Cannot be aesthetically integrated: updates on Secretary Linda McMahon

we're thinking of getting tee shirts...

• You may have caught that Secretary of Education Linda McMahon spent $43,000 on furniture for the office she purports to be vacating, as the current furniture "cannot be configurationally or aesthetically integrated” into new space.
  If you're supposed to be making your job go away entirely, surely you can put up with the old desk in the meantime? 
  

• Just today, AFT announced that they are suing McMahon over the mismanagement of public service loan forgiveness. This makes something like seven lawsuits that AFT has filed against the federal government.
  

• Also on the Secretary McMahon lawsuit front, something that didn't get a lot of mainstream press, so full marks to the wrestling world here, but the effort of she and her (still though separated) husband Vince McMahon to get the lawsuit against them for the sexual abuse of minors that happened while they were running WWE has failed. As quite appropriately noted by the article here linked: 
  

  Despite allegedly being aware of abuse to minors and not preventing it, Linda McMahon serves as Secretary of Education in Donald Trump’s administration.  

• And while we're doing McMahon news, be sure to read Matt Barnum McMahon's "make American education great again" and its relationship with reality. Our revolution on education has always been the access provided to public education, and even that quite unevenly. The bit that I found most telling: regarding that federal "intrusion" in education:
  

  There is good evidence students have benefited from these efforts, and the laws have become foundational to American education. 

 

Some days are like that

 We had a one-two punch of "who's in charge of this, anyway?" around public education late yesterday:

• The Trump administration announced that they are moving special education and civil rights enforcement out of the Department of Education; special education is going to Health and Human Services and civil rights to the Department of Justice. This has of course something that this administration been warning of/planning for some time, but it appears they now are rolling forward. 

  The change will move some of the most essential and integrated functions provided by the federal Education Department to two separate agencies and further accelerates the dismantling of the department without congressional approval. Senior department officials said the changes would not reduce or affect students’ rights and would instead lead to more effective services for students and families. But many details are still being worked out.

  I think it's fair to say, given what we have seen of this administration, that this is not going to work out well for students and families.

• The conference committee working on the literacy bill for Massachusetts came out with their joint work, which can be found here. DESE is now going to have a list of what curricula a district may use, and districts have to choose from the list unless they can get a waiver to use curricula that they can prove works (no room, note for new curricula there). No curricula included may include:
  

  implicit or incidental instruction in word reading, visual memorization of whole words or guessing from context and picture cues, also known as MSV or three-cueing, as a substitute for identifying a word.

  
  Words mean things and barring "implicit or incidental instruction in word meaning" from reading instruction may be the silliest inclusion I have read recently.
  Already, it has been asked if barring "guessing from context and picture cues," which is a large reason we actually use picture books with children, would bar the use of picture books:
  

  "Does it mean you can't show a student a picture? Of course you can. Children's books are always illustrated."

  That isn't a ridiculous question, and that it isn't well understood how VARIED are the methods by which children gain access to the quite complex skill of reading underlines that this is not a decision that should have been made by the Legislature. 
  Oh, and they stripped out the $25M fund for implementation. 

Weaponizing what's left of the Department of Education

 

trans colored heart on a sidewalk at Smith College
photo by Kate Hobbs

If you follow me on any social media platform other than this one, you've probably caught my ire that the U.S. Department of Education has now started a (well-publicized) investigation into my alma mater, Smith College for, they say, admitting men. Smith is the largest historically women's college in the country; the college started admitting women who are trans in 2015 (after an uproar over not doing so). The admission policy specifically says Smith:

considers for admission any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women are eligible to apply to Smith.

And a cheer for Shawnee Mission School District in Kansas

 ...which has not only refused to sign an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education regarding their "investigation" into the district's inclusion of trans students, they also extensively questioned the grounds of the investigation, and concluded with this: 

“Finally, the resolution agreement you have provided contains provisions that are inconsistent with the values that inform our work of supporting all children in our communities. We will never issue a policy that devalues certain members of our diverse community.”

May we all be so bold in defending our students.*

_____________________
*I wish my alma mater were being so public and bold.

we have a federal budget

 And when it comes to education funding, well, I'll let Mark Lieberman of EdWeek take this: 

You can read Mark's coverage (which I recommend) here. The highlight: 

Ultimately, Congress comprehensively rejected the Trump administration’s proposals to slash billions of dollars from federal education investments. Schools nationwide can expect roughly similar year-over-year funding levels this fall for key programs like Title I for students from low-income households, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for special education services, Title II for professional development, and Title III for English learners.

