TRANSCRIPT: Education Webinar — June 10, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00:01):
Welcome to the Evelyn Y. Davis Studios of the National Press Foundation. Thank you for joining us for this briefing, focused on how to cover education department cuts in your community. The past few months since President Donald Trump signed an order to dismantle the Department of Education have yielded a great deal of uncertainty along with massive layoffs and cessation of grants. Just last week, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to let it move ahead with the dismantling by firing hundreds of ed department workers in a bid to completely move school policy to the states. But as this issue plays out, how can journalists help communicate the impact for local communities? Our speakers today will offer critical insights that can help zero in on that topic. First, we’re joined by Steven Nik. He’s an independent writer and researcher who was me, who was Deputy commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics before retiring from the education department in 2025.
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Next, Noel Ellison is an associate executive director of the School Superintendent Association, where she directs the organization’s advocacy and governance efforts along with survey research and policy analysis work. Carrie Rodriguez also joins us. She is the founder and president of the National Parents Union, an organization that unites parents from diverse backgrounds to advocate for the rights, economic and educational needs of America’s children. And Jill Barer rounds out our panel. She is a writer and editor for Columbia University’s Inger Report newsletter and she writes the weekly proof points column about education, research, and data covering a range of topics from early childhood to higher education. You can read the full and impressive bios of our panelists on our website@nationalpress.org. Steven, I’d like to start with you today because of your former role within the Department of Education, but also your expertise as an education historian. I’m hoping you could provide us with a bit of a level set about this issue. Could you tell us how the administration’s executive order has affected the National Center for Education Statistics and help us understand how that can affect schools moving forward?
Stephen Provasnik/formerly NCES (00:02:48):
Sure, and thank you very much for inviting me to be part of this distinguished panel. Effectively, the National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES as I’ll refer to it has been abolished in all, but name the law requires that there be an NCES and gives it a series of congressional mandates. So the three staff members who have been retained in the agency allow the administration to say that NCS is still operating. However, from any objective standpoint, it’s impossible to see how NCS can meet its congressional mandates, particularly the following six that I want to just outline for you, to give you a sense. So first, NCS has to provide objective, reliable, and trustworthy statistics about the condition of education. They’re authorized to do this through administrative data collections, statistical surveys, longitudinal studies assessments, and they are meant to meet a congressional list of topics that are supposed to be reported out.
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Teacher salaries, teacher shortages, everything from special educational accommodations to school safety, and they’re supposed to put this all in the same metric, so data from all across the country can become comparable. The second mandate is to produce an annual report on the condition of education and publish it by June 1st of each year. Third, to develop and conduct the national Assessment of educational progress, also known as nap, also referred to as the Nation’s report card. And that meets the mandatory state level assessment of mathematics and reading at grades four and eight every two years. Fourth, MCS is to compare US student performance without their international peers, which over the past three decades has been done through international comparative studies such as Tims and pisa.
Now, I’ve mentioned that these first four mandates that I’ve mentioned here all come from Ezra. That’s the Education Science Reform Act of 2002, and that’s the law that created IESI might know, and that’s the Institute of Education Sciences.
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I might note that here, that NCS existed before IES and indeed preexisted the entire US Department of Education because the US Department of Education was only created in 1979. NCS in contrast was established in 1867, and you heard that right, 1867 in the wake of the Civil War, and it was created specifically to deal with political challenges left in the war’s wake. The fifth Met Congressional mandate is to promote and support decision-making with education data. This is under the Evidence act of 2018. It requires federal statistical agencies like NCS that are managed by OMB under the leadership of the chief statistician of the US to support federal initiatives to promote at all levels of government. So this is work where with standardizing data such as the collection of race ethnicity data with the official categories and definitions, or providing technical assistance such as helping states link school and workforce databases or high school and post-secondary databases so that you can have a program like in Washington State, which is piloting a program to guarantee admission to participating state universities for any student with a GPA of 3.0 and who’s completed certain required coursework.
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The sixth mandate is to oversee geospatial data activities, and this is probably the least known one. It’s required by the Geospatial Act data, geospatial Data Act of 2018. And it includes collecting, producing, disseminating, and stewarding geospatial data. These are, for example, identifying rural schools so that it’s clear which schools are eligible for rural grants or allowing agencies like FEMA to identify which schools are in a disaster zone disaster zone. Without MCS functioning, all of these functions are at risk. And indeed June 1st came and went and as Jill Bache called out, MCS missed its release of the condition of education for the first time in its history. Although I will point out that a webpage appeared with several bullets released late on June 2nd, and it’s been called the New Condition of Education Report. However, just to give you an example, I just pulled off my shelf.
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This is an old condition of education. This is what has been produced annually for a long time with breakouts by every critical topic and lots and lots of tables and data, which is not quite the same as the bullet points that have just been released in January. Just to give you the last bit of context, NCS had over a hundred staff and approaching about a billion dollars in contracts to employ five to 6,000 contractors to comply with these congressional mandates. In February, doge canceled all but one contract related to NA P, and those canceled contracts led to the dismissal of thousands and thousands of contractors who supported NCS with very specialized skills. In February, the commissioner of NCS who was a presidentially appointed position was fired, and in March 11th all the staff were RIFed except for three employees who were not picked for anything other than administratively.
