In the Fox C-6 district outside of St. Louis, elementary reading teachers are in the process of shifting their practice, moving from a balanced-literacy approach to a “structured” approach, one that aligns with the evidence base behind how children learn to read.
The district implemented new curriculum materials as part of the change. It had planned to offer some follow-up training sessions and coaching this fall to help teachers integrate the resources into their classrooms, funded by federal money designated for professional development, said Tracy Haggerty, the district’s assistant superintendent for teaching and learning.
But the U.S. Department of Education’s decision to withhold that money, alongside billions of other grant funding districts rely on, means Fox C-6 will have to find another way to pay for the PD—sending Haggerty’s district scrambling to adjust its plans.
“We are depending on that money in order to properly train our elementary teachers in literacy,” Haggerty said.
It’s a problem that seems to be happening nationwide.
In the 2023-24 school year, among districts that used this funding for teacher PD, 70% said they focused some money on reading and English/language arts. There’s no national database detailing how much that that works out to be in dollar amounts. But anecdotally, it appears they are feeling the pinch.
“Our districts already had plans. We encourage our districts to plan ahead,” said Angélica Infante-Green, the Rhode Island commissioner of elementary and secondary education. “They don’t know how they’re going to get this done. They’re talking about layoffs now of coaches, of interventionists.”
In a bit of irony, reading is one of the few instructional goals that the Education Department has signaled it wants to prioritize under President Donald Trump’s administration. Yet, now districts are redrawing their budgets or cutting programs and staff altogether.
“This is going to have a direct impact on the science of reading, which the administration says they care about,” Infante-Green said.
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Why teachers need ongoing support to implement the ‘science of reading’
At the end of June, the Education Department notified states that it would not distribute the $6.8 billion in federal education funding indicated in federal law, a result of an “ongoing programmatic review.” Title II-A, as the teacher-training funding is officially known, supports PD for teachers and leaders and was among the funds withheld.
Over the past six years, more than two dozen states have passed legislation requiring schools to use an evidence-based approach to literacy instruction.
The majority of this legislation requires elementary teachers to receive PD in reading-instruction practices. Many of the laws also mandate schools adopt state-approved curriculum.
While states or districts foot the bill for state-mandated training, federal funding can pay for implementation support—such as coaches who help teachers apply new strategies or test out lessons and routines from the new curricula, or they might pay for stipends to cover time in the summer adapting to the new materials.
This kind of ongoing learning is “crucial,” said Katie Sojewicz, the vice president of professional development for the Reading League, a nonprofit headquartered in Syracuse, N.Y., that advocates evidence-aligned instruction.
In part, that’s because several popular reading training programs are curriculum-agnostic. This has some benefits—all teachers across a state or a district, regardless of what materials they use, can leave with the same knowledge base.
But it also means that educators are tasked with figuring out how to apply that knowledge in their own unique context, with the materials they’ve been given.
Retooling budgets has ‘been a struggle’
In the Fox C-6 district, Haggerty wants to employ coaching to give teachers that individualized support, helping them implement new curricula with their students. She and her team have had to reimagine the PD budget, scaling back training in academic interventions and the use of tech tools, to plan for the possibility that Title II-A funds might not arrive.
Figuring out how to reallocate funds to do so has “been a struggle,” she said.
Other districts are facing the same challenge. In Mansfield, Ohio, the city school system uses Title II-A funds to pay for training for science of reading training for its teachers, the Richland Source reported.
The Concordia R-2 district, also in Missouri, was planning to use the federal money to pay for substitutes while teachers attended professional learning on the new reading curriculum, said Superintendent Theresa Christian.
The district will have to rely on other funds to support that work, Christian said. “My focus on federal programs has always been … programs that can be sustainable with or without that money,” she said. “I know some districts don’t have that luxury.”
The effects of the funding delay will hit hardest in school systems that don’t have other funding sources to turn to, said the Reading League’s Sojewicz.
“It’s going to really widen the opportunity gaps that we see,” she said. “Districts that are already financially strapped—urban districts, rural districts—they’re not going to have these other funds that they could then rely on.”
