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"content": "\u003cp>Social emotional learning — lessons in soft skills like listening to people you disagree with or calming yourself down before a test — has become a flashpoint in the culture wars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The conservative political group Moms for Liberty opposes SEL, as it is often abbreviated, \u003ca href=\"https://portal.momsforliberty.org/media/files/files/b0d67d1f/sel-packet-120622-0845-2-.pdf\">telling parents\u003c/a> that its “goal is to psychologically manipulate students to accept the progressive ideology that supports gender fluidity, sexual preference exploration, and systemic oppression.” Critics say that parents should discuss social and emotional matters at home and that schools should stick to academics. Meanwhile, some advocates on the left say standard SEL classes don’t go far enough and should include such topics as social justice and anti-racism training.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the political battle rages on, academic researchers are marshalling evidence for what high-quality SEL programs actually deliver for students. The latest study, by researchers at Yale University, summarizes 12 years of evidence, from 2008 to 2020, and it finds that 30 different SEL programs, which put themselves through \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Table-of-SEL-interventions.pdf\">40 rigorous evaluations\u003c/a> involving almost 34,000 students, tended to produce “moderate” academic benefits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543251367769\">meta-analysis\u003c/a>, published online Oct. 8 in the peer-reviewed journal Review of Educational Research, calculated that the grades and test scores of students in SEL classes improved by about 4 percentile points, on average, compared with students who didn’t receive soft-skill instruction. That’s the equivalent of moving from the 50th percentile (in the middle) to the 54th percentile (slightly above average). Reading gains were larger (more than 6 percentile points) than math gains (fewer than 4 percentile points). Longer-duration SEL programs, extending more than four months, produced double the academic gains — more than 8 percentile points.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Social emotional learning interventions are not designed, most of the time, to explicitly improve academic achievement,” said Christina Cipriano, one of the study’s four authors and an associate professor at Yale Medical School’s Child Study Center. “And yet we demonstrated, through our meta-analytic report, that explicit social emotional learning improved academic achievement and it improved both GPA and test scores.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cipriano also directs the \u003ca href=\"https://medicine.yale.edu/childstudy/research/collaborative-labs/education-collaboratory/\">Education Collaboratory\u003c/a> at Yale, whose mission is to “advance the science of learning and social and emotional development.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The academic boost from SEL in this 2025 paper is much smaller than the 11 percentile points documented in an earlier \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21291449/\">2011 meta-analysis\u003c/a> that summarized research through 2007, when SEL had not yet gained widespread popularity in schools. That has since changed. More than \u003ca href=\"https://casel.org/links/social-and-emotional-learning-in-u-s-schools/\">80 percent\u003c/a> of principals of K-12 schools said their schools used an SEL curriculum during the 2023-24 school year, according to a survey by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and the RAND Corporation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Yale researchers only studied a small subset of the SEL market, programs that subjected themselves to a rigorous evaluation and included academic outcomes. Three-quarters of the 40 studies were randomized-controlled trials, similar to pharmaceutical trials, where schools or teachers were randomly assigned to teach an SEL curriculum. The remaining studies, in which schools or teachers volunteered to participate, still had control groups of students so that researchers could compare the academic gains of students who did not receive SEL instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The SEL programs in the Yale study taught a wide range of soft skills, from \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/helping-kids-learn-how-their-brains-work/\">mindfulness\u003c/a> and anger management to resolving conflicts and setting goals. It is unclear which soft skills are driving the academic gains. That’s an area for future research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Developmentally, when we think about what we know about how kids learn, emotional regulation is really the driver,” said Cipriano. “No matter how good that curriculum or that math program or reading curriculum is, if a child is feeling unsafe or anxious or stressed out or frustrated or embarrassed, they’re not available to receive the instruction, however great that teacher might be.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cipriano said that effective programs give students tools to cope with stressful situations. She offered the example of a pop quiz, from the perspective of a student. “You can recognize, I’m feeling nervous, my blood is rushing to my hands or my face, and I can use my strategies of counting to 10, thinking about what I know, and use positive self talk to be able to regulate, to be able to take my test,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The strongest evidence for SEL is in elementary school, where the majority of evaluations have been conducted (two-thirds of the 40 studies). For young students, SEL lessons tend to be short but frequent, for example, 10 minutes a day. There’s less evidence for middle and high school SEL programs because they haven’t been studied as much. Typically, preteens and teens have less frequent but longer sessions, a half hour or even 90 minutes, weekly or monthly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cipriano said that schools don’t need to spend “hours and hours” on social and emotional instruction in order to see academic benefits. A current trend is to incorporate or embed social and emotional learning within academic instruction, as part of math class, for example. But none of the underlying studies in this paper evaluated whether this was a more effective way to deliver SEL. All of the programs in this study were separate stand-alone SEL lessons.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Advice to schools\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Schools are inundated by sales pitches from SEL vendors. Estimates of the market size range wildly, but a half dozen market research firms put it above $2 billion annually. Not all SEL programs are necessarily effective or can be expected to produce the academic gains that the Yale team calculated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cipriano advises schools not to be taken in by slick marketing. Many of the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Table-of-SEL-interventions.pdf\">effective programs\u003c/a> have no marketing at all and some are free. Unfortunately, some of these programs have been discontinued or have transformed through ownership changes. But she says school leaders can ask questions about which specific skills the SEL program claims to foster, whether those skills will help the district achieve its goals, such as improving school climate, and whether the program has been externally evaluated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Districts invest in things all the time that are flashy and pretty, across content areas, not just SEL,” said Cipriano. “It may never have had an external evaluation, but has a really great social media presence and really great marketing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cipriano has also built a new website, \u003ca href=\"http://improvingstudentoutcomes.org/\">improvingstudentoutcomes.org\u003c/a>, to track the latest research on SEL effectiveness and to help schools identify proven programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cipriano says parents should be asking questions too. “Parents should be partners in learning,” said Cipriano. “I have four kids, and I want to know what they’re learning about in school.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This meta-analysis probably won’t stop the SEL critics who say that these programs force educators to be therapists. Groups like Moms for Liberty, which holds its \u003ca href=\"https://www.momsforliberty.org/summit25/\">national summit\u003c/a> this week, say teachers should stick to academics. This paper rejects that dichotomy because it suggests that emotions, social interaction and academics are all interlinked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before criticizing all SEL programs, educators and parents need to consider the evidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-sel-academic-benefits-yale-study/\"> \u003cem>SEL benefits\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\"> \u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Social emotional learning — lessons in soft skills like listening to people you disagree with or calming yourself down before a test — has become a flashpoint in the culture wars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The conservative political group Moms for Liberty opposes SEL, as it is often abbreviated, \u003ca href=\"https://portal.momsforliberty.org/media/files/files/b0d67d1f/sel-packet-120622-0845-2-.pdf\">telling parents\u003c/a> that its “goal is to psychologically manipulate students to accept the progressive ideology that supports gender fluidity, sexual preference exploration, and systemic oppression.” Critics say that parents should discuss social and emotional matters at home and that schools should stick to academics. Meanwhile, some advocates on the left say standard SEL classes don’t go far enough and should include such topics as social justice and anti-racism training.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the political battle rages on, academic researchers are marshalling evidence for what high-quality SEL programs actually deliver for students. The latest study, by researchers at Yale University, summarizes 12 years of evidence, from 2008 to 2020, and it finds that 30 different SEL programs, which put themselves through \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Table-of-SEL-interventions.pdf\">40 rigorous evaluations\u003c/a> involving almost 34,000 students, tended to produce “moderate” academic benefits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543251367769\">meta-analysis\u003c/a>, published online Oct. 8 in the peer-reviewed journal Review of Educational Research, calculated that the grades and test scores of students in SEL classes improved by about 4 percentile points, on average, compared with students who didn’t receive soft-skill instruction. That’s the equivalent of moving from the 50th percentile (in the middle) to the 54th percentile (slightly above average). Reading gains were larger (more than 6 percentile points) than math gains (fewer than 4 percentile points). Longer-duration SEL programs, extending more than four months, produced double the academic gains — more than 8 percentile points.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Social emotional learning interventions are not designed, most of the time, to explicitly improve academic achievement,” said Christina Cipriano, one of the study’s four authors and an associate professor at Yale Medical School’s Child Study Center. “And yet we demonstrated, through our meta-analytic report, that explicit social emotional learning improved academic achievement and it improved both GPA and test scores.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cipriano also directs the \u003ca href=\"https://medicine.yale.edu/childstudy/research/collaborative-labs/education-collaboratory/\">Education Collaboratory\u003c/a> at Yale, whose mission is to “advance the science of learning and social and emotional development.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The academic boost from SEL in this 2025 paper is much smaller than the 11 percentile points documented in an earlier \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21291449/\">2011 meta-analysis\u003c/a> that summarized research through 2007, when SEL had not yet gained widespread popularity in schools. That has since changed. More than \u003ca href=\"https://casel.org/links/social-and-emotional-learning-in-u-s-schools/\">80 percent\u003c/a> of principals of K-12 schools said their schools used an SEL curriculum during the 2023-24 school year, according to a survey by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and the RAND Corporation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Yale researchers only studied a small subset of the SEL market, programs that subjected themselves to a rigorous evaluation and included academic outcomes. Three-quarters of the 40 studies were randomized-controlled trials, similar to pharmaceutical trials, where schools or teachers were randomly assigned to teach an SEL curriculum. The remaining studies, in which schools or teachers volunteered to participate, still had control groups of students so that researchers could compare the academic gains of students who did not receive SEL instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The SEL programs in the Yale study taught a wide range of soft skills, from \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/helping-kids-learn-how-their-brains-work/\">mindfulness\u003c/a> and anger management to resolving conflicts and setting goals. It is unclear which soft skills are driving the academic gains. That’s an area for future research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Developmentally, when we think about what we know about how kids learn, emotional regulation is really the driver,” said Cipriano. “No matter how good that curriculum or that math program or reading curriculum is, if a child is feeling unsafe or anxious or stressed out or frustrated or embarrassed, they’re not available to receive the instruction, however great that teacher might be.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cipriano said that effective programs give students tools to cope with stressful situations. 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But she says school leaders can ask questions about which specific skills the SEL program claims to foster, whether those skills will help the district achieve its goals, such as improving school climate, and whether the program has been externally evaluated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Districts invest in things all the time that are flashy and pretty, across content areas, not just SEL,” said Cipriano. “It may never have had an external evaluation, but has a really great social media presence and really great marketing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cipriano has also built a new website, \u003ca href=\"http://improvingstudentoutcomes.org/\">improvingstudentoutcomes.org\u003c/a>, to track the latest research on SEL effectiveness and to help schools identify proven programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cipriano says parents should be asking questions too. “Parents should be partners in learning,” said Cipriano. “I have four kids, and I want to know what they’re learning about in school.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This meta-analysis probably won’t stop the SEL critics who say that these programs force educators to be therapists. 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"content": "\u003cp>In his first two months in office, President Donald Trump \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/improving-education-outcomes-by-empowering-parents-states-and-communities/\">ordered\u003c/a> the closing of the Education Department and fired half of its staff. The department’s research and statistics division, called the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), was particularly hard hit. About \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-chaos-confusion-statistics-education/\">90 percent of its staff\u003c/a> lost their jobs and more than 100 federal contracts to conduct its primary activities were canceled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But now there are signs that the Trump administration is partially reversing course and wants the federal government to retain a role in generating education statistics and evidence for what works in classrooms — at least to some extent. On Sept. 25, the department posted a \u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/09/25/2025-18608/request-for-information-feedback-on-redesigning-the-institute-of-education-sciences-ies\">notice\u003c/a> in the Federal Register asking the public to \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/ED-2025-IES-0844\">submit feedback\u003c/a> by Oct. 15 on reforming IES to make research more relevant to student learning. The department also asked for suggestions on how to collect data more efficiently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The timeline for revamping IES remains unclear, as is whether the administration will invest money into modernizing the agency. For example, it would take time and money to pilot new statistical techniques; in the meantime, statisticians would have to continue using current protocols.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, the signs of rebuilding are adding up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the end of May, the department \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-welcomes-dr-amber-northern-senior-advisor\">announced\u003c/a> that it had temporarily hired a researcher from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, to recommend ways to reform education research and development. The researcher, \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-welcomes-dr-amber-northern-senior-advisor\">Amber Northern\u003c/a>, has been “listening” to suggestions from think tanks and research organizations, according to department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann, and now wants more public feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Biedermann said that the Trump administration “absolutely” intends to retain a role in education research, even as it seeks to close the department. Closure will require congressional approval, which hasn’t happened yet. In the meantime, Biedermann said the department is looking across the government to find where its research and statistics activities “best fit.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other IES activities also appear to be resuming. In June, the department disclosed in a legal filing that it had or has plans to reinstate \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-restart-ed-contracts/\">20 of the 101 terminated contracts\u003c/a>. Among the activities slated to be restarted are 10 Regional Education Laboratories that partner with school districts and states to generate and apply evidence. It remains unclear how all 20 contracts can be restarted without federal employees to hold competitive bidding processes and oversee them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Earlier in September, the department posted \u003ca href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lesley-muldoon-20010_search-results-activity-7371653279925161984-_UHR?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABOsY8BDVlfLq8BBp90gugfoOY6nDIh4D8\">eight new jobs\u003c/a> to help administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also called the Nation’s Report Card. These positions would be part of IES’s statistics division, the National Center for Education Statistics. Most of the work in developing and administering tests is handled by outside vendors, but federal employees are needed to award and oversee these contracts. After \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-chaos-confusion-statistics-education/\">mass firings\u003c/a> in March, employees at the board that oversees NAEP have been on loan to the Education Department to make sure the 2026 NAEP test is on schedule.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only a small staff remains at IES. Some education statistics have trickled out since Trump took office, including its \u003ca href=\"https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2025/09/25/gutted-nces-releases-first-batch-higher-ed-data\">first release of higher education data\u003c/a> on Sept. 23. But the data releases have been \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-condition-of-education/\">late\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://bsky.app/profile/robertkelchen.com/post/3lzj4ab7j7s2b\">incomplete\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is believed that no new grants have been issued for education studies since March, according to researchers who are familiar with the federal grant making process but asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. A big obstacle is that a contract to conduct peer review of research proposals was canceled so new ideas cannot be properly vetted. The staff that remains is trying to make annual disbursements for older multi-year studies that haven’t been canceled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With all these changes, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to figure out the status of federally funded education research. One potential source of clarity is a new \u003ca href=\"https://osf.io/6wrtn/\">project\u003c/a> launched by two researchers from George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University. Rob Olsen and Betsy Wolf, who was an IES researcher until March, are tracking cancellations and keeping a record of research results for policymakers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If it’s successful, it will be a much-needed light through the chaos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jill-barshay/\">\u003cem>Jill Barshay\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or \u003c/em>\u003cem>barshay@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-reforming-ies-education-research/\">\u003cem>reforming IES\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In his first two months in office, President Donald Trump \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/improving-education-outcomes-by-empowering-parents-states-and-communities/\">ordered\u003c/a> the closing of the Education Department and fired half of its staff. The department’s research and statistics division, called the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), was particularly hard hit. About \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-chaos-confusion-statistics-education/\">90 percent of its staff\u003c/a> lost their jobs and more than 100 federal contracts to conduct its primary activities were canceled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But now there are signs that the Trump administration is partially reversing course and wants the federal government to retain a role in generating education statistics and evidence for what works in classrooms — at least to some extent. On Sept. 25, the department posted a \u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/09/25/2025-18608/request-for-information-feedback-on-redesigning-the-institute-of-education-sciences-ies\">notice\u003c/a> in the Federal Register asking the public to \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/ED-2025-IES-0844\">submit feedback\u003c/a> by Oct. 15 on reforming IES to make research more relevant to student learning. The department also asked for suggestions on how to collect data more efficiently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The timeline for revamping IES remains unclear, as is whether the administration will invest money into modernizing the agency. For example, it would take time and money to pilot new statistical techniques; in the meantime, statisticians would have to continue using current protocols.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, the signs of rebuilding are adding up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the end of May, the department \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-welcomes-dr-amber-northern-senior-advisor\">announced\u003c/a> that it had temporarily hired a researcher from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, to recommend ways to reform education research and development. The researcher, \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-welcomes-dr-amber-northern-senior-advisor\">Amber Northern\u003c/a>, has been “listening” to suggestions from think tanks and research organizations, according to department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann, and now wants more public feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Biedermann said that the Trump administration “absolutely” intends to retain a role in education research, even as it seeks to close the department. Closure will require congressional approval, which hasn’t happened yet. In the meantime, Biedermann said the department is looking across the government to find where its research and statistics activities “best fit.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other IES activities also appear to be resuming. In June, the department disclosed in a legal filing that it had or has plans to reinstate \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-restart-ed-contracts/\">20 of the 101 terminated contracts\u003c/a>. Among the activities slated to be restarted are 10 Regional Education Laboratories that partner with school districts and states to generate and apply evidence. It remains unclear how all 20 contracts can be restarted without federal employees to hold competitive bidding processes and oversee them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Earlier in September, the department posted \u003ca href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lesley-muldoon-20010_search-results-activity-7371653279925161984-_UHR?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABOsY8BDVlfLq8BBp90gugfoOY6nDIh4D8\">eight new jobs\u003c/a> to help administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also called the Nation’s Report Card. These positions would be part of IES’s statistics division, the National Center for Education Statistics. Most of the work in developing and administering tests is handled by outside vendors, but federal employees are needed to award and oversee these contracts. After \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-chaos-confusion-statistics-education/\">mass firings\u003c/a> in March, employees at the board that oversees NAEP have been on loan to the Education Department to make sure the 2026 NAEP test is on schedule.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only a small staff remains at IES. Some education statistics have trickled out since Trump took office, including its \u003ca href=\"https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2025/09/25/gutted-nces-releases-first-batch-higher-ed-data\">first release of higher education data\u003c/a> on Sept. 23. But the data releases have been \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-condition-of-education/\">late\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://bsky.app/profile/robertkelchen.com/post/3lzj4ab7j7s2b\">incomplete\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is believed that no new grants have been issued for education studies since March, according to researchers who are familiar with the federal grant making process but asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. A big obstacle is that a contract to conduct peer review of research proposals was canceled so new ideas cannot be properly vetted. The staff that remains is trying to make annual disbursements for older multi-year studies that haven’t been canceled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With all these changes, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to figure out the status of federally funded education research. One potential source of clarity is a new \u003ca href=\"https://osf.io/6wrtn/\">project\u003c/a> launched by two researchers from George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University. Rob Olsen and Betsy Wolf, who was an IES researcher until March, are tracking cancellations and keeping a record of research results for policymakers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If it’s successful, it will be a much-needed light through the chaos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jill-barshay/\">\u003cem>Jill Barshay\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or \u003c/em>\u003cem>barshay@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-reforming-ies-education-research/\">\u003cem>reforming IES\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "what-schools-stand-to-lose-in-the-battle-over-the-next-federal-education-budget",
"title": "What Schools Stand to Lose in the Battle Over the Next Federal Education Budget",
