Education & Outreach

Patty Limerick and George Orwell merge to celebrate anniversaries

Megan Maneval — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 13:27:16 +0000

Patty Limerick and George Orwell merge to celebrate anniversaries Megan Maneval Fri, 03/21/2025 - 07:27

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

Historian Patty Limerick embodied author George Orwell in the summer of 2024 to commemorate her 40th year in Boulder and the 75th anniversary of “1984.”

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Cutting half the education department’s staff will have devastating, possibly illegal, consequences, expert says

Daniel William Strain — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 21:13:55 +0000

Cutting half the education department’s staff will have devastating, possibly illegal, consequences, expert says Daniel William… Thu, 03/13/2025 - 15:13

Daniel Strain , Nicholas Goda

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon meets with schoolchildren in March. (Credit: Department of Education)

This week, the United States Department of Education announced it was terminating nearly 2,000 of its roughly 4,000 employees—the latest move in what Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has called the department’s “final mission.” Both McMahon and President Donald Trump have signaled that they ultimately want to close the department completely.

“Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” McMahon said in a statement.

Kevin Welner, a legal scholar and research professor in the School of Education at the ��, sees many reasons to worry in the new cuts. The department’s major programs were all established by Congress and provide important services to communities and children around the country, he said—including rural schools and students with disabilities.

“The effect of this is going to be that if you're, for example, a parent of a student with disabilities, you're going to have to fend for yourself,” said Welner, who also directs the National Education Policy Center based at ��.

Welner discussed the Department of Education—the cabinet-level department with the fewest staff in the federal government—even before the recent cuts. He spoke about what the department actually does, and whether the cuts will open the White House to legal challenges.

Kevin Welner

What does the Department of Education do?

At the higher education level, its work includes administering student loans and Pell Grants. The department also oversees the accreditation process for higher education.

At the K-12 level, the two biggest federal programs are Title I, which provides resources for schools serving families who are lower income. That's at about $18 billion a year. And there’s IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which is at over $14 billion a year.

Beyond those two, it's important to note that there are many programs that are funded at smaller levels. They provide programs around vocational education, mental health, community schools, magnet schools, rural schools, after-school programming, teacher preparation, students who are experiencing homelessness and students whose first language is other than English. These are all extremely important programs for communities, and they are all now going to be understaffed, presumably.

Has the department historically been controversial?

When the Department of Education was originally created by Congress in 1979, it really wasn't that controversial in the moment. By my count, there were 14 Republican co-sponsors in the Senate. There have been attempts since then to close the Department of Education, but many Republicans resisted those attempts. It hasn't been that partisan of an issue until very recently.

Let’s break down a few of the department’s programs a little more. What does Title I do?

For Title I, that money is being used to pay for teachers. It's being used to pay for after-school programming, tutoring and more, particularly in communities that are impoverished. Think about rural areas of Alaska or Appalachia. In a lot of those districts, Title I is providing more than half of the money for any individual kid’s education.

What does the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act do?

For IDEA, schools often have students whose needs are extremely expensive to meet, and state and local districts are not able to provide the needed resources by themselves. That’s where the federal money comes in.

Right now, less than 13% of the funding for those students is coming from the federal government. But that is still crucial money. There are also a series of procedures that go along with that money to protect the students. IDEA requires students with disabilities to have an IEP, or an Individualized Education Plan. That is worked out between the school and the parents to make sure the student receives an appropriate education.

If there’s no one—or many fewer people—on the Washington, DC, end to administer and enforce that program, a lot of that is now going to be much more difficult for parents and schools to carry out.

What impacts do you think these cuts will have?

Losing half of the employees in the department is undoubtedly going to kneecap the ability of the department to carry out its work.

Imagine that you are a student applying to college or a parent trying to figure out questions about affordability. Are you going to be able to get that loan? How do you apply? Those questions are going to be much more difficult to get answered. And the actual administration of student loans and the Pell Grant program will be gutted if the staffing is gutted.

It’s hard to figure out what the process might be moving forward for administering the department’s programs at some basic level. We have to assume there'll be delays and less effective services. But there's also a very real question about whether those functions can even be carried out at all because of losing so many employees.

Now the big legal question: Is it constitutional to completely shut down this department?

The U.S. Department of Education was created in 1979 by Congress, and the U.S. Department of Education, therefore, can only be closed by an act of Congress. A key legal question then is whether the department is being functionally or meaningfully closed.

As we all learned in our own educations, the U.S. Constitution sets up a system of checks and balances. But that system only works if the other two branches—in this case, Congress and the courts—step up and push back on any over-reach by the third branch—in this case, the Executive Branch. If no one pushes back, then the Executive Branch can do whatever it wants. This separation of powers issue lies at the center of a lawsuit by 21 attorneys general, including Colorado’s, filed two days after the firings.

