Deep cuts and funding for Department of Education staff will hit the public's public understanding of how American students work and what schools can do.
On Tuesday evening, at least 100 federal workers focusing on educational research, student testing and basic data collection were fired from the Department of Education, a part of the blood blood of 1,300 staff members. Outside the government, at least 700 people have been fired or destroyed in the field of social science research, primarily as a result of federal government cuts in education and research.
The layoff comes weeks after the latest federal test scores showed mathematical skills in reading and record declines among American children. Trump administration officials point to these low scores as evidence that the Department of Education failed.
However, these reductions now raise questions about how federal tests will continue to provide data on how students do things.
Other basic information about schools, along with research into what works to improve them, appears to be most likely to deteriorate or disappear completely. Many of those fired are working on projects that evaluate mathematics and reading instruction, disability support, and other subjects that are essential to student learning.
And some of the data they collected and analyzed played a key role in directing federal dollars towards schools.
“The University of Maryland has been a great opportunity to learn about it,” said Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. Data from the education sector informed knowledge well beyond the school system, addressing and pointing out issues related to the economy, labor market, race, class, gender and inequality. “It's a common language. It's a shared reality that we all have.”
In a written statement, Maddie Biederman, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Education, said “we are actively auditing spending to maximize the impact on students and ensure responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
Trump and his allies have repeatedly ridiculed federally funded research into race and gender. However, many of the cancelled projects were an indisputable quest to the central questions of student achievement and happiness.
The Institute of Education Science, the Department of Education's research division, had already seen cuts reaching hundreds of millions of dollars. Last night, two former employees said the majority of staff were fired. The department manages high-quality exams, including a national assessment of educational advancement, and is used to measure what American students are learning and how they compare with their peers across the nation and around the world.
The NAEP is mandatory by Congress and overseen by another independent board of directors. But federal employees who have lost their jobs are responsible for conducting the tests and are “essential” to ensure they are accurate, said Andrew Ho, a Harvard testing expert who sat on the board overseeing the tests.
“Who can trust that this former 'gold standard' test is still fair and comparable, if Congress and the department don't act quickly to strengthen national evaluation expertise? ” he said.
IES workers also maintain a common core of data, a wealth of demographic information about students and educators.
Betsy Wolf, an investigative analyst at the agency who was fired yesterday, said the staff and funding cuts were very dramatic and he believed that “in most cases, federal education research is over.”
She said she has three young children, so many education professionals have left their jobs and expects to have a quick career change as federal funds are running out. She said she hoped federal workers would be “traumatically affected” by the layoffs.
Outside workers who lost their jobs were employed in clusters of independent organizations, including the American Institutes, Mathematica and Wested, which are frequently associated with the government and are known for conducting high-quality research.
These staffing delivery was confirmed in interviews with current and former employees and in recordings of internal meetings reviewed by The New York Times.
Some research cuts will immediately affect students and teachers who participated in the educational equivalent of medical drug testing.
One of the cancelled contracts was to weigh how effectively they spent taxpayer dollars set aside to improve reading instruction by highlighting phonics, vocabulary, and other building blocks of early literacy. The results of this study were to guide future school spending decisions.
Another cancelled project provided mentoring and life skills curriculum to high school students with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to find out which types of support would be most useful.
Nathan Edvalson, director of special education for Canyons School District outside of Salt Lake City, said students with disabilities were “not getting much research” and were given to their needs. Approximately 90 students from his suburban district were taking part in the cancelled assessment. This was called charting my path for future success, working with 1,600 students across the country. Funding from the project allowed the canyon to hire three teachers and one counselor. They spent most of the fall semester training and only started in December to meet students.
Since the grant was cancelled, those staff have been reassigned to other jobs. Parents received letters describing that teenagers do not receive support from the program but are eligible for other types of counseling.
Edvalson said he understands the need for financial responsibility. However, he argued that quality educational research helped to its cause by referring to best practices that help students with disabilities become independent working adults.
A spokesman for the American Institute, which administered the program, declined to request an interview. The nonprofit fired about 300 staff on Monday, according to an audio recording of an internal meeting shared with The Times.
At one of the recorded meetings, Air President Jessica Heppen said that due to the federal government cuts in education and foreign aid, the group lost $400 million in its expected 2025 funding to the research project. She said another $80 million was in danger.
“We can't maintain the current staffing level given the situation and the headwinds that we know are coming,” she said in the recording. “We had to make painful decisions that would affect our staff.”
AIR received more than $600 million in federal funds in 2024. This includes $115 million from the education sector.
Princeton-based Mathematica has 340 workers layoffs or discarded last week, according to current and former staff. The organization received $1.3 billion from the federal government last year. This includes $29 million from the education sector.
The Trump administration has finished work at Mathematica, which manages local education labs in 11 states, according to a statement from a nonprofit organization. These labs investigated the lack of mathematics teaching, writing instruction and teachers, among other topics.
The group also received funding from other federal agencies whose budgets were cut.
Laid-off Digital Project Manager Grazia Mieren said Mathematica staff had heard for months about preparations for cuts during the second Trump period. She said the group was planning to strengthen existing funding from state governments and charities.
Still, the extent of the reduction was shocking.
“No one was expecting this,” Mirren said. “Your life is upside down, flipped and backward.”
50 more positions have been eliminated at Wested, a research nonprofit based in San Francisco.
Several cancelled Wested projects directly addressed the biggest challenges in education since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Wested managed cancelled assessments of Oregon's reading reforms and planned similar efforts in Alaska, Montana and Washington.
The group also worked to combat chronic absenteeism in Nevada school districts. A study of ways to prevent attrition among teachers in Utah. Developing tools to support the mental health of Alaska students.
“These cancellations are a major loss for our country's students, families and communities,” Wested Chief Executive Jannelle Kubinec said in a written statement.
Nat Malkus is an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute, which tracks contract cancellations and layoffs, and acknowledged the inefficiency in federally funded research. However, he argued that the Trump cuts were made so broad and hastily that they claimed they grouped wheat with chaff, threatening the institution's core functions.
“We're losing some valuable research,” he said. “And you'll probably lose some bloated research.”
Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Neus Contributed research.