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They happen to be in the office of the commissioner. And so we have three random sort of people who are left having to man NCS, chief Psychometrician, not a chief statistician, the director of data governance, and someone who was the director for NATE Partnerships. There have been various lawsuits that have been filed, I think there are over 30 that are related to the Department of Education, and I think it’s four that are directly related to MCS or IES. And of these New York versus McMahon blocked the enforcement of the president’s March 20th executive order that you referred to dismantling the agency and stop the administration from working to transfer the Department of Education functions to other agencies. So everything’s kind of in a legal limbo at the moment, but there are still fundamentally only three staff members, no new data being collected, checked, validated, or published. And this will not have an immediate effect on local schools or state education system, but it will have impacts in time. And I’m just take a few minutes here to outline those. They’re multitude of prosaic and administrative impacts, but the key ones I think that are important.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:09:21):
Steven, I want to jump in right there. I want you to really unpack that at some point during this discussion. So let’s do a round of questions and we’ll allow you to do just that. I wanted now to go to Noel because in our early conversation you gave us a lot, gave me a lot of impact or context about how superintendents were being affected by this issue. So can you help us understand what the biggest challenges are for superintendents in local school districts?
Noelle Ellerson Ng/AASA (00:09:53):
Certainly I can. I do want to lead first with a thank you for the opportunity to be here. Our superintendents are navigating a lot in their day-to-day to run their districts and having an opportunity to engage in what it’s like to implement your school work and the context of the current political environment and administrative environment is a lot. I do want to pick up on what Steven was throwing down though. I’m a data geek. I live in NCES and I think one of the simplest ways to distill this down is not only can you not evaluate the merit or lack thereof of programs, as we look at it, we are public education advocates. Not only are we now not able to tell the successes of public education in an environment where we see a prioritization of privatization, no data means you also can’t demonstrate that privatization doesn’t work.
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And so it is the absence of data in any way. And one of my favorite quotes from Senator Patrick Moynihan, you are entitled to your own opinion, sir, and not your own facts. You can’t have facts if you don’t have data. And so we are following closely the changes to NCES. Now, I will do what I’m supposed to do and answer your questions. When I look at what the biggest hardship is for school superintendents, I think there’s a few things to level set. Number one, congress and the administration never feel the full weight of the consequences of their actions or inactions as it relates to education because the fact of the matter remains, public schools open their doors every day regardless of what Congress and the administration do or do not do. And in an environment where we’re talking about school choice, people gloss over the fact that public education is the number one choice far and away.
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And when you look at what that means for all students, but particularly students from historically disadvantaged populations, so English language learners, students of different races, students in poverty, students with disabilities, it is public education in a federal role that’s looking to level that playing field that has really afforded an opportunity to give them an education that moves them forward as civilians and citizens and employees to move the economy forward. To quote the tagline of one of our favorite coalitions, when the student succeeds, the nation succeeds. And it’s hard to measure success when you don’t have data. So when we look at how superintendents are trying to run their systems, we have to level set and keep in mind that on average the federal dollars are just 10% of an operating budget. So it’s a consequential point, but kind of the tail wagging the dog state and local funding and policy are far more integral and far more granular.
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You’ll hear people like me say, oh, we don’t want the federal government to be overly prescriptive, but there’s a heck of a lot more prescription coming at the state and local level. So when we see a declaration from Secretary McMahon and President Trump that they’re going to return education to the states, high 10th Amendment education has been at the states high spending realities, 90% of funding is at the state and local level. So that is a nice declaration, but I haven’t seen a specific policy proposal on what’s going to change. You cut some funding and that’s disruptive, but you’re not returning that funding to the states. We haven’t seen a successful proposal for what that’s going to look like in terms of expanded authority for the states. We are responding to one element of that and the recent priorities is released for competitive grants. And the last thing I’ll say about what’s tricky right now for superintendents is the polar opposite elements, the how some elements of the Trump proposals are so polar opposite, right?
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Because at the end of the day, as superintendents work with their boards and council to open their schools every day, they are integrating and implementing in a braided manner state, local and federal policy. And it’s one thing to implement policies that are a little far apart, but we have a president who says he wants to get the federal government out of education, but then he has an executive order that’s talking about ending vote curriculum. Well, are you getting the department out of education or are you establishing a national school board? Right? Those are so diametrically opposed. It’s really hard for me as an advocate to help our superintendents understand what a meaningful path forward looks like because through a question that came across my phone today from another advocate, what happens with Title two if that funding doesn’t come through right? Because an FY 25 Title two didn’t receive a specified amount, and that means the Trump administration has the authority to repurpose those dollars and they’ve affirmed to us that they intend to exercise that flexibility.
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Okay, so that means no Title two funding for schools, but those mandates are written into law. Are districts still on the hook to apply mandates that are unfunded? We suspect the answer is yes, hello, IDEA in that unfunded set of requirements as it related to provisions of services. But that’s going to have a significant fiscal impact on districts because money doesn’t grow on trees, they’re running districts with public dollar budgets and it’s a finite amount of resources. So I can clearly go on, but I’ll stop there. I also want to hear from Jill and care and make sure that we have an opportunity to get questions from our participants. So thank you, Rachel.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:14:45):
I really like that level set because the message that superintendents are going to open those doors no matter what. They have no choice, but the lack of clarity from the federal government will be tricky for them. Carrie, I understand you’re in DC this week and you’re actually with a group of parents who are expressing their views and their concerns about the dismantling. Can you tell us what the National Parents Union’s position is about this and what you’re hearing from communities across the nation?
Keri Rodrigues/National Parents Union (00:15:16):
Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity. And I’m here this week in Washington DC with parents and families from 30 different states who are deeply, deeply concerned about the cuts that are being proposed through the big beautiful bill, and frankly, a lot about all of the cuts in the dismantling of the US Department of Education. So I’m very proud to be with these representatives of all of these states who are frankly leaders of movements on the local and state level who have been organizing pockets of parent power across this nation. Our organization is 1800 groups in all 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico. We represent about 2 million parents and families across the country who are deeply concerned and frustrated. I was so glad to hear Steven talking about the importance of data as well as Noelle, because when it comes to parents and families, this is a critically important piece of holding systems accountable for making sure that our kids are able to access economic mobility because really that is the different lens that we come at this.
