The students and faculty in Temple’s College of Education and Human Development are navigating how $881 million in cuts of contracts under the Institute of Education Science made by the newly instated Department of Government Efficiency could impact higher education at Temple and beyond.
The cuts, made on Feb. 10, effectively eliminated many of IES’ research and evaluation studies concerning teaching practice, education history and policy, civil rights and education inequality.
The action is the latest in a series of major funding cuts made to national education and research institutions by the Trump administration, and has some concerned that President Donald Trump will follow through on his pledge to dismantle the Department of Education.
The IES functions as a repository of data pertaining to education practice in the United States, including research and data about education standards, teaching strategies and discrimination in school systems, said James Earl Davis, a CEHD professor.
“If you want to know something about education, if you want to know something about teaching and learning, what the most effective strategies, that’s the Department of Education’s role and function, particularly around research,” Davis said. “For some politicians, that information is damning and damaging to their political positions and their political ambitions.”
Advocating to dismantle the ED has been a conservative effort since the department was created in October 1979 by the legislative branch under the administration of former President Jimmy Carter.
Former President Ronald Reagan attempted to abolish it in 1980, stating that it would save money and ensure the local needs and preferences to determine the education of children. Since Reagan’s presidency, Republican administrations have tried and failed to shut down the department. Trump’s return to the oval office has renewed these efforts, though the barrier of congressional approval remains.
“I think it’s new in this political climate and in the current administration’s willingness, ability and desire to completely gut the US Department of Education because of what it is and what it does,” Davis said.
On Feb. 10, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s effort to cut $4 billion of indirect costs accrued by Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics research distributed through the National Institute of Health.
Indirect costs are the non-project specific expenses that are necessary to conduct research. They include the costs of running and maintaining laboratories, paying for utilities, the salaries of maintenance staff and administrators, said Beth Olanoff, an associate professor in CEHD and former policy director and special assistant to the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
The federal government covers many of the indirect costs at universities that conduct government research like Temple, the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University.
“The Trump administration seems to be ignoring that idea completely and just using the analogy of foundation funding,” Olanoff said. “Which is not part of that implicit agreement that the federal government is largely subsidising, or paying universities to be the research arm of the federal government for the benefit of society.”
For some Temple students, threats to the ED have made them think twice about pursuing a career in education.
“I’ve known people who’ve had their majors in English, intending to be teachers, switch their major to something more STEM-oriented or something that they think in the long run is going to hold up,” said Rachel Kealey, a freshman English major.
Fifty-one percent of U.S. adults believe public education is heading in the wrong direction, compared to 16% who feel it’s improving, according to an April 2024 study by the Pew Research Center. Similarly, 82% of K-12 public teachers believe that overall public education has gotten worse, and 60% of teachers say the political climate has made teaching public K-12 worse, the study found.
While some students are concerned with how funding cuts and government oversight will affect their future careers as teachers, a dismantling of the ED holds other, more immediate implications as well.
“People are kind of scared because we’re in college right now,” Kealey said. “At the moment, most of us are just more worried about immediate kinds of effects of it, like [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] potentially being taken away, or funding being taken away.”
The latest budget cuts have caused anxiety among the education community due to their severity and lack of transparency or clarity. However, Jada Scott, a senior education major, believes that educators and scientific research have been increasingly undervalued since before the second Trump administration.
“I think definitely what’s going on right now is heightening everything, and making people a little more worried, and bringing out those concerns a little bit,” Scott said. “But I think they have existed for a long time.”
Rachel Kealey has freelanced for The Temple News. She was not involved in the writing, reporting or editing of this article.
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