A series of plans to help Kentucky students struggling in math abruptly shuddered to a halt last month.
Work stopped on developing a set of five training courses to equip teachers with new strategies to reach kids who had fallen behind. And a scheduled research project, aimed at identifying other states’ solutions to the problem, was put on hold.
These projects were supposed to be led by the federally funded centers designed to support state education agencies—the Regional Education Labs and the Comprehensive Centers, said Micki Marinelli, the chief academic officer at the Kentucky department of education.
But after the Trump administration cut grant funding for both groups of centers in February, these Kentucky initiatives—and dozens of other programs in states across the country—face an uncertain future. Much of the centers’ work is on helping states raise student achievement.
The U.S. Department of Education canceled contracts for all 19 Comprehensive Centers and all 10 Regional Education Labs, totaling about $103.7 million. With the centers defunded, ongoing and scheduled work with states has been paused indefinitely.
In announcing the cuts, the U.S. Department of Education called the centers “divisive and wasteful,” saying that they had been “forcing radical agendas onto states and systems.” A press release offered examples, including a video that instructed teachers to “flick that white man off your shoulder” in order to resist the “settler patriarchy” and the “white gaze,” and a joint video call that told teachers to “move away” from the gender binary. A spokesperson for the Education Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
But state leaders who have called on these groups for assistance paint a different picture.
The centers have helped improve teaching and learning in core academic subjects like reading and math, they say—and dissolving them leaves states without important manpower and expertise.
‘I just don’t know what I would have done without it’
Some center staff have “said stuff they shouldn’t have said,” said a state agency program director in a Southeastern state, who asked that her name not be used because she was not authorized to speak on behalf of the state education department. “I’ve seen it; it’s wrong,” she said, referencing the examples provided by the Education Department.
“But don’t punish everyone,” she continued. The centers are an invaluable way to build state agency employees’ knowledge base, and provide human capital, she said.
“That service—I just don’t know what I would have done without it,” said Kim Benton, a former deputy state superintendent and interim superintendent at the Mississippi department of education, who led work in school improvement and early reading instruction. Benton has also worked for the Comprehensive Centers.
In Mississippi, state education leaders relied on their REL to fuel the early reading overhaul often referred to as the “Mississippi Miracle,” skyrocketing the state’s 4th grade scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
“In so many [state education agencies], you have a single person driving rather large initiatives,” Benton said, which makes the centers’ efforts to share research and best practices, develop guidelines and tools, and act as a sounding board especially critical.
Priorities for the work that these centers undertook were set by states that approached them for help, said Rachel Dinkes, president and CEO of Knowledge Alliance, a coalition of education organizations involved in research efforts nationwide.
“As much as this administration is talking about bringing education back to the states, the RELs and CCs were doing work that the states had asked for and requested. In my mind, this aligns with their priorities,” Dinkes said.
There’s always room to make programs like these more efficient and economical, several people who worked for RELs and Comprehensive Centers told Education Week. But scrapping the centers entirely forecloses that possibility, they said.
“I think a lot of people would be open to talking about how to do things better,” said Allison Crean Davis, the chief research officer at Education Northwest, and a former director of the National Comprehensive Center, the anchor organization for the more than 15 regional centers. “What’s challenging is we’re left with absolutely nothing to work with.”
What do RELs and Comprehensive Centers do?
The Regional Education Labs and Comprehensive Centers both support states, but they play different roles. The RELs conduct research and develop research-based practice guides that states can use. The Comprehensive Centers support states in putting that research and guidance into practice, with the goal of fostering broad, sustainable improvement.
“‘Capacity building’ is a bit of a jargony term, but it’s really about rolling up sleeves and building knowledge and skills,” said Crean Davis.
The REL program started in the 1960s. The Comprehensive Centers were first funded later, in the 2000s, after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. The law required states to track the academic performance of different student subgroups—including English learners, students with disabilities, and students from low-income families—with the goal of getting all students to proficiency.
States were expected to create systems of support to help schools that weren’t meeting that mandate improve—a new role for these agencies, which historically focused on compliance, said Crean Davis. Comprehensive Centers stepped into the gap.
What does that mean in practice? Imagine that raising student achievement is like renovating a house.
The state education agency is like the general contractor, setting the vision for the project and calling the shots. But a contractor doesn’t have detailed knowledge of electrical systems or HVAC installation, so they hire technicians with specialized skills. They don’t know which wallpaper brands are the most durable or which light fixtures are the most energy efficient, so they hire an interior decorator to give them options. These electricians, HVAC technicians, and interior decorators are the RELs and the Comprehensive Centers.
Because these centers work across states, they can bring efficiency to the process, said Benton. When she led development of guidelines for school improvement in her state, the Comprehensive Centers she worked with gave her examples of what was working elsewhere.
“You had a critical friend with external expertise and a broad view of what was happening in other states, so they could come back and help me then understand what would work best in our context,” she said.
Work in reading, math has been cut
The centers have been—and were slated to be—involved in a host of other projects that are core to improving student learning outcomes.
Comprehensive Center proposals for five-year projects, set to begin in 2024 before the grant cancellations and last until 2029, and ongoing REL projects under contracts spanning 2022-2027 would have supported math and literacy work across more than a dozen states. Some examples of projects that would have started, or continued, in the coming years include:
- Helping Alabama implement a new law requiring more support for students struggling in math by developing a framework to drive academic intervention and an improvement process for schools not making sufficient progress;
- Designing and piloting professional learning for K-3 teachers in Nebraska on early literacy instruction;
- Creating guidelines for implementing academic support for struggling students in the District of Columbia school system;
- Developing a toolkit for 6th grade math teachers in Illinois to help their students who have trouble with fractions—a notoriously difficult skill to master that underpins future success in math.
Translating success in other states to a local context was part of the work Kentucky had planned to do with its REL, said Marinelli, the state chief academic officer.
Staff there were planning to do a nationwide search for math-intervention resources, drawing from states that have built out strong programs for improving elementary math instruction, such as Alabama.
“We don’t have another partner like REL that we can go to for that kind of support,” she said.
The center was also going to conduct an evaluation of math coaching paid for through the Mathematics Achievement Fund—money set aside by the state legislature last year.
“I worry about our ability to be able to report impact on the grant,” Marinelli said. “If we can’t point to tangible impact, then there is a chance that our state legislature would say, ‘we’re going to move the funds to another project or program.’”
Another Southeastern state had planned to work with its Comprehensive Center to help districts figure out how to continue funding projects they had paid for initially with ESSER funds. Now, the state would have to hire outside contractors to convene district leaders and train them on this budgeting process.
“Not knowing what’s coming, I’m afraid to use any money,” said a program director at the state agency.