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We’re not fighting to protect a bureaucracy that frankly we know needs improvement. That is why we are here on a regular basis voicing our concerns about the state of public education. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but the fact of the matter is if we do not have data to hold these systems accountable, we are never going to be making improvements. And so when we see cuts to things like IES and the idea that we are somehow magically going to depend on states who frankly have never done a good job of spending money wisely of allocating it to the kids that need it the most, it really strikes fear in the heart of a lot of Americans. I’ll tell you that today we are also releasing our national report card, which we have done every year for the past five years, which gives parents the opportunity to assess how they think public education is doing, how they think our leaders are doing right now.
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And I’ll tell you that the US Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon scored about a 28% approval rating from American families in terms of the job that she has done over the last six months and what parents and families are seeing. I will tell you that 83% of American families oppose the drastic cuts to public education that we have seen, and that includes 74% of Republicans. So if you are sitting back and saying, oh my gosh, national parent, this must be all the folks on the, we’re here to say with fidelity, the folks that are trying to speak on behalf of American families saying this is what they want, this is what they ask for. Absolutely not 88% of independent finding fault in opposing the cuts that we have seen so far to public education and the dismantling of the US Department of Education. And I’ll tell you, for Donald Trump presenting himself as being the president that listens to parents, he himself is only getting a 36% approval rating from American families who are deeply concerned about what they are seeing.
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So we are down here in Washington DC we are going to be visiting, we have about 40 different office visits meeting directly with the members of the United States Senate to voice our opposition, to cuts to things like Medicaid, which is the fourth largest funder of public education. And there’s a whole lot of money that streams directly into schools that we’re not talking about how this 800 billion cut to Medicaid is going to impact our schools and how dangerous that is going to be. Parents that are deeply concerned about snap cuts, because again, I know we’re here talking about education, but hungry kids cannot learn. And for kids like mine, it can be the beginning of the school, the prison pipeline. I’m the mother of five, I’m Matthew Miles, David Maxon, Dillon’s mom. That is the most important thing in the world to me. So I also say I’m quite the expert on little boy, but even as a 46-year-old woman, you can’t even talk to me if I’m hungry, let alone teach me something.
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My little boys and little boys across this country that are not going to have access to those SNAP benefits who are going to go to school in danger of not having, literally they are going to be candidates for punitive discipline and start the school to prison pipeline as early as in kindergarten. So all of these cuts combined with the fact that they’re trying to rob us of data, which is critically important for us as parents and families, to be able to assess the health, the educational health of our children, the educational health of our schools, and to be able to advocate for the things that they need, we can see what is happening here and we deeply frustrated. The last thing I want to say on behalf of my constituency, because I’m going to shoot my shot in front of the people who are so critically important and covering local education, state education issues, and even on the federal level, please, when you’re talking to parents and families, make sure you understand who is in front of you and saying they represent parents and families. Now, as a person who again represents about 2 million families with kids who are actually in K through 12 public education, it’s really disheartening to see coverage of public education that is not, and people who say that they represent my constituency who don’t even have kids in public schools that don’t have the skin in the game. So I want to encourage all of you to do that due diligence.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:20:41):
Carrie, I’m going to stop you there because I really am looking forward to you offering us some concrete suggestions for the kinds of stories that journalists can do. So you’ve planted some good seeds there and we will circle back to you, but I want to go to Jill now because as a fellow journalist, I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you over the past couple of months planting a strategy to cover this unprecedented move. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about that, but I also wanted to give you an opportunity to respond to the question in the chat about where things stand with the firing. So take it away,
Jill Barshay/Hechinger Report (00:21:22):
Rachel. Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be invited by the National Press Foundation to speak about what I’ve been covering over the last few months. I had the driest possible beat in the universe, ed research and data. I had professors and think tank researchers begging me to be quoted, and it was stories that nobody wanted to read. Well, I’m exaggerating a bit. Maybe my husband wanted to read them and a few of my colleagues, but it was a limited audience. And now I feel, I mean the Trump administration has upended my life. I feel like an investigative reporter.
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The Signal app on my phone is the most important thing in my life right now, and I’m begging people to go on the record. It’s just the opposite from before. And when I think about my career, it feels, when I look back on it, it feels kind of fragmented. I used to be a foreign correspondent in the former Soviet Union when it was falling apart. I was a Wall Street bond market reporter covering private placements sometimes and having to get documents leaked to me about big bond offerings. And I was a tax reporter on Capitol Hill talking off the record with staff committee. And so it seemed very disparate. Now I’m an education journalist, and what little did I realize that all these disconnected experiences would a hundred percent prepare me for this moment right now? And I’m kind of grateful. I mean, what seemed discombobulated suddenly makes sense in a way, and I feel like this is something I’ve been trained to do.
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There was a question on the q and a chat asking what happened on Friday around two 14 in the afternoon on Friday, I started to get all these signal messages saying, look at this email I got. We’ve been rehired. It says, and it was very confusing. This were the 1300 Department of Education employees who were told their jobs were eliminated in March. They were briefly allowed back in the office maybe a week later. And then they were told to stay home on administrative leave being paid but not allowed to do one iota of work. And their very last day of this was supposed to be June 10th, which is today, I believe, and suddenly on Friday they said, ignore that you’re not being eliminated. But that was so confusing because earlier that morning, the Department of Education filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court saying, don’t make us take back those employees.
