Education
As Trump Targets Universities, Schools Plan Their Counteroffensive
![As Trump Targets Universities, Schools Plan Their Counteroffensive As Trump Targets Universities, Schools Plan Their Counteroffensive](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/01/29/multimedia/29nat-universities-lobbying-03-zbmk/29nat-universities-lobbying-03-zbmk-facebookJumbo.jpg)
With a now-rescinded White House directive that threw millions of federal dollars for education and research into uncertainty, President Trump and his allies tried to prove they were not bluffing with their campaign threats to target universities.
But before President Trump even returned to office, many of the nation’s well-known universities were already preparing to fight back.
While few college presidents are especially eager to spar with Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance in public, schools have been marshaling behind-the-scenes counteroffensives against promises of an onslaught of taxes, funding cuts and regulations.
Some universities have hired powerhouse Republican lobbying firms. Others are strengthening, or rebuilding, their presences in Washington.
Many are quietly tweaking their messaging and policies, hoping to deter policymakers who know it can be good politics to attack higher education — even when they themselves are products of the schools they castigate on cable television. Rutgers University, for example, announced last week that it would cancel a conference on diversity, equity and inclusion, a focus of the new administration.
A spokeswoman for the university said the decision, which prompted criticism, was made after many speakers from a federally funded program withdrew from the conference, citing an executive order that targets the topic.
“There’s a concern among a lot of campuses,” said Kenneth K. Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown.
Some efforts to rehabilitate higher education’s reputation were already in the works, a response to attacks leaders in Congress made after campus protests over the war in Gaza. But now university officials are confronting an administration whose leaders have made clear their contempt for some wings of higher education. Mr. Trump has said schools are dominated by “Marxists, maniacs and lunatics,” and Mr. Vance has called them “insane.”
The ominous saber rattling from Mr. Trump and his allies includes threats to endowments, federal research funding, student financial aid, diversity initiatives and the potential deportation of roughly 400,000 undocumented students enrolled in U.S. schools.
Several major universities have responded by hiring lobbyists whom Republican leaders might view favorably. Harvard University has turned to a Capitol Hill heavyweight, Ballard Partners, the former firm of both Mr. Trump’s attorney general-designate, Pam Bondi, and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Columbia University signed up with BGR Government Affairs, which counts Haley Barbour, a former Mississippi governor and Republican National Committee chairman, among its co-founders.
Duke University, which has an in-house government relations effort, brought in DLA Piper as an adviser. One of the firm’s executives is Richard Burr, a Republican who represented North Carolina (where Duke is located) in the Senate for 18 years.
The University of Notre Dame recently registered its own lobbyists for the first time since Mr. Trump’s previous term. And Yale University is beginning its own theater of operations in Washington.
“The university decided to open an office in Washington, D.C. after conducting benchmarking among peer institutions,” Karen Peart, a Yale spokeswoman, wrote in an email, citing upcoming higher education “issues” on Capitol Hill.
The latest activity in Washington came after some other schools ramped up lobbying efforts.
As recently as 2022, Washington University in St. Louis paid $50,000 for its lobbying in the capital. The next year, it raised that spending to $250,000. That exploded to $720,000 in 2024, federal records show. A university spokeswoman did not comment.
Across the country, university officials and their allies said that they were somewhat more prepared for what to expect under Mr. Trump than they were when he first ascended to power in 2017. Eight years later, they said, they had a better sense of Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency and have also looked for insights into his administration’s ambitions in the “Project 2025” plan, which is closely linked to many of his appointees.
The administration wasted no time in launching those plans with a flurry of executive orders in its first week. One seeks to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, including those run by contractors that receive federal student aid funding — a category that includes virtually every campus.
Mr. Trump also ordered federal agencies to compile lists of “nine potential civil compliance investigations” of organizations, including higher-education institutions with endowments over $1 billion.
In a public conference call on Monday sponsored by DLA Piper, Mr. Burr said that while the rest of the Trump administration’s higher education policy was not yet entirely clear, “we believe that endowments are a target of revenue, potentially, in a tax bill.”
Few topics are as alarming to the leaders of the country’s wealthiest universities.