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"content": "\u003cp>The battle over next year’s federal education budget has begun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Congress and the White House have released not one, not two, but \u003cem>three\u003c/em> competing funding visions for the nation’s K-12 schools in fiscal year 2026. And education researchers warn that two of those three proposals — from the White House and House Republicans — would impose steep cuts on some of the United States’ most vulnerable students and disadvantaged school communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The three proposals on the table\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>First up, \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/media/document/fy-2026-presidents-budget-request-110152.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">President Trump’s proposed budget\u003c/a> would cut U.S. Department of Education funding by 15%. It would eliminate all funding ($1.3 billion) for English language learners and migrant students. It would also combine 18 funding streams — including help for rural schools, civics education, at-risk youth and students experiencing homelessness — and cut them from roughly $6.5 billion down to $2 billion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The White House has \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">defended this consolidation\u003c/a>, saying it “requires fewer Federal staff and empowers States and districts to make spending decisions based on their needs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-appropriations.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/fy26-labor-health-and-human-services-education-and-related-agencies-subcommittee-mark.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">second proposal, from House Republicans\u003c/a>, would push for even deeper K-12 cuts, notably a $4.7 billion reduction in funding that supports schools in low-income communities. This funding stream, known as Title I, has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades and currently sends roughly \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/03/21/nx-s1-5330917/trump-schools-education-department-cuts-low-income\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$18 billion to schools\u003c/a> in disadvantaged communities all over the United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/committee-approves-fy26-labor-health-and-human-services-education-and-related\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">news release\u003c/a> heralding the legislation, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Republican Tom Cole of Oklahoma, said, “Change doesn’t come from keeping the status quo—it comes from making bold, disciplined choices.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the \u003ca href=\"https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy26_lhhs_bill_text.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">third proposal, from the Senate\u003c/a>, would make minor cuts but largely maintain funding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A quick reminder: Federal funding makes up a relatively small share of school budgets, roughly 11%, though cuts in low-income districts can still be painful and disruptive.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Schools in blue congressional districts could lose more money\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Researchers at the liberal-leaning think tank New America \u003ca href=\"https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/edcentral/congressional-districts-losing-the-most-k12-funding-under-trump-and-house-budgets/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wanted to know\u003c/a> how the impact of these proposals might vary depending on the politics of the congressional district receiving the money. They found that the Trump budget would subtract an average of about $35 million from each district’s K-12 schools, with those led by Democrats losing slightly more than those led by Republicans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The House proposal would make deeper, more partisan cuts, with districts represented by Democrats losing an average of about $46 million and Republican-led districts losing about $36 million.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republican leadership of the House Appropriations Committee, which is responsible for this budget proposal, did not respond to an NPR request for comment on this partisan divide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In several cases, we’ve had to make some very hard choices,” Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., a top Republican on the appropriations committee, said during the full-committee markup of the bill. “Americans must make priorities as they sit around their kitchen tables about the resources they have within their family. And we should be doing the same thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Senate proposal is more moderate and would leave the status quo largely intact.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to the work of New America, the liberal-leaning Learning Policy Institute created \u003ca href=\"https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/blog/5-billion-federal-k-12-formula-funding-hangs-balance-between-white-house-and-senate-proposals\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this tool\u003c/a> to compare the potential impact of the Senate bill with the president’s proposal.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>High-poverty schools could lose more than low-poverty schools\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Trump and House proposals would disproportionately hurt high-poverty school districts, according to an \u003ca href=\"https://edtrust.org/rti/fy26-federal-funding-at-risk-for-americas-schools/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">analysis by the liberal-leaning EdTrust\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Kentucky, for example, EdTrust estimates that the president’s budget could cost the state’s highest-poverty school districts $359 per student, nearly three times what it would cost its wealthiest districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cuts are even steeper in the House proposal: Kentucky’s highest-poverty schools could lose $372 per student, while its lowest-poverty schools could lose $143 per child.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Senate bill would cut far less: $37 per child in the state’s highest-poverty school districts versus $12 per student in its lowest-poverty districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New America researchers arrived at similar conclusions when studying congressional districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The lowest-income congressional districts would lose one and a half times as much funding as the richest congressional districts under the Trump budget,” says New America’s Zahava Stadler.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The House proposal, Stadler says, would go further, imposing a cut the Trump budget does not on Title I.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The House budget does something new and scary,” Stadler says, “which is it openly targets funding for students in poverty. This is not something that we see \u003cem>ever\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republican leaders of the House Appropriations Committee did not respond to NPR requests for comment on their proposal’s outsize impact on low-income communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Senate has proposed a modest increase to Title I for next year.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Majority-minority schools could lose more than mostly white schools\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Just as the president’s budget would hit high-poverty schools hard, New America found that it would also have an outsize impact on congressional districts where schools serve predominantly children of color. These districts would lose nearly twice as much funding as predominantly white districts, in what Stadler calls “a huge, huge disparity\u003cem>.”\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of several drivers of that disparity is the White House’s decision to end all funding for English language learners and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/08/29/640862283/in-one-generation-a-farmworker-family-grows-college-ambitions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">migrant students\u003c/a>. In \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">one budget document\u003c/a>, the White House justified cutting the former by arguing the program “deemphasizes English primacy. … The historically low reading scores for all students mean States and communities need to unite—not divide—classrooms.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under the House proposal, according to New America, congressional districts that serve predominantly white students would lose roughly $27 million on average, while districts with schools that serve mostly children of color would lose more than twice as much: nearly $58 million.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>EdTrust’s data tool tells a similar story, state by state. For example, under the president’s budget, Pennsylvania school districts that serve the most students of color would lose $413 per student. Districts that serve the fewest students of color would lose just $101 per child.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The findings were similar for the House proposal: a $499-per-student cut in Pennsylvania districts that serve the most students of color versus a $128 cut per child in predominantly white districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That was most surprising to me,” says EdTrust’s Ivy Morgan. “Overall, the House proposal really is worse [than the Trump budget] for high-poverty districts, districts with high percentages of students of color, city and rural districts. And we were not expecting to see that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump and House proposals do share one common denominator: the belief that the federal government should be spending less on the nation’s schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Trump \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSbBNm5Pms0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pledged\u003c/a>, “We’re going to be returning education very simply back to the states where it belongs,” that apparently included scaling back some of the federal role in funding schools, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The challenge for states, communities and families, if one of these budgets becomes a reality, will be filling that funding void, especially since the federal government has always focused its dollars on helping students and schools that need it the most.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The battle over next year’s federal education budget has begun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Congress and the White House have released not one, not two, but \u003cem>three\u003c/em> competing funding visions for the nation’s K-12 schools in fiscal year 2026. And education researchers warn that two of those three proposals — from the White House and House Republicans — would impose steep cuts on some of the United States’ most vulnerable students and disadvantaged school communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The three proposals on the table\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>First up, \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/media/document/fy-2026-presidents-budget-request-110152.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">President Trump’s proposed budget\u003c/a> would cut U.S. Department of Education funding by 15%. It would eliminate all funding ($1.3 billion) for English language learners and migrant students. It would also combine 18 funding streams — including help for rural schools, civics education, at-risk youth and students experiencing homelessness — and cut them from roughly $6.5 billion down to $2 billion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The White House has \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">defended this consolidation\u003c/a>, saying it “requires fewer Federal staff and empowers States and districts to make spending decisions based on their needs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-appropriations.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/fy26-labor-health-and-human-services-education-and-related-agencies-subcommittee-mark.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">second proposal, from House Republicans\u003c/a>, would push for even deeper K-12 cuts, notably a $4.7 billion reduction in funding that supports schools in low-income communities. This funding stream, known as Title I, has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades and currently sends roughly \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/03/21/nx-s1-5330917/trump-schools-education-department-cuts-low-income\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$18 billion to schools\u003c/a> in disadvantaged communities all over the United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/committee-approves-fy26-labor-health-and-human-services-education-and-related\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">news release\u003c/a> heralding the legislation, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Republican Tom Cole of Oklahoma, said, “Change doesn’t come from keeping the status quo—it comes from making bold, disciplined choices.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the \u003ca href=\"https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy26_lhhs_bill_text.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">third proposal, from the Senate\u003c/a>, would make minor cuts but largely maintain funding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A quick reminder: Federal funding makes up a relatively small share of school budgets, roughly 11%, though cuts in low-income districts can still be painful and disruptive.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Schools in blue congressional districts could lose more money\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Researchers at the liberal-leaning think tank New America \u003ca href=\"https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/edcentral/congressional-districts-losing-the-most-k12-funding-under-trump-and-house-budgets/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wanted to know\u003c/a> how the impact of these proposals might vary depending on the politics of the congressional district receiving the money. They found that the Trump budget would subtract an average of about $35 million from each district’s K-12 schools, with those led by Democrats losing slightly more than those led by Republicans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The House proposal would make deeper, more partisan cuts, with districts represented by Democrats losing an average of about $46 million and Republican-led districts losing about $36 million.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republican leadership of the House Appropriations Committee, which is responsible for this budget proposal, did not respond to an NPR request for comment on this partisan divide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In several cases, we’ve had to make some very hard choices,” Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., a top Republican on the appropriations committee, said during the full-committee markup of the bill. “Americans must make priorities as they sit around their kitchen tables about the resources they have within their family. And we should be doing the same thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Senate proposal is more moderate and would leave the status quo largely intact.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to the work of New America, the liberal-leaning Learning Policy Institute created \u003ca href=\"https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/blog/5-billion-federal-k-12-formula-funding-hangs-balance-between-white-house-and-senate-proposals\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this tool\u003c/a> to compare the potential impact of the Senate bill with the president’s proposal.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>High-poverty schools could lose more than low-poverty schools\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Trump and House proposals would disproportionately hurt high-poverty school districts, according to an \u003ca href=\"https://edtrust.org/rti/fy26-federal-funding-at-risk-for-americas-schools/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">analysis by the liberal-leaning EdTrust\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Kentucky, for example, EdTrust estimates that the president’s budget could cost the state’s highest-poverty school districts $359 per student, nearly three times what it would cost its wealthiest districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cuts are even steeper in the House proposal: Kentucky’s highest-poverty schools could lose $372 per student, while its lowest-poverty schools could lose $143 per child.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Senate bill would cut far less: $37 per child in the state’s highest-poverty school districts versus $12 per student in its lowest-poverty districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New America researchers arrived at similar conclusions when studying congressional districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The lowest-income congressional districts would lose one and a half times as much funding as the richest congressional districts under the Trump budget,” says New America’s Zahava Stadler.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The House proposal, Stadler says, would go further, imposing a cut the Trump budget does not on Title I.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The House budget does something new and scary,” Stadler says, “which is it openly targets funding for students in poverty. This is not something that we see \u003cem>ever\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republican leaders of the House Appropriations Committee did not respond to NPR requests for comment on their proposal’s outsize impact on low-income communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Senate has proposed a modest increase to Title I for next year.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Majority-minority schools could lose more than mostly white schools\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Just as the president’s budget would hit high-poverty schools hard, New America found that it would also have an outsize impact on congressional districts where schools serve predominantly children of color. These districts would lose nearly twice as much funding as predominantly white districts, in what Stadler calls “a huge, huge disparity\u003cem>.”\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of several drivers of that disparity is the White House’s decision to end all funding for English language learners and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/08/29/640862283/in-one-generation-a-farmworker-family-grows-college-ambitions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">migrant students\u003c/a>. In \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">one budget document\u003c/a>, the White House justified cutting the former by arguing the program “deemphasizes English primacy. … The historically low reading scores for all students mean States and communities need to unite—not divide—classrooms.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under the House proposal, according to New America, congressional districts that serve predominantly white students would lose roughly $27 million on average, while districts with schools that serve mostly children of color would lose more than twice as much: nearly $58 million.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>EdTrust’s data tool tells a similar story, state by state. For example, under the president’s budget, Pennsylvania school districts that serve the most students of color would lose $413 per student. Districts that serve the fewest students of color would lose just $101 per child.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The findings were similar for the House proposal: a $499-per-student cut in Pennsylvania districts that serve the most students of color versus a $128 cut per child in predominantly white districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That was most surprising to me,” says EdTrust’s Ivy Morgan. “Overall, the House proposal really is worse [than the Trump budget] for high-poverty districts, districts with high percentages of students of color, city and rural districts. And we were not expecting to see that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump and House proposals do share one common denominator: the belief that the federal government should be spending less on the nation’s schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Trump \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSbBNm5Pms0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pledged\u003c/a>, “We’re going to be returning education very simply back to the states where it belongs,” that apparently included scaling back some of the federal role in funding schools, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>What if improving children’s mental health — and life outcomes — could be done by teaching kids how their brains work?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a key idea behind the approach of teachers at Momentous School in Dallas, a private elementary school that serves 225 students, most of whom come from low-income families. Each day, educators present lessons on neuroscience and mindfulness, from the youngest learners all the way up to fifth graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Preschoolers in the school’s 3-year-old classroom learn about the brain by singing \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psRCo7yu1_I&t=1s\">“The Brain Song”\u003c/a> to the tune of “Bingo” (“I have a brain in my head/And it’s for thinking”). They practice mindfulness by lying down with stuffed animals on their stomachs and watching them move up and down as they breathe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Older students learn calming strategies like slowly counting each finger on their hands while breathing in and out. Classrooms offer tactile models of the brain to help students learn about different parts such as the prefrontal cortex, which controls such processes as executive function and problem solving, and the brain stem, which regulates breathing and blood pressure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This focus on mindfulness is happening in \u003ca href=\"https://childmind.org/article/mindfulness-in-the-classroom/\">schools across the country\u003c/a>, according to the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit focused on children’s mental health. Experts say the goal is teaching self-awareness and regulation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once the kids feel they can calm themselves, even just through breathing it’s like the ‘wow’ moment,” said Rick Kinder, creator of a mindfulness program called “Wellness Works in Schools,” in an article by the Child Mind Institute.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65793\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1346px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65793\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/09/mader-ec-brain-learning.jpeg\" alt=\"Illustration of a brain and its functions\" width=\"1346\" height=\"1346\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/09/mader-ec-brain-learning.jpeg 1346w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/09/mader-ec-brain-learning-160x160.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/09/mader-ec-brain-learning-768x768.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1346px) 100vw, 1346px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Research shows teaching children about their brains can help with learning and motivation. \u003ccite>(Momentous School)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At Momentous School, conversations about the brain continue throughout the day, as teachers can be heard encouraging students to identify their emotions or asking, “What’s your amygdala saying to you in this moment?” according to Jessica Gomez, a psychologist and executive director of Momentous Institute, the Dallas-based mental health nonprofit that operates the school. (The amygdala processes emotions in the brain.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Through these frequent discussions and additional lessons on mental health and healthy relationships, teachers are “trying to normalize these things as part of the human condition versus something that is stigmatizing,” Gomez said. The school also holds regular parent nights to educate families on how the brain works and teach emotional regulation strategies that families can practice together at home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://momentousinstitute.org/momentous-school\">Momentous School\u003c/a>, which launched in 1997 and is funded by philanthropic donations, was developed to put into practice mental health and brain science research from Momentous Institute. A \u003ca href=\"https://centerforbrainhealth.org/article/momentous-case-study\">recent study\u003c/a> by Momentous Institute and the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas found this approach may be contributing to positive outcomes for graduates of the school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These findings come at a time when lessons on emotions, relationships and social awareness, often referred to as social and emotional learning, \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/social-and-emotional-learning-is-the-latest-flashpoint-in-the-education-wars/\">have become a flashpoint in education and culture wars\u003c/a>. Studies show such lessons can improve academic performance: Other researchers unaffiliated with Momentous School have also found that teaching about the brain \u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9775149/\">can provide motivation\u003c/a> for students and improve academic and social development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As teachers and students head back to school and face new routines and social situations, now is a good time to build relationships and introduce even young students to ideas about how their brain works, Gomez said. Although many students at Momentous deal with challenges such as poverty, she believes that the school’s emphasis on mental health and brain science has helped families to better cope with those pressures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The point isn’t to never have stress in your life, it’s to know what to do with it,” Gomez said. “Children and parents having agency and tools helps them know how to navigate life stressors, which has a buffering effect on their brain.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that Momentous School was developed based on research by Momentous Institute.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jackie-mader/\">\u003cem>Jackie Mader\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/j1U5CM890xs9omELswfOt8jvEJ?domain=hechingerreport.org\">\u003cem>neuroscience in education\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by The \u003c/em>\u003cem>Hechinger\u003c/em>\u003cem> Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/GmbvCNk8Pyf9nyvQs4hrtyzLzj?domain=hechingerreport.org\">\u003cem>Hechinger\u003c/em>\u003cem> newsletter\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>What if improving children’s mental health — and life outcomes — could be done by teaching kids how their brains work?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a key idea behind the approach of teachers at Momentous School in Dallas, a private elementary school that serves 225 students, most of whom come from low-income families. Each day, educators present lessons on neuroscience and mindfulness, from the youngest learners all the way up to fifth graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Preschoolers in the school’s 3-year-old classroom learn about the brain by singing \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psRCo7yu1_I&t=1s\">“The Brain Song”\u003c/a> to the tune of “Bingo” (“I have a brain in my head/And it’s for thinking”). They practice mindfulness by lying down with stuffed animals on their stomachs and watching them move up and down as they breathe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Older students learn calming strategies like slowly counting each finger on their hands while breathing in and out. Classrooms offer tactile models of the brain to help students learn about different parts such as the prefrontal cortex, which controls such processes as executive function and problem solving, and the brain stem, which regulates breathing and blood pressure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This focus on mindfulness is happening in \u003ca href=\"https://childmind.org/article/mindfulness-in-the-classroom/\">schools across the country\u003c/a>, according to the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit focused on children’s mental health. Experts say the goal is teaching self-awareness and regulation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once the kids feel they can calm themselves, even just through breathing it’s like the ‘wow’ moment,” said Rick Kinder, creator of a mindfulness program called “Wellness Works in Schools,” in an article by the Child Mind Institute.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65793\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1346px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65793\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/09/mader-ec-brain-learning.jpeg\" alt=\"Illustration of a brain and its functions\" width=\"1346\" height=\"1346\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/09/mader-ec-brain-learning.jpeg 1346w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/09/mader-ec-brain-learning-160x160.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/09/mader-ec-brain-learning-768x768.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1346px) 100vw, 1346px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Research shows teaching children about their brains can help with learning and motivation. \u003ccite>(Momentous School)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At Momentous School, conversations about the brain continue throughout the day, as teachers can be heard encouraging students to identify their emotions or asking, “What’s your amygdala saying to you in this moment?” according to Jessica Gomez, a psychologist and executive director of Momentous Institute, the Dallas-based mental health nonprofit that operates the school. (The amygdala processes emotions in the brain.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Through these frequent discussions and additional lessons on mental health and healthy relationships, teachers are “trying to normalize these things as part of the human condition versus something that is stigmatizing,” Gomez said. The school also holds regular parent nights to educate families on how the brain works and teach emotional regulation strategies that families can practice together at home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://momentousinstitute.org/momentous-school\">Momentous School\u003c/a>, which launched in 1997 and is funded by philanthropic donations, was developed to put into practice mental health and brain science research from Momentous Institute. A \u003ca href=\"https://centerforbrainhealth.org/article/momentous-case-study\">recent study\u003c/a> by Momentous Institute and the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas found this approach may be contributing to positive outcomes for graduates of the school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These findings come at a time when lessons on emotions, relationships and social awareness, often referred to as social and emotional learning, \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/social-and-emotional-learning-is-the-latest-flashpoint-in-the-education-wars/\">have become a flashpoint in education and culture wars\u003c/a>. Studies show such lessons can improve academic performance: Other researchers unaffiliated with Momentous School have also found that teaching about the brain \u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9775149/\">can provide motivation\u003c/a> for students and improve academic and social development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As teachers and students head back to school and face new routines and social situations, now is a good time to build relationships and introduce even young students to ideas about how their brain works, Gomez said. Although many students at Momentous deal with challenges such as poverty, she believes that the school’s emphasis on mental health and brain science has helped families to better cope with those pressures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The point isn’t to never have stress in your life, it’s to know what to do with it,” Gomez said. “Children and parents having agency and tools helps them know how to navigate life stressors, which has a buffering effect on their brain.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that Momentous School was developed based on research by Momentous Institute.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jackie-mader/\">\u003cem>Jackie Mader\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/j1U5CM890xs9omELswfOt8jvEJ?domain=hechingerreport.org\">\u003cem>neuroscience in education\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by The \u003c/em>\u003cem>Hechinger\u003c/em>\u003cem> Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/GmbvCNk8Pyf9nyvQs4hrtyzLzj?domain=hechingerreport.org\">\u003cem>Hechinger\u003c/em>\u003cem> newsletter\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>New test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, show eighth-graders’ science scores have fallen 4 points since 2019 and 12th-graders’ math and reading scores have fallen 3 points in the same time period.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tests were administered between January and March 2024.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is the first NAEP score release since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department. Those cuts, included \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5325854/trump-education-department-layoffs-civil-rights-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">laying off more than half the workers\u003c/a> at the Institute of Education Sciences, IES, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After those cuts, the department also \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/fewer-subjects-students-data-points-feds-to-scale-back-naep/2025/04\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">canceled about a dozen\u003c/a> national and state assessments of student progress through 2032 — about half those tests were planned for 12th-graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NAEP, which provides data for the Nation’s Report Card, is mandated by Congress and is the largest nationally representative test of student learning. NAEP tests were first administered in 1969.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the assessments in math and reading are given every two years to a broad sample of students in fourth and eighth grades; 12th-graders receive them every four years. NAEP also administers voluntary assessments in other subjects outside the congressional mandate.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What to make of the test scores\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Reading scores dipped for 12th-graders, except among the highest-achieving students, compared with 2019, the last time this test was administered. Compared with NAEP’s first 12th-grade reading assessment, in 1992, today’s average score is 10 points lower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows — continued declines that began more than a decade ago,” Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, told reporters. “My predecessor warned of this trend, and her predecessor warned of this trend as well. And now I am warning you of this trend.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2024 assessment tested students for reading comprehension skills and surveyed them about opportunities to learn and engage with reading in and outside school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twelfth-grade math scores dropped the same amount as reading scores and were 3 points lower than in 2005, the first time this version of the math test was administered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted, focused action to accelerate student learning,” Soldner said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among eighth-graders, the average science score dropped 4 points compared with 2019. Student scores decreased across the board, for low- and high-performing students alike.