Efforts to Improve Reading and Math in U.S. Schools will be Thwarted Due to Funding Cuts by the Federal Government Administration

A series of plans to help students struggling in math and reading abruptly shuddered to a halt last month.

Work stopped on developing training courses to equip teachers with new strategies to reach kids who have fallen behind. Scheduled research projects, aimed at solutions to the problem, have also put on hold. Why? Because The U.S. Department of Education canceled contracts for all 19 Comprehensive Centers and all 10 Regional Education Labs, totaling about $103.7 million. With the centers defunded, ongoing and scheduled work with states has been paused indefinitely.

The centers have helped improve teaching and learning in core academic subjects like reading and math throughout the country, and dissolving them leaves states without the important manpower and expertise needed to bring about positive change.

“Without that service—I just don’t know what I would have done ,” said Kim Benton, a former deputy state superintendent and interim superintendent at the Mississippi department of education, who led work in school improvement and early reading instruction in the state. She and education leaders in other state relied on the agencies that Mississippi needed to fuel the early reading overhaul that skyrocketing the state’s 4th grade scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

States are expected to create systems of support to help schools that aren’t meeting mandates improve.

The Regional Education Labs and Comprehensive Centers both support states in their efforts, but they play different roles. The RELs conduct research and develop research-based practice guides that states can use. The Comprehensive Centers support states in putting that research and guidance into practice, with the goal of fostering broad, sustainable improvement.

Unfortunately, in most state department, you have a single person driving rather large initiatives, which makes the centers’ efforts to share research and best practices, develop guidelines and tools, and act as a sounding board especially critical. Without the support from these organizations, the forecast for improving student learning and achievement in our county is dire. While a lot of people would be open to talking about how to do things better, the challenging part of all this is some states will be left with absolutely nothing to work with.

The centers have been and were slated to be involved in a host of projects that are core to improving student learning outcomes. Proposed projects would have supported math and literacy work across more than a dozen states. Some examples of projects that would have started, or continued included such things as …

• Designing and piloting professional learning for K-3 teachers on early literacy instruction;

• Creating guidelines for implementing academic support for struggling students in one state;

• Developing a toolkit for 6th grade math teachers in another to help their students who have trouble with fractions—a notoriously difficult skill to master that underpins future success in math; and much more.

States don’t have other partners like REL and the Comprehensive Centers that they can go to for that kind of support. The extent of what will ultimately come as a result of these funding cuts is yet to be determined, but the forecast is bleak.