After a year of uncertainty, upheavals, and procedural changes, the U.S. Department of Education is funding 12 new grant projects this fall focused on training aspiring and current teachers on how to best work with the nation’s growing population of English learners.
The National Professional Development grant program has, for years, helped colleges and universities partner with school districts to support both pre-service and in-service teachers working with English learners through endorsement and certification pathways, as well as professional development.
But in 2025, the program lost most, if not all, of its program officers as part of mass layoffs across the Education Department. That same year, the federal agency discontinued 28 multi-year grant projects that, according to agency spokespeople, did not align with the administration’s priorities. This summer, legal groups and researchers sued the agency over those cuts, a case that remains pending.
When the Education Department opened applications for a fiscal year 2026 cohort this spring, it added a new competitive preference priority in the form of letters of endorsement from state leaders, which left some educators and state officials concerned over a lack of clarity on how the letters would work.
Yet the turmoil did not deter prospective grantees. The Education Department received 163 applications this year compared with 150 in the last application round in fiscal year 2024, according to agency press officials.
All 12 selected grantees (receiving a total of about $50 million for multi-year projects) submitted letters of endorsement from state leaders, the Education Department added.
“The letters of endorsement were an important component of the selection process, demonstrating that the applicant’s proposed projects were aligned with state priorities and would receive state support,” agency officials said in a statement. “The letters were considered as part of the established selection criteria, alongside the other requirements and priorities of the competition.”
Projects focus on general education teachers
Winning projects largely focus on building the expertise of general education teachers working with English learners.
These students, on average, spend most of the school day with general education teachers who aren’t always equipped to support language development in mainstream classrooms. Meanwhile, bilingual education or English-language development teachers aren’t always available across all schools to support them.
In Wyoming, for instance, only about 60 to 80 teachers carry an English-as-a-second-language endorsement, said Amin Davoodi, an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming.
It’s why Davoodi’s new federal grant-funded project focuses on helping 120 in-service teachers obtain an ESL endorsement, while an additional 40 teachers will receive a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction with the ESL endorsement embedded.
“With this project, we are going to basically triple the number of ESL endorsed teachers in the state of Wyoming,” Davoodi said.
Without the $4.1 million grant, the university wouldn’t be able to fund that many teachers, he added.
In South Dakota, the Black Hills Special Services Cooperative, a local education agency that represents 12 public school districts in the western part of the state, will use its $4.5 million grant to train in-service teachers and administrators across the state, not just those in the cooperative, on language use in mainstream classrooms.
“Teachers need to understand how language works in the service of understanding content and learning about content. We don’t learn it in a vacuum. We use language to learn content,” said Gwyneth Fastnacht, the grant project director and coordinator of South Dakota’s Title III Consortium of districts using federal dollars designated for supplementing English-learner education.
While research, for years, has underscored the value of training teachers in mainstream classrooms on how to teach language through academic content, such work has lagged in practice.
That’s partly due to financial constraints preventing such training for pre-service teachers, said Kate Reynolds, a professor at Central Washington University’s College of Education and Professional Studies. Without grant funding, colleges and universities are often limited to running programs offered on campus instead of working directly with local school districts.
Central Washington University, led by Reynolds and Jenny Dechaine the director of the school of education there, will use close to $4 million in new federal grant funding to cover the costs of coursework toward ESL endorsements for in-service teachers and pre-service teachers, instructional coaching for in-service teachers, and more.
“These pre-service teachers who might not be able to add on an endorsement because of finances will be able to do that,” Reynolds said.
States aligned with new projects
Several new grantees who spoke with Education Week said the application process this year went relatively smoothly, including obtaining a letter of endorsement from a state leader.
In most cases, grantees said pre-existing working relationships with state education agencies, or pre-established priorities from state leaders on the need for more teachers trained to work with English learners helped secure the endorsement letters.
Education Week contacted all 50 governors’ offices, state education agencies, and the District of Columbia this summer to inquire about the endorsement process and learn how many letters were requested and submitted.
The processes varied largely by state, and even when states sent out multiple letters on behalf of grant applicants, such as California officials submitting 13, that wasn’t a guarantee of final selection.
Applicants told Education Week there were some concerns over the time crunch they had to obtain the letters, and the lack of clarity of the Education Department provided on what the letters should say.
Still, researchers across the country are hopeful for the work this federal grant will fund over the next few years.
“I don’t think there’s another program that provides dedicated funding for higher education and K-12 to work together on this or other critical issues to school districts,” Dechaine said, “and there is a huge need for that.”
