Deep cuts to staff and funding at the Ministry of Education will face a significant blow to understanding the public about how American students are running and what schools they can do to improve.
On Tuesday night, at least 100 federal workers focusing on research on education, student tests and basic data collection were fired by the Department of Education, part of the bloodshed of 1,300 executives. In addition to the government, at least 700 people in the field of social science research were fired or enraged last week, mainly as a result of federal cuts in education.
The redundancies came just a few weeks after the last score of federal tests that showed the reading skills and mathematical children of American children at low records. Trump administration officials have highlighted these low scores as proof that the Ministry of Education had failed and had to be cut.
But now the extent of these cuts raises questions about how the federal test itself will continue.
Other basic information about schools, along with research on what works to improve them, seems to be more likely to degrade or disappear entirely. Many of those fired have worked on works that evaluate mathematics and reading teaching, disability supports and other issues that are critical to learning students.
And some of the data they collected and analyzed played a decisive role in the direction of federal dollars in schools.
“This is the background, the basic information on how our society works,” said Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. The data of the Department of Education updates knowledge far beyond the school system, pointed out and deals with issues related to economics, labor market, race, class, gender and inequality. “It’s a common language – a common reality we all have.”
In a written statement, Madi Biedermann, a spokesman for the Ministry of Education, said: “We are aggressively controlling our expenditure to ensure the maximum impact on students and the responsible management of taxpayers’ dollars.”
Mr Trump and his allies have repeatedly ridiculed the research funded by the federal, which touches the race and the sex. But many of the canceled projects were unquestionable explorations on key issues to achieve students and prosperity.
The Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, had already seen budget cuts and contracts that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Last night, the vast majority of its staff were fired, according to three former employees and an email sent to IES staff revised by the New York Times.
This included extensive redundancies in the group that manages several major tests, such as the program for international student evaluation, which measures how competing US students are worldwide and the national evaluation of educational progress, which is considered a golden model in the field and is the only 50 -year -olds.
Education researchers and even those who are involved in NAEP’s supervision were trying to understand what the trial cuts would mean by Congress and supervised by a separate, independent council.
Federal employees who lost their jobs helped manage the test and were “necessary” to ensure that it was accurate, said Andrew Ho, a Harvard test expert, who previously sat on the board who oversees the exams.
“If the Congress and the section do not act quickly to enhance the specialization of national evaluation, who could trust that this” Gold Standard “test is still fair and comparable?” He said.
The national test was regarded as a priority for Trump’s administration, even if it was possible to move to a different section. Project 2025, the right -wing plan to revise the federal government, has proposed the movement of the NAEP section to the inventory office.
IES employees also maintain the common core of the data, a rich demographic element of demographic information for students and teachers, who are used to determine how many federal school areas K-12 must receive.
Betsy Wolf, a research analyst yesterday, said that staff and funding reductions were so drastic that he believed: “For the most part, federal education is over.”
He has three young children and said he is expected to make a quick change of career, as so many education experts are now out of work and federal funding has dried. Referring to a Trump official who said he wanted federal workers to be “traumatic” by redundancies, he said: “He had success in it.”
External workers who lost their jobs were employed by a cluster of independent organizations, including the US Research, Mathematics and Western Institutes, who often collaborate with the government and are known to conduct high quality studies.
These staffing cuts were confirmed in interviews with today’s and former employees and the recordings of internal meetings examined by the Times.
Some of the survey cuts immediately affect students and teachers who participated in the educational equivalent of medical drug tests.
A canceled contract weighs how effectively Oregon’s schools spent taxpayers who had been deducted to improve reading teaching, emphasizing vocal, vocabulary and other structural elements of early education. The findings from the study had to guide the decisions of school spending in the future.
Another expert project provided guidance and curriculum for high school students with disabilities, as they prepared to go to the workforce or college. The purpose of the research was to find out what types of supports were very useful.
Students with disabled “do not take much research” that have been done on their needs directly related to schools, said Nathan Edvalson, a Special Education Manager for the Canyons School area, except for Salt Lake City. About 90 students in its suburban area participated in the canceled evaluation, called my mapping for future success, which works with 1,600 students at national level. Funding from the project had allowed the canyons to hire three teachers and one adviser who spent most of the autumn semester in training and had begun only a meeting with the students in December.
Since the grant was canceled, these employees have been assigned to other jobs. Parents received a letter explaining that their teens would no longer receive support from the program, but would be eligible for other types of advice.
Mr Edvalson said he understood the need for budgetary responsibility. But he argued that research on the quality of education was served by highlighting the best practices that would help students with disabilities become independent, workers.
A representative of the US Research Institutes, which manages the program, rejected an interview request. According to internal meetings shared with Times, the non -profit organization was fired about 300 executives on Monday.
In one of the recorded meetings, Air President Jessica Heppen said that due to federal cuts in education and external assistance, the team had lost $ 80 million from the expected funding of $ 2025 for research projects. Another $ 80 million was at risk, he said, from federal attitude orders.
“We cannot maintain current levels of staffing, given the situation and the capital we know are coming,” he said in recording. “We had to make agonizing decisions that influence our staff.”
Air earned more than $ 600 million in federal funding in 2024, including $ 115 million from the Department of Education.
At Mathematica, based in Princeton, 340 employees were fired or unfolded last week, according to today’s and former employees. The organization earned $ 360 million from the federal government last year, including $ 28 million from the Department of Education.
Trump’s administration ended Mathematica’s work that manages regional training laboratories in 11 states, according to a statement from the non -profit organization. These workshops explored mathematical teaching, teaching writing and lack of teachers, including topics.
Grazia Mieren, a digital project manager, said, said Mathematica staff had heard for months on cuts for cuts during a second TRUMP. He said the team was planning to strengthen its existing funding from state governments and charities.
However, the extent of the reductions was shocking.
“No one was waiting for this,” Ms Mieren said. “Your life is upside down. Inward and backward.”
Another 50 posts were eliminated at Wested, a non -profit research in San Francisco.
Several canceled Wested projects have been directly aimed at the greatest challenges in education since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Wested had managed the canceled evaluation of Oregon’s reading reforms and had planned similar efforts in Alaska, Montana and Washington.
The team was also working to combat chronic absence in a Nevada school district. researching how to prevent teachers from deteriorating in Utah. and the development of tools to help the mental health of students in Alaska.
In a written statement, Wested CEO Jannelle Kubinec said: “These cancellations are a great loss for our nation students, families and communities.”
Nat Malkus, a training expert at the American Enterprise Institute, who monitors the cancellations and redundancies of the contracts, recognized ineffectiveness in the federal funded research. But Trump’s cuts had become so widely and in a hurry, argued that they had grouped the wheat with the slap, threatening the body’s basic functions.
“We will lose some valuable studies,” he said, “and we will probably lose some inflated studies.”
Kitty Bennett and Kirsten noyes He contributed research.
