At the beginning of this month, Isabel Baca was preparing for a two-week summer workshop for middle and high school teachers about the history and literature of the Chihuahuan Desert—an area that spans the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.
Baca, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, had sent out acceptance letters to selected teachers, scheduled speakers, and was planning to send out a required reading list.
“Then, on April 3, in the morning, I get a letter that it had been terminated,” she said. “Put a stop to everything, no more expenses. Nothing.”
The program’s nearly $173,000 federal grant had been terminated, part of sweeping cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities announced last week. The National Humanities Alliance, a group that advocates for the agency, estimates that more 1,200 grants have been canceled. About 80 percent of the agency’s staff has been placed on administrative leave, NPR reported.
The National Endowment for the Humanities, established in 1965, funds a wide range of arts, culture, and history programming across the country, from academic papers and books to local museums and community reading nights.
It also plays a substantial role for K-12 teachers—specifically, social studies educators.
The agency makes grants to summer professional development institutes, like Baca’s course, that offer deep dives into local history and culture; supports nationwide history education programs; and funds the development and maintenance of public resources, like the National Archives, that teachers use daily in the classroom.
In social studies—a subject to which schools have historically given short shrift in favor of devoting time and resources to math and reading—the loss of these kinds of supplemental resources and programs may take an especially big toll.
The idea that history teachers rely on a single textbook “has gone by the wayside,” said Anton Schulzki, the interim executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies, referring to a recent report that found secondary history teachers in the United States tend to rely more on free online resources—including those from federal institutions—than traditional textbooks.
The reliance on a single textbook, “in many ways, that’s very much 1983—which is when I started, way back when,” he said.
In this environment, materials and programs from community organizations aren’t extras—they’re core to the work teachers do in the classroom, said Jess Alden, the senior program coordinator at Georgia Humanities, one of 56 state humanities councils supported by NEH funding. All of the councils received notices last week that their operating grants had been terminated.
“We wouldn’t have to have these types of programs if they were surplus,” Alden said.
“I think that people make assumptions, and that’s part of the problem,” she added. “There’s a lack of understanding about what the landscape is really like.”
Termination notices sent to grant recipients said the agency was “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda,” according to letters obtained by Education Week. The NEH did not respond to a request for comment.
The National Endowment for the Humanities, along with the National Endowment for the Arts, has been the target of criticism from conservatives for decades, who have argued that the agencies have a left-leaning bias and waste taxpayer money on obscure academic pursuits. Trump first proposed eliminating the agency in 2017 in his budget plan.
But to some in the humanities field, the abrupt cancellation of federal funding feels ironic at a time of such intense political division.
“We have been reducing the presence of the humanities in our education system for quite some time, while simultaneously complaining about the fact that our communities are less connected, people don’t have an understanding of civics, people don’t have a connection to the history of the country,” said Michael Haley Goldman, the executive director of New Hampshire Humanities, the state’s humanities council.
Read on for three ways NEH cuts will affect history and civics education.
1. Summer teacher institutes will lose funding
The NEH funds summer professional development for teachers through two main avenues—one- to four-week residential institutes on different topics in the humanities, and one-week place-based workshops designed around landmarks in American history and culture. Since 2012, these programs have reached more than 11,000 teachers, according to the National Humanities Alliance.
Among the grants canceled for this summer’s planned programs was a $200,000 award to the Chicago History Museum for a three-week workshop on the history and culture of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in Chicago.
The program prioritizes working with primary sources and “wrestling” with different scholars’ interpretations of the past—skills that teachers can then introduce to their students, said Robert D. Johnston, a co-director of the project and a professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago.
“These skills are not just so-called intellectual skills, but they’re crucial skills related to citizenship and democracy,” said Johnston, who is also the director of the university’s Teaching of History Program, which prepares middle and high school social studies teachers.
“Wrestling with different ideas, wrestling with complex and a wide diversity of voices in the past, trying to give students autonomy to think through their own ideas, and at the same time needing to engage responsively and constructively with other ideas—these are really at the heart of how a democracy should work, regardless of political ideologies,” he said.
