(WASHINGTON) — Following the Department of Education’s gutting of nearly 50% of its workforce Tuesday evening, educators have expressed deep concern — not only for students’ futures but for their own as well.
Tara Kini, chief of policy and programs at the Learning Policy Institute, told ABC News on Friday the job cuts will have “huge impacts” on teachers.
She pointed to the loss of federal money that previously funded teacher training programs as particularly devastating, especially for programs for teachers of special needs, marginalized and multilingual students.
“The fact that those grants will be able to go out the door means that we’re going to have fewer teachers trained, particularly for high-need subject areas where there are shortages all over the country,” she said.
“We will lose counselors, social workers, behavior specialists — people who ensure safety and stability for students who need it most,” Robert Castleberry, a fifth grade teacher in Kansas and the American Federation of Teachers’ Kansas secretary, said in a statement to ABC News.
“I hope this change by the government doesn’t set educators back years while our states are working to try and figure out how to distribute all those funds,” said Michael Brix, an instructor at the Peoria Public Schools’ Woodruff Career and Technical Center in Illinois and a member of the Peoria Federation of Teachers.
As President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order proposing to return education power to states, senior Department of Education officials stressed the massive reforms on Tuesday are going to help the department get funding to states in a more cost-efficient way.
“What we are doing now is not working,” the officials said. “It’s just not, so it’s time for change and that’s what’s starting tonight.”
But Kini said the cuts this will exacerbate preexisting issues of teacher shortages and lack of funding that has already been prevalent in America.
“Our schools are already grossly underfunded in Connecticut,” said Jennifer Graves, special education teacher in New Haven, Connecticut, and vice president of New Haven Federation of Teachers. “We are really, really struggling already and constantly working in a deficit model to support not only general education students but especially our most vulnerable populations — our multilingual learners and our students with disabilities.”
As a result, teachers could become more overworked and struggle to accommodate student demands, with Kini speculating that classes could get combined and offer less individualized attention.
“Or they may cut some courses like electives altogether because they don’t have teachers to teach it,” she continued. “They may staff classes with substitute teachers or long-term substitute teachers … who aren’t trained for the job, and none of those options are good for student learning.”
Mike Carvella, a third grade math and science teacher in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, told ABC News during a rally on Friday how students with individualized education plans, or IEPs, can be denied by private schools, causing them to flood the public school system and subsequently affect teachers.
“That’s going to put more kids with IEPs into more underfunded public schools and put more pressure on public school teachers and public school districts to educate kids who are already marginalized and already have learning problems,” he said.
Kini noted the coronavirus pandemic in which teachers faced shortages and were forced to pick up “more of the burden” while simultaneously juggling their own responsibilities.
She also emphasized how vital federal funding programs are for allocating resources to marginalized students.
“The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funds teacher training and professional development for special education teachers, and that’s a huge chunk of federal funding that’s going to be impacted. It’s going to impact the numbers of special education positions,” Kini said. “The same is true for Title 1 funding for low-income students and Title 3 funding for multilingual students.”
IDEA is a law that ensures free public education to children with disabilities, including special education and other resources.
The DOE promised that it would continue delivering all statutory programs, including funding for special needs and disadvantaged students, formula funding, student loans and Pell Grants for low-income students.
Yet sources told ABC News that most of the reduction in force affected the Offices for Civil Rights and Federal Student Aid, effectively terminating many of the department’s employees who are tasked with investigating discrimination within schools and helping the nation’s students achieve higher education.
Kini spoke to the job cuts at OCR, emphasizing that students will not be protected from unlawful discrimination and explaining how this would consequently force teachers to pick up an additional responsibility and “play more of that watchdog role.”
When asked about the future of teaching, Kini expressed a bleak outlook over the likelihood of young people seeking to pursue education as a career.
“It would be a little bit of speculation there, but I think it would be a reasonable conclusion for a young person today to look at what’s happening with the uncertainty in education, and particularly with the cuts to the U.S. Department of Education, and say, ‘You know what? That doesn’t seem like a stable career choice for me right now,'” Kini said.
Jim Ward, a retired educator and retired National Education Association employee who traveled from St. Louis, Missouri, to Washington, D.C., for Friday’s #EDMatters Rally outside the department’s headquarters, emphasized to ABC News how students remain the most important priority.
“All the dedicated educators that are here today are serving in those classrooms because they care about the needs of every single student, not just the ones that look like them — although their workforce is quite diverse, too — which you might not see in some of the more exclusive private schools,” Ward said.
Lori Stratton of Kansas also attended the rally, telling ABC News how “meaningful” it was for her to be present on Friday.
“I’ve been a teacher for 34 years. Most of my sons are in education. My husband’s in education. Most of my family’s in education. This is our business. You know, we are believers,” she said. “We have dedicated our lives to supporting students in public schools, and I feel like it’s an American value. I feel like there is not a bigger democratic American value than supporting education.”
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