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to measuring students’ academic achievement, NAEP also surveys things like students’ comfort level with certain subjects and their attendance. In those surveys, a smaller share of eighth-graders indicated high levels of confidence in their science skills compared with their counterparts in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And nearly one-third of 12th-graders reported missing three or more days of school in the month prior to taking the assessment in 2024, an increase from 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How changes at the Education Department are impacting student assessments\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Legally, the federal government \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/02/04/nx-s1-5286311/trump-schools-education-department-funding-cuts-congress-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">has no power\u003c/a> over what is taught in schools. So while Tuesday’s release measured student achievement under President Biden, experts avoid linking NAEP scores to any particular administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The federal government is in a unique position with these test scores to be the scoreboard of American education, to tell us what’s happening and for whom,” says Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “[That] doesn’t mean that it has the capacity to fix these issues. That’s a job for the states.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But behind the scenes, federal changes \u003cem>have \u003c/em>had an impact on how the Nation’s Report Card is administered, according to a senior official at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the cuts to the U.S. Education Department left only two senior staffers assigned to NAEP and said that NCES relied on additional support from colleagues in other departments to get the new release out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NCES confirmed that, in order to meet congressional testing mandates in 2026 and 2028, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has approved a waiver to add at least eight staff positions before the end of the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marty West is on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and is vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which sets NAEP policy. He says he’s confident in the department’s ability to meet NAEP deadlines moving forward: “The preparation for the tests that will be administered in early 2026, for example, really began as much as five years ago and were pretty far down the road by the spring of 2025.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There will also be fewer deadlines to meet. This spring, the NAGB slashed about a dozen planned assessments — for fourth-grade science, 12th-grade U.S. history and writing across fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders — that were scheduled to be administered over the next seven years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was not too unusual in terms of the history of the program,” West says of restructuring the assessment schedule. “We felt [it] was an important step so that we could allow our colleagues at NCES to focus their energies on the tests that we felt were most important.” Among them are the tests for math and reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The NAGB is an independent, nonpartisan organization made up of state and local representatives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are no federal officials on the National Assessment Governing Board, and that’s by design,” West says. “Although it is a federal assessment … it is designed and administered in a way that meets the needs of state and local governments and the broader public.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New national test scores are out today, measuring eighth-grader science skills, and for 12th-graders, it was math and reading. The scores are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress – also known as the Nation’s Report Card – and they come after massive cuts to the U.S. Education Department. It oversees the national assessment, which is required by Congress. NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo has been following this. So, Sequoia, what do the new test scores show us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: So these tests were taken in spring of 2024. So this is the first report for these students since the pandemic. And a few things stood out. In 12th-grade math, scores dropped about 3 points from pre-pandemic levels, while eighth-graders followed a similar pattern with a 4-point average drop in science. These might not sound like huge drops, but I want to note something. In both science and math, drops happened across all achievement levels. So both low and high-performing students dropped this cycle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading scores also dipped for nearly all 12th-graders compared to the last test in 2019. But one important thing to note here is when you compare today’s scores to the first Nation’s Report Card for 12th-grade reading more than 30 years ago, today’s average score is 10 points lower. I talked to some of the folks who oversee these tests, and they said this report follows a pattern, one we’ve known about for a while. Scores from the lowest-performing students are at a historic low, and they’re continuing on a decline that started more than a decade ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: I’ve been hearing some Republicans say that Biden policies are to blame for the low scores because the students took these tests during the Biden administration. So how much does federal policy influence what happens in the classroom?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: The federal government is not allowed to dictate what is taught in the classrooms at all. So experts avoid linking NAEP scores to any particular administration. Also these are trends. Like I said, they go back several presidential administrations, well before the pandemic. The tests are drawn up by a bipartisan group of local and state education leaders. They include teachers and principals. The assessment is supposed to show people what is happening to students in classrooms, not why it’s happening. Nat Malkus is deputy director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He explains the role of the U.S. government as somewhat of a scoreboard for the country’s education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NAT MALKUS: The federal government is in a unique position to tell us what’s happening and for whom. Just because the federal government is good at being that scoreboard doesn’t mean that it has the capacity to fix these issues. That’s a job for the states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: You know, back in March, the Education Department cut almost half of its staff. Do we know how all of that impacted the release?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: So a senior official at the National Center for Education Statistics, who oversee this test, briefed reporters on condition of anonymity that there are currently only two senior staffers left working on the Nation’s Report Card. In order to get today’s results out, they had to rely on workers from other teams within the department. But that is about to change. The same senior officials said they recently received a waiver from the education secretary to hire for eight more positions being added before the end of the year, so that the department can meet its goals in 2026 and 2028 under Congressional mandate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: That’s NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo. Thank you for educating us on this report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: (Laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF DO MAKE SAY THINK’S “GOODBYE ENEMY AIRSHIP”)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>New test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, show eighth-graders’ science scores have fallen 4 points since 2019 and 12th-graders’ math and reading scores have fallen 3 points in the same time period.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tests were administered between January and March 2024.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is the first NAEP score release since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department. Those cuts, included \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5325854/trump-education-department-layoffs-civil-rights-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">laying off more than half the workers\u003c/a> at the Institute of Education Sciences, IES, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After those cuts, the department also \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/fewer-subjects-students-data-points-feds-to-scale-back-naep/2025/04\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">canceled about a dozen\u003c/a> national and state assessments of student progress through 2032 — about half those tests were planned for 12th-graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NAEP, which provides data for the Nation’s Report Card, is mandated by Congress and is the largest nationally representative test of student learning. NAEP tests were first administered in 1969.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the assessments in math and reading are given every two years to a broad sample of students in fourth and eighth grades; 12th-graders receive them every four years. NAEP also administers voluntary assessments in other subjects outside the congressional mandate.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What to make of the test scores\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Reading scores dipped for 12th-graders, except among the highest-achieving students, compared with 2019, the last time this test was administered. Compared with NAEP’s first 12th-grade reading assessment, in 1992, today’s average score is 10 points lower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows — continued declines that began more than a decade ago,” Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, told reporters. “My predecessor warned of this trend, and her predecessor warned of this trend as well. And now I am warning you of this trend.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2024 assessment tested students for reading comprehension skills and surveyed them about opportunities to learn and engage with reading in and outside school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twelfth-grade math scores dropped the same amount as reading scores and were 3 points lower than in 2005, the first time this version of the math test was administered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted, focused action to accelerate student learning,” Soldner said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among eighth-graders, the average science score dropped 4 points compared with 2019. Student scores decreased across the board, for low- and high-performing students alike.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to measuring students’ academic achievement, NAEP also surveys things like students’ comfort level with certain subjects and their attendance. In those surveys, a smaller share of eighth-graders indicated high levels of confidence in their science skills compared with their counterparts in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And nearly one-third of 12th-graders reported missing three or more days of school in the month prior to taking the assessment in 2024, an increase from 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How changes at the Education Department are impacting student assessments\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Legally, the federal government \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/02/04/nx-s1-5286311/trump-schools-education-department-funding-cuts-congress-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">has no power\u003c/a> over what is taught in schools. So while Tuesday’s release measured student achievement under President Biden, experts avoid linking NAEP scores to any particular administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The federal government is in a unique position with these test scores to be the scoreboard of American education, to tell us what’s happening and for whom,” says Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “[That] doesn’t mean that it has the capacity to fix these issues. That’s a job for the states.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But behind the scenes, federal changes \u003cem>have \u003c/em>had an impact on how the Nation’s Report Card is administered, according to a senior official at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the cuts to the U.S. Education Department left only two senior staffers assigned to NAEP and said that NCES relied on additional support from colleagues in other departments to get the new release out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NCES confirmed that, in order to meet congressional testing mandates in 2026 and 2028, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has approved a waiver to add at least eight staff positions before the end of the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marty West is on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and is vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which sets NAEP policy. He says he’s confident in the department’s ability to meet NAEP deadlines moving forward: “The preparation for the tests that will be administered in early 2026, for example, really began as much as five years ago and were pretty far down the road by the spring of 2025.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There will also be fewer deadlines to meet. This spring, the NAGB slashed about a dozen planned assessments — for fourth-grade science, 12th-grade U.S. history and writing across fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders — that were scheduled to be administered over the next seven years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was not too unusual in terms of the history of the program,” West says of restructuring the assessment schedule. “We felt [it] was an important step so that we could allow our colleagues at NCES to focus their energies on the tests that we felt were most important.” Among them are the tests for math and reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The NAGB is an independent, nonpartisan organization made up of state and local representatives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are no federal officials on the National Assessment Governing Board, and that’s by design,” West says. “Although it is a federal assessment … it is designed and administered in a way that meets the needs of state and local governments and the broader public.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New national test scores are out today, measuring eighth-grader science skills, and for 12th-graders, it was math and reading. The scores are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress – also known as the Nation’s Report Card – and they come after massive cuts to the U.S. Education Department. It oversees the national assessment, which is required by Congress. NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo has been following this. So, Sequoia, what do the new test scores show us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: So these tests were taken in spring of 2024. So this is the first report for these students since the pandemic. And a few things stood out. In 12th-grade math, scores dropped about 3 points from pre-pandemic levels, while eighth-graders followed a similar pattern with a 4-point average drop in science. These might not sound like huge drops, but I want to note something. In both science and math, drops happened across all achievement levels. So both low and high-performing students dropped this cycle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading scores also dipped for nearly all 12th-graders compared to the last test in 2019. But one important thing to note here is when you compare today’s scores to the first Nation’s Report Card for 12th-grade reading more than 30 years ago, today’s average score is 10 points lower. I talked to some of the folks who oversee these tests, and they said this report follows a pattern, one we’ve known about for a while. Scores from the lowest-performing students are at a historic low, and they’re continuing on a decline that started more than a decade ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: I’ve been hearing some Republicans say that Biden policies are to blame for the low scores because the students took these tests during the Biden administration. So how much does federal policy influence what happens in the classroom?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: The federal government is not allowed to dictate what is taught in the classrooms at all. So experts avoid linking NAEP scores to any particular administration. Also these are trends. Like I said, they go back several presidential administrations, well before the pandemic. The tests are drawn up by a bipartisan group of local and state education leaders. They include teachers and principals. The assessment is supposed to show people what is happening to students in classrooms, not why it’s happening. Nat Malkus is deputy director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He explains the role of the U.S. government as somewhat of a scoreboard for the country’s education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NAT MALKUS: The federal government is in a unique position to tell us what’s happening and for whom. Just because the federal government is good at being that scoreboard doesn’t mean that it has the capacity to fix these issues. That’s a job for the states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: You know, back in March, the Education Department cut almost half of its staff. Do we know how all of that impacted the release?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: So a senior official at the National Center for Education Statistics, who oversee this test, briefed reporters on condition of anonymity that there are currently only two senior staffers left working on the Nation’s Report Card. In order to get today’s results out, they had to rely on workers from other teams within the department. But that is about to change. The same senior officials said they recently received a waiver from the education secretary to hire for eight more positions being added before the end of the year, so that the department can meet its goals in 2026 and 2028 under Congressional mandate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: That’s NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo. Thank you for educating us on this report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: (Laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF DO MAKE SAY THINK’S “GOODBYE ENEMY AIRSHIP”)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Writing can be hard, equal parts heavy lifting and drudgery. No wonder so many students are turning to the time-saving allure of ChatGPT, which can crank out entire papers in seconds. It rescues them from procrastination jams and dreaded all-nighters, magically freeing up more time for other pursuits, like, say … doomscrolling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, no one learns to be a better writer when someone else (or some AI bot) is doing the work for them. The question is whether chatbots can morph into decent writing teachers or coaches that students actually want to consult to improve their writing, and not just use for shortcuts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jennifer Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, has been studying how AI bots can be used to improve student writing for several years. In an interview, she explained why she is cautious about the ability of AI to make us better writers and is still testing how to use the new technology effectively.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>All in the timing \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Meyer says that just because ChatGPT is available 24/7 doesn’t mean students should consult it at the start of the writing process. Instead, Meyer believes that students would generally learn more if they wrote a first draft on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s when AI could be most helpful, she thinks. With some prompting, a chatbot could provide immediate writing feedback targeted to each students’ needs. One student might need to practice writing shorter sentences. Another might be struggling with story structure and outlining. AI could theoretically meet an entire classroom’s individual needs faster than a human teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Meyer’s experiments, she inserted AI only after the first draft was done as part of the revision process. In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X23000784\">study\u003c/a> published in 2024, she randomly assigned 200 German high school students to receive AI feedback after writing a draft of an essay in English. Their revised essays were stronger than those of 250 students who were also told to revise, but didn’t get help from AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In surveys, those with AI feedback also said they felt more motivated to rewrite than those who didn’t get feedback. That motivation is critical. Often students aren’t in the mood to rewrite, and without revisions, students can’t become better writers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer doesn’t consider her experiment proof that AI is a great writing teacher. She didn’t compare it with how student writing improved after human feedback. Her experiment compared only AI feedback with no feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most importantly, one dose of AI writing feedback wasn’t enough to elevate students’ writing skills. On a second, fresh essay topic, the students who had previously received AI feedback didn’t write any better than the students who hadn’t been helped by AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s unclear how many rounds of AI feedback it would take to boost a student’s writing skills more permanently, not just help revise the essay at hand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Meyer doesn’t know whether a student would want to keep discussing writing with an AI bot over and over again. Maybe students were willing to engage with it in this experiment because it was a novelty, but could soon tire of it. That’s next on Meyer’s research agenda.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A viral MIT study\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A much smaller MIT study published earlier this year echoes Meyer’s theory. “\u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1\">Your Brain on ChatGPT\u003c/a>” went viral because it seemed to say that using ChatGPT to help write an essay made students’ brains less engaged. Researchers found that students who wrote an essay without any online tools had stronger brain connectivity and activity than students who used AI or consulted Google to search for source materials. (Using Google while writing wasn’t nearly as bad for the brain as AI.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although those results made \u003ca href=\"https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/\">headlines\u003c/a>, there was more to the experiment. The students who initially wrote an essay on their own were later given ChatGPT to help improve their essays. That switch to ChatGPT boosted brain activity, in contrast to what the neuroscientists found during the initial writing process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These studies add to the evidence that delaying AI a bit, after some initial thinking and drafting, could be a sweet spot in learning. That’s something researchers need to test more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Meyer remains concerned about giving AI tools to very weak writers and to young children who haven’t developed basic writing skills. “This could be a real problem,” said Meyer. “It could be detrimental to use these tools too early.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Cheating your way to learning?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Meyer doesn’t think it’s always a bad idea for students to ask ChatGPT to do the writing for them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just as young artists learn to paint by copying masterpieces in museums, students might learn to write better by copying good writing. (The late great New Yorker editor John Bennet taught Jill to write this way. He called it “copy work” and he encouraged his journalism students to do it every week by copying longhand the words of legendary writers, not AI.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer suggests that students ask ChatGPT to write a sample essay that meets their teacher’s assignment and grading criteria. The next step is key. If students pretend it’s their own piece and submit it, that’s cheating. They’ve also offloaded cognitive work to technology and haven’t learned anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the AI essay can be an effective teaching tool, in theory, if students study the arguments, organizational structure, sentence construction and vocabulary before writing a new draft in their own words. Ideally, the next assignment should be better if students have learned through that analysis and internalized the style and techniques of the model essay, Meyer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My hypothesis would be as long as there’s cognitive effort with it, as long as there’s a lot of time on task and like critical thinking about the output, then it should be fine,” said Meyer.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Reconsidering praise\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Everyone likes a compliment. But too much praise can drown learning just as too much water can keep flowers from blooming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ChatGPT has a tendency to pour the praise on thick and often begins with banal flattery, like “Great job!” even when a student’s writing needs a lot of work. In Meyer’s test of whether AI feedback can improve students’ writing, she intentionally told ChatGPT not to start with praise and instead go straight to constructive criticism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her parsimonious approach to praise was inspired by a \u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0969594X.2023.2179956\">2023 writing study\u003c/a> about what motivates students to revise. The study found that when teachers started off with general praise, students were left with the false impression that their work was already good enough so they didn’t put in the extra effort to rewrite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Meyer’s experiment, the praise-free feedback was effective in getting students to revise and improve their essays. But she didn’t set up a direct competition between the two approaches — praise-free vs. praise-full — so we don’t know for sure which is more effective when students are interacting with AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Being stingy with praise rubs real teachers the wrong way. After Meyer removed praise from the feedback, teachers told her they wanted to restore it. “They wondered about why the feedback was so negative,” Meyer said. “That’s not how they would do it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer and other researchers may one day solve the puzzle of how to turn AI chatbots into great writing coaches. But whether students will have the willpower or desire to forgo an instantly written essay is another matter. As long as ChatGPT continues to allow students to take the easy way out, it’s human nature to do so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Shirley Liu is a graduate student in education at Northwestern University. Liu reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-writing-meyer/\">\u003cem>using AI to become a better writer\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Writing can be hard, equal parts heavy lifting and drudgery. No wonder so many students are turning to the time-saving allure of ChatGPT, which can crank out entire papers in seconds. It rescues them from procrastination jams and dreaded all-nighters, magically freeing up more time for other pursuits, like, say … doomscrolling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, no one learns to be a better writer when someone else (or some AI bot) is doing the work for them. The question is whether chatbots can morph into decent writing teachers or coaches that students actually want to consult to improve their writing, and not just use for shortcuts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jennifer Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, has been studying how AI bots can be used to improve student writing for several years. In an interview, she explained why she is cautious about the ability of AI to make us better writers and is still testing how to use the new technology effectively.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>All in the timing \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Meyer says that just because ChatGPT is available 24/7 doesn’t mean students should consult it at the start of the writing process. Instead, Meyer believes that students would generally learn more if they wrote a first draft on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s when AI could be most helpful, she thinks. With some prompting, a chatbot could provide immediate writing feedback targeted to each students’ needs. One student might need to practice writing shorter sentences. Another might be struggling with story structure and outlining. AI could theoretically meet an entire classroom’s individual needs faster than a human teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Meyer’s experiments, she inserted AI only after the first draft was done as part of the revision process. In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X23000784\">study\u003c/a> published in 2024, she randomly assigned 200 German high school students to receive AI feedback after writing a draft of an essay in English. Their revised essays were stronger than those of 250 students who were also told to revise, but didn’t get help from AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In surveys, those with AI feedback also said they felt more motivated to rewrite than those who didn’t get feedback. That motivation is critical. Often students aren’t in the mood to rewrite, and without revisions, students can’t become better writers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer doesn’t consider her experiment proof that AI is a great writing teacher. She didn’t compare it with how student writing improved after human feedback. Her experiment compared only AI feedback with no feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most importantly, one dose of AI writing feedback wasn’t enough to elevate students’ writing skills. On a second, fresh essay topic, the students who had previously received AI feedback didn’t write any better than the students who hadn’t been helped by AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s unclear how many rounds of AI feedback it would take to boost a student’s writing skills more permanently, not just help revise the essay at hand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Meyer doesn’t know whether a student would want to keep discussing writing with an AI bot over and over again. Maybe students were willing to engage with it in this experiment because it was a novelty, but could soon tire of it. That’s next on Meyer’s research agenda.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A viral MIT study\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A much smaller MIT study published earlier this year echoes Meyer’s theory. “\u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1\">Your Brain on ChatGPT\u003c/a>” went viral because it seemed to say that using ChatGPT to help write an essay made students’ brains less engaged. Researchers found that students who wrote an essay without any online tools had stronger brain connectivity and activity than students who used AI or consulted Google to search for source materials. (Using Google while writing wasn’t nearly as bad for the brain as AI.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although those results made \u003ca href=\"https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/\">headlines\u003c/a>, there was more to the experiment. The students who initially wrote an essay on their own were later given ChatGPT to help improve their essays. That switch to ChatGPT boosted brain activity, in contrast to what the neuroscientists found during the initial writing process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These studies add to the evidence that delaying AI a bit, after some initial thinking and drafting, could be a sweet spot in learning. That’s something researchers need to test more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Meyer remains concerned about giving AI tools to very weak writers and to young children who haven’t developed basic writing skills. “This could be a real problem,” said Meyer. “It could be detrimental to use these tools too early.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Cheating your way to learning?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Meyer doesn’t think it’s always a bad idea for students to ask ChatGPT to do the writing for them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just as young artists learn to paint by copying masterpieces in museums, students might learn to write better by copying good writing. (The late great New Yorker editor John Bennet taught Jill to write this way. He called it “copy work” and he encouraged his journalism students to do it every week by copying longhand the words of legendary writers, not AI.