�� Today regularly publishes Q&As with our faculty members weighing in on news topics through the lens of their scholarly expertise and research/creative work. The responses here reflect the knowledge and interpretations of the expert and should not be considered the university position on the issue. All publication content is subject to edits for clarity, brevity and university style guidelines.

Attorneys general from 21 states have filed a lawsuit to prevent the U.S. Department of Education from cutting its workforce by half.

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Aerospace undergrads teaching high school students about rocketry

Megan Maneval — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 17:54:54 +0000

Aerospace undergrads teaching high school students about rocketry Megan Maneval Thu, 03/13/2025 - 11:54

Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences

A team of aerospace undergraduates are headed back to high school to teach the next generation of students about rocketry.

A team of aerospace undergraduates is headed back to high school to teach the next generation of students about rocketry.

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Engineering department sparks STEM curiosity at Denver science fair

Megan Maneval — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 16:16:43 +0000

Engineering department sparks STEM curiosity at Denver science fair Megan Maneval Tue, 03/11/2025 - 10:16

The Department of Electrical, Computer & Energy Engineering recently volunteered at a science fair and engaged with middle and high school students with hands-on activities such as building paper circuits and changing LED colors. The event sparked curiosity and excitement, inspiring the next generation of engineers.

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New RIO faculty fellows continue legacy of leadership development across campus

Megan Maneval — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 16:13:00 +0000

New RIO faculty fellows continue legacy of leadership development across campus Megan Maneval Tue, 03/11/2025 - 10:13

This year’s cohort includes 14 faculty members from departments and research institutes spanning the campus. The program supports faculty in achieving their research and innovation goals and promotes collaboration through tailored training, experiential learning and leadership development opportunities.

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Words of hope: Revitalizing the Zapotec language

Megan Maneval — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 15:33:39 +0000

Words of hope: Revitalizing the Zapotec language Megan Maneval Fri, 02/28/2025 - 08:33

As many languages face endangerment or extinction, Associate Teaching Professor Rai Farrelly and Assistant Professor Ambrocio Gutiérrez Lorenzo are working with community members and �� students to support and sustain efforts to revitalize the use of the Zapotec languages within Teotitlán del Valle, Mexico.

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What DOGE’s recent Department of Education cuts could mean for researchers, educators

Daniel William Strain — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:16:03 +0000

What DOGE’s recent Department of Education cuts could mean for researchers, educators Daniel William… Mon, 02/17/2025 - 08:16

Daniel Strain , Nicholas Goda

Last week, the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency under billionaire Elon Musk announced nearly $900 million in cuts to the chief research arm of the U.S. Department of Education—vaulting the little-known Institute of Education Sciences (IES) into news headlines.

The recent moves by the Trump administration appear to cancel scores of contracts undertaken by the IES. The young government office, founded in 2002 by Congress, funds research and collects statistics about the state of education in the United States.

Derek Briggs, professor of education and director of the Center for Assessment Design Research and Evaluation (CADRE) at ��, said he has trepidation about the cuts. For more than 20 years, the IES has played a critical role in driving high-quality research about what works, and what doesn’t, in terms of how America teaches its students.

“Gutting is the word that has been used a lot,” said Briggs, who is not currently receiving funding from the IES. “If the data and resources that were cut are no longer going to be provided, it would be to the great detriment our ability to monitor trends and to conduct good education research.”

Briggs shared his take on what researchers know and don’t know about the recent cuts—and why they could matter for schools around the country.

Derek Briggs

Do you think the IES does important work?

The IES funds and supports very important education research and data collection. It's a critical resource for objective evidence related to the condition of education in the United States.

Why does that matter for everyday Americans?

There are data that are prohibitively expensive for individual researchers to try to gather, so you really need resources and economies of scale to collect this kind of data efficiently and effectively.

It's very costly and challenging, for example, to capture the experiences of nationally representative cohorts of students across the country over time. An example of this are the multiple iterations of the the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics within IES.

In the original iteration of this study, students who were in kindergarten in 1998-99 were followed through the eighth grade. Then another cohort of kindergarten students in the class of 2010-11 were followed through the fifth grade. In the most recent iteration, kindergarten students in the class of 2023-24 are to be followed. It would be terrible if data collection were to be interrupted because this would hinder our ability to compare the learning experiences and outcomes of these successive cohorts of students during the most formative periods of schooling.

Can you give an example of how researchers might use that kind of information?

As a graduate student, I took advantage of the data in the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988, which, in contrast to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, focuses on the experiences of students as they transition from high school to postsecondary experiences. I used this data to examine the efficacy of test preparation programs for college admissions. I examined whether students that had gotten commercial coaching for tests like the SAT and the ACT were doing better than students that had not gotten that coaching. What I found was that coaching did have an effect, but it was far smaller than what was being promised by commercial coaching companies.