With federal funding cut, Johnston said, “we’re in considerable limbo.”
The program organizers may try to access emergency philanthropic funding, or operate a scaled-down version of the institute online.
Other former grant recipients have discussed moving their institutes online, too.
“These are interesting times, as far as the federal government goes,” said Michael Purcaro, the chief of government administration for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, which saw an $81,000 grant—for a one-week institute this summer on Pequot history and culture—canceled last week.
“When these things happen, I think it is a call to action for us as leaders—both as education leaders and community leaders alike—to implement creative strategies and use innovation to figure out ways to still continue this work,” Purcaro said.
2. The future is uncertain for National History Day programming
National History Day, a nonprofit organization that runs a nationwide student history contest and provides classroom materials and teacher professional development, also saw large cuts to federal grant support, losing more than $336,000 in funding.
“That’s really devastating to us,” said Cathy Gorn, National History Day’s executive director. “It pays for the national contest prizes; it pays for other kinds of teacher training and materials.”
The organization’s student history contest is run through social studies classrooms, where students spend part of the school year investigating a topic, drawing on academic papers, archives, and museums. They present their findings in local, state, and national competitions to panels of historians and educators who judge the conclusions and use of evidence in their projects.
“In the process of doing that, you not only learn about the past, but [students] find their heroes in the past, they find their role models in the past,” Gorn said. “This process, it truly helps build empathy, and we could use a whole lot of that in this world today.”
This year’s national competition will go forward, Gorn said, funded largely by donations. But the future of the program is uncertain, she said, as is the other NEH-supported project the organization was working on: a book of instructional resources on Jewish American history and the history of antisemitism.
Individual state National History Day competitions are often run through state humanities councils, Gorn said, which have also lost their funding.
In Georgia, the state council uses its National History Day program to offer teacher training on historical research and methods, said Alden, the senior program coordinator at Georgia Humanities. Because preservice teacher programs vary so widely across the country, some teachers enter social studies classrooms with “zero” training in these skills, Alden said.
Georgia Humanities is hoping to fill some of the gaps left by the cancellation of NEH grants with donations, but the organization isn’t sure how readily those will come, said Mary McCartin Wearn, the group’s president.
Materials and professional development provided by state humanities councils could be in jeopardy
In some states, like Louisiana, humanities councils have been deeply involved in core work on social studies standards and curricula.
The state updated social studies standards in 2022, with some significant changes. Instead of containing state history to a few specific grades, the standards distributed content throughout grades 1-12.
This meant that some elementary and middle school teachers—who might not have degrees in, or significant experience with, history education—were now asked to teach the specifics about Louisiana’s past, said Miranda Restovic, the president and executive director of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the state’s humanities council.
The state department of education provided a “big picture overview,” but teachers still needed more, Restovic said.
“Reconstruction in Louisiana cannot be learned in two slides on a PowerPoint,” she said.
The council stepped into the gap, developing teacher training and supplemental resources—some for use in classroom instruction, and some to build teachers’ own background knowledge. More than 100,000 students use the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ education website each semester, Restovic said.
NEH dollars helped keep that resource running, funding staff time and website management, she said.
“We are committed to finding a way to keep things going,” she said. “How it’s going to look, I don’t really know yet.”
Other state humanities councils fund place-based teacher workshops—for instance, South Dakota’s on local Native American culture and heritage, or New Hampshire’s on state-specific resources related to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, coming up next year.
In several states, the humanities council hosts the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street, a traveling exhibition that visits small towns. In Kentucky, the council promotes the tour to school districts and encourages field trips, said Bill Goodman, the organization’s executive director.
All of these initiatives are in jeopardy with the loss of federal funding for state humanities councils, said leaders at the organizations in South Dakota, New Hampshire, and Kentucky.
“It’s just such very little money that the Department of Government Efficiency has taken away from the NEH that supports the humanities councils around the country,” said Goodman. “It’s going to cost Americans a lot more in the long run than the few dollars that they think they’re saving.”