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer suggests that students ask ChatGPT to write a sample essay that meets their teacher’s assignment and grading criteria. The next step is key. If students pretend it’s their own piece and submit it, that’s cheating. They’ve also offloaded cognitive work to technology and haven’t learned anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the AI essay can be an effective teaching tool, in theory, if students study the arguments, organizational structure, sentence construction and vocabulary before writing a new draft in their own words. Ideally, the next assignment should be better if students have learned through that analysis and internalized the style and techniques of the model essay, Meyer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My hypothesis would be as long as there’s cognitive effort with it, as long as there’s a lot of time on task and like critical thinking about the output, then it should be fine,” said Meyer.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Reconsidering praise\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Everyone likes a compliment. But too much praise can drown learning just as too much water can keep flowers from blooming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ChatGPT has a tendency to pour the praise on thick and often begins with banal flattery, like “Great job!” even when a student’s writing needs a lot of work. In Meyer’s test of whether AI feedback can improve students’ writing, she intentionally told ChatGPT not to start with praise and instead go straight to constructive criticism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her parsimonious approach to praise was inspired by a \u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0969594X.2023.2179956\">2023 writing study\u003c/a> about what motivates students to revise. The study found that when teachers started off with general praise, students were left with the false impression that their work was already good enough so they didn’t put in the extra effort to rewrite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Meyer’s experiment, the praise-free feedback was effective in getting students to revise and improve their essays. But she didn’t set up a direct competition between the two approaches — praise-free vs. praise-full — so we don’t know for sure which is more effective when students are interacting with AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Being stingy with praise rubs real teachers the wrong way. After Meyer removed praise from the feedback, teachers told her they wanted to restore it. “They wondered about why the feedback was so negative,” Meyer said. “That’s not how they would do it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meyer and other researchers may one day solve the puzzle of how to turn AI chatbots into great writing coaches. But whether students will have the willpower or desire to forgo an instantly written essay is another matter. As long as ChatGPT continues to allow students to take the easy way out, it’s human nature to do so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Shirley Liu is a graduate student in education at Northwestern University. Liu reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Rigorous research rarely shows that any teaching approach produces large and consistent benefits for students. But tutoring seemed to be a rare exception. Before the pandemic, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/papers/w27476\">almost 100 studies\u003c/a> pointed to impressive math or reading gains for students who were paired with a tutor at least three times a week and used a proven curriculum or set of lesson plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some students gained an extra year’s worth of learning — far greater than the benefit of smaller classes, summer school or a fantastic teacher. These were rigorous randomized controlled trials, akin to the way that drugs or vaccines are tested, comparing test scores of tutored students against those who weren’t. The expense, sometimes surpassing \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28531/w28531.pdf\">$4,000 a year\u003c/a> per student, seemed worth it for what researchers called high-dosage tutoring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the strength of that evidence, the Biden administration urged schools to invest their pandemic recovery funds in intensive tutoring to help students catch up academically. \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/press_releases/7_18_2024.asp\">Forty-six percent\u003c/a> of public schools heeded that call, according to a 2024 federal survey, though it’s unclear exactly how much of the $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds have been spent on high-dosage tutoring and how many students received it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even with ample money, schools immediately reported \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-early-data-on-high-dosage-tutoring-shows-schools-are-sometimes-finding-it-tough-to-deliver-even-low-doses/\">problems in ramping up\u003c/a> high-quality tutoring for so many students. In 2024, researchers documented either tiny or no academic benefits from large-scale tutoring efforts in \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tutoring-research-nashville/\">Nashville\u003c/a>, Tennessee, and \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tutoring-absenteeism/\">Washington, D.C\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New evidence from the 2023-24 school year reinforces those results. Researchers are rigorously studying large-scale tutoring efforts around the nation and testing whether effective tutoring can be done more cheaply. A dozen researchers studied more than 20,000 students in Miami; Chicago; Atlanta; Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; schools throughout New Mexico, and a California charter school network. This was also a randomized controlled study in which 9,000 students were randomly assigned to get tutoring and compared with 11,000 students who didn’t get that extra help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Their preliminary results were “sobering,” according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.mdrc.org/sites/default/files/UChicago-Education-Lab-PLI-Interim-Report-06.2025.pdf\">June report\u003c/a> by the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC, a research organization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers found that tutoring during the 2023-24 school year produced only one or two months’ worth of extra learning in reading or math — a tiny fraction of what the pre-pandemic research had produced. Each minute of tutoring that students received appeared to be as effective as in the pre-pandemic research, but students weren’t getting enough minutes of tutoring altogether. “Overall we still see that the dosage students are getting falls far short of what would be needed to fully realize the promise of high-dosage tutoring,” the report said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monica Bhatt, a researcher at the University of Chicago Education Lab and one of the report’s authors, said schools struggled to set up large tutoring programs. “The problem is the logistics of getting it delivered,” said Bhatt. Effective high-dosage tutoring involves big changes to bell schedules and classroom space, along with the challenge of hiring and training tutors. Educators need to make it a priority for it to happen, Bhatt said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of the earlier, pre-pandemic tutoring studies involved large numbers of students, too, but those tutoring programs were carefully designed and implemented, often with researchers involved. In most cases, they were ideal setups. There was much greater variability in the quality of post-pandemic programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For those of us that run experiments, one of the deep sources of frustration is that what you end up with is not what you tested and wanted to see,” said Philip Oreopoulos, an economist at the University of Toronto, whose \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/papers/w27476\">2020 review of tutoring evidence\u003c/a> influenced policymakers. Oreopoulos was also an author of the June report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“After you spend lots of people’s money and lots of time and effort, things don’t always go the way you hope. There’s a lot of fires to put out at the beginning or throughout because teachers or tutors aren’t doing what you want, or the hiring isn’t going well,” Oreopoulos said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another reason for the lackluster results could be that schools offered a lot of extra help to everyone after the pandemic, even to students who didn’t receive tutoring. In the pre-pandemic research, students in the “business as usual” control group often received no extra help at all, making the difference between tutoring and no tutoring far more stark. After the pandemic, students — tutored and non-tutored alike — had extra math and reading periods, sometimes called “labs” for review and practice work. More than three-quarters of the 20,000 students in this June analysis had access to computer-assisted instruction in math or reading, possibly muting the effects of tutoring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report did find that cheaper tutoring programs appeared to be just as effective (or ineffective) as the more expensive ones, an indication that the cheaper models are worth further testing. The cheaper models averaged $1,200 per student and had tutors working with eight students at a time, similar to small group instruction, often combining online practice work with human attention. The more expensive models averaged $2,000 per student and had tutors working with three to four students at once. By contrast, many of the pre-pandemic tutoring programs involved smaller 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 student-to-tutor ratios.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the disappointing results, researchers said that educators shouldn’t give up. “High-dosage tutoring is still a district or state’s best bet to improve student learning, given that the learning impact per minute of tutoring is largely robust,” the report concludes. The task now is to figure out how to improve implementation and increase the hours that students are receiving. “Our recommendation for the field is to focus on increasing dosage — and, thereby learning gains,” Bhatt said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That doesn’t mean that schools need to invest more in tutoring and saturate schools with effective tutors. That’s not realistic with the end of federal pandemic recovery funds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead of tutoring for the masses, Bhatt said researchers are turning their attention to targeting a limited amount of tutoring to the right students. “We are focused on understanding which tutoring models work for which kinds of students.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tutoring-effectiveness/\">\u003cem>tutoring effectiveness\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Rigorous research rarely shows that any teaching approach produces large and consistent benefits for students. But tutoring seemed to be a rare exception. Before the pandemic, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/papers/w27476\">almost 100 studies\u003c/a> pointed to impressive math or reading gains for students who were paired with a tutor at least three times a week and used a proven curriculum or set of lesson plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some students gained an extra year’s worth of learning — far greater than the benefit of smaller classes, summer school or a fantastic teacher. These were rigorous randomized controlled trials, akin to the way that drugs or vaccines are tested, comparing test scores of tutored students against those who weren’t. The expense, sometimes surpassing \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28531/w28531.pdf\">$4,000 a year\u003c/a> per student, seemed worth it for what researchers called high-dosage tutoring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the strength of that evidence, the Biden administration urged schools to invest their pandemic recovery funds in intensive tutoring to help students catch up academically. \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/press_releases/7_18_2024.asp\">Forty-six percent\u003c/a> of public schools heeded that call, according to a 2024 federal survey, though it’s unclear exactly how much of the $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds have been spent on high-dosage tutoring and how many students received it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even with ample money, schools immediately reported \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-early-data-on-high-dosage-tutoring-shows-schools-are-sometimes-finding-it-tough-to-deliver-even-low-doses/\">problems in ramping up\u003c/a> high-quality tutoring for so many students. In 2024, researchers documented either tiny or no academic benefits from large-scale tutoring efforts in \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tutoring-research-nashville/\">Nashville\u003c/a>, Tennessee, and \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tutoring-absenteeism/\">Washington, D.C\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New evidence from the 2023-24 school year reinforces those results. Researchers are rigorously studying large-scale tutoring efforts around the nation and testing whether effective tutoring can be done more cheaply. A dozen researchers studied more than 20,000 students in Miami; Chicago; Atlanta; Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; schools throughout New Mexico, and a California charter school network. This was also a randomized controlled study in which 9,000 students were randomly assigned to get tutoring and compared with 11,000 students who didn’t get that extra help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Their preliminary results were “sobering,” according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.mdrc.org/sites/default/files/UChicago-Education-Lab-PLI-Interim-Report-06.2025.pdf\">June report\u003c/a> by the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC, a research organization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers found that tutoring during the 2023-24 school year produced only one or two months’ worth of extra learning in reading or math — a tiny fraction of what the pre-pandemic research had produced. Each minute of tutoring that students received appeared to be as effective as in the pre-pandemic research, but students weren’t getting enough minutes of tutoring altogether. “Overall we still see that the dosage students are getting falls far short of what would be needed to fully realize the promise of high-dosage tutoring,” the report said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monica Bhatt, a researcher at the University of Chicago Education Lab and one of the report’s authors, said schools struggled to set up large tutoring programs. “The problem is the logistics of getting it delivered,” said Bhatt. Effective high-dosage tutoring involves big changes to bell schedules and classroom space, along with the challenge of hiring and training tutors. Educators need to make it a priority for it to happen, Bhatt said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of the earlier, pre-pandemic tutoring studies involved large numbers of students, too, but those tutoring programs were carefully designed and implemented, often with researchers involved. In most cases, they were ideal setups. There was much greater variability in the quality of post-pandemic programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For those of us that run experiments, one of the deep sources of frustration is that what you end up with is not what you tested and wanted to see,” said Philip Oreopoulos, an economist at the University of Toronto, whose \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/papers/w27476\">2020 review of tutoring evidence\u003c/a> influenced policymakers. Oreopoulos was also an author of the June report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“After you spend lots of people’s money and lots of time and effort, things don’t always go the way you hope. There’s a lot of fires to put out at the beginning or throughout because teachers or tutors aren’t doing what you want, or the hiring isn’t going well,” Oreopoulos said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another reason for the lackluster results could be that schools offered a lot of extra help to everyone after the pandemic, even to students who didn’t receive tutoring. In the pre-pandemic research, students in the “business as usual” control group often received no extra help at all, making the difference between tutoring and no tutoring far more stark. After the pandemic, students — tutored and non-tutored alike — had extra math and reading periods, sometimes called “labs” for review and practice work. More than three-quarters of the 20,000 students in this June analysis had access to computer-assisted instruction in math or reading, possibly muting the effects of tutoring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report did find that cheaper tutoring programs appeared to be just as effective (or ineffective) as the more expensive ones, an indication that the cheaper models are worth further testing. The cheaper models averaged $1,200 per student and had tutors working with eight students at a time, similar to small group instruction, often combining online practice work with human attention. The more expensive models averaged $2,000 per student and had tutors working with three to four students at once. By contrast, many of the pre-pandemic tutoring programs involved smaller 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 student-to-tutor ratios.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the disappointing results, researchers said that educators shouldn’t give up. “High-dosage tutoring is still a district or state’s best bet to improve student learning, given that the learning impact per minute of tutoring is largely robust,” the report concludes. The task now is to figure out how to improve implementation and increase the hours that students are receiving. “Our recommendation for the field is to focus on increasing dosage — and, thereby learning gains,” Bhatt said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That doesn’t mean that schools need to invest more in tutoring and saturate schools with effective tutors. That’s not realistic with the end of federal pandemic recovery funds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead of tutoring for the masses, Bhatt said researchers are turning their attention to targeting a limited amount of tutoring to the right students. “We are focused on understanding which tutoring models work for which kinds of students.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tutoring-effectiveness/\">\u003cem>tutoring effectiveness\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "inaccurate-impossible-experts-knock-new-trump-plan-to-collect-college-admissions-data",
"title": "Inaccurate, Impossible: Experts Knock New Trump Plan to Collect College Admissions Data",
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"headTitle": "Inaccurate, Impossible: Experts Knock New Trump Plan to Collect College Admissions Data | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>President Donald Trump wants to collect more admissions data from colleges and universities to make sure they’re complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action. And he wants that data now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But data experts and higher education scholars warn that any new admissions data is likely to be inaccurate, impossible to interpret and ultimately misused by policymakers. That’s because 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.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The department already collects data on enrollment from every institution of higher education that participates in the federal student loan program. The results are reported through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). But in an Aug. 7 \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/ensuring-transparency-in-higher-education-admissions/\">memorandum\u003c/a>, Trump directed the Education Department, which \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/improving-education-outcomes-by-empowering-parents-states-and-communities/\">he sought to close in March,\u003c/a> to expand that task and provide “transparency” into how some 1,700 colleges that do not admit everyone are making their admissions decisions. And he gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon just 120 days to get it done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Expanding data collection on applicants is not a new idea. The Biden administration had already ordered colleges to start reporting \u003ca href=\"https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAViewDocument?ref_nbr=202402-1850-008\">race and ethnicity data to the department this fall\u003c/a> in order to track changes in diversity in postsecondary education. But in a separate \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/media/document/secretary-directive-ensuring-transparency-higher-education-admissions-august-7-2025-110497.pdf\">memorandum\u003c/a> to the head of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), McMahon asked for even more information, including high school grades and college entrance exam scores, all broken down by race and gender.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the 120-day timeline “preposterous” because of the enormous technical challenges. For example, IPEDS has never collected high school GPAs. Some schools use a weighted 5.0 scale, giving extra points for advanced classes, and others use an unweighted 4.0 scale, which makes comparisons messy. Other issues are equally thorny. Many schools no longer require applicants to report standardized test scores and some no longer ask them about race so the data that Trump wants doesn’t exist for those colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ve got this effort to add these elements without a mechanism with which to vet the new variables, as well as a system for ensuring their proper implementation,” said Cook. “You would almost think that whoever implemented this didn’t know what they were doing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cook has helped advise the Education Department on the IPEDS data collection for 20 years and served on technical review panels, which are normally convened first to recommend changes to the data collection. Those panels were disbanded earlier this year, and there isn’t one set up to vet Trump’s new admissions data proposal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cook and other data experts can’t figure out how a decimated education statistics agency could take on this task. All six NCES employees who were involved in IPEDS data collection were fired in March, and there are only three employees left out of 100 at NCES, which is run by an acting commissioner who also has several other jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An Education Department official, who did not want to be named, denied that no one left inside the Education Department has IPEDS experience. The official said that staff inside the office of the chief data officer, which is separate from the statistics agency, have a “deep familiarity with IPEDS data, its collection and use.” Former Education Department employees told me that some of these employees have experience in analyzing the data, but not in collecting it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the past, there were as many as a dozen employees who worked closely with RTI International, a scientific research institute, which handles most of the IPEDS data collection work.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Technical review eliminated\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Of particular concern is that RTI’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?q=Integrated+postsecondary+education+data+system++PIID%3A%2291990022F0021%22+PIID%3A%2291990022F0021%22&s=FPDS.GOV&templateName=1.5.3&indexName=awardfull\">$10 million annual contract\u003c/a> to conduct the data collection had been slashed approximately in half by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, according to two former employees, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. Those severe budget cuts eliminated the technical review panels that vet proposed changes to IPEDS, and ended training for colleges and universities to submit data properly, which helped with data quality. RTI did not respond to my request to confirm the cuts or answer questions about the challenges it will face in expanding its work on a reduced budget and staffing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Education Department did not deny that the IPEDS budget had been cut in half. “The RTI contract is focused on the most mission-critical IPEDS activities,” the Education Department official said. “The contract continues to include at least one task under which a technical review panel can be convened.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Additional elements of the IPEDS data collection have also been reduced, including a contract to check data quality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, the scope of the new task became more apparent. On Aug. 13, the administration released more \u003ca href=\"https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-15536.pdf\">details about the new admissions data\u003c/a> it wants, describing how the Education Department is attempting to add a whole new survey to IPEDS, called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), which will disaggregate all admissions data and most student outcome and financial aid data by race and gender. College will have to report on both undergraduate and graduate school admissions. The public has 60 days to comment, and the administration wants colleges to start reporting this data this fall.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Complex collection\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Christine Keller, executive director of the Association for Institutional Research, a trade group of higher education officials who collect and analyze data, called the new survey “one of the most complex IPEDS collections ever attempted.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Traditionally, it has taken years to make much smaller changes to IPEDS, and universities are given a year to start collecting the new data before they are required to submit it. (Roughly 6,000 colleges, universities and vocational schools are required to submit data to IPEDS as a condition for their students to take out federal student loans or receive federal Pell Grants. Failure to comply results in fines and the threat of losing access to federal student aid.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Normally, the Education Department would reveal screenshots of data fields, showing what colleges would need to enter into the IPEDS computer system. But the department has not done that, and several of the data descriptions are ambiguous. For example, colleges will have to report test scores and GPA by quintile, broken down by race and ethnicity and gender. One interpretation is that a college would have to say how many Black male applicants, for example, scored above the 80th percentile on the SAT or the ACT. Another interpretation is that colleges would need to report the average SAT or ACT score of the top 20 percent of Black male applicants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Association for Institutional Research used to train college administrators on how to collect and submit data correctly and sort through confusing details — until DOGE eliminated that training. “The absence of comprehensive, federally funded training will only increase institutional burden and risk to data quality,” Keller said. Keller’s organization is now dipping into its own budget to offer a small amount of free \u003ca href=\"https://www.airweb.org/academy/offerings/IPEDS\">IPEDS training to universities\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Education Department is also requiring colleges to report five years of historical admissions data, broken down into numerous subcategories. Institutions have never been asked to keep data on applicants who didn’t enroll.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s incredible they’re asking for five years of prior data,” said Jordan Matsudaira, an economist at American University who worked on education policy in the Biden and Obama administrations. “That will be square in the pandemic years when no one was reporting test scores.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘Misleading results’\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Matsudaira explained that IPEDS had considered asking colleges for more academic data by race and ethnicity in the past and the Education Department ultimately rejected the proposal. One concern is that slicing and dicing the data into smaller and smaller buckets would mean that there would be too few students and the data would have to be suppressed to protect student privacy. For example, if there were two Native American men in the top 20 percent of SAT scores at one college, many people might be able to guess who they were. And a large amount of suppressed data would make the whole collection less useful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, small numbers can lead to wacky results. For example, a small college could have only two Hispanic male applicants with very high SAT scores. If both were accepted, that’s a 100 percent admittance rate. If only 200 white women out of 400 with the same test scores were accepted, that would be only a 50 percent admittance rate. On the surface, that can look like both racial and gender discrimination. But it could have been a fluke. Perhaps both of those Hispanic men were athletes and musicians. The following year, the school might reject two different Hispanic male applicants with high test scores but without such impressive extracurriculars. The admissions rate for Hispanic males with high test scores would drop to zero. “You end up with misleading results,” said Matsudaira.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reporting average test scores by race is another big worry. “It feels like a trap to me,” said Matsudaira. “That is mechanically going to give the administration the pretense of claiming that there’s lower standards of admission for Black students relative to white students when you know that’s not at all a correct inference.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The statistical issue is that there are more Asian and white students at the very high end of the SAT score distribution, and all those perfect 1600s will pull the average up for these racial groups. (Just like a very tall person will skew the average height of a group.) Even if a college has a high test score threshold that it applies to all racial groups and no one below a 1400 is admitted, the average SAT score for Black students will still be lower than that of white students. (See graphic below.) The only way to avoid this is to purely admit by test score and take only the students with the highest scores. At some highly selective universities, there are enough applicants with a 1600 SAT to fill the entire class. But no institution fills its student body by test scores alone. That could mean overlooking applicants with the potential to be concert pianists, star soccer players or great writers.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The Average Score Trap\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65718\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65718\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/08/Hechinger-SAT-Admission-.png\" alt=\"Two graphs side by side\" width=\"1000\" height=\"446\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/08/Hechinger-SAT-Admission-.png 1000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/08/Hechinger-SAT-Admission--160x71.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/08/Hechinger-SAT-Admission--768x343.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This graphic by Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, depicts the problem of measuring racial discrimination though average test scores. Even for a university that admits all students above a certain cut score, the average score of one racial group (red) will be higher than the average score of the other group (blue). Source: graphic posted on Bluesky Social by \u003ca href=\"https://bsky.app/profile/joshua-goodman.com/post/3lvtp7vjk722q\">Josh Goodman\u003c/a>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Admissions data is a highly charged political issue. The Biden administration originally spearheaded the collection of college admissions data by race and ethnicity. Democrats wanted to collect this data to show how the nation’s colleges and universities were becoming less diverse with the end of affirmative action. This data is slated to start this fall, following a full technical and procedural review.