The final legislation doesn’t require the Trump administration to halt efforts to shift Education Department programs to other agencies, and it doesn’t explicitly prohibit the administration from taking further steps to diminish the Cabinet-level agency.

It does, however, include requirements for the department to consult more closely with Congress on the status of its efforts to shift responsibilities to other agencies. It also includes nearly $400 million for Education Department staff compensation, only slightly less than for the previous fiscal year despite recent staff reductions that have nearly cut the agency’s ranks in half.

The legislation also supplies funding for several smaller agencies the Trump administration had already moved unilaterally to defund, including AmeriCorps and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Remember, we're now talking about next school year's funding: 

Most education funding is forward-funded, which means allocations for the current fiscal year will hit schools in the upcoming school year. Typically, formula funds for schools start flowing to states in July. Grant program competitions can happen throughout the year.

Do remember that both how much goes to each state and how much then goes to each district has to be recalculated each year based on the factors in the formula for each grant, so how much your district gets may not be the same as last year. But we aren't seeing the deep cuts that Trump campaigned on and continued to promise once elected.

They aren't popular. 

federal funding waiver doesn't live up to the hype

 I entirely understand how it is that people might have missed this, but if you do pay attention to school funding, you may have caught U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon touting "returning education to the states" through approval of a waiver for Iowa for combining federal funding, in essence, block granting their funding. As the Department's release says: 

Today, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) approved Iowa’s Returning Education to the States Waiver, empowering state education officials to have more discretion over their federal education dollars. Iowa is the first state to apply for and receive such a waiver, which will allow state leaders to focus federal dollars on work that best improves the achievement of Iowa students.

Iowa’s waiver permits the state education agency to combine four federal funding streams into one. Iowa leaders seek to focus more federal resources on improving student achievement rather than federal compliance. This waiver’s flexibility will reduce compliance costs, allowing nearly $8 million to be redirected from bureaucratic red tape to the classroom over four years. State education leaders will use the redirected funds and the greater flexibility they afford to expand support for evidence-based literacy training, strengthening their teacher pipeline, and narrowing achievement gaps.

If you know anything of how much federal funding flows to states, you may have had that *record scratch* sound in your head when you to the bit about "nearly $8 million" up here. 

Excellent work from Mark Lieberman over at EdWeek gives a more clear eyed assessment on this one: 

 ...in contrast with proposals the state put forward roughly a year ago, the new federal approval touches only 5% of Iowa’s overall allocation of federal education funds, the part that’s set aside for the state education agency. The bulk of federal dollars that flow to school districts each year—$900 million worth—will retain their current structure and spending and reporting requirements.

This announcement could signal an acknowledgment from the department that its legal authority to flatten discrete funding programs and implement unrestricted block grants without congressional approval is limited, said Anne Hyslop, the director of policy development for the nonprofit advocacy group All4Ed, and a former senior policy adviser at the Education Department who helped implement the Every Student Succeeds Act.

It also foreshadows an uphill battle for other states aiming to convert federal education funding to block grants, including Indiana, which submitted a request for that flexibility, along with relief from certain school accountability requirements, in October.

I realize that it isn't going to surprise anyone that the Trump administration is being less than forthcoming on what they're actually doing, but it's always worth calling these out. 

Not that anyone asked me but: on state education priorities

In their past two meetings, the Board of Ed has established priorities; in November, for the FY27 budget request, and in December, for the Commissioner, which he proposed as being the foundation of a strategic plan. 

I'd first note--and I do realize that the Board here is constrained by state deadlines on budget--that the above is really backwards; you always want to establish your priorities before you do your budgeting. You set your values before you spend your money. 

With that in mind, then, let's consider first the priorities, with a connection to what one would then need for budgetary priorities. 

Let's first note that he started with this slide: 

...which I just find super disheartening as framing. Someday, someone is going to note? remember? that public education is guaranteed by the state "for the preservation of their rights and liberties" and that it is for the good not only of individual children, but for all of us. THAT is what we should be leading with, anytime we are asking how we are doing.

What we're losing in the Office of Civil Rights

 Good read from The Hechinger Report: 

Now, however, the Trump administration is wielding the power of the Justice Department in new and, some say, extreme ways. Hundreds of career staffers, including most of those who worked on education cases, have resigned. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also has been decimated, largely through layoffs. The two offices traditionally have worked closely together to enforce civil rights protections for students. The result is a potentially lasting shift in how the nation’s top law enforcement agency handles issues that affect public school students, including millions who have disabilities...

