As part of a broader push to eliminate programs associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion, the U.S. Education Department has eliminated two major teacher-training programs.
The cuts include two of the department’s largest discretionary programs for professional development: the $70 million-a-year Teacher Quality Partnerships program and the $80 million-a-year Supporting Effective Educator Development, or SEED grants.
Both of these are competitive grant programs whose last selection happened in 2022, though some programs from that competition have received new or continuation awards in the years since. (TQP grantees are typically funded for five years and SEED grantees for three.)
The Education Department said it would recoup $600 million from the combined cuts, but it would not confirm whether it would seek to regain money the programs had already spent.
The TQP grants support partnerships between school districts and nonprofits or colleges and universities to expand teacher preparation and recruitment. These grants underlie many of the nation’s teacher-residency programs, which typically support teacher-candidates to receive hands-on classroom training for a year. The SEED grants include those purposes as well as in-service professional development for teachers and principals, and alternative programs for entering the profession.
“Teacher-prep programs should be prioritizing training that prepares youth with the fundamentals they need to succeed for the future, not wasting valuable training resources on divisive ideologies,” said department spokeswoman Savannah Newhouse in a statement.
The Trump administration cites DEI as its reasons for cutting training grants
What counts as wasting resources on divisive ideologies? In short, anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The Trump administration’s push to eliminate federal DEI programs comes on the heels of similar conservative efforts in the states. Eighteen states have restricted how teachers can discuss race or sex in class, and late last year, Pennsylvania changed its teacher-prep guidelines after a conservative group sued to remove requirements for “anti-bias, anti-racism” training.
Sharif El-Mekki, the founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, argued that removing programs related to teacher diversity, culturally relevant curricula, and equity-based initiatives would cut out programs shown to improve student outcomes. “Removing DEI doesn’t make education ‘neutral'—it reinforces inequalities that have existed for generations,” El-Mekki said.
In letters, the Education Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Management and Planning, Mark Washington, said the grants were being cancelled because they “promote or take part in DEI initiatives;" violate the letter or spirit of federal civil rights laws; conflict with the agency’s policy to “prioritize merit, fairness, and excellence in education;" include fraud, abuse, or duplication; or “otherwise fail to serve the best interests of the United States.”
Grant recipients dispute this.
“These programs are focused at their core on addressing teacher shortages and professional learning for teachers,” said Amanda Winkelsas, a clinical associate professor of learning and instruction at the University at Buffalo, and director of its teacher-residency program. “We’re frustrated most because there’s a way to rework the priorities of these programs to align with the administration’s priorities, but we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”
Several large evaluations of short-term anti-bias training suggest it often doesn’t change long-term behavior, and in some cases can even worsen stereotyping, if participants think of biases as common and uncontrollable. But the TQP and SEED grants tended to be longer in duration.
The University at Buffalo’s teacher-residency program lost both SEED and TQP grants, collectively worth $7.6 million over their life, which provided stipends and other supports to student-teachers undergoing yearlong medical-style residencies with mentor teachers. Winkelsas said the program had already spent most of its SEED money, and the university and its partner school district will be able to pick up costs for the resident-teachers and their mentors through the end of the year.
The residency program has been funded over several rounds of competition in both grants, and has adjusted over the years in response to changing federal priorities: emphasizing training in math and science and computational thinking in 2018, and focusing on social-emotional learning for teachers during the pandemic. The most recent grants, in 2022, under the Biden administration, in part encouraged programs to build pathways to the teaching profession for diverse educators.
“I think it’s the focus on promoting educator diversity that is probably what they’re finding to be most problematic,” Winkelsas said. “Our [teacher residency] cohorts tend to be older, they tend to have more work experience—and they do tend to be more racially and linguistically diverse.”
Grants supported tuition and stipends for prospective teachers
The grant cancelations seem to be a direct attack on teachers from these backgrounds, said A.Dee Williams, a professor in the Charter College of Education at California State University, Los Angeles. The university is one of the partners in the Los Angeles Urban Teacher Residency, which recruits candidates from diverse backgrounds. Williams was notified last week that TQP funding for the program was cancelled.
“They think the teachers that we are producing are poisonous,” Williams said.
The department cited examples of eliminating grants from applicants for “requiring practitioners to take personal and institutional responsibility for systemic inequities (e.g., racism) and critically reassess their own practices,” and “receiving professional development workshops and equity training on topics such as ‘Building Cultural Competence,’ ‘Dismantling Racial Bias,’ and ‘Centering Equity in the Classroom.’”
Late Tuesday, President Trump sent a memorandum to all agency heads, asking them to provide public details on all cuts. However, the department declined to provide criteria for how the teacher-prep grants were judged by press time. Nor has it confirmed whether or not it will re-compete the grants. (Grantees have 30 days to appeal the terminations.)
Winston-Salem TEACH, a collaborative teacher residency led by three North Carolina colleges, turned to crowdfunding after learning that its five-year, $4.7 million TQP grant was canceled after little more than two years.
The residency program, which prepares educators to teach in-demand subjects in high-needs, urban schools, posted a donation link on Facebook on Saturday. It’s also “carefully considering” appeal options, said Kimberly Harrington, a spokesperson for Winston-Salem State University, one of the universities in the program, in an emailed statement.
“The loss of this funding presents significant challenges for WS-TEACH, as it directly affects our ability to provide fair-wage stipends to our dedicated program participants,” Harrington said.
Harrington emphasized that the TQP grant that supported the residency’s operations “was not solely connected to DEI-specific work or research.”
Teacher-candidates in the program receive training in social-emotional learning and culturally responsive teaching practices, as well as research-based best practices for classroom instruction and using student achievement data, according to the grant proposal.
In the Los Angeles Urban Teacher Residency, canceled grant funding was set to pay for tuition for current candidates at one of the campuses that participates in the program, who are teaching in schools this year, Williams said.
“The students signed contracts to receive this TQP funding for the year, and now with one quarter to go, all of a sudden, they have no recourse. There are no funds available for them,” he said.
A chance to rethink preparation?
The head of one of the nation’s largest teacher-preparation programs, however, said the cuts might provide an opportunity to rethink the federal approach to teacher training.
A prior TQP grant helped Arizona State University overhaul its teacher education programs, according to Carole Basile, dean of ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation. But Basile thinks the grants need to be “rethought.” Residencies and programs under the grants have not developed new educators quickly enough—and at large enough scale—to meet changing school needs.
“We are at a pivotal time in thinking about our education workforce ... and I don’t know that in the current iteration of either of those grants, we were going to hit those targets,” Basile said.
“I hope that this doesn’t mean [the grants are] going away forever. I’m hoping this is a reset, and that we actually can get serious about thinking about who this educator workforce is and approach it as a workforce-development issue, not just the teacher-shortage, recruitment-retention issue,” she continued.
Although the federal government does not provide the lion’s share of funding for teacher preparation—that function is mainly a state role, since a majority of teachers are prepared at public universities—its attention to the issue has helped push forward concepts like teacher residencies.
“It’s hard to imagine that there’s going to be an easy way to fill this large of a gap,” said Brendan Bartanen, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Virginia, who studies early teacher skills and retention. “It really is a disinvestment in teacher quality and teacher supply at a time where we need those things more than ever.”