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now the Trump administration is demanding what was already in the works, and adding a host of new data requirements — without following normal processes. And instead of tracking the declining diversity in higher education, Trump wants to use admissions data to threaten colleges and universities. If the new directive produces bad data that is easy to misinterpret, he may get his wish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-new-college-admissions-data-collection/\">\u003cem>college admissions data\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"title": "Inaccurate, Impossible: Experts Knock New Trump Plan to Collect College Admissions Data | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>President Donald Trump wants to collect more admissions data from colleges and universities to make sure they’re complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action. And he wants that data now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But data experts and higher education scholars warn that any new admissions data is likely to be inaccurate, impossible to interpret and ultimately misused by policymakers. That’s because 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.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The department already collects data on enrollment from every institution of higher education that participates in the federal student loan program. The results are reported through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). But in an Aug. 7 \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/ensuring-transparency-in-higher-education-admissions/\">memorandum\u003c/a>, Trump directed the Education Department, which \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/improving-education-outcomes-by-empowering-parents-states-and-communities/\">he sought to close in March,\u003c/a> to expand that task and provide “transparency” into how some 1,700 colleges that do not admit everyone are making their admissions decisions. And he gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon just 120 days to get it done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Expanding data collection on applicants is not a new idea. The Biden administration had already ordered colleges to start reporting \u003ca href=\"https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAViewDocument?ref_nbr=202402-1850-008\">race and ethnicity data to the department this fall\u003c/a> in order to track changes in diversity in postsecondary education. But in a separate \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/media/document/secretary-directive-ensuring-transparency-higher-education-admissions-august-7-2025-110497.pdf\">memorandum\u003c/a> to the head of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), McMahon asked for even more information, including high school grades and college entrance exam scores, all broken down by race and gender.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the 120-day timeline “preposterous” because of the enormous technical challenges. For example, IPEDS has never collected high school GPAs. Some schools use a weighted 5.0 scale, giving extra points for advanced classes, and others use an unweighted 4.0 scale, which makes comparisons messy. Other issues are equally thorny. Many schools no longer require applicants to report standardized test scores and some no longer ask them about race so the data that Trump wants doesn’t exist for those colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ve got this effort to add these elements without a mechanism with which to vet the new variables, as well as a system for ensuring their proper implementation,” said Cook. “You would almost think that whoever implemented this didn’t know what they were doing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cook has helped advise the Education Department on the IPEDS data collection for 20 years and served on technical review panels, which are normally convened first to recommend changes to the data collection. Those panels were disbanded earlier this year, and there isn’t one set up to vet Trump’s new admissions data proposal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cook and other data experts can’t figure out how a decimated education statistics agency could take on this task. All six NCES employees who were involved in IPEDS data collection were fired in March, and there are only three employees left out of 100 at NCES, which is run by an acting commissioner who also has several other jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An Education Department official, who did not want to be named, denied that no one left inside the Education Department has IPEDS experience. The official said that staff inside the office of the chief data officer, which is separate from the statistics agency, have a “deep familiarity with IPEDS data, its collection and use.” Former Education Department employees told me that some of these employees have experience in analyzing the data, but not in collecting it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the past, there were as many as a dozen employees who worked closely with RTI International, a scientific research institute, which handles most of the IPEDS data collection work.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Technical review eliminated\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Of particular concern is that RTI’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?q=Integrated+postsecondary+education+data+system++PIID%3A%2291990022F0021%22+PIID%3A%2291990022F0021%22&s=FPDS.GOV&templateName=1.5.3&indexName=awardfull\">$10 million annual contract\u003c/a> to conduct the data collection had been slashed approximately in half by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, according to two former employees, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. Those severe budget cuts eliminated the technical review panels that vet proposed changes to IPEDS, and ended training for colleges and universities to submit data properly, which helped with data quality. RTI did not respond to my request to confirm the cuts or answer questions about the challenges it will face in expanding its work on a reduced budget and staffing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Education Department did not deny that the IPEDS budget had been cut in half. “The RTI contract is focused on the most mission-critical IPEDS activities,” the Education Department official said. “The contract continues to include at least one task under which a technical review panel can be convened.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Additional elements of the IPEDS data collection have also been reduced, including a contract to check data quality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, the scope of the new task became more apparent. On Aug. 13, the administration released more \u003ca href=\"https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-15536.pdf\">details about the new admissions data\u003c/a> it wants, describing how the Education Department is attempting to add a whole new survey to IPEDS, called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), which will disaggregate all admissions data and most student outcome and financial aid data by race and gender. College will have to report on both undergraduate and graduate school admissions. The public has 60 days to comment, and the administration wants colleges to start reporting this data this fall.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Complex collection\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Christine Keller, executive director of the Association for Institutional Research, a trade group of higher education officials who collect and analyze data, called the new survey “one of the most complex IPEDS collections ever attempted.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Traditionally, it has taken years to make much smaller changes to IPEDS, and universities are given a year to start collecting the new data before they are required to submit it. (Roughly 6,000 colleges, universities and vocational schools are required to submit data to IPEDS as a condition for their students to take out federal student loans or receive federal Pell Grants. Failure to comply results in fines and the threat of losing access to federal student aid.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Normally, the Education Department would reveal screenshots of data fields, showing what colleges would need to enter into the IPEDS computer system. But the department has not done that, and several of the data descriptions are ambiguous. For example, colleges will have to report test scores and GPA by quintile, broken down by race and ethnicity and gender. One interpretation is that a college would have to say how many Black male applicants, for example, scored above the 80th percentile on the SAT or the ACT. Another interpretation is that colleges would need to report the average SAT or ACT score of the top 20 percent of Black male applicants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Association for Institutional Research used to train college administrators on how to collect and submit data correctly and sort through confusing details — until DOGE eliminated that training. “The absence of comprehensive, federally funded training will only increase institutional burden and risk to data quality,” Keller said. Keller’s organization is now dipping into its own budget to offer a small amount of free \u003ca href=\"https://www.airweb.org/academy/offerings/IPEDS\">IPEDS training to universities\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Education Department is also requiring colleges to report five years of historical admissions data, broken down into numerous subcategories. Institutions have never been asked to keep data on applicants who didn’t enroll.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s incredible they’re asking for five years of prior data,” said Jordan Matsudaira, an economist at American University who worked on education policy in the Biden and Obama administrations. “That will be square in the pandemic years when no one was reporting test scores.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘Misleading results’\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Matsudaira explained that IPEDS had considered asking colleges for more academic data by race and ethnicity in the past and the Education Department ultimately rejected the proposal. One concern is that slicing and dicing the data into smaller and smaller buckets would mean that there would be too few students and the data would have to be suppressed to protect student privacy. For example, if there were two Native American men in the top 20 percent of SAT scores at one college, many people might be able to guess who they were. And a large amount of suppressed data would make the whole collection less useful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, small numbers can lead to wacky results. For example, a small college could have only two Hispanic male applicants with very high SAT scores. If both were accepted, that’s a 100 percent admittance rate. If only 200 white women out of 400 with the same test scores were accepted, that would be only a 50 percent admittance rate. On the surface, that can look like both racial and gender discrimination. But it could have been a fluke. Perhaps both of those Hispanic men were athletes and musicians. The following year, the school might reject two different Hispanic male applicants with high test scores but without such impressive extracurriculars. The admissions rate for Hispanic males with high test scores would drop to zero. “You end up with misleading results,” said Matsudaira.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reporting average test scores by race is another big worry. “It feels like a trap to me,” said Matsudaira. “That is mechanically going to give the administration the pretense of claiming that there’s lower standards of admission for Black students relative to white students when you know that’s not at all a correct inference.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The statistical issue is that there are more Asian and white students at the very high end of the SAT score distribution, and all those perfect 1600s will pull the average up for these racial groups. (Just like a very tall person will skew the average height of a group.) Even if a college has a high test score threshold that it applies to all racial groups and no one below a 1400 is admitted, the average SAT score for Black students will still be lower than that of white students. (See graphic below.) The only way to avoid this is to purely admit by test score and take only the students with the highest scores. At some highly selective universities, there are enough applicants with a 1600 SAT to fill the entire class. But no institution fills its student body by test scores alone. That could mean overlooking applicants with the potential to be concert pianists, star soccer players or great writers.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The Average Score Trap\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65718\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65718\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/08/Hechinger-SAT-Admission-.png\" alt=\"Two graphs side by side\" width=\"1000\" height=\"446\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/08/Hechinger-SAT-Admission-.png 1000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/08/Hechinger-SAT-Admission--160x71.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/08/Hechinger-SAT-Admission--768x343.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This graphic by Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, depicts the problem of measuring racial discrimination though average test scores. Even for a university that admits all students above a certain cut score, the average score of one racial group (red) will be higher than the average score of the other group (blue). Source: graphic posted on Bluesky Social by \u003ca href=\"https://bsky.app/profile/joshua-goodman.com/post/3lvtp7vjk722q\">Josh Goodman\u003c/a>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Admissions data is a highly charged political issue. The Biden administration originally spearheaded the collection of college admissions data by race and ethnicity. Democrats wanted to collect this data to show how the nation’s colleges and universities were becoming less diverse with the end of affirmative action. This data is slated to start this fall, following a full technical and procedural review.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now the Trump administration is demanding what was already in the works, and adding a host of new data requirements — without following normal processes. And instead of tracking the declining diversity in higher education, Trump wants to use admissions data to threaten colleges and universities. If the new directive produces bad data that is easy to misinterpret, he may get his wish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-new-college-admissions-data-collection/\">\u003cem>college admissions data\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>In just six months, the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress have brought lasting change – and enormous unpredictability – to federal education policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. Department of Education, under Secretary Linda McMahon, has cut roughly half its staff. It is also \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/07/14/nx-s1-5467251/trump-school-education-grants-lawsuit\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">withholding nearly $7 billion\u003c/a> in grant funding to school districts – for before- and after-school programs, teacher training, services for English language learners and more – while that funding undergoes further review.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which President Trump \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/07/03/nx-s1-5454841/house-republicans-trump-tax-bill-medicaid\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">signed into law\u003c/a> on July 4, imposes a host of \u003cem>new\u003c/em> obligations on the scaled-down department.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s what to know about the changes students, K-12 schools and colleges can expect now that the legislation is officially law:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"vouchers\">K-12 school vouchers are going national (sort of)\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The final bill includes a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/05/23/nx-s1-5397175/trump-federal-voucher-private-school\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">first-of-its-kind federal school voucher program\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The program \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5397945/private-school-vouchers-choice-reconciliation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">uses the federal tax code\u003c/a> to offer vouchers that students can use to attend private secular or religious schools as well as for qualifying education expenses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Parents should decide where their kids go to school. This bill helps them do that,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said in \u003ca href=\"https://www.cassidy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cassidy-school-choice-legislation-heads-to-president-trumps-desk-as-part-of-one-big-beautiful-bill/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a statement\u003c/a> after the House approved the Senate’s changes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Senate changed the original House proposal, now requiring states to opt into the program, therefore keeping it from becoming a truly national program. Blue states where vouchers have little support may not participate, and even in more conservative states, support is mixed – \u003ca href=\"https://stateline.org/2024/11/12/3-states-blunt-school-choice-momentum/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">voters recently rejected\u003c/a> school voucher ballot measures in Kentucky and Nebraska.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That may be, in part, due to concerns that voucher programs can sap local public schools of resources, because when students leave a public school system, they take funding with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This isn’t just a policy failure—it is a moral disgrace,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nea.org/about-nea/media-center/press-releases/nea-reacts-final-passage-trump-administrations-budget-bill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">said in a statement\u003c/a>. “Trump and congressional Republicans undermined our public schools and every student in them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new federal program will reward people who make charitable donations to what are known as Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). Their reward: a dollar-for-dollar tax credit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The SGO would then distribute the donated money in the form of scholarships for students to use on a range of expenses, including tuition, books and certain homeschooling costs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike some of the country’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/05/19/527429292/the-nations-oldest-voucher-program-beacon-of-hope-or-failed-experiment\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">earliest\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://scohio.org/2025/05/09/where-it-all-started-the-story-of-the-cleveland-scholarship-program/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">smaller\u003c/a> voucher programs, this federal version won’t be limited to lower-income families. Instead, it will be available to households earning at or below 300% of a given area’s median gross income. So, in an area of the country where the median gross income is $75,000, any child in a household earning less than $225,000 could qualify.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cost of a program like this is hard to measure, especially with the opt-in caveat leaving states to decide if they will participate. However, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the vouchers could cost the federal government almost $26 billion in lost tax revenue over the next decade.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"medicaid\">Medicaid changes and K-12 schools\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>More than 37 million children are enrolled in either Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a federal program that provides affordable health insurance to pregnant mothers and children who live just above Medicaid’s poverty threshold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The “One Big Beautiful Bill” introduces strict eligibility requirements for Medicaid including more frequent eligibility verification and a first-ever national work requirement, though parents of children age 13 and younger are exempt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It also cuts federal health spending by about $1 trillion over a decade, according to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/06/06/g-s1-70918/whats-the-cbo-meet-the-nonpartisan-agency-under-fire-from-republicans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">nonpartisan\u003c/a> Congressional Budget Office (CBO).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As NPR \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/02/nx-s1-5453870/senate-republicans-tax-bill-medicaid-health-care\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">has previously\u003c/a> reported, \u003ca href=\"https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/medicaid-work-requirements-states-revamp-trump-administration/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">state experiments with work requirements\u003c/a> have been plagued with administrative issues, such as eligible enrollees’ losing coverage over paperwork problems and budget overruns.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How will all this impact K-12 students?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“When there’s more red tape, we know that it’s harder for families,” Joan Alker, head of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, told NPR before the bill passed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The CBO estimates nearly 12 million people will lose their health coverage as a result of the changes in the final bill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Medicaid is also the fourth largest source of funding for K-12 schools, according to the School Superintendents Association (AASA). \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/osers/docs/medicaid-funding-for-school-based-services-03-08-2024.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Schools receive money to help provide services\u003c/a> for low-income students enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP as well as for students with disabilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"https://www.aasa.org/resources/resource/how-medicaid-cuts-will-harm-students-schools\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a survey\u003c/a> published earlier this year, AASA asked over 1,000 school district leaders from all 50 states and the District of Columbia how they use Medicaid funds. The vast majority of districts (86%) said Medicaid funds support salaries for school health staff such as nurses, psychologists, occupational and physical therapists and speech-language pathologists. More than half said Medicaid helps fund mental and behavioral health services in school districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When asked how their districts would cope with the loss of funds, 80% of respondents predicted layoffs of school health staff and more than half anticipated a reduction in services and resources for students.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"food\">Cuts to food assistance would also affect eligibility for free school meals\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helps pay for groceries for \u003ca href=\"https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap/key-statistics-and-research\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">more than 15 million children\u003c/a> in the U.S., will also undergo significant changes in the coming years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The “One Big Beautiful Bill” shrinks the number of people who are exempt from SNAP’s work requirements. Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst for food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told NPR before the bill passed, “research has repeatedly shown that [work requirements don’t] increase people’s employment. It doesn’t increase their earnings. It just cuts people off of SNAP and leaves them hungry.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When children lose access to SNAP benefits, they also lose their automatic enrollment in free meals at school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new law will cut about $186 billion from SNAP over 10 years, according to the CBO. Bergh’s organization \u003ca href=\"https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/by-the-numbers-senate-republican-leaderships-reconciliation-bill-takes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">estimates\u003c/a>, “about 1 million children would see food assistance to their families cut substantially or terminated.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the first time in the history of SNAP, the federal government is also shifting some of the cost on to states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whether this shift in funding, from the federal government onto states, is a good idea is “debatable,” Kevin Corinth, who studies poverty and safety net programs at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI), told NPR before the bill passed. Though he pointed to one potential upside: It could force states to have “more skin in the game.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One potential downside, \u003ca href=\"https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/Klobuchar-Craig-Letter-SNAP_5-22-25.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">according to CBO\u003c/a>, is that some states “would modify benefits or eligibility or possibly leave [SNAP] altogether because of the increased costs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"ctc\">An increase to the Child Tax Credit\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The “One Big Beautiful Bill” comes with a modest tax credit increase for parents. The Child Tax Credit, now capped at $2,000 per child, will rise to $2,200. However, it requires at least one parent and all qualifying children to provide valid Social Security numbers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, as with the current Child Tax Credit, this expansion would only be available to families earning enough income to qualify and hence unavailable to low- and moderate-income families.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"loans\">What to know about big changes to federal student loans\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The law will \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/05/12/nx-s1-5389644/trump-student-loan-program-forgiveness-overhaul\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">press the reset button\u003c/a> on federal student loan policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For graduate students, new loan limits will make it harder for lower- and middle-income borrowers to attend pricier graduate programs. The old \u003ca href=\"https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/plus/grad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">grad PLUS program\u003c/a>, which allowed students to borrow up to the cost of their graduate school program, will be shuttered on July 1, 2026. After that, graduate students’ borrowing will be capped at $20,500 a year with a lifetime graduate school loan limit of $100,000, a big drop from the previous cap of $138,500.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Borrowers working toward a professional graduate degree (i.e. medical or law school) will have their borrowing capped at $50,000 a year, and their lifetime cap increased from $138,500 to $200,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parents and caregivers who use PLUS loans to help students pay for college will also see new loan limits. They will be capped at $20,000 a year and, in aggregate, at $65,000 per child.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The law also sets a new lifetime borrowing limit, for undergraduate \u003cem>and\u003c/em> graduate loans, at $257,500 per person.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republicans agreed to make big changes to repayment plans too, phasing out most of them, including the generous, Biden-era SAVE plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After July 1, 2026, new borrowers will have just two repayment options: 1.) A new income-based plan that requires borrowers to pay at least $10 a month and offers loan cancellation after 30 years of repayment, or 2) a new standard repayment plan with fixed monthly payments over 10-25 years – the larger the debt, the longer the repayment window.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Older and current borrowers will have a few more choices, at least for the time being, which will no doubt stir confusion among borrowers and the loan servicing companies that have to make sense of all these changes. You can find a more detailed explanation of those \u003ca href=\"https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Summary-One-Big-Beautiful-Bill-Act.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"pell\">Changes to Pell Grants for low-income college students\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The bill expands Pell Grants, which help low-income students pay for college, to include job-training programs, which is a win for community colleges which offer a variety of certificate programs. It also tweaks eligibility for all Pell recipients: Starting in July 2026, students who have a full-ride scholarship will no longer be eligible to receive Pell Grants. The bill also fully funds the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nasfaa.org/news-item/35581/New_CBO_Projection_Pell_Grant_Program_Faces_Budget_Shortfall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">existing Pell Grant shortfall\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"earnings\">An accountability earnings test for colleges\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>To incentivize colleges to provide a good return on investment, the bill connects schools’ access to federal student loans to how much their graduates earn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If an undergraduate program fails the earnings test – which means their students earn less than someone with a high school diploma – it could lose access to federal loans. One analysis shows this would have the most \u003ca href=\"https://www.aei.org/education/senate-embraces-do-no-harm-for-higher-education/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">impact on two-year associate degree\u003c/a> programs, though federal data \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_331.95.asp?current=yes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">shows\u003c/a> community college students are less reliant on federal student loans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The measure follows in the footsteps of a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202291883/for-profit-colleges-student-loans-affordable\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">similar regulation known as the gainful employment\u003c/a> rule which was developed by the Obama administration and reissued under Biden.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The final version of this new accountability policy doesn’t go as far \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/06/12/nx-s1-5428077/student-loans-republicans-reconciliation-college\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">as the House version did\u003c/a> – that draft included a risk-sharing plan where colleges would pay a penalty based on the federal loan debt their students fail to repay.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"endowments\">A higher tax on college endowments\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Colleges with endowments will now be taxed at a higher rate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill raises the tax rate from 1.4% to as high as 8%, depending on the college’s endowment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The endowment of Harvard University, which is currently fighting \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/06/16/nx-s1-5432750/harvard-lawsuit-international-students-hearing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">multiple\u003c/a> legal \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/04/22/nx-s1-5372566/trump-harvard-lawsuit-antisemitism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">battles\u003c/a> against the Trump administration, \u003ca href=\"https://finance.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy24_harvard_financial_report.pdf?m=1729182806\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">totals more than $52 billion\u003c/a>. Based on the new law’s formula, that puts Harvard in the highest endowment tax bracket, for institutions with an endowment of more than $2 million per domestic student.