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It’s all stemming from a case in Boston with two Massachusetts school districts, 21 Democratic Attorneys General and one of the teacher’s unions, and they’re saying, you cannot fire these employees because it’s tantamount to dismantling the Department of Education, which is something Congress has not yet authorized. And so we’ve got this big legal battle in the courts and what the Department of Education is doing is opposite things simultaneously. It’s saying Supreme Court don’t make us take back the employees, but meanwhile it’s complying with a lower court order. It’s very confusing. The Department of Education employees really just don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing tomorrow. Some have accepted new jobs, they don’t know if they can still get their severance if they take the new job. And a lot of them are saying, all the work that I was doing was separately canceled by Elon Musk and Doge, even if I go back, what am I supposed to be doing? So it’s more chaos and confusion.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:25:04):
I know that you’re going to be sharing some slides containing some of the stories that you’ve done that will help the journalists understand how to localize this issue. But again, I have to extend my support to you for having to unpack and analyze and figure out everything that’s going on. I want to pivot back to Steven right now because again, our early conversation provided me with such incredible context about the role of NCES and APE and why data matters and schools. So I’m going to let you jump in and take that away again.
Stephen Provasnik/formerly NCES (00:25:38):
Sure. Thank you very much. So I’ll just kind of pick up, and first I do want to say I think Jill is absolutely right. Chaos and confusion reigns. That’s absolutely true. And the points that other panelists have made are right on the mark on that. Without data, how are you going to hold anyone accountable? How are you going to know whether anything is successful or not? And those are kind of the first point that I would make about the key impact of NCS not being able to function in the way that it has. You’ll lose the ability to have any reliable way to compare local data to national trends except using old data. And why does this matter? Well, for the longest time we’ve had NAP data, which showed that math was improving over the years, steadily, steadily. But when we began to do international comparisons, we began to see that all countries had kind of steady improvement in math, but most countries had much more improvement than the US did in math.
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And indeed the US began at a lower point so that if we didn’t have international assessments to compare, we wouldn’t know that the US is doing so poorly in mathematics because if you just look at it for the nation, we have steady improvement. And this is the same problem states and local communities have if they’re just looking at their trends. Trends are important, data are important, but if you can’t have a proper context with reliable data to validate it, it’s very hard to make sense of it. And so investigating local disparities, highlighting successful local programs all will be more complicated. You’ll have to rely on old data until new data are collected. And I think that that’s kind of one of the first impacts on local journalists, and this is not just for achievement data, but teacher workforce trends, teacher demographics, salaries, staffing difficulties, school finance and expenditures, how you’re going to compare all of those things are we take for granted that we know what they are, but we know what they are because NCS has collected them, checked them, scrubbed them, and most importantly standardized them.
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So for example, some state may report out what its salary is for teachers and another may report out salary for teachers, but they aren’t apples to apples, they’re not apples, they’re apples and orange comparisons because the way in which some states will bundle in benefits or not make it a lot of work, which is part of the key functionality that NCS provided to bridge those differences. And this brings to the second sort of impact NCS has long run has a voluntary program called the Common Education Data Standards that basically sets shared vocabulary and technical specifications for all states to use. And this allows common definitions, which I’ve just kind of gotten to that are key so that you’re making valid comparisons, but it provides this national data standards that national and state policymakers need for reliable benchmarking policy evidence because without that sort of standardization, the data ecosystem tends to create data silos, fragmentation, you have inconsistent styles of reporting, whose number are you going to use?
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And I really want to emphasize the point that someone made earlier, Carrie, I believe it was that it is absolutely critical in order to know who is the spokesperson, who is speaking because who is representing, who’s giving you that data and whose number are they using? Absolutely essential. And the last third point I’ll make is simply that there will be chaos and confusion not only in the Department of Ed but for funding of programs. And I’m not talking about the programs that are getting cut like Snap, I’m talking about the regular programs because they have been set up so that the statutes say that the federal monies, the amounts and who is to receive them are to be based on NCS data classifications. And if you don’t have NCS classifying which schools are rural or not, those are soon going to be out of date and how you’re going to have tremendous sort of fighting over who’s valid, who’s going to get it, and this includes Title one, money Reap and it is going to be messy to say the least. I’ll stop there. So there’s time for more questions.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:30:03):
Noel, I think you can provide us also with another powerful level set in helping journalists and other viewers understand the true federal role in schools. Because as you put it during our conversation, this early focus on cuts to title one was something of a dog whistle because of not really understanding how much money is. Can you restate that for our viewers?
Noelle Ellerson Ng/AASA (00:30:33):
Yeah, absolutely. And the way we’re explaining this moment to superintendents in a lot of ways, I like to say both that I have one five-year-old at home, a boy, Carrie, so props to you for multiple boys. I have another one on the way. So maybe we need to connect on boy mom life, but I often say there’s a lot of parallels between ranging a five-year-old in lobbying Congress, the frequency with which I say, let’s take a breath. I’m going to take things seriously, but not literally, right? I’m not going to take literally that President Trump wants to get rid of the Department of Ed, but I can’t stop there because then I’m being dismissive and patronizing because one of the things I have to be very responsible about is that I serve superintendents who live personally across the entire political spectrum and serve professionally across the entire political spectrum.
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So if I’m dismissing President Trump’s interest in eliminating the Department of Ed, I’m professionally and personally failing, but I can seriously consider an interest in reducing the footprint, cutting spending and policy changes. But see how that pivot allows me to engage in the work while ratcheting down some of the partisan messaging and political pressure. And that’s a great foray into some of these funding messages when we have to pay attention to not just what’s said, right? We’re living in a 24 hour news cycle where you want to get a quick quip that go viral on a social media platform. You got to pay attention to what is said, how it’s covered, and then what actually happens. How much of what is said about education so far has been whittled down because they’re constrained by current loss a lot, but when it gets rained back in, it’s a Friday 3:00 PM dump and it’s not covered in the media.