Studies like this had been done in the past by the College Board and the Educational Testing Service (ETS). But because the College Board and ETS were affiliated with SAT, their studies on the effects of coaching were regarded with a certain amount of suspicion. The fact that nationally representative data on college admissions test preparation were available from an external organization that was independent of the test makers gave my research a lot more credibility.

How did you react when you heard about the cuts?

It’s a little bit baffling. If you look at the articles in the national press, so far no one's really willing to go on record as to what has been cut. Most of the information you get from DOGE is on X through tweets, and the tweets tend to be rather sensationalistic, focusing on the millions of dollars that have been saved. But cost saving always has to be evaluated relative to the benefit lost. It's hard to get a clear sense of just how pervasive the cuts have been or what rationale is being provided for how the cuts were made.

With that said, there's a real sense of uncertainty among those of us who do education research and trepidation about what the future holds—one day you might be in the middle of research work, and the next day, you might find out that the plug has been pulled.

One of IES’ high-profile programs, which seems to be a target of the recent cuts, is the What Works Clearinghouse. What is it?

Around the time when the IES was founded, there was a real emphasis on doing more randomized, controlled experiments to find out whether certain educational interventions were actually having effects on student achievement and other outcomes.

The What Works Clearinghouse was designed to assemble the results from these kinds of studies into one place. If you go into the What Works Clearinghouse and search for a particular topic or even an intervention name or a curriculum, you can find out if there have been high-quality studies conducted on the efficacy of those programs.

There are some questions about whether it's met its intended goal. In the past, I was involved in a study that focused on how school and district leaders make use of research in their decision making. We found that very few of these educators reported using the What Works Clearinghouse regularly.

DOGE’s argument is that it’s eliminating wasteful spending. Do you think some of these cuts are justified?

One of the things that IES is does is to fund qualified researchers to conduct multi-year research projects. I've served on one of the IES grant proposal review panels, and I just want to make the case for just how difficult it is to actually get a proposal funded. It can take people months of work to put together these proposals. Then maybe 10% the proposals or fewer get funded. It often takes multiple tries, multiple years of submitting proposals before you're able to get funded. By the time you get through those many hoops, the quality of the proposals that are funded is usually quite high.

The programs and services that IES is expected to provide by Congressional mandate are critical if we care about supporting scientific research. Good science requires a combination rigorous experimentation and qualitative investigation. And that’s the only way we can expect to make progress in how we understand the processes of teaching and learning.

Recent cuts have targeted the Institute for Education Sciences, the main research arm of the Department of Education, which collects data and funds research on what works in education.

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Alma Program lights way for maternal mental health solutions

Megan Maneval — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 19:56:40 +0000

Alma Program lights way for maternal mental health solutions Megan Maneval Tue, 02/11/2025 - 12:56

New research from the Crown Institute’s Alma Program shows rapid relief for Latina moms facing perinatal depression and anxiety. Many saw significant improvement within just two sessions.

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University Libraries award grants for librarian-researcher collaborations

Megan Maneval — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 19:27:34 +0000

University Libraries award grants for librarian-researcher collaborations Megan Maneval Thu, 01/23/2025 - 12:27

See who won the University Libraries’ first round of seed grants to support collaborations between researchers and librarians.

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Creating shade: Building sun-safe communities in Denver

Megan Maneval — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 18:49:28 +0000

Creating shade: Building sun-safe communities in Denver Megan Maneval Thu, 12/19/2024 - 11:49

Last summer, CEDaR explored the connection between sun exposure, skin cancer and the built environment to work toward building sun-safe communities in the Mile High City.

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Education & Outreach

Patty Limerick and George Orwell merge to celebrate anniversaries

Related Articles

Cutting half the education department’s staff will have devastating, possibly illegal, consequences, expert says

What does the Department of Education do?

Has the department historically been controversial?

Let’s break down a few of the department’s programs a little more. What does Title I do?

What does the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act do?

What impacts do you think these cuts will have?

Now the big legal question: Is it constitutional to completely shut down this department?

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Aerospace undergrads teaching high school students about rocketry

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Engineering department sparks STEM curiosity at Denver science fair

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Words of hope: Revitalizing the Zapotec language

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What DOGE’s recent Department of Education cuts could mean for researchers, educators

Do you think the IES does important work?

Why does that matter for everyday Americans?

Can you give an example of how researchers might use that kind of information?

How did you react when you heard about the cuts?

One of IES’ high-profile programs, which seems to be a target of the recent cuts, is the What Works Clearinghouse. What is it?

DOGE’s argument is that it’s eliminating wasteful spending. Do you think some of these cuts are justified?

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Alma Program lights way for maternal mental health solutions

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University Libraries award grants for librarian-researcher collaborations

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Creating shade: Building sun-safe communities in Denver

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