Last week, the U.S. Department of Education announced it would cut $600 million for teacher training grants. About $90 million worth of those grants went to teaching colleges and school districts in North Carolina.
WUNC host Will Michaels spoke with education reporter Liz Schlemmer to sort through what this means for local schools.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Michaels: So what did the Department of Education say about why it cut these grants for teacher training?
Schlemmer: Last week, the U.S. Department of Education put out a press release saying the cuts are for grants used to train teachers in “divisive ideologies.”
The release said some trainings covered topics like anti-racism and instruction on white privilege, or that the grants sought to recruit teachers and staff based on race.
According to state and local education officials that I checked with, so far this is the only federal policy of the Trump administration that has cut funding to schools in North Carolina.
Who did it affect? Who received these grants in North Carolina?
Some grants went directly to school districts, like Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and Wake County Schools.
Others went to universities to support students pursuing education degrees. High Point University, UNC-Chapel Hill and Winston-Salem State got grants for programs that pay their undergraduate or master’s degree students stipends and help place them in local schools after they graduate.
Tell me more about how this played out in schools. For example, what was the grant for in Wake County Schools?
Wake County Schools got a nearly $12 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education in October 2023. It was a three-year grant, and some of it had already been spent, but about $5 million was canceled.
That grant was for schools to modernize their human resources systems and to see whether targeted bonuses for educators might boost student performance at high-need schools.
This was a competitive grant. The application said it would prioritize funding for districts trying to diversify their workforce, but it wasn’t a mandate.
In Wake County Schools, more than half the teachers hired through its grant were white.
“Of the teachers hired under this grant, 56 percent were white and 44 percent were non-white, demonstrating that the program did not exclude any group but instead expanded opportunities for all qualified educators,” Wake County Schools said in a written statement.
The district’s Superintendent Robert Taylor also addressed that in an interview with WUNC.
“If you talk to anyone that’s involved with this grant, it really, really is about a recruiting effort to make sure that we can increase the number of teachers that we have in all areas. It is not limited to one group,” Taylor said.
How did Wake County Schools actually use the funds?
Wake County Schools hired a marketing firm to improve the district’s recruitment overall, like with software to streamline the application process and conduct targeted social media ads.
The Project LEADERS program, as it’s called, focused on recruiting teachers to 24 “high need” schools. That’s defined as schools that have had lower test scores, more low-income and minority students, and historically more teacher turnover.
A district spokesperson told me principals at these schools often spend so much time finding substitutes to cover vacancies that they don’t actually have time to recruit full-time teachers.
At those 24 schools, new teachers could get a $1,500 hiring bonus. Plus, teachers and principals were supposed to get retention bonuses and bonuses if students showed academic gains. There was also funding for teacher training, and for covering teachers’ licensing or National Board Certification costs.
The district says it was able to reduce teacher vacancies in those schools by 40% in less than two years. They hired 133 teachers — multiplied over the number of students in a classroom, that’s thousands more Wake County kids with a qualified teacher.
You spoke with a Wake County teacher recruited through the program, what did she have to say?
Stephanie Brown was already an experienced teacher who was recruited to a high-need school. She got a signing bonus, and was hoping to use program funds to pursue a master’s degree related to what she teaches. Brown says she was planning to start that next fall.
“There is tuition reimbursement, and I had not started that,” Brown said. “I really kind of wish I had jumped on it immediately.”
Brown was also enticed by the professional development the program offered. She received what she called “one of the best trainings” she’d ever done in her career and said that it had nothing to do with anti-racism or diversity topics.
Brown is worried that without those incentives, schools like hers will have trouble retaining teachers.
So she won’t get a retention bonus. And there were other teachers and teacher candidates also anticipating money to help with their education. What do their schools plan to do?
Superintendent Taylor said this week that Wake County Schools will appeal the decision, which is an option that the U.S. Department of Education provided in its letter notifying schools of the canceled funds.
Otherwise, that funding is gone.
“If $5 million in a competitive grant has been put into the budget, that’s extremely difficult to try and replace that,” Taylor said.
Keep in mind, this is happening at a time when many school districts are facing other financial pressures like falling enrollment and uncertainty about the next state budget, or possibly other federal funding losses.
