Dear Commons Community,

The Trump administration has terminated hundreds of federal grants awarded to advance STEM education in K-12 schools, colleges and universities—a move that educators and experts say will eliminate important sources of science teacher training, learning opportunities for students, and research into best instructional practices.

These cuts come as part of a broader package of grant cancellations at the National Science Foundation, an agency that is a major funder of science and engineering research. In April, the agency canceled more than 1,100 awards, which the Department of Government Efficiency called “wasteful DEI grants” in a post on X.   As reported by Education Week.

More than 400 of these grants were under the NSF’s directorate for STEM Education, according to a database maintained by researchers at Harvard University and the nonprofit rOpenSci.

Among the projects canceled: an after-school robotics program for middle school girls in Chicago, an initiative to expand access for students of color and low-income students to higher-level math courses in Milwaukee public schools, and a research project to recruit and train more computer science teachers from underrepresented groups in California.

Then, this week, NSF staff were told to pause all future grant awards “until further notice,” the journal Nature reported. This directive came after leadership at the agency instructed staff to screen all new proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities.”

Going forward, grants awarded by NSF shouldn’t “preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups,” the agency’s former director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, wrote in a statement on April 18 before stepping down the following week.

Projects focused on misinformation or disinformation will also no longer receive funding, according to a “frequently asked questions” document on the NSF website. An agency spokesperson declined to comment on a request for further information about how the foundation chose which grants to terminate.

The cancellations could have big ripple effects in K-12 schools, said Christine Royce, a past president of the National Science Teaching Association, and a professor of STEM education at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

“We’ve had a longstanding history of having different types of money support teacher development [in STEM],” she said.

The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite prompted investment in teacher training and science curriculum development, a response to fears that American students wouldn’t be prepared to compete in science fields on the world stage. In the 1990s, the federally funded Eisenhower programs provided classroom resources for math and science teachers until Congress cut them in the mid-2000s.

“We’ve seen dropoffs over time when money has been reduced but not eliminated, where … there’s evidence that shows fewer teachers can attend a conference, or not as many teachers can attend a summer program,” Royce said. “I think with this next step of what’s happening, it will have a significant impact.”

Cuts target grants deemed to be connected to diversity, equity, and inclusion

The NSF has several grant programs designed to support work that directly affects teaching and learning.

Computer Science for All awards, for instance, support research and partnerships that help train K-12 teachers to teach computer science and computational thinking. Discovery Research Pre-K-12 grants fund research into STEM learning. The Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program helps recruit, prepare, and retain science and math teachers in high-need districts.

In applying for these grants, as with all NSF grant competitions, researchers are required to outline their proposals’ broader impacts—their “potential to benefit society,” as described on the NSF website. There are many ways for researchers to meet these criteria, but one is through furthering inclusion of underrepresented minorities in STEM—a goal that Congress has required the NSF to address since the 1980s, and one that some Republicans have taken aim at over the past year.

In October, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas—then the ranking Republican on the Senate’s commerce, science, and transportation committee, which oversees NSF—spearheaded a report claiming that the Biden administration had “politicized” science and identifying 3,483 grants that he claimed went to “questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.”

Slightly more than half of the terminated grants were on the Cruz list, according to the database maintained by researchers at Harvard University and rOpenSci.

An analysis of the grants in Cruz’s report by ProPublica earlier this year found that many had nothing to do with DEI themes. Research into biodiversity of plants, for example, seemed to have been flagged for including the word “diversity.”

Some, though, sought to expand participation of underrepresented students in STEM, or use science to investigate problems in students’ communities—goals that the researchers say can get more children to engage in the subject.

“If we can make science relevant to students’ lives, it really broadens how they see themselves,” said Tammie Visintainer, an assistant professor of teacher education at San Jose State University in California.

Visintainer’s $786,285 grant, which trained teachers to help students research the causes and effects of urban heat islands in their communities, was canceled on April 18. Cruz had targeted her work in his 2024 report for her focus on “climate justice”—the idea that low-income communities and communities of color disproportionately feel the effects of climate change, and that policy changes can mitigate those effects.

But her grant doesn’t target specific groups of students over others, she said—her program is open to any classroom, and she doesn’t pick the schools or students.

Teachers participate in a 10-day summer institute that digs into the science behind extreme heat in urban areas, explores community-based solutions, and helps educators create curricular units to use with their students.

“There’s this big need for climate science education that puts students in positions of agency and action,” Visintainer said. Experts say that children need opportunities to work through their emotions about the topic, which can often feel overwhelming and scary, while also having a solid understanding of the science behind how climate change occurs.

On a topic like climate change, NSF-funded workshops might have given teachers an opportunity for professional learning they wouldn’t have otherwise seen—most teachers don’t get training in how to teach the topic, a 2022 EdWeek Research Center survey found.

But even in subjects that are more commonly covered in science professional development, grants that fund the dissemination of the latest research to teachers and students play an important role in science education, said Royce, the former NSTA president.

“New science is happening every year, and it’s being released every week,” she said. “By the time it catches up with the medium, whether it’s a printed textbook or an online textbook, there’s going to be a delay.”

Among the grants canceled by NSF was a project  that I was a research associate on at Borough Manhattan Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center related to students with special needs in STEM courses delivered via online learning.  This was a five-year grant that was to run through 2029.

Tony