Endowments were largely exempt from taxation for years. But in 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term, Republicans led a charge to impose a 1.4 percent excise tax on the investment income of large private university endowments. Now there are discussions of raising it to 14 percent, or even 21 percent.
As a senator, Mr. Vance was a leading proponent of increasing the endowment tax, proposing an increase to 35 percent for endowments of $10 billion or more. Despite his Yale law degree, funded partly by the university, Mr. Vance has previously called for an “attack” on universities.
“Why is it that we allow these massive hedge funds pretending to be universities to enjoy lower tax rates than most of our citizens, people who are struggling to put food on the table?” he said when he was a senator, adding: “It’s insane. It’s unfair.”
At least 56 schools were forced to pay the 1.4 percent tax in 2023, totaling more than $380 million, according to an analysis by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Records show that representatives of major universities were busy presenting their anti-endowment positions on Capitol Hill last year. In the fourth quarter, about 10 top schools, including Stanford and Cornell, lobbied on the tax.
They have often built their case around what they contend would be lost if universities had to pay more of the government’s bills: money that they use for research and tuition support, particularly for low-income students.
At Wesleyan University, for example, that amounted to $85 million last year that served 1,500 students, according to Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan’s president.
“So it’s real money,” Dr. Roth said, adding that a tax increase would make it harder for the university to support students. He added, “It means we will be serving fewer worthy applicants.” Dr. Roth said that Wesleyan would not be hiring outside lobbyists but, instead, would use that money to assist students.
Mr. Burr also said universities would be affected if the Trump administration targeted funds for research. He noted that the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had both recently issued directives to suspend public communications, research-grant reviews, travel and training for scientists.
On Monday evening, the administration also issued a sweeping pause on trillions in federal grant funding, which a federal judge blocked about 24 hours later — but only after a day of chaos and tumult for campus leaders.
Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 campuses nationwide, called it the “most irresponsible public policy” he had ever witnessed. The organization called for the order’s reversal; the White House backed away from the order on Wednesday.
The pause had been designed to give the administration time to determine whether grants align with Mr. Trump’s priorities. In the 2023 fiscal year, universities received close to $60 billion in federal funding for research.
Barbara Snyder, the president of the Association of American Universities, which includes dozens of the most prominent schools in the country, noted that the explosion of anger in Washington toward universities was not necessarily new.
“It’s more challenging than it was 20 years ago,” she said, but added: “I don’t think this has all been an overnight change.”
Even as universities muster defenses, no consensus has emerged among them about how best to approach the second iteration of Mr. Trump’s Washington.
“Our institutions,” Ms. Snyder said, “have their own ways of doing these things.”
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Education
Covid Learning Losses
![Covid Learning Losses Covid Learning Losses](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/11/multimedia/11themorning-nl-lede-02-fbpz/11themorning-nl-lede-02-fbpz-facebookJumbo.jpg)
Schoolchildren in Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania are still about half a year behind typical pre-Covid reading levels. In Florida and Michigan, the gap is about three-quarters of a year. In Maine, Oregon and Vermont, it is close to a full year.
This morning, a group of academic researchers released their latest report card on pandemic learning loss, and it shows a disappointingly slow recovery in almost every state. School closures during Covid set children back, and most districts have not been able to make up the lost ground.
One reason is a rise in school absences that has continued long after Covid stopped dominating daily life. “The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist and a member of the research team, told me.
In today’s newsletter, I will walk through four points from the report, with charts created by my colleague Ashley Wu. I’ll also tell you the researchers’ recommendations for what schools should do now.
1. State variation
The new report — from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford — compares performance across states, based on math and reading tests that fourth and eighth graders take. (A separate report, on national trends, came out last month.)
Today’s report shows a wide variety of outcomes. In the states that have made up the most ground, fourth and eighth graders were doing nearly as well last spring as their predecessors were doing five years earlier.
But the overall picture is not good. In a typical state, students last spring were still about half a year behind where their predecessors were in 2019. In a few states, the gap approaches a full year.
Here are the changes in reading performance:
2. A blue-red divide
Political leaders in red and blue America made different decisions during the pandemic. Many public schools in heavily Democratic areas stayed closed for almost a year — from the spring of 2020 until the spring of 2021. In some Republican areas, by contrast, schools remained closed for only the spring of 2020.
