Looking Ahead To The 2025 School Year

0:07Across the country, K-12 teachers are prepping classrooms, reviewing lesson plans, and bracing for another school year that, for some, feels politically and personally charged. Some of the top issues? The Trump administration's moves to dismantle the Department of Education. In some districts, immigration officials have shown up at schools, likely contributing to a rise in student absences last spring. And artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping what teaching and learning look like. Today, we're discussing what's top of mind for you as you head into the new school year. And we've heard from some of you already.

0:41I feel like education is under fire and teachers are under fire by our communities due to just the recent climate. This is going to be my 12th year teaching, and I have never worked in another industry that is so dysfunctional. It's absolutely ludicrous that the Trump administration is trying to completely eliminate the Department of Education. People are leaving in droves. It's just getting worse. The public needs to pay attention and do something. As a special education teacher, I am concerned about the services that my students will be able to receive. My parents are frustrated because they are having to navigate some misinformation that this administration has sent out.

1:30I am concerned that my students' education will be interrupted or affected in some way, as well as my instructional services. Thanks for those messages. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. We'll be back with our panel and your messages in a moment. Stay with us.

1:55Let's meet our guests. Joining us from Dallas, Texas, is Lance Barish. He's a high school math teacher at Dallas Independent School District. He's a high school math teacher at Dallas Independent School District. Lance, welcome to the program. Hi there. Thank you for having me. Joining us from Guadalajara, Mexico, where she's visiting family, is Jennifer Lopez. She's a high school social studies teacher at Los Angeles Unified School District. She also taught elementary and middle school students. Jennifer, welcome. Hi. Thank you again for having me. And back in studio with us here in Washington, D.C.

2:27is Laura Meckler, national education writer for The Washington Post. Laura, welcome back. So nice to be here. So, Laura, your reporting tracks the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. They say it's an effort to save money and put more power in the hands of states. What does that mean for public schools on the ground as we head into this new school year? Well, in some cases, it doesn't mean anything. Some of this stuff is bureaucratic or involves research studies that doesn't directly touch the classroom. But in some cases, it does. For instance, there are some teacher training grants or some mental health grants or things like this that some schools have counted on that have been frozen and that are just not available.

3:06There was just recently an enormous amount of stress in schools because there was a bunch of expected funding that's provided every year, year in, year out, for professional development, for aid to English language learners that was suddenly frozen and under review. People didn't know what was happening. That funding is now being released, we're told. So that's a relief to a lot of folks. But I think there's just a lot of uncertainty about the federal government in terms of its partnership in providing the supplemental funding for a variety of different types of initiatives. Well, Jennifer and Lance, I'd love to hear your perspectives and reaction to the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle the education department.

3:49Jennifer, I'll come to you first. Yeah, definitely. First of all, it's very disheartening and something we strongly oppose. I work with an organization, Educators for Excellence, and we often go to D.C. to lobby against these just harmful policies that have been, you know, for our students. And not only with EFRE do we go to lobby consistently, but we have a national survey where we survey 1 ,000 teachers across the U.S. And in that survey, we found that not only do I find it disheartening and strongly opposed to it, but 70 % of teachers across the nation oppose the closure of Department of Education.

4:21And what are their particular concerns? I think it's the piece, first of all, it's that fear, I think, that the reporter had mentioned of, you know, this chaos that we were expecting the money and then it's not happening. And so then people are scrambling. It's, you know, the fear that it's causing in terms of, like, am I going to have a job next year if, you know, this funding eventually trickles down? So and then it's just the, you know, the terrible rhetoric that's happening in terms of not being able to support our most vulnerable students, particularly students with disabilities or English language learners.

4:53Lance, what about you? Yeah, I agree with what Jennifer is saying. It's funny in the messaging on these policy changes from the federal level, it's about empowerment of the states. That's been a lot of the messaging. States already have a lot, and in some cases, all power over education in their individual parts of the country. And so it's not necessarily that we're giving the states the powers back. What's going to happen is that some of the programs that provide oversight and protections for a lot of vulnerable populations or low-income populations in our state are no longer going to be trickling down from the federal level.

5:28This includes programs like Title I or the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which has provided a lot of money and protections for students like that throughout the country. So that's kind of the effects we're going to see. Laura, I want to zero in on a couple of the cuts we know about. Major cuts to the Department of Education include the Office for Civil Rights and the Nation's Report Card. So let's start with the Office for Civil Rights. What's its role and how will cuts affect that? Its role is to enforce federal civil rights laws. It's against the law if you receive federal money as a school or university or any other entity for that matter to discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability.

