The education secretary, Linda McMahon, presented sweeping reductions at the US Department of Education as an efficiency drive, hailing firings and funding cuts as a “significant step toward restoring the greatness” of the country’s schools system.
Staff inside the department disagree.
The Trump administration has axed many research programs which have yet to be completed, according to workers, putting years of work – on which the federal government spent tens of millions of dollars – to waste.
Nearly 50% of staff at the US Department of Education was fired last week, with more than 1,300 employees given termination notices and nearly 600 workers taking voluntary resignation offers. Offices covering research, data and statistics were decimated.
A Department of Education employee who survived the cuts likened the experience to a funeral. “People were crying, breaking down at the human toll,” they told the Guardian. “These people are not bureaucratic bloat: they’re vital to helping improve educational outcomes for our nation’s children, and to ensuring states comply with the law. It’s death by a thousand cuts.”
Staff were particularly concerned about the decision to halt research projects, years after they started, that were nearly complete.
Nearly all employees at the department’s Institute of Educational Sciences (IES) were fired, and more than 160 education research funding contracts and grants worth $900m were cancelled.
Many of the research projects were commissioned to take place over five years. “We were in year four, which means there was a lot of research that was almost done, but is now never going to see the light of day,” one fired IES employee said.
They cited one study into the early impact of a literacy program in Michigan. The outcome of the research will now not see the light of day.
Most of the money spent on such research will now “yield nothing for the taxpayers, nothing for schools, nothing for students,” the employee said. “You can’t even quantify the loss.”
They questioned McMahon’s claim that the sweeping cuts would restore the “greatness” of the US education system. “I don’t understand how you can do that when you cut an office where our only job was to figure out what’s working in classrooms, what’s not working, who’s it working for, and who’s it not working for?
“We have this roadmap for schools, we have all this information, and now we’re just taking it away and saying, figure it out.”
“These cancellations are going to have stopped research that was well on its way to helping us better understand how to improve outcomes for kids,” said Rachel Dinkes, president and CEO of Knowledge Alliance, a non-profit whose members are educational organizations. “It’s just been halted, stopped, and it doesn’t look like there’s any indication that it will get restarted.”
She cited proven success stories that relied on the kind of research being cancelled, including vast improvements in literacy in Mississippi.
“When states use evidence-based practices, student achievements improve,” Dinkes added. “I think we’re unwinding, hampering and putting speed bumps into achieving those goals.”
Joshua Stewart, an education researcher for a federal contractor since 2012, was working on research for the education department’s regional educational laboratories. Last week, he said they had to inform school districts and teachers they were working with that – midway through their work – it had been abruptly halted.
“We had to send them a series of notes saying we’ve been thankful to be your partners on these projects that are intended to improve outcomes for students and teachers, but we have to stop right away. We can’t even leave you with anything, we just have to stop,” Stewart said. “I have a hard time believing that it’s going to have any positive impact on students, teachers and families.”
A federal judge in Maryland has since ordered a temporary halt to the reduction in force firings at the Department of Education and other agencies. The Trump administration has appealed.
Attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia also filed a lawsuit last week over the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the agency.
Contacted for comment, a spokesperson for the Department of Education referred the Guardian to the press release on the cuts, which claimed that it would continue to deliver “on all statutory programs” under the agency’s purview.
Education outcomes in reading and math in the US had been gradually increasing since the education department’s creation in 1979, up until Covid-19 shutdowns caused significant disruption. Trump has made clear he wants to close the department.