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So it’s paying attention all the way through, and again, not letting the tail wipe the dog. So specific to funding, one of the examples I like to talk about is, and we have to give credit where credit is due in his proposed budget for federal fiscal year 26, the appropriation cycle that they’re working on now, president Trump level funds Title I and IDEA, and I can go on a whole tangent on why that’s inappropriate or unacceptable, but he himself has not proposed to cut Title One or IDEA, but what Rachel’s referring to is in the past two years, we have seen Congress propose both an 80% cut to Title one and a 25% cut to title. I never took it literally because the example I like to give is let’s pretend that Rachel was one of the members of Congress who said she wants to cut Title 180%.
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Rachel just doesn’t like Title one when push team to shove. If it was a final vote and they were down to two 70 and someone had to be the deciding factor, I suspect that Rachel wasn’t actually going to vote to cut Title one. She was playing the system of checks and balances. She knew that even the house wasn’t going to pass a bill that cut Title one by 80%, and she knew sure as heck that the Senate, which requires bipartisan support to get anything over the finish line isn’t going to cut Title one by 80%. So the calculus was, I can introduce a bill that allows me to message I’m being true to my base. Cutting the funding and cutting funding for Title one is sometimes a dog whistle for cutting funding to blue states and blue cities who have big nominal dollar amounts. But if I have a geeky shirt, it’s the one that says hashtag denominators matter because it’s not the overall nominal amount.
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And one of the very normal responses I had was I went out and bought a data set of every school district budget in the nation and analyzed it for federal state and no whole share, completely normal, I assure you. But when you look at that, what looks like deep cuts in dollar amounts to blue states and blue cities to the New York, to the LA Chicagos, when you put it in proportion in terms of what federal funding represents to an operating district budget, while on average districts get about 10 to 11% of their funding from a federal level, red states and red districts have a disproportionately high reliance on federal funding. So we’re talking upwards of 15, 18, 20. Some areas are 70, 80% relying on federal funding. And so again, I’ve stepped away from the title one conversation intentionally because Title one is a politically divisive term, right?
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They want to cut funding to the states, but now what I can do is I’ve stepped back and the five largest streams of funding federal funding in the nation schools are Title one and IDEA, the special ed program. Those are the only two that are at the Department of Ed. And the next three are Medicaid reimbursement for medically eligible services that schools provide E-Rate, which is a discount program helping schools and libraries afford internet, and then school meals. Those are your five largest. All of them are needs-based. And so when you look at the consistency with the programs that are being targeted, to Carrie’s point, we also believe you can’t teach the student until you feed the child. All of them are needs-based. And so when you’re cutting needs-based programs, say on average ends up being a two or 3% cut, two or 3% if you’re from a district that only gets two to 3% of your operating budget from the federal government is very different than if you’re a district that gets 15, 20, 40, 80% from an operating budget.
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And so I’m actually buying that data set again to run a new analysis ahead of this FY 26 approaches push, but it’s really important to look at how denominators matter, and it’s not about dollar amount, it’s reliance on federal dollars and federal dollars as a share of operating budget. It completely inverted the narrative. And then as an appropriations lobbyist, all I need to do is go into the five house offices who are most reliant on federal funding and say, Hey, you’re 60% reliant on federal funding. I don’t need to get them to vote no on the budget. I just need them to abstain. And that’s really all it takes to move the needle on conversations like that.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:36:05):
That is such an important powerful point for me in that helping journalists understand that they need to communicate that the impact of these cuts is not just at the so-called broken schools in Chicago and LA and whatever. It’s really farther afield. Carrie, I wanted to pivot to you because yesterday’s news focused on a tax credit for a national school voucher program that would be included in the president’s domestic policy bill. And so I wanted to ask you about this issue of school choice and vouchers, and it’s often been used as sort of the solution to whatever problems exist in public education, but what are you hearing from your members and from communities about this issue of vouchers and school choice?
Keri Rodrigues/National Parents Union (00:36:59):
Well, I’ll tell you, I think we tend to conflate private school choice and public school choice because I can say 86% of American families support public school choice. So that includes public charter schools, that includes magnet schools, different alternatives within the public system, and the reason why parents support that is because they provide meaningful measurable results. There is an accountability around having an option, but knowing that there are guardrails around it to ensure that you’re not being sold a bag of magic beads, and that’s what these voucher programs that we’re talking about right now, that’s what it gets down to. You want to talk about waste, fraud and abuse, the idea that we are just going to hand out tax credits to anybody who says they’re an educational entity. They don’t have to prove that they’re getting kids to any kind of educational outcome. They don’t have to assess it.
(00:37:56):
It’s the wild, wild west that none of that is acceptable to parents. That’s not even talking about the disaster and the damage that it will do to the overall public education system just on its face. If we’re trying to get kids to be prepared for the jobs and economy of the future, if we’re trying to get them to economic mobility, there is nothing. There is absolutely no guarantee that any of these voucher programs are going to do that, and that’s why we have serious concerns and serious objections and frankly, issue don’t talk about every student in America, every family in America, there are not even enough choices worth choosing enough operators out there that would be able to provide educational options for any of these kids. So again, American families are not going to be falling. So being handed a promise or a bag of magic beans, what we want is meaningful, measurable results because the kids like mine, the consequences, and I’m not being hyperbolic here. It’s literally in the data because we have people like IES and researchers that are tracking all of this. It’s poverty, it’s incarceration, and its potential dying on the streets. So none of that is in alignment with what we think the priorities of American families are and what they tell us every single day.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:39:23):
I want to make sure we have time to curate a list of tangible story ideas. So I’m going to pivot now to Jill. Jill has prepared some slides highlighting some of the stories that she’s done since the executive order was announced. So why don’t I turn it over to you and then I’d like each of your co-panelists to chime in.