6:13So this office enforces those laws. It's been severely cut. Its staff is down by at least half. They used to have 12 regional offices. Now they have five. And even the five offices that are remaining are smaller than they used to be. So they aren't, and there was already a pretty severe backlog of cases, thousands of cases. So they were already struggling to get through the cases. These are complaints that are made to the office when somebody is concerned that they've been discriminated, say, on the basis of race, gender, disability, or, for instance, anti-Semitism is another thing that this office might deal with.

6:47So that's happening. On one hand, we have these severe cuts and backlogs building and building. On the other hand, of course, we have a very aggressive Trump administration in certain parts of civil rights enforcement. For instance, there are concerns around transgender athletics. their concerns around anti-Semitism, concerns of racial discrimination in terms of advantaging people based on their race, and usually advantaging underrepresented minorities, Black and Hispanics, programs that seek to give them advantages they believe to be illegal. So there's a lot of enforcement along those lines.

7:23So we sort of have a tale of two cities on the Office for Civil Rights. Let's go to our voicemail box in this message we got from Ron in West Lafayette, Indiana. I'm a college professor, have been for over 30 years, and I would not trade my job for a K-12 teacher's job for any money. The amount of work they have to do and the stress they go through demands our respect. I do believe that closing or the proposed closing of the federal education department is a good thing. And I think it will return control of these K-12 systems across the states. to both the State Department of Education and then the local communities.

8:05And each of these local communities and states then will be able to direct or run their systems as it reflects their community values and their local cultures that are all different. Lance, I want to come to you for response to that comment we got. This is the current status quo. In Texas in particular, where I teach, the state government has immense controls over standardized testing, curriculum, high-quality instructional materials. All the things that we do is already coming out of Austin, not necessarily out of Washington. And so what we're seeing instead is negative or deleterious effects coming from protections or oversight on vulnerable populations, not necessarily the day-to-day operations or testing that comes out of my state government.

8:55Let's go to this message we got from Rachel in Chicago. She's in her second year of teaching. I am so excited. It's my second year of teaching, and I have the privilege of teaching STEAM classes. That's science, technology, engineering, arts, math. And I get the opportunity to just bring together all of the learning that they do in their core classes and solve real-world problems and get them thinking critically. And as an engineer myself, changing careers into education, the future is bright. So I know you're going to hear a lot of scary things today, but we've overcome so much and we have to keep doing that.

9:33And I challenge the administrators to not be complacent, the districts to get innovative and stay innovative, because that's how we're going to bring change. Rachel, thanks for that call. Jennifer, are you hearing similar sentiments from the teachers you work with, your colleagues? I think there's some hesitation. I think given, as you mentioned previously, with the funding being withheld, it created a lot of fear and chaos. So it's and now it's being released. So it's like, OK, we do have it. We don't. And we're hoping that, you know, that we have this money and, you know, trying to be positive working together as a teachers, as a collective in what's the best interest of students.

10:10So I feel like we're trying to be hopeful and, you know, taking it day by day in the classroom. Now, both you and Lance are involved with organizations empowering educators to get involved in policy debates. Jennifer, you're on the advising council for the group Educators for Excellence. Lance, you're a fellow with Teach Plus. When we hear about this call for more diversity in subjects, Lance, how often do teachers have a seat at the table in education policymaking? It very much depends. We have our voices. The question is whether we feel empowered to project our voices and whether we know the avenues to do so.

10:46So I do work for Teach Plus for the past four years or so. And they really plant the seeds into teachers' minds that we can go to Austin and testify on legislation. We can write opinion pieces to place into our local papers. And I didn't necessarily know about that before in a decade plus of teaching. And now I can. And I would argue that all of my colleagues throughout the country that teach can do the same. We'll take a quick pause here and head to a break. We'll be back in just a moment. Stay with us.

11:21Let's get back to the conversation with this message from Joe in North Carolina. My biggest concern is the potential for the loss of high quality research on how to improve best practices in education. And it's a two-prong concern. The first concern is that over my few years of education, I've participated in some grants and research programs that were 100 % funded through federal funding. And it flowed through the USED, either directly or through the state where I was employed. The second part is those high-quality research projects are generally conducted by institutions of higher education, which are under attack.

12:16And so I think we could foresee a huge deficit, a drought of informative literature to help teachers in the future, administrators, all of us, provide best practice instruction to students. Joe, thanks for that call. Laura, one of the programs cut at the U.S. Department of Education is the Nation's Report Card. Tell us how that research is used and what other cuts we're seeing at the Department of Education. Well, actually, the Nation's Report Card has had some small cuts, but the core of it has been preserved. That's something that the administration has prioritized. However, it is part of a larger part of the department called the Institute for Education Sciences, and that as a whole has had devastating cuts.