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is a carveout for small private colleges: Institutions with fewer than 3,000 students are exempted from the tax. The previous exemption was 500 students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/348780034/nicole-cohen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Nicole Cohen\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In just six months, the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress have brought lasting change – and enormous unpredictability – to federal education policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. Department of Education, under Secretary Linda McMahon, has cut roughly half its staff. It is also \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/07/14/nx-s1-5467251/trump-school-education-grants-lawsuit\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">withholding nearly $7 billion\u003c/a> in grant funding to school districts – for before- and after-school programs, teacher training, services for English language learners and more – while that funding undergoes further review.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which President Trump \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/07/03/nx-s1-5454841/house-republicans-trump-tax-bill-medicaid\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">signed into law\u003c/a> on July 4, imposes a host of \u003cem>new\u003c/em> obligations on the scaled-down department.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s what to know about the changes students, K-12 schools and colleges can expect now that the legislation is officially law:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"vouchers\">K-12 school vouchers are going national (sort of)\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The final bill includes a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/05/23/nx-s1-5397175/trump-federal-voucher-private-school\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">first-of-its-kind federal school voucher program\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The program \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5397945/private-school-vouchers-choice-reconciliation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">uses the federal tax code\u003c/a> to offer vouchers that students can use to attend private secular or religious schools as well as for qualifying education expenses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Parents should decide where their kids go to school. This bill helps them do that,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said in \u003ca href=\"https://www.cassidy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cassidy-school-choice-legislation-heads-to-president-trumps-desk-as-part-of-one-big-beautiful-bill/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a statement\u003c/a> after the House approved the Senate’s changes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Senate changed the original House proposal, now requiring states to opt into the program, therefore keeping it from becoming a truly national program. Blue states where vouchers have little support may not participate, and even in more conservative states, support is mixed – \u003ca href=\"https://stateline.org/2024/11/12/3-states-blunt-school-choice-momentum/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">voters recently rejected\u003c/a> school voucher ballot measures in Kentucky and Nebraska.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That may be, in part, due to concerns that voucher programs can sap local public schools of resources, because when students leave a public school system, they take funding with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This isn’t just a policy failure—it is a moral disgrace,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nea.org/about-nea/media-center/press-releases/nea-reacts-final-passage-trump-administrations-budget-bill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">said in a statement\u003c/a>. “Trump and congressional Republicans undermined our public schools and every student in them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new federal program will reward people who make charitable donations to what are known as Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). Their reward: a dollar-for-dollar tax credit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The SGO would then distribute the donated money in the form of scholarships for students to use on a range of expenses, including tuition, books and certain homeschooling costs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike some of the country’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/05/19/527429292/the-nations-oldest-voucher-program-beacon-of-hope-or-failed-experiment\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">earliest\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://scohio.org/2025/05/09/where-it-all-started-the-story-of-the-cleveland-scholarship-program/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">smaller\u003c/a> voucher programs, this federal version won’t be limited to lower-income families. Instead, it will be available to households earning at or below 300% of a given area’s median gross income. So, in an area of the country where the median gross income is $75,000, any child in a household earning less than $225,000 could qualify.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cost of a program like this is hard to measure, especially with the opt-in caveat leaving states to decide if they will participate. However, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the vouchers could cost the federal government almost $26 billion in lost tax revenue over the next decade.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"medicaid\">Medicaid changes and K-12 schools\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>More than 37 million children are enrolled in either Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a federal program that provides affordable health insurance to pregnant mothers and children who live just above Medicaid’s poverty threshold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The “One Big Beautiful Bill” introduces strict eligibility requirements for Medicaid including more frequent eligibility verification and a first-ever national work requirement, though parents of children age 13 and younger are exempt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It also cuts federal health spending by about $1 trillion over a decade, according to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/06/06/g-s1-70918/whats-the-cbo-meet-the-nonpartisan-agency-under-fire-from-republicans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">nonpartisan\u003c/a> Congressional Budget Office (CBO).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As NPR \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/02/nx-s1-5453870/senate-republicans-tax-bill-medicaid-health-care\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">has previously\u003c/a> reported, \u003ca href=\"https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/medicaid-work-requirements-states-revamp-trump-administration/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">state experiments with work requirements\u003c/a> have been plagued with administrative issues, such as eligible enrollees’ losing coverage over paperwork problems and budget overruns.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How will all this impact K-12 students?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“When there’s more red tape, we know that it’s harder for families,” Joan Alker, head of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, told NPR before the bill passed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The CBO estimates nearly 12 million people will lose their health coverage as a result of the changes in the final bill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Medicaid is also the fourth largest source of funding for K-12 schools, according to the School Superintendents Association (AASA). \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/osers/docs/medicaid-funding-for-school-based-services-03-08-2024.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Schools receive money to help provide services\u003c/a> for low-income students enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP as well as for students with disabilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"https://www.aasa.org/resources/resource/how-medicaid-cuts-will-harm-students-schools\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a survey\u003c/a> published earlier this year, AASA asked over 1,000 school district leaders from all 50 states and the District of Columbia how they use Medicaid funds. The vast majority of districts (86%) said Medicaid funds support salaries for school health staff such as nurses, psychologists, occupational and physical therapists and speech-language pathologists. More than half said Medicaid helps fund mental and behavioral health services in school districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When asked how their districts would cope with the loss of funds, 80% of respondents predicted layoffs of school health staff and more than half anticipated a reduction in services and resources for students.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"food\">Cuts to food assistance would also affect eligibility for free school meals\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helps pay for groceries for \u003ca href=\"https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap/key-statistics-and-research\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">more than 15 million children\u003c/a> in the U.S., will also undergo significant changes in the coming years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The “One Big Beautiful Bill” shrinks the number of people who are exempt from SNAP’s work requirements. Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst for food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told NPR before the bill passed, “research has repeatedly shown that [work requirements don’t] increase people’s employment. It doesn’t increase their earnings. It just cuts people off of SNAP and leaves them hungry.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When children lose access to SNAP benefits, they also lose their automatic enrollment in free meals at school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new law will cut about $186 billion from SNAP over 10 years, according to the CBO. Bergh’s organization \u003ca href=\"https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/by-the-numbers-senate-republican-leaderships-reconciliation-bill-takes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">estimates\u003c/a>, “about 1 million children would see food assistance to their families cut substantially or terminated.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the first time in the history of SNAP, the federal government is also shifting some of the cost on to states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whether this shift in funding, from the federal government onto states, is a good idea is “debatable,” Kevin Corinth, who studies poverty and safety net programs at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI), told NPR before the bill passed. Though he pointed to one potential upside: It could force states to have “more skin in the game.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One potential downside, \u003ca href=\"https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/Klobuchar-Craig-Letter-SNAP_5-22-25.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">according to CBO\u003c/a>, is that some states “would modify benefits or eligibility or possibly leave [SNAP] altogether because of the increased costs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"ctc\">An increase to the Child Tax Credit\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The “One Big Beautiful Bill” comes with a modest tax credit increase for parents. The Child Tax Credit, now capped at $2,000 per child, will rise to $2,200. However, it requires at least one parent and all qualifying children to provide valid Social Security numbers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, as with the current Child Tax Credit, this expansion would only be available to families earning enough income to qualify and hence unavailable to low- and moderate-income families.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"loans\">What to know about big changes to federal student loans\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The law will \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/05/12/nx-s1-5389644/trump-student-loan-program-forgiveness-overhaul\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">press the reset button\u003c/a> on federal student loan policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For graduate students, new loan limits will make it harder for lower- and middle-income borrowers to attend pricier graduate programs. The old \u003ca href=\"https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/plus/grad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">grad PLUS program\u003c/a>, which allowed students to borrow up to the cost of their graduate school program, will be shuttered on July 1, 2026. After that, graduate students’ borrowing will be capped at $20,500 a year with a lifetime graduate school loan limit of $100,000, a big drop from the previous cap of $138,500.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Borrowers working toward a professional graduate degree (i.e. medical or law school) will have their borrowing capped at $50,000 a year, and their lifetime cap increased from $138,500 to $200,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parents and caregivers who use PLUS loans to help students pay for college will also see new loan limits. They will be capped at $20,000 a year and, in aggregate, at $65,000 per child.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The law also sets a new lifetime borrowing limit, for undergraduate \u003cem>and\u003c/em> graduate loans, at $257,500 per person.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republicans agreed to make big changes to repayment plans too, phasing out most of them, including the generous, Biden-era SAVE plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After July 1, 2026, new borrowers will have just two repayment options: 1.) A new income-based plan that requires borrowers to pay at least $10 a month and offers loan cancellation after 30 years of repayment, or 2) a new standard repayment plan with fixed monthly payments over 10-25 years – the larger the debt, the longer the repayment window.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Older and current borrowers will have a few more choices, at least for the time being, which will no doubt stir confusion among borrowers and the loan servicing companies that have to make sense of all these changes. You can find a more detailed explanation of those \u003ca href=\"https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Summary-One-Big-Beautiful-Bill-Act.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"pell\">Changes to Pell Grants for low-income college students\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The bill expands Pell Grants, which help low-income students pay for college, to include job-training programs, which is a win for community colleges which offer a variety of certificate programs. It also tweaks eligibility for all Pell recipients: Starting in July 2026, students who have a full-ride scholarship will no longer be eligible to receive Pell Grants. The bill also fully funds the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nasfaa.org/news-item/35581/New_CBO_Projection_Pell_Grant_Program_Faces_Budget_Shortfall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">existing Pell Grant shortfall\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"earnings\">An accountability earnings test for colleges\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>To incentivize colleges to provide a good return on investment, the bill connects schools’ access to federal student loans to how much their graduates earn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If an undergraduate program fails the earnings test – which means their students earn less than someone with a high school diploma – it could lose access to federal loans. One analysis shows this would have the most \u003ca href=\"https://www.aei.org/education/senate-embraces-do-no-harm-for-higher-education/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">impact on two-year associate degree\u003c/a> programs, though federal data \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_331.95.asp?current=yes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">shows\u003c/a> community college students are less reliant on federal student loans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The measure follows in the footsteps of a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202291883/for-profit-colleges-student-loans-affordable\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">similar regulation known as the gainful employment\u003c/a> rule which was developed by the Obama administration and reissued under Biden.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The final version of this new accountability policy doesn’t go as far \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/06/12/nx-s1-5428077/student-loans-republicans-reconciliation-college\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">as the House version did\u003c/a> – that draft included a risk-sharing plan where colleges would pay a penalty based on the federal loan debt their students fail to repay.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"endowments\">A higher tax on college endowments\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Colleges with endowments will now be taxed at a higher rate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill raises the tax rate from 1.4% to as high as 8%, depending on the college’s endowment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The endowment of Harvard University, which is currently fighting \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/06/16/nx-s1-5432750/harvard-lawsuit-international-students-hearing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">multiple\u003c/a> legal \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/04/22/nx-s1-5372566/trump-harvard-lawsuit-antisemitism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">battles\u003c/a> against the Trump administration, \u003ca href=\"https://finance.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy24_harvard_financial_report.pdf?m=1729182806\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">totals more than $52 billion\u003c/a>. Based on the new law’s formula, that puts Harvard in the highest endowment tax bracket, for institutions with an endowment of more than $2 million per domestic student.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is a carveout for small private colleges: Institutions with fewer than 3,000 students are exempted from the tax. The previous exemption was 500 students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/348780034/nicole-cohen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Nicole Cohen\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "suddenly-sacked-the-final-days-of-former-nces-chiefs-term-and-the-future-of-education-data",
"title": "Suddenly Sacked: The Final Days of Former NCES Chief’s Term and the Future of Education Data",
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"content": "\u003cp>Peggy Carr’s last day on the job came so abruptly that she only had time to grab a few personal photos and her coat before a security officer escorted her out of her office and into a chilly February afternoon. She still doesn’t know why she was summarily dismissed as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), where she helped build the National Assessment of Educational Progress into the influential Nation’s Report Card. NCES is the federal government’s third-largest statistical agency after the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Running it for three and a half years was the capstone of Carr’s 35-year career at the Education Department.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And suddenly, she was out in the cold with no explanation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I would say that what has happened is a professional tragedy, not just for me, but for all of NCES and my staff,” said Carr, 71, in a recent interview. “But for me, it really was a personal tragedy because I have spent my career helping NCES build its solid reputation as a premier statistical agency in the federal system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr doesn’t know if the decision to fire her came from the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or an outside policy advocate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she is clear about what was lost by the firing of the head of a nonpartisan statistical agency: an objective assessment of how American students are doing. And she finds it “ironic,” she said, that her increasingly grim reports were President Donald Trump’s public rationale for \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/improving-education-outcomes-by-empowering-parents-states-and-communities/\">dismantling the Education Department\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although Carr was the first woman and the first Black person to run NCES, her “firsts” go back decades. She joined NCES in 1993, after teaching statistics at Howard University and a stint as a statistician in the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. “I was the first person of color in NCES to ever have a managerial job, period,” said Carr. She broke a long record: The education statistical agency dates back to 1867, created in the aftermath of the Civil War as part of an effort to help the South recover during Reconstruction. She was appointed commissioner by former President Joe Biden in 2021.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a kill-the-messenger strategy,” she said. “We have just been the messenger of how students in this country are faring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Congress established a six-year term for the commissioner so that the job would straddle administrations and insulate statistics from politics. Carr’s term was supposed to extend through 2027, but she made history with yet another first: the first NCES commissioner to be fired by a president.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr wasn’t thinking about her gender or her race, despite the fact that three days earlier, Trump had abruptly fired another Black senior official, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Maybe they found out I was the only Biden appointee left in the department,” Carr said. “Maybe they didn’t realize that until then.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr has reason to be puzzled by her firing. She is hardly a radical. She defended standardized tests against charges that they are racist. She publicly made the case that the nation needs to pay attention to achievement gaps, even if it sometimes means putting a spotlight on the low achievement of Black and Hispanic students. “The data can reveal things about what people can do to improve it,” Carr said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was dismissed on Feb. 24, more than a week before Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s Senate confirmation on March 3. The department named Carr’s deputy, Chris Chapman, to act as her replacement, but subsequently fired him in a round of mass layoffs on March 11. The agency was then leaderless until July 7, when another senior department official was told to add NCES to his responsibilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Civil servant\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In January, at the start of the second Trump administration, Carr thought her job was relatively safe. As a career civil servant, she’d worked with many Republican administrations and served as second in command under James “Lynn” Woodworth, whom Trump appointed as NCES commissioner in his first term. Both Woodworth and Carr say they had a good working relationship because they both cared about getting the numbers right. Indeed, Woodworth was so troubled and disturbed by Carr’s dismissal and the fate of the nation’s education statistics agency that he \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-former-trump-commissioner-blasts-education-data-cuts/\">spoke out publicly\u003c/a>, risking retaliation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even Carr’s fiercest critics, who contend she was an entrenched bureaucrat who failed to modernize the statistical service and allowed costs to balloon, condemned the humiliating way she was dismissed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She deserves the nation’s gratitude and thanks” for setting up a whole system of assessments, said Mark Schneider, who served as the director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which oversees NCES, from 2018 to 2024 and as NCES commissioner from 2005 to 2008.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65604\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2378px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65604\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2.jpg\" alt=\"Framed document on a table\" width=\"2378\" height=\"1586\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2.jpg 2378w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2-2000x1334.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2-2048x1366.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2378px) 100vw, 2378px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The official appointment of Peggy Carr as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics by former President Joe Biden. \u003ccite>(Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A landing team\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The transition seemed normal at first. A “landing team” — emissaries from the Trump transition team — arrived in mid-January and Carr briefed them three times. They asked questions about NCES’s statistical work. “They were quite pleasant, to be honest,” Carr said. “They seemed curious and interested.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But that was before DOGE got there,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr released the 2024 Nation’s Report Card on Jan. 29. \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/naep-test-2024-dismal-report/\">More students lacked the most basic reading and math skills\u003c/a>. It was front-page news across the nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Days later, DOGE arrived. Still, Carr wasn’t worried. “We actually thought we were going to be OK,” Carr said. “We thought that their focus was going to be on grants, not contracts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Institute of Education Sciences had awarded millions of dollars in grants to professors and private-sector researchers to study ways to improve diversity and equity in the classroom — priorities that were now out of favor with the Trump team. Carr’s agency is housed under the IES umbrella, but Carr’s work didn’t touch upon any of that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, NCES has an unusual structure. Unlike other statistics agencies, NCES has never had many statisticians on staff and didn’t do much in-house statistical work. Because Congress put restrictions on its staffing levels, NCES had to rely on outside contractors to do 90 percent of the data work. Only through outside contractors was the Education Department able to measure academic achievement, count students and track university tuition costs. Its small staff of 100 primarily managed and oversaw the contracts.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Keyword searches\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Following DOGE instructions, Carr’s team conducted keyword searches of DEI language in her agency’s contracts. “Everyone was asked to do that,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad. The chaotic part really started when questions were being asked about reductions in the contracts themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr said she never had direct contact with anyone on Musk’s team, and she doesn’t even know how many of them descended upon the Education Department. Her interaction with DOGE was secondhand. Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, summoned Carr and the rest of his executive team to his office to respond to DOGE’s demands. “We met constantly, trying to figure out what DOGE wanted,” Carr said. DOGE’s orders were primarily transmitted through Jonathan Bettis, an Education Department attorney, who was experienced with procurement and contracts. It was Bettis who talked directly with the DOGE team, Carr said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The main DOGE representative who took an interest in NCES was “Conor.” “I don’t know his last name,” said Carr. “My staff never saw anyone else but Conor if they saw him at all.” Conor is \u003ca href=\"https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/#Conor-Fennessy\">32-year-old Conor Fennessy\u003c/a>, according to several media reports. His deleted LinkedIn profile said he has a \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/27/us/politics/doge-staff-list.html\">background in finance\u003c/a>. (Fennessy has also been involved in getting access to data at Health and Human Services and spearheading cuts at the National Park Service, according to media reports.) Efforts to reach Fennessy through the Education Department and through DOGE were unsuccessful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was chaotic,” said Carr. “Bettis would tell us what DOGE wanted, and we ran away to get it done. And then things might change the next day. ‘You need to cut more.’ ‘I need to understand more about what this contract does or that contract does.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a lot. Carr oversaw 60 data collections, some with multiple parts. “There were so many contracts and there were hundreds of lines on our acquisition plans,” she said. “It was a very complex and time-consuming task.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Lost in translation\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The questions kept coming. “It was like playing telephone tag when you have complicated data collections and you’re trying to explain it,” Carr said. Bettis “would sometimes not understand what my managers or I were saying about what we could cut or could not cut. And so there was this translation problem,” she said. (Efforts to reach Bettis were unsuccessful.) Eventually a couple of Carr’s managers were allowed to talk to DOGE employees directly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr said her staff begged DOGE not to cut a technology platform called EDPass, which is used by state education agencies to submit data to the federal Education Department on everything from student enrollment to graduation rates. For Carr, EDPass was a particular point of pride in her effort to modernize and process data more efficiently. EDPass slashed the time it took to release data from 20 months in 2016-17 to just \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/learn/blog/common-core-data-ccd-nonfiscal-data-releases-how-national-center-education-statistics-improved\">four months in 2023-24\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr said DOGE did not spare EDPass. Indeed, DOGE did not spare much of NCES.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Feb 10, only about a week after DOGE arrived, Carr learned that 89 of her contracts were terminated, which represented the vast majority of the statistical work that her agency conducts. “We were in shock,” said Carr. “What do you mean it’s all gone?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even its advocates concede that NCES needed reforms. The agency was slow to release data, it used some outdated collection methods and there were places where costs could be trimmed. Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said that the department, “in partnership with DOGE employees,” found contracts with overhead and administrative expenses that exceeded 50 percent, “a clear example of contractors taking advantage of the American taxpayer.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Piloting an old airplane\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Carr said she was never a fan of the contracting system and wished she could have built an in-house statistical agency like those at the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that would have required congressional authorization for the Education Department to increase its headcount. That never happened. Carr was piloting an old airplane, taped together through a complicated network of contracts, while attempting to modernize and fix it. She said she was trying to follow the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/a-vision-and-roadmap-for-education-statistics-in-2030-and-beyond\">2022 recommendations of a National Academies panel\u003c/a>, but it wasn’t easy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The chaos continued over the next two weeks. DOGE provided guidelines for justifying the reinstatement of contracts it had just killed and Carr’s team worked long hours trying to save the data. Carr was particularly worried about preserving the interagency agreement with the Census Bureau, which was needed to calculate federal Title I allocations to high-poverty schools. Those calculations needed to be ready by June and the clock was ticking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her agency was also responsible for \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/\">documenting geographic boundaries\u003c/a> for school districts and classifying locales as urban, rural, suburban or town. Title I allocations relied on this data, as did a \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/grants-and-programs/formula-grants/rural-education-achievement-program\">federal program for funding rural districts\u003c/a>. “My staff was panicking,” said Carr.