Deep cuts to staff and funding in the Department of Education will deal a major blow to the public’s understanding of how American students are performing and what schools can do to improve.
On Tuesday evening, at least 100 federal workers who focus on education research, student testing and basic data collection were laid off from the Department of Education, part of a bloodletting of 1,300 staffers. Outside of government, at least 700 people in the field of social science research were laid off or furloughed over the past week, largely as a result of federal cuts to education research.
The layoffs came just weeks after the latest federal test scores showed American children’s reading and math skills at record lows. Trump administration officials have pointed to those low scores as evidence that the Department of Education had failed.
But now the extent of those cuts raise questions about how the federal tests, which provide the data on how students are doing, will continue.
Other basic information about schools, along with research about what works to improve them, seems most likely to be degraded or to disappear entirely. Many of those who were laid off worked on projects evaluating math and reading instruction, disability supports and other subjects critical to student learning.
And some of the data they collected and analyzed played a crucial role in directing federal dollars to schools.
“This is bedrock, base-line information for how our society is functioning,” said Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. The education department’s data informs knowledge far beyond the school system, he pointed out, and addresses issues related to the economy, the labor market, race, class, gender and inequality. “It’s a common language — a shared reality we all have.”
In a written statement, Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said, “We are aggressively auditing our spending to ensure maximum impact for students and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly ridiculed federally funded research that touches on race and gender. But many of the canceled projects were uncontroversial explorations into core questions of student achievement and well-being.
The Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, had already seen cuts that amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. Last night, the vast majority of its staff was laid off, according to two former employees. That arm of the department has managed high-quality exams, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, that are used to measure how much American students are learning and how they compare with peers across the country and around the world.
NAEP is mandated by Congress and overseen by a separate, independent board. But federal employees who lost their jobs were responsible for administering the test and “essential” to ensuring it was accurate, said Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard who previously sat on the board that oversees the exam.
“If Congress and the department don’t act quickly to bolster national assessment expertise, who could trust that this once ‘gold standard’ test is still fair and comparable?” he said.
I.E.S. workers also maintain the Common Core of Data, a rich trove of demographic information about students and educators, which is used in determining how many federal dollars K-12 school districts should receive.
Betsy Wolf, an agency research analyst who was laid off yesterday, said that the staff and funding reductions had been so drastic that she believed: “For the most part, federal education research is over.”
She has three young children and said she expected to have to make a swift career change, since so many education experts are now out of work, and federal funding has dried up. Referencing a Trump official who said he wanted federal workers to be “traumatically affected” by layoffs, she said, “He had success in that.”
The outside workers who lost their jobs were employed by a cluster of independent organizations, including the American Institutes for Research, Mathematica and WestEd, that frequently partner with government and are known for conducting high-quality studies.
Those staffing cuts were confirmed in interviews with current and former employees, and in recordings of internal meetings reviewed by The New York Times.
Some of the research cuts immediately affect students and teachers who had been participating in the educational equivalents of medical drug trials.
One canceled contract was weighing how effectively Oregon schools spent taxpayer dollars that were set aside to improve reading instruction, by emphasizing phonics, vocabulary and other building blocks of early literacy. The findings from the study were supposed to guide school spending decisions in the future.
Another aborted project provided mentoring and a life-skills curriculum for high school students with disabilities, as they prepared to transition into the work force or college. The purpose of the research had been to find out what types of supports were most helpful.
Disabled students “don’t get a lot research” done on their needs that is directly relevant to schools, said Nathan Edvalson, director of special education for the Canyons School District, outside of Salt Lake City. About 90 students in his suburban district were participating in the canceled evaluation, called Charting My Path for Future Success, which was working with 1,600 students nationwide. Funding from the project had allowed Canyons to hire three teachers and one counselor, who spent most of the fall semester in training and had only begun meeting with students in December.
Since the grant was canceled, those staffers have been reassigned to other jobs. Parents received a letter explaining that their teenagers would no longer receive support from the program, but would be eligible for other types of counseling.
Mr. Edvalson said he understood the need for fiscal responsibility. But he argued that quality education research served that cause by pointing to best practices that would help students with disabilities become independent, working adults.
A spokesman for the American Institutes for Research, which was administering the program, declined an interview request. According to audio recordings of internal meetings shared with The Times, the nonprofit laid off about 300 staffers on Monday.
In one of the recorded meetings, A.I.R.’s president, Jessica Heppen, said that because of federal cuts to education and foreign aid, the group had lost $80 million of its expected 2025 funding of $400 million for research projects. Another $80 million was at risk, she said, from federal stop-work orders.
“We cannot maintain our current staffing levels given the situation and the headwinds we know are coming,” she said in the recording. “We’ve had to make agonizing decisions that affect our staff.”
A.I.R. received over $600 million in federal funding in 2024, including $115 million from the education department.
At Mathematica, based in Princeton, 340 workers were laid off or furloughed last week, according to current and former staffers. The organization received $1.3 billion from the federal government last year, including $29 million from the Education Department.
The Trump administration ended Mathematica’s work managing regional educational laboratories across 11 states, according to a statement from the nonprofit. Those labs were researching math instruction, writing instruction and teacher shortages, among other topics.
The group also received funding from other federal agencies whose budgets have been cut.
Grazia Mieren, a digital project manager who was laid off, said Mathematica staff had heard for months about preparations for cuts during a second Trump term. She said the group had been planning to beef up its existing funding from state governments and philanthropies.
Even so, the extent of the reductions had been shocking.
“Nobody expected this,” Ms. Mieren said. “Your life is upside down, inside out and backwards.”
Another 50 positions were eliminated at WestEd, a research nonprofit based in San Francisco.
Several canceled WestEd projects directly addressed the biggest challenges in education since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. WestEd had managed the canceled evaluation of Oregon’s reading reforms, and had been planning similar efforts in Alaska, Montana and Washington.
The group was also working to combat chronic absenteeism in a Nevada school district; researching how to prevent teacher attrition in Utah; and developing tools to aid student mental health in Alaska.
In a written statement, WestEd chief executive Jannelle Kubinec said, “These cancellations are a great loss for our nation’s students, families and communities.”
Nat Malkus, an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute who has been tracking contract cancellations and layoffs, acknowledged inefficiencies in federally funded research. But the Trump cuts had been made so broadly and hastily, he argued, that they had grouped the wheat with the chaff, while threatening the agency’s core functions.
“We will lose some valuable studies,” he said, “and we’ll probably lose some bloated studies.”
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