The Justice Department’s lawyers historically have worked on a few dozen education cases at once, concentrating on combating sexual harassment, racial discrimination against Black and Latino students, restraint and seclusion, and failure to provide adequate services to English learners. 

In the last 11 months, however, the agency has sued over and opened investigations into concerns about antisemitism, transgender policies and bias against white people at schools. It sued at least six states for offering discounted tuition to undocumented immigrants and pressured the president of the University of Virginia to resign as part of an investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies. And it joined other federal departments to form a special Title IX investigations team to protect students from what the administration called the “pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities.”  

We at least temporarily have an Office of Civil Rights back

 Well, well, well, what do you know? If you lay off hundreds of people who deal with civil rights complaints in the U.S. Department of Education, what do you end up with?

...a growth in its massive backlog of those complaints. 

Thus on Friday, U.S. Ed called back hundreds of those employees, though not without the trademark unprofessional snark that is a current hallmark of the agency: 

In the email to employees, the department said “it is important to refocus OCR’s work and utilize all OCR staff to prioritize OCR’s existing complaint caseload.” 

“In order for OCR to pursue its mission with all available resources, all those individuals currently being compensated by the Department need to meet their employee performance expectations and contribute to the enforcement of existing civil rights complaints,” the email notes.

Remember, Secretary McMahon has repeatedly said that the mandates Congress has for the Department can and are being carried out, but as USA Today notes: 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon's decision to tap into her own laid-off workforce provides further evidence her agency is struggling more than she has publicly indicated to meet its legally mandated responsibilities.

Since cutting the department in half earlier this year, many families waiting on resolutions to their civil rights complaints have been stuck in limbo. Colleges have also reported significant issues with the federal financial aid system.

 I should note that the first report I saw of this was in FedScoop.

Outsourcing the Department of Education

It was another of those news rounds where if, like me, you were offline for an hour, you missed a major thing and had to play catch-up.

On Tuesday of this week, the U.S. Department of Education signed a series of agreements with other federal departments. Those agreements move functions of U.S. Ed to those other Departments, as EdWeek charts out here. Most of it is going to the Department of Labor—demonstrating truncated view of the function of the public education system—though several go to the Interior, and one to HHS. As yet, there is no move of IDEA which covers special education to HHS, as has been floated a number of times.

It's worth noting that this isn't the first of such moves: career and technical education grants were moved to the Department of Labor earlier this year. Those who have been paying attention say it has not gone well.

Secretary McMahon was quick to say that funding would continue to flow to states and from there to schools. As Matt Barnum wrote in Chalkbeat, it's quite possible that schools will see little change, so long as those other departments actually pick up the ball. The AP, though, captured the concern that I've had all week: 

Instead of being housed in a single agency, much of the Education Department’s work now will be spread across four other federal departments...The plan increases bureaucracy fivefold, Washington state’s education chief said, “undoubtedly creating confusion and duplicity” for educators and families. His counterpart in California said the plan is “clearly less efficient” and invites disruption. Maryland’s superintendent raised concerns about “the challenges of coordinating efforts with multiple federal agencies.”

It is state education agencies that coordinate with the federal level, and it is those state agencies that now have to chase funding down across multiple federal departments--departments not set up to interface on those programs--in order to get the funding to states and then to districts. Those state agencies, if they're anything like our own (and I'll bet they are) are understaffed already.

It's also worth noting that objections have not all fallen along party lines, as covered in the same article:

Yet some conservatives pushed back against the dismantling. U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said on social media that moving programs to agencies without policy expertise could hurt young people. And Margaret Spellings, a former education secretary to Republican President George W. Bush, called it a distraction to a national education crisis.

“Moving programs from one department to another does not actually eliminate the federal bureaucracy, and it may make the system harder for students, teachers and families to navigate and get the support they need,” Spellings said in a statement.

Those who work in the Department have also noted that this makes no sense.
This is doing it for the sake of doing it. As I noted elsewhere earlier in the week, this feels a lot like the phase some kids go through where they have to push every rule and will come back with "TECHNICALLY..." when they are called on it.

TECHNICALLY, they haven't closed the Department of Education. I suspect that isn't going to be good enough for the judges that have already told them to knock it off.  