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The DOGE sledgehammer came just as schools were administering an important international test — the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The department was also in the midst of a national teachers and principals survey. “People were worried about what was going to happen with those,” said Carr.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though DOGE terminated the PISA contract, the contractor continued testing in schools and finished its data collection in June. But now it’s unclear who will tabulate the scores and analyze them. The Education Department \u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69896743/46/2/american-educational-research-association-v-us-department-of-education/\">disclosed\u003c/a> in a June legal brief that it is restarting PISA. “I was told that they’re not going to do the national report, which is a little concerning to me,” Carr said. Asked for confirmation, the Education Department did not respond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another widely used data collection, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS-K 2024), which tracks a cohort of students from kindergarten through elementary school, was supposed to collect its second year of data as the kindergarteners progressed to first grade. “We had to give up on that,” said Carr.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>NAEP anxiety\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Carr said that behind the scenes, her priority was to save NAEP. DOGE was demanding aggressive cuts, and she worked throughout the weekend of Feb. 22-23 with her managers and the NAEP contractors to satisfy the demands. “We thought we could cut 28 percent — I even remember the number — without cutting into critical things,” she said. “That’s what I told them I could do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DOGE had been demanding 50 percent cuts to NAEP’s $185 million budget, according to several former Education Department employees. Carr could not see a way to cut that deep. The whole point of the exam is to track student achievement over time, and if too many corners were cut, it could “break the trend,” she said, making it impossible to compare the next test results in 2026 with historical scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I am responsible in statute and I could not cut NAEP as much as they wanted to without cutting into congressionally mandated activities,” Carr said. “I told them that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Carr and DOGE remained far apart in negotiations over cost, a security officer appeared at her office door at 3:50 p.m. on Feb. 24. Carr remembers the exact time because colleagues were waiting at her door to join her for a 4 p.m. Zoom meeting with the chair of the board that oversees NAEP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The security officer closed the door to her office so he could tell her privately that he was there to escort her out. He said she had 15 minutes to leave. “Escort me where? What do you mean?” Carr asked. “I was in shock. I wasn’t even quite understanding what he was asking, to be honest.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The security officer told her about an email saying she was put on administrative leave. Carr checked her inbox. It was there, sent within the previous hour.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The security officer “was very nice,” she said. “He refused to call me Peggy,” and addressed her as Dr. Carr. “He helped me collect my things, and I left.” He opened the doors for her and walked her to her car.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had no idea that this was going to happen, so it was shocking and unexpected,” Carr said. “I was working like I do every other day, a busy day where every minute is filled with something.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She said she’s asked the department why she was dismissed so abruptly, but has not received a response. The Education Department said it does not comment to the public on its personnel actions.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Packing via Zoom\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Two days later, Carr returned to pick up other belongings. Via Zoom, Carr’s staff had gone through her office with her — 35 years worth of papers and memorabilia — and packed up so many boxes that Carr had to bring a second car, an SUV.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Carr and her husband arrived, she said, “there were all these people waiting in the front of the building cheering me on. The men helped me put the things in my husband’s car and my car. It was a real tearjerker. And that was before they would be dismissed. They didn’t know they would be next.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less than two weeks later, on March 11, most of Carr’s staff — more than 90 NCES staffers — was fired. Only three remained. “I thought maybe they just made a mistake, that it was going to be a ‘whoops moment’ like with the bird flu scientists or the people overseeing the weapons arsenal,” Carr said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fate of NCES remains uncertain. The Education Department says that it is restarting and reassessing some of the data collections that DOGE terminated, but the scope of the work might be much smaller. Carr says it will take years to understand the full extent of the damage. Carr was slated to issue a \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/A-Message-from-Dr.-Peggy-Carr-July-14-2025.docx.pdf\">statement\u003c/a> about her thoughts on NCES on July 14.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The damage\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The immediate problem is that there aren’t enough personnel to do the work that Congress mandates. So far, NCES \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-condition-of-education/\">has missed an annual deadline\u003c/a> for delivering a statistical report to Congress — a deadline NCES had “never, ever missed” in its history, Carr said — and \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-delay-release-naep-science/\">failed to release the 2024 NAEP science test scores\u003c/a> in June because there was no commissioner to sign off on them. But the department managed to calculate the Title I allocations to high-poverty schools “in the nick of time,” Carr said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to the collection of fresh data, Carr is concerned about the maintenance of historical datasets. When DOGE canceled the contracts, Carr counted that NCES had 550 datasets scattered in different locations. NCES doesn’t have its own data warehouse and Carr was trying to corral and store the datasets. She’s worried about protecting privacy and student confidentiality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An Education Department official said that this data is safe and will soon be transferred to IES’s secure servers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65606\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2382px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65606\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP.jpg\" alt='Person holding artwork that spells out \"NAEP\"' width=\"2382\" height=\"1586\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP.jpg 2382w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP-2000x1332.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP-1536x1023.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP-2048x1364.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2382px) 100vw, 2382px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Peggy Carr holds artwork made by a former colleague at the National Center for Education Statistics. NAEP stands for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which Carr helped build into the influential barometer of how American students are faring. \u003ccite>(Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the meantime, Carr says she plans to stay involved in education statistics — but from the outside. “With this administration wanting to push education down to the states, there are opportunities that I see in my next chapter,” Carr said. She said she’s been talking with states and school districts about calculating where they rank on an international yardstick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr is in close touch with her former team. In May, 50 of them gathered at a church in Virginia to commiserate. A senior statistician gave Carr a homespun plaque of glued blue buttons spelling the letters NAEP with a shiny gold star above it. It was a fitting gift. NAEP is regarded as the best designed test in the country, the gold standard. Carr built that reputation, and now it has gone home with her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jill-barshay/\">\u003cem>Jill Barshay\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or \u003c/em>\u003cem>barshay@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-peggy-carr-interview-nces/\">\u003cem>Peggy Carr\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Dr. Peggy Carr, former education statistics chief, describes her final days under DOGE and what the ed department cuts mean for understanding what students in the United States are and are not learning through the NAEP. \r\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Peggy Carr’s last day on the job came so abruptly that she only had time to grab a few personal photos and her coat before a security officer escorted her out of her office and into a chilly February afternoon. She still doesn’t know why she was summarily dismissed as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), where she helped build the National Assessment of Educational Progress into the influential Nation’s Report Card. NCES is the federal government’s third-largest statistical agency after the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Running it for three and a half years was the capstone of Carr’s 35-year career at the Education Department.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And suddenly, she was out in the cold with no explanation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I would say that what has happened is a professional tragedy, not just for me, but for all of NCES and my staff,” said Carr, 71, in a recent interview. “But for me, it really was a personal tragedy because I have spent my career helping NCES build its solid reputation as a premier statistical agency in the federal system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr doesn’t know if the decision to fire her came from the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or an outside policy advocate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she is clear about what was lost by the firing of the head of a nonpartisan statistical agency: an objective assessment of how American students are doing. And she finds it “ironic,” she said, that her increasingly grim reports were President Donald Trump’s public rationale for \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/improving-education-outcomes-by-empowering-parents-states-and-communities/\">dismantling the Education Department\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although Carr was the first woman and the first Black person to run NCES, her “firsts” go back decades. She joined NCES in 1993, after teaching statistics at Howard University and a stint as a statistician in the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. “I was the first person of color in NCES to ever have a managerial job, period,” said Carr. She broke a long record: The education statistical agency dates back to 1867, created in the aftermath of the Civil War as part of an effort to help the South recover during Reconstruction. She was appointed commissioner by former President Joe Biden in 2021.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a kill-the-messenger strategy,” she said. “We have just been the messenger of how students in this country are faring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Congress established a six-year term for the commissioner so that the job would straddle administrations and insulate statistics from politics. Carr’s term was supposed to extend through 2027, but she made history with yet another first: the first NCES commissioner to be fired by a president.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr wasn’t thinking about her gender or her race, despite the fact that three days earlier, Trump had abruptly fired another Black senior official, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Maybe they found out I was the only Biden appointee left in the department,” Carr said. “Maybe they didn’t realize that until then.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr has reason to be puzzled by her firing. She is hardly a radical. She defended standardized tests against charges that they are racist. She publicly made the case that the nation needs to pay attention to achievement gaps, even if it sometimes means putting a spotlight on the low achievement of Black and Hispanic students. “The data can reveal things about what people can do to improve it,” Carr said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was dismissed on Feb. 24, more than a week before Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s Senate confirmation on March 3. The department named Carr’s deputy, Chris Chapman, to act as her replacement, but subsequently fired him in a round of mass layoffs on March 11. The agency was then leaderless until July 7, when another senior department official was told to add NCES to his responsibilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Civil servant\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In January, at the start of the second Trump administration, Carr thought her job was relatively safe. As a career civil servant, she’d worked with many Republican administrations and served as second in command under James “Lynn” Woodworth, whom Trump appointed as NCES commissioner in his first term. Both Woodworth and Carr say they had a good working relationship because they both cared about getting the numbers right. Indeed, Woodworth was so troubled and disturbed by Carr’s dismissal and the fate of the nation’s education statistics agency that he \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-former-trump-commissioner-blasts-education-data-cuts/\">spoke out publicly\u003c/a>, risking retaliation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even Carr’s fiercest critics, who contend she was an entrenched bureaucrat who failed to modernize the statistical service and allowed costs to balloon, condemned the humiliating way she was dismissed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She deserves the nation’s gratitude and thanks” for setting up a whole system of assessments, said Mark Schneider, who served as the director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which oversees NCES, from 2018 to 2024 and as NCES commissioner from 2005 to 2008.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65604\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2378px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65604\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2.jpg\" alt=\"Framed document on a table\" width=\"2378\" height=\"1586\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2.jpg 2378w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2-2000x1334.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-2-2048x1366.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2378px) 100vw, 2378px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The official appointment of Peggy Carr as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics by former President Joe Biden. \u003ccite>(Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A landing team\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The transition seemed normal at first. A “landing team” — emissaries from the Trump transition team — arrived in mid-January and Carr briefed them three times. They asked questions about NCES’s statistical work. “They were quite pleasant, to be honest,” Carr said. “They seemed curious and interested.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But that was before DOGE got there,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr released the 2024 Nation’s Report Card on Jan. 29. \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/naep-test-2024-dismal-report/\">More students lacked the most basic reading and math skills\u003c/a>. It was front-page news across the nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Days later, DOGE arrived. Still, Carr wasn’t worried. “We actually thought we were going to be OK,” Carr said. “We thought that their focus was going to be on grants, not contracts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Institute of Education Sciences had awarded millions of dollars in grants to professors and private-sector researchers to study ways to improve diversity and equity in the classroom — priorities that were now out of favor with the Trump team. Carr’s agency is housed under the IES umbrella, but Carr’s work didn’t touch upon any of that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, NCES has an unusual structure. Unlike other statistics agencies, NCES has never had many statisticians on staff and didn’t do much in-house statistical work. Because Congress put restrictions on its staffing levels, NCES had to rely on outside contractors to do 90 percent of the data work. Only through outside contractors was the Education Department able to measure academic achievement, count students and track university tuition costs. Its small staff of 100 primarily managed and oversaw the contracts.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Keyword searches\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Following DOGE instructions, Carr’s team conducted keyword searches of DEI language in her agency’s contracts. “Everyone was asked to do that,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad. The chaotic part really started when questions were being asked about reductions in the contracts themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr said she never had direct contact with anyone on Musk’s team, and she doesn’t even know how many of them descended upon the Education Department. Her interaction with DOGE was secondhand. Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, summoned Carr and the rest of his executive team to his office to respond to DOGE’s demands. “We met constantly, trying to figure out what DOGE wanted,” Carr said. DOGE’s orders were primarily transmitted through Jonathan Bettis, an Education Department attorney, who was experienced with procurement and contracts. It was Bettis who talked directly with the DOGE team, Carr said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The main DOGE representative who took an interest in NCES was “Conor.” “I don’t know his last name,” said Carr. “My staff never saw anyone else but Conor if they saw him at all.” Conor is \u003ca href=\"https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/#Conor-Fennessy\">32-year-old Conor Fennessy\u003c/a>, according to several media reports. His deleted LinkedIn profile said he has a \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/27/us/politics/doge-staff-list.html\">background in finance\u003c/a>. (Fennessy has also been involved in getting access to data at Health and Human Services and spearheading cuts at the National Park Service, according to media reports.) Efforts to reach Fennessy through the Education Department and through DOGE were unsuccessful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was chaotic,” said Carr. “Bettis would tell us what DOGE wanted, and we ran away to get it done. And then things might change the next day. ‘You need to cut more.’ ‘I need to understand more about what this contract does or that contract does.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a lot. Carr oversaw 60 data collections, some with multiple parts. “There were so many contracts and there were hundreds of lines on our acquisition plans,” she said. “It was a very complex and time-consuming task.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Lost in translation\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The questions kept coming. “It was like playing telephone tag when you have complicated data collections and you’re trying to explain it,” Carr said. Bettis “would sometimes not understand what my managers or I were saying about what we could cut or could not cut. And so there was this translation problem,” she said. (Efforts to reach Bettis were unsuccessful.) Eventually a couple of Carr’s managers were allowed to talk to DOGE employees directly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr said her staff begged DOGE not to cut a technology platform called EDPass, which is used by state education agencies to submit data to the federal Education Department on everything from student enrollment to graduation rates. For Carr, EDPass was a particular point of pride in her effort to modernize and process data more efficiently. EDPass slashed the time it took to release data from 20 months in 2016-17 to just \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/learn/blog/common-core-data-ccd-nonfiscal-data-releases-how-national-center-education-statistics-improved\">four months in 2023-24\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr said DOGE did not spare EDPass. Indeed, DOGE did not spare much of NCES.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Feb 10, only about a week after DOGE arrived, Carr learned that 89 of her contracts were terminated, which represented the vast majority of the statistical work that her agency conducts. “We were in shock,” said Carr. “What do you mean it’s all gone?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even its advocates concede that NCES needed reforms. The agency was slow to release data, it used some outdated collection methods and there were places where costs could be trimmed. Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said that the department, “in partnership with DOGE employees,” found contracts with overhead and administrative expenses that exceeded 50 percent, “a clear example of contractors taking advantage of the American taxpayer.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Piloting an old airplane\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Carr said she was never a fan of the contracting system and wished she could have built an in-house statistical agency like those at the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that would have required congressional authorization for the Education Department to increase its headcount. That never happened. Carr was piloting an old airplane, taped together through a complicated network of contracts, while attempting to modernize and fix it. She said she was trying to follow the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/a-vision-and-roadmap-for-education-statistics-in-2030-and-beyond\">2022 recommendations of a National Academies panel\u003c/a>, but it wasn’t easy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The chaos continued over the next two weeks. DOGE provided guidelines for justifying the reinstatement of contracts it had just killed and Carr’s team worked long hours trying to save the data. Carr was particularly worried about preserving the interagency agreement with the Census Bureau, which was needed to calculate federal Title I allocations to high-poverty schools. Those calculations needed to be ready by June and the clock was ticking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her agency was also responsible for \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/\">documenting geographic boundaries\u003c/a> for school districts and classifying locales as urban, rural, suburban or town. Title I allocations relied on this data, as did a \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/grants-and-programs/formula-grants/rural-education-achievement-program\">federal program for funding rural districts\u003c/a>. “My staff was panicking,” said Carr.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The DOGE sledgehammer came just as schools were administering an important international test — the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The department was also in the midst of a national teachers and principals survey. “People were worried about what was going to happen with those,” said Carr.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though DOGE terminated the PISA contract, the contractor continued testing in schools and finished its data collection in June. But now it’s unclear who will tabulate the scores and analyze them. The Education Department \u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69896743/46/2/american-educational-research-association-v-us-department-of-education/\">disclosed\u003c/a> in a June legal brief that it is restarting PISA. “I was told that they’re not going to do the national report, which is a little concerning to me,” Carr said. Asked for confirmation, the Education Department did not respond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another widely used data collection, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS-K 2024), which tracks a cohort of students from kindergarten through elementary school, was supposed to collect its second year of data as the kindergarteners progressed to first grade. “We had to give up on that,” said Carr.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>NAEP anxiety\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Carr said that behind the scenes, her priority was to save NAEP. DOGE was demanding aggressive cuts, and she worked throughout the weekend of Feb. 22-23 with her managers and the NAEP contractors to satisfy the demands. “We thought we could cut 28 percent — I even remember the number — without cutting into critical things,” she said. “That’s what I told them I could do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DOGE had been demanding 50 percent cuts to NAEP’s $185 million budget, according to several former Education Department employees. Carr could not see a way to cut that deep. The whole point of the exam is to track student achievement over time, and if too many corners were cut, it could “break the trend,” she said, making it impossible to compare the next test results in 2026 with historical scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I am responsible in statute and I could not cut NAEP as much as they wanted to without cutting into congressionally mandated activities,” Carr said. “I told them that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Carr and DOGE remained far apart in negotiations over cost, a security officer appeared at her office door at 3:50 p.m. on Feb. 24. Carr remembers the exact time because colleagues were waiting at her door to join her for a 4 p.m. Zoom meeting with the chair of the board that oversees NAEP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The security officer closed the door to her office so he could tell her privately that he was there to escort her out. He said she had 15 minutes to leave. “Escort me where? What do you mean?” Carr asked. “I was in shock. I wasn’t even quite understanding what he was asking, to be honest.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The security officer told her about an email saying she was put on administrative leave. Carr checked her inbox. It was there, sent within the previous hour.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The security officer “was very nice,” she said. “He refused to call me Peggy,” and addressed her as Dr. Carr. “He helped me collect my things, and I left.” He opened the doors for her and walked her to her car.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had no idea that this was going to happen, so it was shocking and unexpected,” Carr said. “I was working like I do every other day, a busy day where every minute is filled with something.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She said she’s asked the department why she was dismissed so abruptly, but has not received a response. The Education Department said it does not comment to the public on its personnel actions.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Packing via Zoom\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Two days later, Carr returned to pick up other belongings. Via Zoom, Carr’s staff had gone through her office with her — 35 years worth of papers and memorabilia — and packed up so many boxes that Carr had to bring a second car, an SUV.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Carr and her husband arrived, she said, “there were all these people waiting in the front of the building cheering me on. The men helped me put the things in my husband’s car and my car. It was a real tearjerker. And that was before they would be dismissed. They didn’t know they would be next.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less than two weeks later, on March 11, most of Carr’s staff — more than 90 NCES staffers — was fired. Only three remained. “I thought maybe they just made a mistake, that it was going to be a ‘whoops moment’ like with the bird flu scientists or the people overseeing the weapons arsenal,” Carr said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fate of NCES remains uncertain. The Education Department says that it is restarting and reassessing some of the data collections that DOGE terminated, but the scope of the work might be much smaller. Carr says it will take years to understand the full extent of the damage. Carr was slated to issue a \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/A-Message-from-Dr.-Peggy-Carr-July-14-2025.docx.pdf\">statement\u003c/a> about her thoughts on NCES on July 14.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The damage\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The immediate problem is that there aren’t enough personnel to do the work that Congress mandates. So far, NCES \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-condition-of-education/\">has missed an annual deadline\u003c/a> for delivering a statistical report to Congress — a deadline NCES had “never, ever missed” in its history, Carr said — and \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-delay-release-naep-science/\">failed to release the 2024 NAEP science test scores\u003c/a> in June because there was no commissioner to sign off on them. But the department managed to calculate the Title I allocations to high-poverty schools “in the nick of time,” Carr said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to the collection of fresh data, Carr is concerned about the maintenance of historical datasets. When DOGE canceled the contracts, Carr counted that NCES had 550 datasets scattered in different locations. NCES doesn’t have its own data warehouse and Carr was trying to corral and store the datasets. She’s worried about protecting privacy and student confidentiality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An Education Department official said that this data is safe and will soon be transferred to IES’s secure servers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65606\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2382px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65606\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP.jpg\" alt='Person holding artwork that spells out \"NAEP\"' width=\"2382\" height=\"1586\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP.jpg 2382w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP-2000x1332.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP-1536x1023.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/07/Hechinger-Peggy-Carr-NAEP-2048x1364.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2382px) 100vw, 2382px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Peggy Carr holds artwork made by a former colleague at the National Center for Education Statistics. NAEP stands for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which Carr helped build into the influential barometer of how American students are faring. \u003ccite>(Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the meantime, Carr says she plans to stay involved in education statistics — but from the outside. “With this administration wanting to push education down to the states, there are opportunities that I see in my next chapter,” Carr said. She said she’s been talking with states and school districts about calculating where they rank on an international yardstick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carr is in close touch with her former team. In May, 50 of them gathered at a church in Virginia to commiserate. A senior statistician gave Carr a homespun plaque of glued blue buttons spelling the letters NAEP with a shiny gold star above it. It was a fitting gift. NAEP is regarded as the best designed test in the country, the gold standard. Carr built that reputation, and now it has gone home with her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jill-barshay/\">\u003cem>Jill Barshay\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or \u003c/em>\u003cem>barshay@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-peggy-carr-interview-nces/\">\u003cem>Peggy Carr\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The repercussions from the decimation of staff at the Education Department keep coming. Last week, the fallout led to a delay in releasing results from a national science test.