A federal appeals court has granted the Trump administration’s request to keep millions of dollars in teacher-training grants frozen while a legal challenge to the abrupt February termination of the grants proceeds in a lower court.
The order from a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Va., represents the latest legal victory for the president as his administration fights federal district court orders that have held up a number of his executive actions and broad spending cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
The appeals court’s order is a response to a legal challenge to the cancellation of millions of dollars in teacher-preparation grants made under three congressionally mandated programs: Seeking Effective Educator Development (SEED), Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP), and Teacher and School Leader (TSL) Development.
Three organizations representing grant recipients sued the Trump administration in early March in an effort to restore the grantees’ funding, and a federal judge in Maryland temporarily restored it through a preliminary injunction to members of those groups. The three groups are the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and its Maryland affiliate and the National Center for Teacher Residencies.
The appeals court order overturns that injunction, which the Trump administration had appealed.
The order consists of two paragraphs that don’t go into legal reasoning, but it cites an April 4 Supreme Court opinion that overturned a similar temporary order restoring funding to teacher-training grant recipients in eight states that sued separately to stop the grant terminations.
“This moment represents yet another setback for our nation’s educator pipeline and for the institutions and communities working tirelessly to prepare effective teachers and educators for all communities across the country,” Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, said in a statement.
The Trump administration has said it terminated grants that it perceived as promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. In a filing in the lawsuit from the eight states, the chief of staff to Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the agency flagged grants for termination if they “included objectionable material associated with DEI, such as cultural responsiveness, systemic privilege, racial justice, social justice, and anti-racism.”
The three organizations that filed the lawsuit are meeting with their boards to discuss the next steps in their legal challenge, and are also appealing to Congress to restore the funding, according to the association.
Teacher-training programs fund scholarships, professional development, performance pay incentives
The three programs to which the Trump administration terminated funding were some of the U.S. Department of Education’s largest discretionary grants, all aimed at boosting the supply of new teachers and training existing educators.
Grant recipients received multi-year awards to run teacher residency programs that pay teacher-candidates as they receive hands-on classroom training, alternative programs that train professionals from other fields to enter teaching, and in-service professional development for teachers and principals. One of the three programs, the Teacher and School Leader Development program, pays for coaches and mentors to support teachers in high-poverty and high-need schools as well as financial incentives for teachers who meet student performance goals.
The grantees whose funding was terminated received an email in the first two weeks of February that said their grant “no longer effectuates Department priorities” related to rooting out diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Among the programs that lost grant funding were efforts to recruit and retain teachers for rural schools, special education services, schools in low-income areas, elementary schools, and charter schools.
The two lawsuits filed to challenge the grant terminations covered many, but far from all, of the recipients of these grant awards.
The judge who granted the injunction in the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education lawsuit, Julie Rubin, wrote in her March 17 order that the abrupt cancellations were “unreasonable, not reasonably explained, based on factors Congress had not intended the Department to consider (i.e., not agency priorities), and otherwise not in accordance with law.”
Rubin was appointed by former President Joe Biden.
The Supreme Court order on teacher-training grants is having ripple effects
The appeals court order overturning that injunction shows another ripple effect of the April 4 Supreme Court opinion invalidating the temporary restoration of teacher-training grant funds.
A five-member Supreme Court majority—all of the Republican presidential appointees on the court except for Chief Justice John Roberts—invalidated a restraining order that had temporarily restored teacher-training funds in the eight states that filed the lawsuit. The order initially restored the funding for 14 days, and then the judge extended the order while the Trump administration appealed it.
When the Supreme Court invalidated that order, the eight states were still pursuing a preliminary injunction in their case, which would have restored funding for the duration of the case as it played out.
But the states withdrew that request after the five-member Supreme Court majority weighed in, saying in an April 8 filing that they would drop the ask even though they “respectfully disagree with the analysis” in the high court’s opinion.