Will we have a U.S. Department of Education Tuesday?

 As we were warned, the Trump administration is using the federal shutdown as an excuse to issue layoff notices--including a little 'oops' moment at the CDC, which they're now blaming on a coding issue--leading many of us to wonder just how much of the U.S. Department of Education will exist as of Tuesday after the holiday weekend. 

Probable federal government shutdown at midnight

 And while we've been over this a few times, here's Politico on what this means for education. The two big PreK-12 hits are Head Start (in some cases) and federal funding in areas with non-taxed federal land. Again, remember, most of our federal grants are forward funded.

Politico also shared the official "here's what happens in a shutdown" document filed by Secretary McMahon. Page 1 has the number of employees expected to have to continue to work should the federal government shutdown at midnight tonight.

The part that isn't getting the headline on the NAEP release

 ...is what the Trump administration has done to the Department of Education. From NPR:

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.

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.

Because of cuts to the Department: 

 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.

 

Quick note on federal funding

First, while we should be attentive to the "House GOP eyes 27% cut to Title I" headline, what do we know about how the federal budget process works? There are many steps! And don't forget where the Senate (also with a GOP majority) went on this one: 

In July, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a bipartisan bill that would fund the Education Department at $79 billion in FY 26, a slight increase to current spending. 

As I posted then:

 Money has impact on real people.  

Keep telling your stories to those who make decisions. It makes a difference.

So about that impounded federal funding

 The Office of Management and Budget, to which the Department of Education is directing all inquiries, were asked about the freeze on current year federal grant funds and they have quite an answer:

“Initial findings show that many of these grants programs have been grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda,” the spokesman said in statement to RealClearPolitics.

Asked for specifics, OMB officials said it had found an example in New York in which public schools had used funds designated for English-language learning to promote “illegal immigrant advocacy organizations.” The agency, which oversees federal spending, also said funds had used the grants to steer illegal immigrants towards “scholarships intended for American students.” In an unspecified case, the school improvement funds were allegedly used for a seminar on “queer resistance in the arts.”

The AP also has picked this up. 

closing tabs

 Things I've had open to share: 

• I linked to this in yesterday's post, but do read the New York Times coverage that, yes, ICE raids do have an impact on attendance: 
  

  The spike in absences is equivalent to the average student missing about 15 days of school each year, up from 12 days, according to Professor Dee’s paper.
  He called the findings “a canary in the coal mine” for public education. If absences continue to be elevated, they could threaten student learning and children’s mental health.

  While the article suggests unlinking school funding from attendance (the data are from California) and perhaps adding funding when there are raids, the answer is of course not having them in the first place.
  At some point, someone may want to mark that chronic absenteeism is part of the school accountability system in Massachusetts.

If it has felt as if there is a lot going on at the federal level for schools

 ...you're right. Washington Post has a great visual of all that has been going on. (That's a gift link.)

Massachusetts responds

 DESE released this just a few minutes ago. 

While not as combative as Minnesota's, it does footnote the greeting, which one must admire. That isn't just passive aggressive--though it is!--it also points out how they're dodging someone taking responsibility for this mess.

And footnote 3! The Paperwork Reduction Act! 

Also note that this is the state saying districts have no responsibility to respond on their own. 

"you know what we mean" certification from U.S. Ed

There's much to be said about the U.S. Department of Education's Thursday demand that states and districts sign that they "aren't doing DEI" to continue to receive federal funds, but the thing that keeps coming to mind for me is this Monty Python skit: 

You know, DEI! You know what we mean!
No, we don't, Secretary McMahon. Please be more specific!

Worcester did what?

Plenty of press last week on the announcement* of the Worcester School Committee voting to become part of the lawsuit against President Trump, Secretary of Education McMahon, and the U.S. Department of Education, which argues that the elimination of the Department would be harmful, and in fact, the cuts of employees that have already occurred are harmful, mostly due to federal funding. 

If, like me, you learned the word "declarant" from this, welcome. This means that Worcester is not itself actually suing--that's Somerville Public Schools, Easthampton** Public Schools, AFT-MA, AFSCME, and AAPU--but is supporting the position of the plaintiffs officially. 

Note, by the way, that's the School Committee taking action here, as they're essentially the legal entity of the district (for all that they mostly weren't the "face" of the press).

______________________

*I think? This appears to have only been done in executive session?
** for those surprised by Maureen Binienda's vote in favor: she's currently the interim superintendent of Easthampton