A federal judge has blocked the Trump Administration’s attempts to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. Lawsuits have been filed against the Administration for slashing the staff and budget of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the federal education department’s research arm. Massive cancelations of education-related research grants also are being contested in the courts.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Given all this, I fully anticipated that the Trump Administration would eventually get around to firing the National Board for Education Sciences (NBES). It finally happened four months into President Donald Trump’s second term when he removed 13 Biden appointees from the National Board for Education Sciences on May 23.
“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Board for Education Sciences is terminated, effective immediately,” the email read. “Thank you for your service.”
As just one of the Americans who received this two-sentence message, I wonder if the sender or anyone else in the Trump Administration even knows who we are or what our service entailed.
President Joe Biden appointed 13 of us to this bipartisan White House Board in October 2022. We were selected because of our deep expertise on education research, evaluation, and development. Members included three past presidents of the American Educational Research Association, National Academy of Education inductees (including the Academy’s current president who chaired NBES), a dean of two academic schools at a Historically Black University, and a mayor who worked for two decades as a teacher and school administrator and served five terms in the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
We committed to spending four years in the unpaid role because we all want the best for our democracy, we value the production and use of research, and we understand how high-quality studies and evidence-informed tools can improve educational opportunities, experiences, and outcomes for all students. Nothing about what we were asked to do qualifies as any version of wokeness or extremism. We approached our work as experts, not as politically-polarizing activists who somehow sought to advance anti-American agendas.
The voting NBES members met with and served alongside nine ex-officio members: Director of IES, Director of the National Science Foundation, Director of the Census, Commissioner of Labor Statistics, Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and commissioners of the four National Education Centers. It was a brilliant group of people who were united by our deep appreciation for rigorous, useful research.
During the second year of George W. Bush’s presidency, Congress established NBES as part of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002. We were responsible for advising the IES Director on policies and procedures, collaboratively establishing priorities for the Institute’s roughly $900 million annual budget, soliciting and providing input from educators and researchers, and strengthening peer review for grant-funded research projects, plus several other responsibilities related to scientific inquiry and innovation.
The IES website specifies another role for NBES: “Advise the Director on opportunities for the participation in, and the advancement of, women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in education research, statistics, and evaluation activities of the Institute.”
Without knowing or even asking what this entailed, it is possible that the Trump Administration presumed this to be a hotbed of DEI activities that privileged wokeness over merit and somehow discriminated against white men who applied for IES research grants. I never participated in nor witnessed this. There is no evidence of such wrongdoing.
Being invited by a U.S. president to serve on a White House board was a significant honor; I will forever appreciate the faith that the Biden-Harris Administration placed in me as a citizen and scholar. I do not wear termination by the Trump Administration from my position as a badge of honor. It is disgraceful.
Again, I anticipated that the Trump Administration would terminate my position prior to the conclusion of my four-year term. And I also anticipate that eliminating the federal education department, defunding IES, and ousting its law-abiding NBES partners will weaken the production and quality of education-focused studies and evaluation activities.
Consequently, students with disabilities will be even more underserved. Inequities between rich and poor, as well as white and racially diverse learners will widen. Solutions to antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and sexism in schools will be stifled. Also, new educational disparities will emerge but will not be systematically tracked, communicated, studied, and addressed. Congress and educational leaders will have even less access to trustworthy, high-quality research on what works, what undermines excellence and innovation, and where the U.S. is falling short in fulfilling its educational promises to students and taxpaying families.
Terminating NBES members is yet another example of the Trump Administration’s attack on research, researchers, and research universities. Yanking hundreds of millions in federal research grants from Harvard and Columbia, two of the world’s highest-impact producers of science and innovation, is indeed an assault on research itself. These actions are anti-American, as they will surely place our nation further behind others that pursue solutions to educational inequities, climate change, disease and health disparities, poverty, and other vexing problems.
I accepted Biden’s invitation to serve on NBES because I wanted better for our country and the people educated in its schools, colleges, and universities. I also said yes because I value research. Inasmuch as I despise our undeserved and unjustified dismissal, I have greater grief for IES leaders and staff who lost their paid full-time jobs— its national statistics unit reportedly has just three remaining employees, down from around 100 before Trump began his second term.
These hardworking, law-abiding professionals are far more negatively affected by the Administration’s actions than are other NBES members and me. We will be fine.
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