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is best known for tests that track reading and math achievement but includes other subjects too. In early 2024, when the main reading and math tests were administered, there was also a science section for eighth graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The board that oversees NAEP had \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/about-us/quarterly-board-meetings/2025/2025-may.html\">announced at its May meeting\u003c/a> that it planned to release the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/content/dam/nagb/en/documents/what-we-do/quarterly-board-meeting-materials/2025-05/3-plenary-sessions/discussion-and-action-release-plan-for-2024-naep-science/02-release-plan-for-2024-naep-science-results-r-d-approved-draft.pdf\">science results in June\u003c/a>. But that month has since come and gone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why the delay? There is no commissioner of education statistics to sign off on the score report, a requirement before it is released, according to five current and former officials who are familiar with the release of NAEP scores, but asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press or feared retaliation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peggy Carr, a former Biden administration appointee, was dismissed as the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics in February, two years before the end of her six-year term set by Congress. Chris Chapman was named acting commissioner, but then he was \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-chaos-confusion-statistics-education/\">fired in March\u003c/a>, along with half the employees at the Education Department. The role has remained vacant since.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A spokesman for the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, said the science scores will be released later this summer, but denied that the lack of a commissioner is the obstacle. “The report building is proceeding so the naming of a commissioner is not a bureaucratic hold up to its progress,” Stephaan Harris said by email.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The delay matters. Education policymakers have been keen to learn if science achievement had held steady after the pandemic or tumbled along with reading and math. (Those reading and math scores were \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/naep-test-2024-dismal-report/\">released in January\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump administration has vowed to dismantle the Education Department and did not respond to an emailed question about when a new commissioner would be appointed.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Researchers hang onto data\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Keeping up with administration policy can be head spinning these days. Education researchers were notified in March that they would have to relinquish federal data they were using for their studies. (The department shares restricted datasets, which can include personally identifiable information about students, with approved researchers.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But researchers learned on June 30 that the department had changed its mind and decided not to terminate this remote access.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lawyers who are suing the Trump administration on behalf of education researchers heralded this about-face as a “\u003ca href=\"https://www.citizen.org/news/big-win-education-department-restores-research-data-access-following-lawsuit/\">big win\u003c/a>.” Researchers can now finish projects in progress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, researchers don’t have a way of publishing or presenting papers that use this data. Since the mass firings in mid-March, there is no one remaining inside the Education Department to review their papers for any inadvertent disclosure of student data, a required step before public release. And there is no process at the moment for researchers to request data access for future studies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“While ED’s change-of-heart regarding remote access is welcome,” said Adam Pulver of Public Citizen Litigation Group, “other vital services provided by the Institute of Education Sciences have been senselessly, illogically halted without consideration of the impact on the nation’s educational researchers and the education community more broadly. We will continue to press ahead with our case as to the other arbitrarily canceled programs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pulver is the lead attorney for one of three suits fighting the Education Department’s termination of research and statistics activities. Judges in the District of Columbia and Maryland have \u003ca href=\"https://democracyforward.org/updates/court-allows-unlawful-trump-cuts-to-education-research-after-agency-partly-reverses-course-during-litigation/\">denied researchers\u003c/a> a preliminary injunction to restore the research and data cuts. But the Maryland case is now fast-tracked and the court has asked the Trump administration to produce an administrative record of its decision making process by July 11. (See \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-researchers-sue-trump/\">this previous story\u003c/a> for more background on the court cases.)\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Some NSF grants restored in California\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Just as the Education Department is quietly \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-restart-ed-contracts/\">restarting some activities \u003c/a>that DOGE killed, so is the National Science Foundation (NSF). The federal science agency \u003ca href=\"https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#reinstatement\">posted on its website\u003c/a> that it reinstated 114 awards to 45 institutions as of June 30. NSF said it was doing so to comply with a federal court order to reinstate awards to all University of California researchers. It was unclear how many of these research projects concerned education, one of the major areas that NSF funds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers and universities outside the University of California system are hoping for the same reversal. In June, the largest professional organization of education researchers, the American Educational Research Association, joined forces with a large coalition of organizations and institutions in filing a legal challenge to the mass termination of grants by the NSF. \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-three-fourths-nsf-funding-cuts-education/\">Education grants\u003c/a> were especially hard hit in a series of cuts in April and May. Democracy Forward, a public interest law firm, is \u003ca href=\"https://democracyforward.org/updates/coalition-files-suit-challenging-doge-attacks-on-congressionally-approved-stem-programs/\">spearheading this case\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jill-barshay/\">\u003cem>Jill Barshay\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or \u003c/em>\u003cem>barshay@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-delay-release-naep-science/\">\u003cem>delaying the NAEP science score report\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The repercussions from the decimation of staff at the Education Department keep coming. Last week, the fallout led to a delay in releasing results from a national science test.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is best known for tests that track reading and math achievement but includes other subjects too. In early 2024, when the main reading and math tests were administered, there was also a science section for eighth graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The board that oversees NAEP had \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/about-us/quarterly-board-meetings/2025/2025-may.html\">announced at its May meeting\u003c/a> that it planned to release the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/content/dam/nagb/en/documents/what-we-do/quarterly-board-meeting-materials/2025-05/3-plenary-sessions/discussion-and-action-release-plan-for-2024-naep-science/02-release-plan-for-2024-naep-science-results-r-d-approved-draft.pdf\">science results in June\u003c/a>. But that month has since come and gone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why the delay? There is no commissioner of education statistics to sign off on the score report, a requirement before it is released, according to five current and former officials who are familiar with the release of NAEP scores, but asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press or feared retaliation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peggy Carr, a former Biden administration appointee, was dismissed as the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics in February, two years before the end of her six-year term set by Congress. Chris Chapman was named acting commissioner, but then he was \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-chaos-confusion-statistics-education/\">fired in March\u003c/a>, along with half the employees at the Education Department. The role has remained vacant since.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A spokesman for the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, said the science scores will be released later this summer, but denied that the lack of a commissioner is the obstacle. “The report building is proceeding so the naming of a commissioner is not a bureaucratic hold up to its progress,” Stephaan Harris said by email.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The delay matters. Education policymakers have been keen to learn if science achievement had held steady after the pandemic or tumbled along with reading and math. (Those reading and math scores were \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/naep-test-2024-dismal-report/\">released in January\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump administration has vowed to dismantle the Education Department and did not respond to an emailed question about when a new commissioner would be appointed.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Researchers hang onto data\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Keeping up with administration policy can be head spinning these days. Education researchers were notified in March that they would have to relinquish federal data they were using for their studies. (The department shares restricted datasets, which can include personally identifiable information about students, with approved researchers.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But researchers learned on June 30 that the department had changed its mind and decided not to terminate this remote access.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lawyers who are suing the Trump administration on behalf of education researchers heralded this about-face as a “\u003ca href=\"https://www.citizen.org/news/big-win-education-department-restores-research-data-access-following-lawsuit/\">big win\u003c/a>.” Researchers can now finish projects in progress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, researchers don’t have a way of publishing or presenting papers that use this data. Since the mass firings in mid-March, there is no one remaining inside the Education Department to review their papers for any inadvertent disclosure of student data, a required step before public release. And there is no process at the moment for researchers to request data access for future studies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“While ED’s change-of-heart regarding remote access is welcome,” said Adam Pulver of Public Citizen Litigation Group, “other vital services provided by the Institute of Education Sciences have been senselessly, illogically halted without consideration of the impact on the nation’s educational researchers and the education community more broadly. We will continue to press ahead with our case as to the other arbitrarily canceled programs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pulver is the lead attorney for one of three suits fighting the Education Department’s termination of research and statistics activities. Judges in the District of Columbia and Maryland have \u003ca href=\"https://democracyforward.org/updates/court-allows-unlawful-trump-cuts-to-education-research-after-agency-partly-reverses-course-during-litigation/\">denied researchers\u003c/a> a preliminary injunction to restore the research and data cuts. But the Maryland case is now fast-tracked and the court has asked the Trump administration to produce an administrative record of its decision making process by July 11. (See \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-researchers-sue-trump/\">this previous story\u003c/a> for more background on the court cases.)\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Some NSF grants restored in California\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Just as the Education Department is quietly \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-restart-ed-contracts/\">restarting some activities \u003c/a>that DOGE killed, so is the National Science Foundation (NSF). The federal science agency \u003ca href=\"https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#reinstatement\">posted on its website\u003c/a> that it reinstated 114 awards to 45 institutions as of June 30. NSF said it was doing so to comply with a federal court order to reinstate awards to all University of California researchers. It was unclear how many of these research projects concerned education, one of the major areas that NSF funds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers and universities outside the University of California system are hoping for the same reversal. In June, the largest professional organization of education researchers, the American Educational Research Association, joined forces with a large coalition of organizations and institutions in filing a legal challenge to the mass termination of grants by the NSF. \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-three-fourths-nsf-funding-cuts-education/\">Education grants\u003c/a> were especially hard hit in a series of cuts in April and May. Democracy Forward, a public interest law firm, is \u003ca href=\"https://democracyforward.org/updates/coalition-files-suit-challenging-doge-attacks-on-congressionally-approved-stem-programs/\">spearheading this case\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jill-barshay/\">\u003cem>Jill Barshay\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or \u003c/em>\u003cem>barshay@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-delay-release-naep-science/\">\u003cem>delaying the NAEP science score report\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Education Secretary Linda McMahon has repeatedly said that the February and March cancellations and firings at her department cut not only the “fat” but also into some of the “muscle” of the federal role in education. So, even as she promises to dismantle her department, she is also bringing back some people and restarting some activities. Court filings and her own congressional testimony illuminate what this means for the agency as a whole, and for education research in particular. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">McMahon told a U.S. House committee last month she rehired 74 employees out of the roughly 2,000 who were laid off or agreed to separation packages. A court filing earlier this month says the agency will revive about a fifth of research and statistics contracts killed earlier this year, at least for now, though that doesn’t mean the work will look exactly as it did before. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Trump administration \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69896743/46/2/american-educational-research-association-v-us-department-of-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">disclosed\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in a June 5 federal court filing in Maryland that it either has or is planning to reinstate 20 of 101 terminated contracts to comply with congressional statutes. More than half of the reversals will restart 10 regional education laboratories that the Trump administration had said were engaged in “\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-cancels-additional-350-million-woke-spending\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">wasteful and ideologically driven spending\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">,” but had been very popular with \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.the74million.org/article/trump-cuts-research-lab-that-helped-nurture-mississippi-miracle/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">state education leaders\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. The reinstatements also include an international assessment, a study of how to help struggling readers, and Datalab, a web-based data analysis tool for the public. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Even some of the promised reinstatements are uncertain because the Education Department plans to put some of them up for new bids. That process could take months and potentially result in smaller contracts with fewer studies or hours of technical assistance. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These research activities were terminated by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) before McMahon was confirmed by the Senate. The Education Department’s disclosure of the reinstatements occurred a week after President Donald Trump bid farewell to Musk in the Oval Office and on the same day that the Trump-Musk feud exploded on social media. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Education Department press office said it had no comment beyond what was disclosed in the legal brief. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Education researchers, who are suing the Trump administration to restore all of its previous research and statistical activities, were not satisfied.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Elizabeth Tipton, president of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) said the limited reinstatement is “upsetting.” “They’re trying to make IES as small as they possibly can,” she said, referring to the Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research and data arm. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SREE and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) are suing McMahon and the Education Department in the Maryland case. The suit asks for a temporary reinstatement of all the contracts and the rehiring of IES employees while the courts adjudicate the broader constitutional issue of whether the Trump administration violated congressional statutes and exceeded its executive authority.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The 20 reinstatements were not ordered by the court, and in some instances, the Education Department is voluntarily restarting only a small slice of a research activity, making it impossible to produce anything meaningful for the public. For example, the department said it is reinstating a contract for operating the What Works Clearinghouse, a website that informs schools about evidence-based teaching practices. But, in the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69896743/46/american-educational-research-association-v-us-department-of-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">legal brief\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, the department disclosed that it is not planning to reinstate any of the contracts to produce new content for the site. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69896743/46/american-educational-research-association-v-us-department-of-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">brief\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, the administration admitted that congressional statues mention a range of research and data collection activities. But the lawyers argued that the legislative language often uses the word may instead of must, or notes that evaluations of education programs should be done “as time and resources allow.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Read together, the Department has wide discretion in whether and which evaluations to undertake,” the administration lawyers wrote. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Trump administration argued that as long as it has at least one contract in place, it is technically fulfilling a congressional mandate. For example, Congress requires that the Education Department participate in international assessments. That is why it is now restarting the contract to administer the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), but not other international assessments that the country has participated in, such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The administration argued that researchers didn’t make a compelling case that they would be irreparably harmed if many contracts were not restarted. “There is no harm alleged from not having access to as-yet uncreated data,” the lawyers wrote.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the terminated contracts was supposed to help state education agencies create longitudinal data systems for tracking students from pre-K to the workforce. The department’s brief says that states, not professional associations of researchers, should sue to restore those contracts. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In six instances, the administration said it was evaluating whether to restart a study. For example, the legal brief says that because Congress requires the evaluation of literacy programs, the department is considering a reinstatement of a study of the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program. But lawyers said there was no urgency to restart it because there is no deadline for evaluations in the legislative language.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In four other instances, the Trump administration said it wasn’t feasible to restart a study, despite congressional requirements. For example, Congress mandates that the Education Department identify and evaluate promising adult education strategies. But after terminating such a study in February, the Education Department admitted that it is now too difficult to restart it. The department also said it could not easily restart two studies of math curricula in low-performing schools. One of the studies called for the math program to be implemented in the first year and studied in the second year, which made it especially difficult to restart. A fourth study the department said it could not restart would have evaluated the effectiveness of extra services to help teens with disabilities transition from high school to college or work. When DOGE pulled the plug on that study, those \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/nx-s1-5345870/trump-doge-students-disabilities\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">teens lost those services\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> too. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about the \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-restart-ed-contracts/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">reinstatement of education statistics and research\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Education Secretary Linda McMahon has repeatedly said that the February and March cancellations and firings at her department cut not only the “fat” but also into some of the “muscle” of the federal role in education. So, even as she promises to dismantle her department, she is also bringing back some people and restarting some activities. Court filings and her own congressional testimony illuminate what this means for the agency as a whole, and for education research in particular. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">McMahon told a U.S. House committee last month she rehired 74 employees out of the roughly 2,000 who were laid off or agreed to separation packages. A court filing earlier this month says the agency will revive about a fifth of research and statistics contracts killed earlier this year, at least for now, though that doesn’t mean the work will look exactly as it did before. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Trump administration \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69896743/46/2/american-educational-research-association-v-us-department-of-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">disclosed\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in a June 5 federal court filing in Maryland that it either has or is planning to reinstate 20 of 101 terminated contracts to comply with congressional statutes. More than half of the reversals will restart 10 regional education laboratories that the Trump administration had said were engaged in “\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-cancels-additional-350-million-woke-spending\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">wasteful and ideologically driven spending\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">,” but had been very popular with \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.the74million.org/article/trump-cuts-research-lab-that-helped-nurture-mississippi-miracle/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">state education leaders\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. The reinstatements also include an international assessment, a study of how to help struggling readers, and Datalab, a web-based data analysis tool for the public. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Even some of the promised reinstatements are uncertain because the Education Department plans to put some of them up for new bids. That process could take months and potentially result in smaller contracts with fewer studies or hours of technical assistance. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These research activities were terminated by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) before McMahon was confirmed by the Senate. The Education Department’s disclosure of the reinstatements occurred a week after President Donald Trump bid farewell to Musk in the Oval Office and on the same day that the Trump-Musk feud exploded on social media. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Education Department press office said it had no comment beyond what was disclosed in the legal brief. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Education researchers, who are suing the Trump administration to restore all of its previous research and statistical activities, were not satisfied.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Elizabeth Tipton, president of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) said the limited reinstatement is “upsetting.” “They’re trying to make IES as small as they possibly can,” she said, referring to the Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research and data arm. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SREE and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) are suing McMahon and the Education Department in the Maryland case. The suit asks for a temporary reinstatement of all the contracts and the rehiring of IES employees while the courts adjudicate the broader constitutional issue of whether the Trump administration violated congressional statutes and exceeded its executive authority.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The 20 reinstatements were not ordered by the court, and in some instances, the Education Department is voluntarily restarting only a small slice of a research activity, making it impossible to produce anything meaningful for the public. For example, the department said it is reinstating a contract for operating the What Works Clearinghouse, a website that informs schools about evidence-based teaching practices. But, in the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69896743/46/american-educational-research-association-v-us-department-of-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">legal brief\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, the department disclosed that it is not planning to reinstate any of the contracts to produce new content for the site. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69896743/46/american-educational-research-association-v-us-department-of-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">brief\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, the administration admitted that congressional statues mention a range of research and data collection activities. But the lawyers argued that the legislative language often uses the word may instead of must, or notes that evaluations of education programs should be done “as time and resources allow.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Read together, the Department has wide discretion in whether and which evaluations to undertake,” the administration lawyers wrote. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Trump administration argued that as long as it has at least one contract in place, it is technically fulfilling a congressional mandate. For example, Congress requires that the Education Department participate in international assessments. That is why it is now restarting the contract to administer the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), but not other international assessments that the country has participated in, such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The administration argued that researchers didn’t make a compelling case that they would be irreparably harmed if many contracts were not restarted. “There is no harm alleged from not having access to as-yet uncreated data,” the lawyers wrote.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the terminated contracts was supposed to help state education agencies create longitudinal data systems for tracking students from pre-K to the workforce. The department’s brief says that states, not professional associations of researchers, should sue to restore those contracts. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In six instances, the administration said it was evaluating whether to restart a study. For example, the legal brief says that because Congress requires the evaluation of literacy programs, the department is considering a reinstatement of a study of the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program. But lawyers said there was no urgency to restart it because there is no deadline for evaluations in the legislative language.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In four other instances, the Trump administration said it wasn’t feasible to restart a study, despite congressional requirements. For example, Congress mandates that the Education Department identify and evaluate promising adult education strategies. 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},
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"info": "The day's top stories from BBC News compiled twice daily in the week, once at weekends.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/BBC-World-Service-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
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},
"californiareport": {
"id": "californiareport",
"title": "The California Report",
"tagline": "California, day by day",
"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-California-Report-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareport",
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"order": 8
},
"link": "/californiareport",
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},
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"title": "The California Report Magazine",
"tagline": "Your state, your stories",
"info": "Every week, The California Report Magazine takes you on a road trip for the ears: to visit the places and meet the people who make California unique. The in-depth storytelling podcast from the California Report.",
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"order": 10
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
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"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
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},
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"order": 1
},
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"order": 9
},
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"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
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},
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"id": "fresh-air",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"hidden-brain": {
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"source": "NPR"
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"how-i-built-this": {
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"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
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"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
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"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"order": 18
},
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},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
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