This pattern helps explains a partisan gap in learning loss: Students in blue states have lost more ground since 2019. The differences are especially large in math. Eight of the 10 states that have lost the most ground since 2019 voted Democratic in recent presidential elections. And eight of the 10 states with the smallest math shortfalls voted Republican.
I know some readers may wonder if blue states had bigger declines simply because they started from a higher point. After all, the states with the best reading and math scores have long been mostly blue. But that doesn’t explain the post-pandemic patterns. For example, New Jersey (a blue state) and Utah (a red state) both had high math scores in 2019, but New Jersey has fared much worse since then.
3. More inequality
Pandemic learning loss has exacerbated class gaps and racial gaps. Lower-income students are even further behind upper-income students than they were five years ago, and Black students and Latino students are even further behind Asian and white students. “Children, especially poor children, are paying the price for the pandemic,” Kane said.
Other research, by Rebecca Jack of the University of Nebraska and Emily Oster of Brown, points to two core reasons. First, schools with a large number of poor students and Black or Latino students were more likely to remain closed for long periods of time. Second, a day of missed school tends to have a larger effect on disadvantaged students than others.
In the years before Covid, the U.S. education system had impressive success in reducing learning inequality, as I explained in a 2022 newsletter. But Covid erased much of that progress. “Educational inequality grew during the pandemic and remains larger now than in 2019,” Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the new report, said.
4. How to recover
The authors of the report note that some school districts, including in poorer areas, have largely recovered from Covid learning loss. Among the standouts are Compton, Calif.; Ector County, Texas, which includes Odessa; Union City, N.J.; and Rapides Parish, La. The authors urge more study of these districts to understand what they’re doing right.
Early evidence suggests that after-school tutoring and summer school, subsidized by federal aid, made a difference. Intensive efforts to reduce absenteeism can also help.
One problem, the authors write, is that many schools have not been honest with parents about learning loss: “Since early in the recovery, the overwhelming majority of parents have been under the false impression that their children were unaffected.”
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Education
How Schools Are Responding to Trump’s D.E.I. Orders
![How Schools Are Responding to Trump’s D.E.I. Orders How Schools Are Responding to Trump’s D.E.I. Orders](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/12/multimedia/12nat-dei-schools-01-pgwl/12nat-dei-schools-01-pgwl-facebookJumbo.jpg)
Students at North Carolina’s public universities can no longer be required to take classes related to diversity, equity and inclusion to graduate.
The University of Akron, citing changing state and federal guidance, will no longer host its “Rethinking Race” forum that it had held annually for more than two decades.
The University of Colorado took down its main D.E.I. webpage, and posted a new page for an Office of Collaboration.
Around the country, dozens of universities and colleges have begun to scrub websites and change programming in response to President Trump’s widening crusade against diversity and inclusion. But much remains unclear about the legality and reach of President Trump’s new orders.
So some schools are simply watching and waiting.
“It’s meant to create chaos in higher education, and in that it’s been successful,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, of the attempts by President Trump to end D.E.I. activity on campuses. “The responses are all over the map.”
The president has signed several executive orders seeking to ban diversity practices across the federal government, educational institutions and private companies. The orders are sweeping in their language and scope. One demands that agencies and schools terminate D.E.I. offices, positions, action plans, grants and contracts. Another bans “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology” and threatens to withhold federal funding from schools that do not promote “patriotic” education.
Already, some orders have been challenged in court, and it remains to be seen how broadly the government will pursue institutions that it believes are using “illegal” preferences that “discriminate, exclude, or divide individuals based on race or sex.” An education secretary has not yet been confirmed; Linda McMahon, the nominee, will appear before a Senate committee on Thursday.
Administrators of K-12 institutions — which are more financially insulated — are making their own calculations. But in higher education, hundreds of millions in funding are on the line. University administrators are debating whether to freeze existing programs, stand on principle and resist, or try to fly below the radar while they see if the executive orders hold up in the courts.
At Princeton, for example, the president, Christopher Eisgruber, urged the community to “Keep Calm and Carry On,” until the legal status of the executive orders becomes more clear.
Meanwhile its athletics department posted a modified transgender athlete participation policy to comply with new N.C.A.A. rules, which changed because of President Trump’s order barring transgender athletes from women’s sports. Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania also removed references to transgender inclusion from their athletics websites.
