The Trump administration must restore two sets of centers that help state education departments and schools with improvement strategies and the use of education research, after two companies involved in the programs sued over the abrupt cancellations of their contracts earlier this year.
A federal judge in Maryland on Friday concluded that the administration violated federal law and the Constitution’s separation of powers by effectively shuttering the U.S. Department of Education’s Comprehensive Centers and Regional Educational Laboratories programs.
By 5 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 20, lawyers for the federal government and the companies that sued must provide the judge, Brendan Hurson, with a plan laying out how they’ll relaunch the technical assistance programs, all of which are federally funded but run by private contractors.
Hurson’s ruling came in response to an April lawsuit from two of those contractors, Maryland-based Child Trends Inc. and New Hampshire-based RMC Research Corp., which said in their lawsuit that the February cancellation of the contracts powering the two programs was “unlawful many times over.”
What the Comprehensive Centers and Regional Educational Laboratories do
The Comprehensive Centers provide technical assistance to states and school districts aimed at addressing specific problems, with a focus on districts serving large populations of low-income students. Their work can involve developing trainings for educators and helping districts work through both immediate and ongoing challenges—such as shifting to remote instruction during the pandemic and welcoming an influx of migrant students.
The Regional Educational Laboratories, or RELs, help states and schools apply education research to their improvement strategies and make sense of available research.
Mississippi’s education department, for example, relied on the REL assigned to its region as it developed and implemented the set of literacy instruction reforms credited with producing the “Mississippi Miracle”—the southern state’s yearslong improvement in reading performance that other states have since tried to emulate.
Both sets of organizations provide states and schools with access to manpower and expertise they otherwise wouldn’t have, state education leaders told Education Week in March.
Federal law requires that the Education Department award at least 20 grants to outside organizations to run the Comprehensive Centers. Most serve specific regions, but a handful work nationally to address specific focuses set by the Education Department. Most recently, those national centers were assigned to work on fiscal equity, English learners, early childhood success, and bolstering the educator workforce.
The law also requires that the department award 10 contracts so groups can run RELs that, together, cover the entire country.
How these technical assistance centers became the focus of litigation
The contracts powering the two technical assistance networks were among the dozens canceled across the Education Department during the first weeks of the second Trump administration as the Department of Government Efficiency, then led by billionaire Elon Musk, terminated contracts and grants for key research and data collection functions and teacher-training programs.
The Education Department announced the termination of the REL contracts on Feb. 13, saying a review “uncovered wasteful and ideologically driven spending not in the interest of students and taxpayers.” It claimed one laboratory was advising schools in Ohio to undertake “equity audits.”
The cancellation of 18 of the 20 Comprehensive Centers’ contracts came days later. In a Feb. 19 news release, the Education Department claimed the centers “have been forcing radical agendas onto states and systems, including race-based discrimination and gender identity ideology.”
Child Trends and RMC Research Corp. both held contracts to run regional comprehensive centers. In addition, RMC Research served as a subcontractor for two of the RELs.
In their April 7 lawsuit, they said the Education Department provided no official explanation for terminating their contracts in the middle of the five-year grant cycles. The department said in the official termination notices only that their grants are “inconsistent with, and no longer effectuate, department priorities”—generic language that has accompanied the cancellation of dozen of department grants since Trump took office.
The department also provided no explanation for why it retained two of the 20 Comprehensive Centers’ contracts.
The cancellations, they argued, violated the federal statutes requiring the operation of the programs and infringed on Congress’ authority, as Congress had appropriated money for both programs and the Trump administration had spent little of it.
Judge agrees the terminations violate federal law
Hurson, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, agreed with Child Trends and RMC Research that the contract terminations violated federal law and the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution.
In his 44-page opinion, he also dismissed arguments from Trump administration lawyers that federal law required only the awarding of contracts and not necessarily the programs’ continued operation and that the contract terminations represented only a pause for the programs.
The Education Department has said that it intends to solicit new bids to run the RELs, but it hasn’t taken formal steps to solicit them.
Administration lawyers, Hurson wrote, “provided no credible argument ... that any efforts are underway to reestablish the statutorily required numbers of Comprehensive Centers and RELs.”
Hurson stopped short of ordering the Education Department to restore Child Trends’ and RMC Research’s contracts. Instead, he ordered lawyers for both sides to deliver a plan by 5 p.m. Wednesday outlining how the Trump administration will restore both programs by Sept. 30.
The judge’s ruling “marks important progress towards restoring essential, high-quality federal education research, a victory for the millions of students, educators, families, and policymakers who rely on the vital insights and tools provided by the Regional Education Laboratories (RELs) and Comprehensive Centers (CCs),” Rachel Dinkes, president and CEO of Knowledge Alliance, which represents many entities that held contracts the Education Department terminated earlier this year, said in a statement.
An Education Department spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon.
Lawsuits challenging education research cuts have had mixed success
Hurson isn’t the first judge to find the Trump administration violated federal laws and procedures when abruptly terminating Education Department contracts and grants, and to order that they be restored.
But this is the first case in which plaintiffs have succeeded in specifically challenging cutbacks to the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, which oversees the RELs.
In June, two federal judges ruling in three cases challenging cuts to the Institute of Education Sciences declined to issue orders restoring terminated staff and contracts.