13:05I mean, it's been almost completely wiped out. The administration says that, you know, these research projects, some of what the caller was talking about, are just not a priority for the federal government to do. Others can do them if they want, but this is not something that we need to be spending federal money on. There's no proof that this has really worked. All this spending has worked to actually improve education for kids who are still struggling, and it's not a core function. So there has been a lot of cuts there. The nation's report card itself is supposed to still come off, although I will say that the staff, it's run by contractors, but the staff has been cut so severely that some wonder, will they actually be able to pull it off?

13:42And so what does that mean for individual school districts that are trying to understand best practices? Well, you know, this is research, there's obviously a lot of research that goes on. It's not all federally supported, but, you know, this is a long-term game, you know, so you might have a research study that lasts for, you know, many years, five, 10 years, even longer, that tries to study what is the difference between teaching reading in this way versus teaching reading in that way, and then learning something from those results and then having that eventually affect practice. So this is sort of a long ball effort.

14:16We heard from Kathy in North Carolina. She's a retired teacher. Here's what she had to say. I think the most concerning part to me, since I live in a almost totally red state, is the ineptness of my own legislature. They were caught totally unprepared for these destructive policies of the federal government. They have no plans whatsoever to re-institute funds that have been stopped or held up. And I look at my peers, the young people who are replacing me, and they are totally unsure of their jobs. I taught for over 35 years in an inclusion classroom. I had special needs regular ed as well as ESL students.

15:03I had a full-time special needs aide for some of my students, and I had a special ed teacher for 16 years. We all worked together. My special ed needs friends now who are young and in the classroom are not sure that they will get the help that they truly need in the classroom. Our legislators have no clue. They have not sought out the advice of educators in our state. And they're just unsure of what to do next. So the students and the teachers that I know, I'm afraid, will pay the price. Thanks for that call, Kathy. Lance, how are you seeing this dynamic play out in your state? What are you hearing from your colleagues?

15:48Well, thank you, Kathy, for sharing about the effects in Alabama. and in Texas, we're seeing some similar effects. With the defunding that's coming out of the Department of Education, you're gonna see programs like Title I be completely, if not dismantled, lose a lot of their funding. And this does provide protections on teaching positions, specifically specialists, people that work with special ed, instructional coaches. And that's definitely going to maybe put some effect on those positions, which could raise class sizes, and you're going to see a big effect writ large because of those effects.

16:27Lauren, explain a little bit more about Title I. Well, I think it's important to note that the two biggest funders of K-12 education is Title I for high-poverty schools and IDEA, both of which were mentioned, for students with disabilities. And the administration has not, in fact, cut either one of these programs, nor have they proposed cuts in either of these programs. I understand that there's fear that that may come down the line, but they have been pretty clear. Secretary McMahon, the education secretary, has said that she doesn't want to cut these programs. And in their budget proposal to Congress, there were not cuts to these programs.

17:00What does it mean for the way states administer those funds? Because what we heard from Kathy was a concern that at the state level, legislators aren't making the appropriate adjustments in response to changes at the federal level. Yeah, I mean, I'm not exactly sure what she was referring to in terms of those two programs. I mean, there's really no particular adjustments that are needed. There have been other smaller programs that have been frozen temporarily or that have been terminated unilaterally. And in that case, she may be looking for the states to step in. I should also say that in the budget proposal, which I just mentioned, they are talking about other cuts to other programs, other things that states do rely on, such as funding for after-school programs or for mental health.

17:42Those they're suggesting essentially collapsing all of that into a much smaller program that states would have more control over. So if that happens, I think there would be a lot of concern. That is a proposal right now, not a fact on the ground. Now, the massive tax and spending bill President Trump signed into law earlier this month also delivered huge education changes. It includes billions in new funding for private school vouchers. Now, this won't take effect until 2027, Laura, but what does it tell us about the shifting story of School Choice Nationwide? School Choice Nationwide is on the march.

18:13There are a lot of, especially in conservative states, a lot of states have adopted voucher programs using state money to help parents pay for private school or even for homeschooling in many cases. Now there's a federal program that's coming where it will allow donations to be entirely reimbursed through the tax code to scholarship-granting organizations. So that will give a big boost to these state-level groups. States do need to opt into this program. So it's going to be a difficult decision for Democratic states whether to participate or not. But yes, but large school choice and more public money for private options is definitely on the rise.

18:51And in Texas, Lance, there was also recent changes to school choice. Starting in the 2026-27 school year, Texas families will be able to use public money to help pay for private education. Our families will be able to receive about$11 ,000 per student with up to$30 ,000 for students with disabilities through education savings accounts, so not direct payment. But that money can go toward private school tuition. It can go toward homeschooling costs or other approved expenses. You're a public school teacher in Texas. What's your perspective on that change? Yes, this was a huge push by our governor over the past several years.