Jill Barshay/Hechinger Report (00:39:48):
Can you everyone see my screen?
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:39:50):
Yes.
Jill Barshay/Hechinger Report (00:39:51):
Yes. So I just wanted to give you a little walk through my personal chaos over the last few months. I was thinking about back in November when President Trump was first elected, we did a story at the Hecker Report explaining to our readers what dismantling the Department of Education would mean, and I sort of lacked imagination because I assumed that they would follow congressional statute and transfer things to other agencies first, and that is not the way it went down. So my world just completely changed. On the evening of Monday, February 10th, I forgot that I even had signal. I used to live in Hong Kong working for the Wall Street Journal and one of my dear friends in Hong Kong more than a year ago, I mean several years ago after all the protests there, she wanted to start talking on signal because she was afraid of the Chinese government eavesdropping on our conversations and then suddenly my signal act went wild again, and the first step was when Elon Musk eliminated, I think it was 89 different contracts in the Department of Education, primarily in the Institute for Education of Education Science and the National Center for Education Statistics.
(00:41:09):
These were not woke DEI types of things. These were a lot of them, plain vanilla census data collections, and it was really shocking to everyone and nobody was giving us a list of everything that had been canceled. So it was being kind of cobbled together and shared on social media, and it took me almost a week to put a story together. Then the former commissioner of Education statistics in the first Trump administration was horrified and really sounded off, and then less than a month later, we have the firing mass firing of half the people at the education department, which is what left the statistics division with only three employees and the cuts kept coming. Then you have massive cuts at the National Science Foundation, three quarters of them targeted in education, and I started to comb through the rubble and notice that even priorities of the Trump administration like homeschooling, those data collections had been cut and the money is running out to protect student data against cyber criminals, and there’s a big data service that I don’t know how schools are going to be warned about malware pretty soon.
(00:42:23):
And then now we’re starting to see some of the consequences. Steven mentioned the failure to produce the annual statistical report and just overnight last night, the whole websites went down at IE essence NCS for over nine hours because I mean, I think it’s because IT people had been sacked. There’s no one to maintain the web, and somehow they got it up again this morning. I’ll have to figure out how they did it. One of the biggest concerns is documenting the achievement of US students. You’ve all heard of the national report card, and so Secretary Linda McMahon keeps saying it’s safe, but we were seeing behind the scenes problems with the contracts and eventually the governing board that oversees the test had to diminish the assessment schedule and kill a bunch of assessments. There’s one little victory that we’ve had along the way. A very brave woman who was a former education department employee was willing to go public about the elimination of an online library that dates back 60 years with these historic documents that they were killing that. And after we publicized it, the Department of Education reverse course and restarted it at a diminished level, but at least they restarted it and we’re not going to lose the documents. And so I think all reporters can take some heart that people are reading it and maybe you can make a difference now and then even on something small and now everything is in the courts. There are quite a few cases.
(00:44:02):
There are three cases by education research groups, but there are also other cases like the one I described before, and it can be very confusing as these cases are going through the courts because you can see the education department moving in contradictory directions with their legal strategies and it’s going to be a while before we see how it all falls out.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:44:27):
Terrific coverage. Noel, you had some really good tangible suggestions for journalists when you did your presentation, I think you said to AP journalists and sort of highlighted the fact that we’re in this sort of a perfect storm moment where schools were hit by COVID. Now the emergency funds are running out and then dismantling. So can you walk us through that list of things that journalists could do, talk to your district CFO and interview a principal? Tell us more about that.
Noelle Ellerson Ng/AASA (00:45:02):
Yeah, I think one of the first things you can do is don’t be afraid. Ask to walk around in a school, build that relationship just like we tell our superintendents to build relationships with their elected officials, and it’s increasingly hard to build relationships with local reporters because while I will geek out on an education, I’m fully aware that that’s not necessarily what sells all the papers, but that’s an important relationship for superintendents to have. And then those site visits might open your eyes to a story that you didn’t even know was there. If you’re spending once a quarter you’re in just shadowing a teacher or a different program or a different student demographic, you might be surprised what you see in terms of some of the storytelling we can do On the heels of the ending of the extended drawdown for the stimulus dollars under COVID, ask for the district spending plan and final report as it relates to the ESER dollars.
(00:45:54):
Talk to the district chief financial officer, see if you can interview a principal. You want to look for federal dollars is tied to contracts and staffing because I think one of the things that really gets glossed over, because federal funding on its own looks like a 14 billion program from Title I, it’s 10% of an operating budget and the fact remains in a typical district budget is 80 to 90% tied up in humans. So any type of cut pretty quickly gets to people and superintendents boards through demonstrated data. It’s like the concentric cookie cutters that our grandma had. They are going to make the cuts at least directly impact student services first, but when you’re aging to 90% humans and a little bit widgets, the human impact comes and you’re talking about instructional and non-instructional staff that are important to supporting our students opportunities and experiences, and so that becomes very, very consequential.
