The rural Daviess County public schools in Kentucky prides itself on giving teachers comprehensive, ongoing training to solve their day-to-day classroom problems, from behavior management to writing skills.
But the U.S. Department of Education’s ongoing delay in releasing federal education funds for fiscal 2025—and a proposed fiscal 2026 budget that would cut or consolidate key federal funding streams for professional development—have put teacher training in the district in a “holding pattern,” according to Jana Beth Francis, Daviess County’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning.
Projects that could be affected are the district’s Writing Project, which helps improve teachers’ instruction in writing, as well as work to emphasize “essential science content” in middle and high school, and potentially, even stipends for teachers to attend LETRS literacy training, Francis said.
“I feel like most of our professional learning that we have worked multiple years to develop ... has been put on hold,” Francis said. “It’s like someone’s pressed a giant pause button and we don’t know when that’s going to be un-paused.”
A coalition of school and district leaders and other education groups is pushing the Education Department to solidify a plan to release money Congress appropriated in March for fiscal 2025 teacher professional development grants.
At a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing June 3, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the department would release the fiscal 2026 money by the close of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Many school budget periods, however, run from July 1 to June 30.
But McMahon would not give details or confirm, either at the hearing or to the coalition, that the new spending plan would be finalized in time for July 1 or that programs like the $2.2 billion Title II-A Supporting Effective Instruction grants would simply be funded at fiscal 2024 levels—as generally has been done for prior budgets passed through continuing resolutions.
“We are looking at the unallocated dollars to determine which of those programs we can spend those dollars on,” McMahon said.
The spending disruptions and proposed future cuts come at a particularly bad time for many school districts. Leaders had been relying on Title II—one of the most flexible federal programs for teacher PD—to sustain supports they had started or expanded using the $190 billion in pandemic recovery aid that expired earlier this school year.
In a nationally representative 2024 survey by the EdWeek Research Center, first published in EdWeek Market Brief, the majority of school and district leaders said their districts planned to spend Title II dollars over the next two years to improve elementary reading instruction in particular. Math and other content trainings were also popular.
“Because of ESSER, they were able to invest in new interventions and new supports and new services for students that they realized, ‘OK, this is something we have to continue,’ ... and they were figuring out a way of continuing with the federal funds that they were getting,” said Tara Thomas, the government affairs manager for AASA, the School Superintendents Association. “And so now with them potentially receiving even less, they’re going to have to make really tough decisions about what supports they’re going to keep.”
The move follows earlier efforts to reduce federal spending on teacher quality. The Education Department canceled more than 100 active professional development grants and contracts in February, sparking multiple lawsuits.
And the Trump administration’s $66.7 billion budget proposal for fiscal 2026, unveiled last week, would cut the U.S. Department of Education’s budget by 15 percent. It would eliminate or consolidate nearly $2.9 billion in federal support for teacher training, including the Title II state grants, as well as smaller grants for training teachers of rural and English-learner students and in literacy, arts, and civics content.
“It’s very concerning. ... States or the districts would have to fill that gap, and it’s a huge gap,” said David Griffith, an associate executive director for policy and advocacy for the National Association of Elementary School Principals. “It’s just a sense that educator preparation and support just isn’t a real priority. That’s the through-line of a lot of this.”
Thomas suggested rural districts could be hit particularly hard. The proposed budget would absorb the targeted $220 million Rural Education Achievement Program into the same block grant as the far larger Title II program.
“Rural districts, especially small rural districts, are some of the hardest schools to staff. They usually have to rely on the people already in their community,” Thomas said. “They rely a lot on Title II and ... on REAP to get new certifications and and new professional development for the teachers that they have. Taking away both of those resources at the same time is really unfortunate.”
Without Title II, smaller districts may have to cut programs and teachers. (Title II supports class size reduction as well as in-service training.)
“Most states require some form of induction program or professional development,” Thomas said. “So it’s not like these services can be cut; schools are just going to have to cut other programs to find the money to pay for the programs that they have to provide.”
Daviess County has opted to pay for most of its instructional coaches out of pocket, but most of its nearly $300,000 allocation of Title II money goes to compensate teachers for extra training. Even the loss of $25-an-hour stipends will hit hard, Francis said.
“Even though it’s not a lot of money, it still covers a babysitter and it’s an acknowledgement of their time as a professional,” Francis said. “It will be hard for them to meet after school if they’re not getting that additional compensation.”
Frederick Brown, the president and chief executive officer of Learning Forward, a nonprofit that works with districts to improve teacher training, said the combination of federal budget cuts, delays, and proposed consolidations is “devastating” to teacher development programs. While private foundations and nonprofit groups like Learning Forward often partner with districts to provide professional development, he said, state and private funding will not be able to take up the slack for lost federal dollars.
And even if Title II and other training grants don’t end up cut in fiscal 2025 or 2026, Brown and Thomas said the funding instability undermines districts’ ability to plan meaningful teacher training and supports.
“If [administrators] cannot rely on stable federal funding, then they’re not able to think of long-term investments,” Thomas said. “They’re not able to use funding in the way that most people want them to, because they’re having to go back and fill in gaps, budget, and re-budget six months late.”