19:30It came up in the 2023 session and didn't make it. And then in 2025, he got it over the finish line. And so now, as you just described, money that comes to public schools per the enrollment that we have will definitely see a decrease as some parents and students take advantage of this program to take the voucher and then potentially go into a private school or homeschool or other program. It's simple as that. We're going to see less funding as a result of less population. And I don't necessarily know if my students who might be withdrawn from the public schools will continue to get the same great programs and access to education that they would have gotten in their public schools had they stayed.

20:12Kristen emailed us as a college first year writing professor of over 30 years, basically English 101. Every year I notice a decrease in the ability to think critically or rather remove the word critically completely. Students are not being taught to think for themselves. and, this is in all caps, this is not their fault. It takes time and funding to put down the books and have conversations and debates with students, teaching them to generate their own ideas and argue points. I fear today's administration will only worsen these side effects I see in the classroom, especially in the fall when they are fresh out of high school.

20:49Jennifer, I want to pivot a little bit to something we've talked about before on this show, and this is students actually showing up in the classroom. So in order for you to do your job, you have to have children in the chair. Is truancy an issue in Los Angeles? If so, what do you think is driving that? Yeah. So as I've mentioned before, I've taught at the elementary, middle, and high school level, and I've seen some of the highest absenteeism at the high school level this year. It's just students I wouldn't see for a couple weeks. And I think one of the reasons why these numbers went up was because of the recent ICE raids that happened in Los Angeles at the beginning of June.

21:29To kind of give you an example, that first weekend in June when it did happen, typically I would have students the next week, you know, 25, 30 in a classroom. And that Monday, right after that first weekend of raids, I had six to seven in each class. And so in hearing the kids who did show up, it's this fear that's being created. And, you know, at the end of the day, it impacts student learning. And so it's really disheartening to see, you know, these acts that are happening that are impacting student absenteeism. Absenteeism, yeah. And Laura, more broadly, what are we seeing around this issue across the country?

22:04I mean, we saw a huge spike in absenteeism during and after the pandemic. The levels were already high, but they got higher. and it was in all types of schools, wealthy schools, poor schools, all types of demographics. Wherever they were, they got higher. They have come down a little bit since then, but they're still elevated, and this is a major concern. I mean, the ICE raids likely were contributing to it in some communities, but this is a problem that goes well beyond that in terms of it seems to have been something of a change of culture in how parents view the need to send their kids to school.

22:39Here's a message we got from Joanne in Michigan. Again, she's been a substitute teacher for about a year. In addition to the class size, the concern with children with ADHD and dyslexia in particular, sometimes I'll have one pair of pro in the class for four kids. Sometimes I'll have none. And I see the struggle that teachers must go through to try to teach all these kids the same thing at the same time. And I feel that the kids with disabilities or special needs or neurodivergent attributes seem to fall behind and continue to fall behind. So I'm just wondering if the changes that are about to come is going to impact that for the better or for the worse.

23:23Joanne, thanks for that call. Laura, your thoughts? I mean, I think that is a concern that a lot of people have. I mean, to be honest, I think that this is, you know, and it goes beyond that, too, you know, mental health concerns and all sorts of things as kids are facing, you know, difficult times and trying to make it through. Yeah. Jennifer, I wonder when you're talking to your colleagues, how much of this is also a pipeline issue? Are people feeling less drawn to the profession? They are. I do feel like in our latest survey, well, a couple of years ago, actually, we found that around 14 percent of teachers would recommend this profession to other teachers.

24:00And that's that's concerning because we already had in the last couple of years, especially post-COVID, a teaching shortage or the shortages in staff. And so it is disheartening. And some are finding I had a colleague, for example, who decided this year, yeah, I'm not going to I'm going to move into another career, maybe consulting because it's just really exhausting and really draining. I think COVID had a big impact on a lot of that. It was just a terrible time to be a teacher. A lot of people thought, you know, for just like, I don't need this. Let's head to a quick break. We'll be back with more in a moment.

24:32Stay with us.

24:38Let's get back to our discussion and turn back to our voicemail box. This is Ronnie from San Diego. And I'm calling because AI has made it so difficult. And I'm in a unique situation where I'm also in grad school for a second time, and I'm an educator. So I constantly get students who have AI-generated assignments, and they're accused of plagiarism. And then it happened to me. I read my information, and then I put in my own words, quoted everything, and it said it was 98 % AI. So these students, they have it tough because the same thing happened to me. Ronnie, thanks for that message. According to a recent Walton Family Foundation Gallup poll, six in 10 teachers have used an AI tool for work in the past year, Laura, and that saved them about six hours per week or six weeks per school year.