(00:46:47):
The other things, when you’re looking at federal dollars, another thing I like to talk about is how you have to tell the long-term story. So I have a chart, but I demonstrate the nominal of final funding level at the Department of Ed between 2011 and 2025, and it’s a steadily increasing yellow bar and funding at Department of Ed went up over 11 billion in those 13 years. That sounds like a good increase, but denominators matter. If the federal government had instead just level funded the Department of Ed at FI 11 levels and adjusted for inflation, it would be over 90 billion. And those are numbers we kind of understand, but if you’re trying to have this conversation in your home community, if carrie’s speaking of the school board meeting and Jill’s there trying to cover it, one of the ways we take that chart that shows that it should be at 90 billion, it’s only at 70 is adjusted for inflation.
(00:47:39):
The federal government spent less per pupil in 2025 than it did in 2012. That’s who graduates in 2025, the kids who were in kindergarten in 2012, and that’s how you make parents understand, if my son was graduating in 2025 and you’re telling me the federal government’s spending less than they did when Henry was in kindergarten, that just doesn’t make sense to me. But what it also allows is a more fair conversation of we’re not making these cuts or having these tough decisions for entertainment purposes. The federal government is a critical partner in funding education and its dollars don’t buy as much, and that’s not assigning blame, but it’s giving space to the fact that that means someone has to cover it. So that’s another way to try to get those stories to really quantify it down to the human or student impact. We think it’s always helpful to try to,
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:48:27):
I’m sorry, I wanted to make sure that we have enough time to get the other two, but these are incredibly good suggestions for journalists. But Carrie, I wanted to really get back to you on this issue of telling journalists to be mindful of who they’re talking to, who they’re getting this information from, particularly in light of one of the aspects of the dismantling is pushback on DEI, inclusion, that kind of language being sort of deterred in schools. What advice would you give journalists on when they’re looking for sources in their communities who they should talk to other than the obvious parents and teachers?
Keri Rodrigues/National Parents Union (00:49:13):
Well, I would just really make sure you’re asking good questions. I mean, a beautiful example of this and how kind of parent power has been hijacked is the whole situation around Moms for Liberty. There was a rally about a week and a half ago with Secretary Linda McMahon, I don’t even know if you can call it a rally, about 15 women standing with Linda McMahon saying they represent all of American families. That’s a PR campaign. Frankly, I would call it a hate campaign, and it’s not reflective or reflective of my constituency. I would ask the tough questions. I was just literally down marching with some members of our organization in Broward County, folks that actually have kids in the Broward County schools whose voices were not being heard because they were being drowned out by a Moms for Liberty group with folks who do not even have kids in public education.
(00:50:10):
They send their kids out, but they are trying to manufacture this campaign. So I would really encourage folks, journalists to ask the question of a source, do you have kids in K 12 education get into their why them to demonstrate that this is more than just a PR campaign. The other thing I would suggest is also when we’re covering schools and parents getting involved in all of this, understanding that we are very powerful in this moment, but maybe not for the reason you think, not so much marching out to the school board, but instead seeing us showing up in court. We had Noelle mentioning the case that is currently making its way through the court system with two different districts who have filed federal injunctions to stop the dismantling of the US Department of Education. That came because parents like me and I have two kids in the Somerville Public Schools, went to our school committee, went to our city council, went to our superintendent and said, you have standing in this case, we are going to make a direct connection for you to democracy forward, and we expect you to take action and in other cases that you’re seeing making their way through the courts right now, we are the ones who have standing and are standing up bravely and boldly for our kids because we have the ability to follow.
(00:51:36):
In the example of the folks at the Bridges family, we had the opportunity to have Ruby Bridges come in and talk to our parents and families. She’s always held up because of that iconic photo of her standing there with the federal marshal, but what she came to talk to us about was the fact that it was her parents who had standing in courts who filed these lawsuits and were brave, and it was a lot. It’s a lot now to go through that entire process and put your entire life on the line because you’re the federal government, but these parents that are standing up and doing that, telling their stories, understanding that that’s really where the parent power is right now is going to be very important.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:52:17):
Thank you for that. Steven, as an education historian, you are a great storyteller yourself, and so have you had some time to think about a couple of concrete suggestions you would have for journalists in telling the story of the role of data and the role of the department?
Stephen Provasnik/formerly NCES (00:52:37):
Well, actually I’ve just been listening to what my colleagues on the panel have been saying, and they just really strike true, especially the whole discussion explaining about court cases. I can’t help but think as I listen to this that wearing the hat as a historian of education. I mean the history of the US education system has always been entangled in larger political questions. So I mean, as a journalist, you always have to kind of think about what political question is being framed at the moment. I mean, I mentioned NCS was created after the Civil War, and it had very much to do with the fact that slaves had been freed and the Republican Party needed to come up with a way to show that it was going to be responsible in promoting democracy by promoting the education of the freed slaves who hadn’t been denied education early 19 hundreds.
(00:53:30):
The larger political question was about immigrants who were coming during the fifties and sixties. It was about civil rights and how should all citizens civil rights be promoted. Then in the had questions of whether the US is keeping up with other countries and performing well with the Soviet Union, challenging with the Sputnik moment in the fifties, and then in the early two thousands it was, are we keeping up with Finland? But fundamentally, I’ll give two key questions that kind of run through. Always keep coming up is what can schools teach? That’s a majorly contested question, and are public schools working? Those are kind of the two fundamental questions that run through, and if you want to think about how to frame things in the political thing, what do schools teach? I mean, in 1925, you had the scopes trial where John Scopes who taught evolution was put on trial because he violated the Tennessee law, which said you couldn’t teach something against biblical truth and he was found guilty.