At the University of Akron, administrators said that declining attendance and enthusiasm were additional reasons the school had stopped funding its Rethinking Race forum, which has been held every year since 1997. But programs for Black history month would continue, they said.
The American Association of University Professors is one of several organizations that has sued in federal court in an effort to block two executive orders related to diversity and inclusion.
The lawsuit charges that the executive orders violate the due process clause of the Constitution by failing to define terms like “D.E.I.,” “equity” and “illegal D.E.I.A.” The orders, it argues, also violate free speech and the separation of powers protections.
Still, the ambiguity in what diversity, equity and inclusion means has led some colleges to take a broad view as they seek to comply.
The University of North Carolina’s campus in Asheville, for example, had designated certain courses as “diversity intensive,” which meant they could be used to meet a diversity graduation requirement. On the list of classes that met the requirement were Appalachian Literature, Global Business, Developmental Psychology and Cultural Anthropology. They will still be offered, but will no longer be part of a requirement, said Brian Hart, a spokesman for the university.
Andy Wallace, a spokesman for the North Carolina system, said the system was assessing federal policy changes to ensure it would still receive funding. “This does not affect any course content,” he said. “It suspends any requirements for D.E.I.-focused courses as a condition of graduation.”
Beth Moracco, chair of the faculty at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the university’s actions were worrisome.
“My concern is that these types of directives and memos will have a chilling effect in terms of discussions in the classroom and faculty developing new courses,” she said, “even if there’s not a direct effect of eliminating courses at this time.”
At Michigan State, administrators canceled a Lunar New Year lunch, and then apologized for the overreaction and rescheduled it, according to emails from the school posted online by Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit news source. A university spokeswoman said that its College of Communication Arts and Sciences canceled the event without consulting the broader university; about 70 people showed up for the rescheduled event on Tuesday.
Mr. Trump’s orders follow a yearslong push by state level Republicans to roll back diversity programs. Twelve states, including Texas and Florida, have passed laws targeting D.E.I., and legislation has been considered or introduced in more than a dozen other states.
More than 240 colleges in 36 states have eliminated some aspects of their programming, including diversity offices or race-based affinity groups, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which has been tracking changes in diversity policies since January 2023.
Most of those moves happened before Mr. Trump’s recent order, however, and it remains unclear how the flurry of action during his first weeks in office will affect schools over the long term, especially in K-12 districts.
So far, few public schools seem to be rushing to change their practices. School districts are less reliant on federal funds than universities are, with 90 percent of their funding coming from state and local taxes. And the nation’s 13,000 districts have always had broad autonomy to set their own curriculum and teaching policies.
The Trump administration has launched investigations into at least two K-12 districts — Denver Public Schools and the Ithaca City School District in New York. Denver is under investigation for transforming one girl’s bathroom at a high school into a nonbinary bathroom, according to the Education Department. Ithaca is under investigation for hosting a series of conferences for students of color, some of which may not have been open for white students to attend, according to the Equal Protection Project, an advocacy group that filed a federal civil rights complaint against the school system.
Yet Denver is still directing educators to a detailed “L.G.B.T.Q.+ Tool Kit” that lays out policies for affirming students who are questioning their gender identities, giving those students access to the bathrooms of their choice and helping them change their names in the district’s computer systems.
And in Ithaca, despite scrutiny on the district’s practices around race, the school system’s website continues to feature a page touting an “anti-marginalization” curriculum. It is intended to aid students “in their development of anti-racist understandings and practices” — language that could run afoul of the president’s executive orders.
Ithaca City Schools did not respond to interview requests.
In a written statement, a spokesman for Denver’s public schools said that before making any “final decisions” about policy changes, the district was awaiting further federal guidance. He added that the district “remains committed to our values including providing a safe and inclusive learning environment to all students.”
Some Democratic education leaders have bluntly stated that they did not intend to change their practices in response to Mr. Trump. When it comes to issues of gender and sexual orientation, “California law is unaffected by recent changes to federal policy,” said Tony Thurmond, the state schools superintendent.
