Weekly Update

A newsletter from The Hechinger Report

In this week's edition: Here’s what changed in 2025 under the Trump administration across colleges and universities, K-12 schools, early education and education research — and what it has all meant. In Lubbock County, Texas, parents say racist incidents are going unchecked after the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights retreated from investigating schools. Plus, South Africa is picking up lessons from the U.S. in early childhood development as the country invests in high-quality programs.

_{President Donald Trump signs an executive order aimed at closing the Education Department at the White House in March. Credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images}

The Trump effect on education in 2025

Even with a conservative think tank’s blueprint detailing how the second Trump administration should reimagine the federal government’s role in education, few might have predicted what actually materialized this year for America’s schools and colleges.

Or what might be yet to come.

“2025 will go down as a banner year for education: the year we restored merit in higher education, rooted out waste, fraud and abuse, and began in earnest returning education to the states,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon told The Hechinger Report. She listed canceling K-12 grants she called wasteful, investing more in charter schools, ending college admissions that consider race or anything beyond academic achievement and making college more affordable as some of the year’s accomplishments.

“Best of all,” she said, “we’ve begun breaking up the federal education bureaucracy and returning education control to parents and local communities. These are reforms conservatives have championed for decades — and in just 12 months, we’ve made them a reality.”

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11 numbers that capture the Trump effect on education

Here’s a look at some key data points from the first year of Trump’s second term that represent the outsized effect this presidency has had on the nation’s educational institutions and the people within them.

Students, parents and educators on the new Trump administration’s first year

We asked people around the country what a shifting federal footprint on education policies meant for them and their communities.

Trump administration makes good on many Project 2025 education goals

This year meant rollbacks of DEI initiatives, student loan forgiveness and gender-related policies, all part of the conservative blueprint.

Probes into racism in schools stall under Trump

The meeting of the local NAACP chapter began with a prayer — and then the litany of injustices came pouring out.

A Black high school football player was called a “b—h-ass” n-word during a game by white players in September with no consequence, his mom said. A Black 12-year-old boy, falsely accused last December of touching a white girl’s breast, was threatened and interrogated by a police officer at school without his parents and sentenced to a disciplinary alternative school for a month, his grandfather recounted. A Black honors student was wrongly accused by a white teacher of having a vape (it was a pencil sharpener) and sentenced to the alternative school for a month this fall, her mom said.

“They’re breaking people,” said Phyllis Gant, a longtime leader of the NAACP chapter in this northwest Texas city, referring to local schools’ treatment of Black children. “It’s just open season on our students.”

Just last year, there was hope that the racial climate at Lubbock-area schools might improve. The federal government had launched civil rights investigations after several alleged incidents of racial bullying shocked the community and made national headlines. In fall 2024, a resolution seemed to be in sight: An investigator from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was planning to visit the area, community members said, for what they hoped would be a final round of interviews before the agency put in place a set of protections negotiated with the Lubbock-Cooper school district.

Then the 2024 presidential election happened — and the visit didn’t. In March, the Trump administration closed seven of the Education Department’s 12 regional civil rights enforcement offices, including the one in Dallas, which had been investigating complaints about Lubbock. Emails from the lawyer representing the families to the federal investigator bounced back — like hundreds of other OCR employees, she had been terminated.

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What the US can teach other countries about home-based child care

South Africa is among those picking up lessons as the country invests in high-quality programs.

Each day, nearly 70 percent of the world’s children are cared for and educated by adults other than their parents in home-based settings, many of which are informal and run by women.

Reading list

OPINION: Beyond DEI offices, colleges are dismantling all kinds of programs related to equity

Shuttering a student-run magazine in Alabama is the latest blow to fighting tyranny

Tracking Trump: His actions on education

The president is working to eliminate the Education Department and fighting ‘woke’ ideology in schools. A week-by-week look at what he’s done

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