools are required by federal law to provide transition planning to students with disabilities who are preparing to graduate. This includes working with school staff to help a student explore and plan for college, career and independence. Charting My Path was a program to do just that, and the educators who used the materials and training, with guidance and expertise from university researchers, say it was hugely effective. Unfortunately, it was abruptly halted after just three weeks.

 Unable to Carry Out Work Required by Law

Last February, the Trump administration revoked nearly $900 million in research contracts. Charting My Path was one casualty. Another was a pilot program to design new student assessments, something states want as they seek autonomy in developing their own assessments in the wake of the federal standardized testing chaos created by the No Child Left Behind Act. Other terminated contracts provided critical data on issues schools and families want to know about – including school crime and safety, early childhood education, and who and how many of our high school graduates are attending college, trade schools, or are employed. 

This information isn’t provided by anyone else, and it’s never been a politically divisive issue. For years, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have relied on federal data to inform their decision making. That’s why so many are stunned by the reckless cuts by DOGE staffers who had no understanding of what they were eliminating. They had no discussions with the ED employees who ran the programs before cutting staff and contracts.

Then, in March, a “Reduction in Force” cut IES staff from nearly 200 employees to fewer than 20. In IES’ National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which has tracked everything from class sizes to school suspensions to faculty pay, the number of staff went from 100 to three. 

Federal research staff dedicated to higher education issues, including college admissions, degree completions, and so on, are gone. Ironically, now the Trump administration wants new college admissions data—and wants it ASAP—to show whether colleges and universities are complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision to end race-based admissions.

 “Trump’s own policies have left the statistics agency inside the Education Department with a skeleton staff and not enough money, expertise or time to create this new dataset,” noted The Hechinger Report recently.

For more than a century, since 1867, NCES has been a reliable source of information that helps educators, researchers and the public understand the state of education in the United States. It was where ED’s number crunchers worked to provide the data and analysis required for program funding formulas, notably Title I.

“This skeletal staff cannot manage the sheer volume of IES’s mandatory functions—at least 30 data collections and assessments, hundreds of competitive research grants, and production of public-facing resources,” says Daaiyah Bilal-Threats, the senior director of NEA’s Education Policy and Implementation Center.

Just 1% of ED Spending

It was a small investment that paid huge dividends. The entire budget of the Department of Education (ED) makes up just 4% of federal spending, while IES accounted for less than 1% of ED’s spending, according to USAFacts.org.

Cutting that small expenditure, however, will be very costly to schools and colleges and will actually create waste rather than eliminating it, experts say.

“The federal government plays an irreplaceable role in providing high-quality, objective, trustworthy, and nonpartisan education data nationwide—work that cannot be replicated at the same economy of scale by states, local agencies, or the private sector,” wrote education research leaders in a letter to Congress. “Ultimately, it will be students, educators, communities, and the nation that bear the cost.”

NEA’s Research Department, housed in the Education Policy and Implementation Center, also has been following actions taken against NCES and other federal statistical agencies and is taking steps to protect and defend federal data. This includes working with partners to create secure backups of federal datasets, asking Congress and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to preserve access to federal data, and providing information to NEA’s Office of the General Counsel as it pursues legal action against ED.

“What is happening at NCES is part of a larger attack on federal statistical agencies,” says Stacey Pelika, the director of NEA’s Research Department. “This administration wants statistics that support its views instead of the objective data on which Americans have long relied,” she says, pointing to the dismissal of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) after the agency released data that showed slowdowns in hiring as an example.

Broken Promises to Students

In its press release announcing the massive cuts to ED staff, the administration said it will “continue to deliver” on "formula funding" for schools, which is required by law. Title I for high-poverty schools, and the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP), which sends money to rural and low-income schools, are two examples of programs that use formula funding.

But by firing the statisticians and data experts who determine whether schools qualify for that money, the administration has made it virtually impossible “to deliver” on those programs as they claim they will do. With no staff to do the number crunching, where do the numbers come from?

“By eliminating the staff and contracts that collected and analyzed the data to calculate formula grant allocations, it will force ED to use incorrect and outdated data, distorting state and district awards and producing mistaken eligibility determinations,” says NEA’s Bilal-Threats.

Title I Schools in Jeopardy

Title I is probably the most well-known of the government’s formula funding programs. 

Congress established Title I in 1965 to provide money to K-12 schools in low-income communities. Nearly 90% of U.S. school districts and 60% of schools benefit from the program, which has long had bipartisan support among lawmakers. If schools lose  this targeted funding, which will happen when data errors strip them of their eligibility, these already-struggling schools will lose significant numbers of staff or be forced to close, leaving some kids with no school in their neighborhoods.

Even minor changes to formula inputs will have major impacts. For example, just a $1 change in average per-pupil expenditure would alter a state’s Title I allocation by more than $1 million. 

The same is true of changes in poverty estimates and formula-eligible child counts. Because school district boundaries and demographics shift each year, these inputs also shift every year. 

As a result, NEA estimates that, in the five school years from 2016-2020, about 13% of schools’ eligibility for Title I funds changed year to year, with at least 10% of ineligible schools moving into eligible status from one year to the next. 

Had eligibility been determined and allocations calculated using previous years’ data, these schools would not have received the Title I funding they were entitled to by law.

“Everybody is Impacted by This”

Ultimately, without proper Title I support, students will suffer the consequences—especially students who are struggling academically but don’t have the same access to extra supports as students in higher income communities.

Take, for example, Elijah, a student at Washington Elementary, a Title I school in Rochelle, New Jersey, who was a student in Sundjata Sekou’s third grade classroom.

“I gave Elijah extra support and placed him with the small-group basic skills teacher. In addition to getting extra support from me, Elijah received daily small group support in math and reading. On some days, the students in the small group that Elijah was in received extra instruction in class. On other days, the students in the small group received instruction on reading, sentence structure, and mathematics in the basic skills teacher’s office,” Sekou says.

Elijah also attended the Title I-funded afterschool academic program, and with hard work, he caught up and was working at or above grade level.

Without Title I, the school wouldn’t have the money to pay for basic skills teachers to work with kids like Elijah.

William Jones is the supervisor of ESSA/Title I in Roselle Public Schools and says changes to Title I funding would be devastating.

“The farmland depends on Title I just as much as the cities do,” says Jones. “Everybody is impacted by this. We get funding based on need. The suburbs may not get as much as the cities do. But they are going to feel the impact too if these funds are cut. 

Without new data, ED could be forced to run the formulas with prior years’ data, leaving schools and districts like Roselle with less funding than they are entitled to under the formulas.

Stale data does not capture the ever-changing demographics that occur in many parts of the country and will skew allocations for every school and district.

“In fact, a failure to determine Title I eligibility based on current data is three times more likely to deprive an eligible school of Title I funding than to award funding to a school that no longer qualifies,” says Bilal-Threats.

What Message Does Cutting Programs Send?

Back in Newton, Mass., John Curley says investments in education aren’t nearly as costly as disinvestment. Disinvestment, he says, is math that doesn’t add up.

“With a small investment now, students can go on to be productive members of our communities, people who work and pay taxes and are less likely to need public assistance,” he says.  “I’ve been doing this long enough to see how well these programs work long term.” 

Curley is also worried about the message the current administration is sending to his students and all students who benefit from federal programs. 

“My students knew the government was paying for the Charting My Path program, and it was small, small dollars in the big picture, but it sent a powerful, priceless message,” he says. “They thought, ‘wow, my school, my teachers, and my president are all investing in me, and when I graduate, I want to give back.’ When that investment was taken away what message does it send to the students?”