In New York, the state education department released a statement calling Mr. Trump’s actions “ineffective” and “antithetical” to the history of federal education policy, which has traditionally sought to protect racial minorities, sexual minorities, students with disabilities and other groups.
“We denounce the intolerant rhetoric of these orders,” the state agency said. “Our children cannot thrive in an environment of chaos; they need steady and stable leadership that we will endeavor to provide.”
Perhaps the biggest impact in education has occurred in the schools that the federal government controls more directly: those for children who live on military bases and the military’s officer academies.
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has declared that official celebrations of events like Black History Month are no longer welcome. The defense department’s K-12 schools have ended some clubs, options for children to use the bathrooms that align with their gender identities and are combing shelves for books with themes related to diversity, according to reporting by Stars and Stripes.
The United States Military Academy at West Point disbanded 12 student affinity groups while investigating whether they complied with the administration’s D.E.I. directives.
Paulette Granberry Russell, president and chief executive of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, which is also suing the Trump administration to overturn the D.E.I. orders, said the new policies would most likely have a broad chilling effect, despite their ambiguity.
“And that chilling effect is, I think, extending whether you are in a red state, a blue state, in anything in between,” she said. “No institution wants to become a target.”
Education
Philadelphia Closes Schools for Eagles’ Super Bowl Parade
![Philadelphia Closes Schools for Eagles’ Super Bowl Parade Philadelphia Closes Schools for Eagles’ Super Bowl Parade](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/12/multimedia/12xp-philly-zpkt/12xp-philly-zpkt-facebookJumbo.jpg)
It was a dream come true for Philadelphia children when the Eagles soared to a Super Bowl victory Sunday against the Kansas City Chiefs. Now they’re getting a second wish granted: a day off school to celebrate with the champions at the city’s Super Bowl parade.
The School District of Philadelphia said on Tuesday that it would close all of its schools on Friday, freeing up nearly 200,000 students to join what is expected to be a million-strong crowd flooding the city’s streets. Nearly 20,000 school staff members will also get the day off.
“We look forward to joyfully celebrating the Eagles’ victory as a community,” the district announced, in what might be a formal way of saying, “Go Birds!”
The parade will travel through Center City, starting at 11 a.m. at Lincoln Financial Field, heading north past City Hall and ending by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, according to the city’s map of the route.
Parents face the decision of whether to bring their children to a parade that could involve, in some sections, standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers in temperatures expecting to hover in the 30s. Others might opt to take an impromptu vacation, as Philadelphia schools will also be closed on Monday for Presidents’ Day, giving students a four-day weekend.
Social media was buzzing with opinions and recommendations about the parade, ranging from optimists booking Airbnbs near the stadium to cautious parents advising others to leave their children at home with a sitter.
Philadelphia’s public safety officials issued some precautions for parents who planned to bring children to the parade: make sure they are wearing bright colors; snap a photo of them before leaving; and write their phone number on a bracelet, on their wrist or on a piece of paper in their pocket, in case child and parent get separated.
Other educational institutions around Philadelphia jumped on the bandwagon: Temple University and nearby school districts like Gloucester City School District, in South Jersey, and Ridley School District, in Delaware County, all canceled classes. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia Schools, which oversees Catholic schools in the city and its suburbs, also announced that its high schools, parish and regional elementary schools would be closed.
Transit officials said that there would be limited train service starting from early morning and congestion in the roads because of the street closures. City officials also said that government offices, city daytime centers and courts would also be shut.
The timing of the parade, falling on Valentine’s Day, drew some grumbling from restaurant and flower shop owners in the city, some of whom complained the parade would affect their dinner service and deliveries. Mayor Cherelle Parker of Philadelphia sought to calm those concerns at a news conference on Tuesday.
“To all in our restaurant community, we want you to know that we will be prepared,” she told reporters. “Nothing will interfere with our restaurant reservations on that evening. We will be done well before you are to appear for dinner. So don’t you dare touch any of those reservations.”
Philadelphia’s school district also closed in 2018 for the celebration of the Eagles’ first Super Bowl victory, against the New England Patriots.
Schools were closed during last year’s Super Bowl parade, in Kansas City, Mo., after Kansas City won against the San Francisco 49ers. A shooting at that parade left one person dead and about two dozen others wounded, including nine children.
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