A teacher training program for early childhood educators in Springfield and Holyoke has fallen victim to sweeping budget cuts imposed by President Trump’s administration. Although a federal judge on Monday temporarily paused Trump’s cuts, the potential damage highlights, again, the wrongheadedness of indiscriminately chopping money that was already promised.
In 2023, the University of Massachusetts Amherst received a five-year, $2.3 million federal grant from the US Department of Education’s Teacher Quality Partnership Program to train paraprofessionals from Springfield and Holyoke to become fully licensed early childhood educators.
Early education is a critical strategy for raising academic standards, making the grant especially important for underprivileged urban districts.
Holyoke, a heavily Hispanic community, is on the verge of exiting state receivership after years of poor student performance. Holyoke Teachers Association president Nick Cream said Holyoke struggles to retain teachers. Students have high rates of poverty and childhood trauma, and teachers, under receivership, were required to work more hours than in neighboring districts. Springfield is a diverse, urban, high-needs district with several underperforming schools.
According to a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Andrea Campbell against Trump’s cuts, one-third of Holyoke’s early childhood educators are unlicensed with waivers that let them teach temporarily while working toward licensure. (A Holyoke district official told the editorial board 29 of 65 teachers in pre-K through second grade are teaching with waivers.) In Springfield, 325 teachers across the district are teaching on waivers or emergency licensure, according to Campbell’s lawsuit.
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With the federal grant, UMass adapted its early education certification program for paraprofessionals who are currently working, so they can take classes online with a summer professional development week. UMass pays the paraprofessionals a stipend for a year of student teaching, pays veteran teachers to mentor them, and pays the district to hire a substitute paraprofessional for that year.
“It builds an ongoing pipeline for new teachers entering the field,” said Gregory Kelly, dean of the UMass Amherst College of Education.
Kelly said the grant is going toward program infrastructure, technology, and staff, with the goal that after five years the program will be financially self-sustaining through tuition and can expand to additional communities.
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Nineteen educators are currently in the program, 10 of whom are set to start student teaching this fall. But last month, the Trump administration abruptly terminated $600 million in grants for two federal teacher training programs, including the Teacher Quality Partnership Program. Without that money, the program will no longer be able to cover the cost of student teaching for current students or recruit new students.
In a letter terminating the grant, a US Department of Education official cited Trump’s order barring support for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and wrote that the grant provides funding for programs “that promote or take part in DEI initiatives or other initiatives that unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin or another protected characteristic,” or that violate civil rights law, or that conflict with the department’s policy “of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education.”
An abstract written when UMass Amherst applied for the grant stated that teachers will learn “anti-racist teaching pedagogy” and the first cohort would include 20 paraprofessionals “of color” — although, according to UMass, the first participants identify as white, Black, Hispanic, and multiracial. But according to the judge’s order pausing the cuts, every grant recipient received an identical letter regardless of the program’s content.
Also eliminated in the cut was a $5.9 million grant for Boston Public Schools to train bilingual educators. UMass Boston was finalizing an agreement to create a teacher residency program where educators could earn a master’s degree in special education with licensure in bilingual education while earning a stipend. Both these specialties are badly needed to close achievement gaps for English language learners and students with disabilities.
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Massachusetts last year had 5,200 teachers, around 7 percent of the state’s teachers, working in positions they were not fully certified for, according to the Learning Policy Institute. If the Trump administration really wants “excellence” in education, licensing teachers to work in districts prone to teacher shortages is a way to achieve it; cutting funding for teacher training is not.
More broadly, the president has shown a propensity for ending worthwhile projects midstream. These include funding for scientific research; for providing locally grown, healthy food to children in schools and child-care centers; and even, as the Globe reported, for a Boston theater director’s Fulbright grant to teach and conduct research in Colombia.
Campbell filed a lawsuit with seven other attorneys general challenging Trump’s elimination of the teacher preparation grants, arguing that committed funding cannot be terminated just because the administration changes priorities and the administration ignored proper procedures.
It’s one thing for the president to reprioritize grant programs moving forward. But if the administration refuses to adhere to the government’s prior commitments, a federal judge should force it to do so.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.