(00:54:25):
There was the McComb versus Board of Education and the Supreme Court rule that you can’t allow religious instruction in school. There’s a whole series of core cases parents have brought up to have established what are the norms that we have perhaps taken for granted that mandatory Bible reading has been ruled unconstitutional. Recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools were found not to pass the secular test in 1987, the Supreme Court struck down in Louisiana that they couldn’t teach creation science alongside of evolution in public schools. We are in a moment of contestation and whether or not there will be a push for reasserting things that feel like they’re settled, law may be reopened. What can schools teach public schools? The same about our public schools working Brown versus Board of Education. The key ruling of separate but equal is no longer constitutional and pave the way for the whole civil rights movement.
(00:55:26):
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was about accountability and annual testing and trying to find out whether the public schools were actually working. That is one of the main things NCS created all of its data for, and the lawsuits that continue, I think like 45 states have had lawsuits about funding. Again, relying on data from NCS and trying to say that it’s a fundamental right and that there’s inequality. What the moment is happening is we’re losing data so that people can’t necessarily measure or makes it much more difficult. And the whole question of equity and whether public schools are continuing to work well or not is what is going to get lost in this moment. It seems to me on purpose, because that’s part of what is happening with the political swing here, and part of it has to do with the fact that public schooling has been at the heart of America’s great experiment, democratic project, whatever you want to call the American institutionalization, so to speak, of the promotion of human and civil rights and reactionary forces. One to undo 50 years of social and political change towards a more secular, tolerant, and equitable society, which they might say is moved us toward a more godless, radical and social society. But however you want, I’m giving you the sort of framing because the question is fundamental and it is public schooling at the heart of American democracy that I think needs to be a major sort of topic for journalists. I don’t want to talk too long at that end of time, but please take it away. Rachel,
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:57:13):
I was just going to say you have provided me with the absolute perfect way to sort of wrap this up, and I’m going to ask each of you to do a sort of lightning round elevator pitch response to one of the questions that came in for us, and that was with reading proficiency and math scores low and all of the touted problems that we have in American public education, should we be open to change? Should we be less resistant to the possibility that maybe this is the path that we need to take? So I’m going to start with you Noel, as someone who works with school superintendents, how would you answer that question of should we be open to making a change?
Noelle Ellerson Ng/AASA (00:58:04):
We absolutely need to be open to change. I think Carrie said this in her opening remarks, public school is the number one choice in the country, but that doesn’t mean we’re above approach or that there’s not room for improvement. Right? 81% of parents might be choosing public ed, but that means there’s 19 that are Ensure there are a portion that want private ed for religious instruction, and that’s a different conversation. But for those parents who aren’t choosing public ed because the system isn’t serving the opportunities that their students deserve, that’s where our first work needs to be. While then moving the needle for everyone, and I can say that confidently, we’re also saying that the confluence of policies being advanced by the current administration of what we might see from this Congress do not do anything to strengthen and support public education. We are here to drive a conversation at the federal level that supports and strengthens public education to ensure that all students, regardless of zip code, have equitable opportunity to good educational opportunity and then post-secondary success, whatever that may look like. So we can both support and strengthen public ed while understanding that the current set of policy and proposals from this administration isn’t going to do it, and we have to just commit to the work that Congress can’t do better until they know better, which is why people like me and Carrie are up there lobbying and why people like Steven run the data. So we can have our talking points and then Jill tells the story, and so together we’ll get it all done.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:59:22):
Excellent. Carrie, what are your thoughts about this?
Keri Rodrigues/National Parents Union (00:59:25):
Well, the fact of the matter is that if you’re unhappy with student outcomes, those decisions are made on the state and local level. The federal backstop is there to make sure that we, number one, recognize that education is a strategic national asset. As we discussed earlier that we are competitive and frankly, we are upholding federal law. This is why parents had to sue over and over and over again before we had a US Department of Education because the federal laws were not being implemented. I would say to you this, listen, before we had a US Department of Education, we have great examples as to why Federal oversight had to exist. Take a look at special education. Take a look at Title one. All of these things is left to their own devices. Governors state chiefs literally locked black brown children with disabilities out of schools.
(01:00:20):
That is why we had to have federal marshals step in and have federal oversight, and even a recent example, we just sent hundred 80 billion in Esser and ARC money just block grants down to states saying, whatever you need to do, need to help in your individual context to overcome learning loss and pandemic learning losses is still such a crisis. Nobody’s been happy with how that turned out. Why we would want to dismantle the system that is emerging, that we’re learning, that obviously needs to improve, but the idea that we’re now going to do Esser and ARP at scale and just send down money to the states and hope, I guess now after 40 years, they do a better job. We have no evidence that would tell us that that is going to be the case. So ask those tough questions. If you weren’t happy with what you did with Esser and R, why is this going to be any better and why would we do this to scale? I’d love to see more questions about that.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:01:19):
Jill send journalists back to the computer with some encouragement about communicating the complexity of this issue and why it’s I to hear these different viewpoints.
Jill Barshay/Hechinger Report (01:01:35):
I would encourage local reporters. There are now some databases and lists of canceled contracts and canceled research, and you can see which ones are happening in your community and write about the consequences. At the same time, not all of this spending was done so efficiently, and there may be a point that things could be done better, and it’s a complex story that needs to be told fully.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:02:02):
This has been a powerful discussion and we at NPF are so grateful to Jill Barer of the Inger Report. Gary Rodriguez of the National Parents Union, Steven Nik, the former Deputy Commissioner of NCES and Noel Ellerson Ang of the School Superintendent’s Association. Thank you so much for joining us for this briefing and please follow national press.org for future conversations and discussions around this topic and so many more. Thank you all for being with us Desk.
Stephen Provasnik/formerly NCES (01:02:38):
Thank you.
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