Teacher training grants at the University of Minnesota and the University of St. Thomas have been terminated again, following an April 4 order from the U.S. Supreme Court.
The universities were notified in February that their teacher training grants from the federal government had been terminated, as part of a mass grant cancellation from the U.S. Department of Education. In March, a district judge in Maryland ordered the Department of Education to reinstate the grants.
But early this week, the universities were notified that the grants have again been terminated.
“It’s just total disappointment,” said Danaya Franke, director of NXT GEN Teach at the University of Minnesota.
In a statement, the University of St. Thomas said it was “disappointed but not surprised” by the court’s decision, and was “examining its options.”
“In the meantime, as it has since February when it was originally informed of these grant terminations, St. Thomas’ School of Education remains focused on supporting all impacted students and helping to address the shortage of teachers in Minnesota’s school districts,” the university said.
Between the two universities, three teacher-training grants have been canceled, totalling nearly $12 million. The University of Minnesota’s grant was designed to support a teacher apprenticeship program in rural, urban and suburban districts.
The grants at St. Thomas support grow-your-own programs in Minneapolis Public Schools and St. Paul Public Schools; charter school teachers earning a special education license; and classroom teachers throughout the state gaining professional licensure.
If completed, the grants would have trained more than 500 teachers, many in special education, an area in which Minnesota and many other states are experiencing a teacher shortage.
Franke still plans to launch her teacher apprenticeship program in the fall, and praised the University of Minnesota for its institutional support. But the program may now be scaled back.
She is now planning to launch the program in at least four districts throughout the state, rather than the seven she was expecting in February before the grant was terminated. She still hopes others will join and is in conversation with additional districts, she said. But the confusion from the government slowed down the process.
“This caused harm. This confuses people. This creates a lack of trust,” she said. “This is not a solution to the teacher shortage.”
From the Supreme Court to Minnesota universities
The Supreme Court’s ruling trickled down to Minnesota universities after a multistep legal process. A coalition of eight states, which did not include Minnesota, filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts to challenge the grant terminations. Separately, professional associations including the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the National Center for Teacher Residencies, which count the U and St. Thomas among their members, filed a similar lawsuit in Maryland.
Judges in both Massachusetts and Maryland ordered the grants to be reinstated on a temporary basis as the lawsuits continued. The ruling in the Maryland case included the reinstatement of grants at the U and St. Thomas. The Department of Education appealed in both cases. The appeal in the Massachusetts case quickly made its way to the Supreme Court.
On April 4, the Supreme Court issued an order on its emergency docket granting the Department of Education a stay of the Massachusetts judge’s order. That means the government can proceed with terminating the teacher training grants while the appeal process continues.
In an unsigned opinion, five of the court’s conservative justices — Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas — said the government was likely to prevail in its claim that the district court judge lacked authority to order the payment of funds under the Administrative Procedure Act. The Administrative Procedure Act is the law that governs the actions of federal agencies like the Department of Education.
The justices said a more appropriate forum to seek payment from a contract would be the Court of Federal Claims. But the conservative justices also expressed doubt that the states would suffer any harm from the grant cancellations.
And if respondents instead decline to keep the programs operating, then any ensuing irreparable harm would be of their own making.
Unsigned opionion from Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas
“Respondents have represented in this litigation that they have the financial wherewithal to keep their programs running,” they wrote. “So, if respondents ultimately prevail, they can recover any wrongfully withheld funds through suit in an appropriate forum. And if respondents instead decline to keep the programs operating, then any ensuing irreparable harm would be of their own making.”
Though the court’s opinion was unsigned, it said Chief Justice John Roberts would have denied the application — that is, he would not have allowed the government to terminate the grants at this stage. The court’s liberal justices filed two dissents, one by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, the other by Elena Kagan.
Both Kagan and Jackson noted that the government had not defended its legal ability to cancel the grants.
“One would expect the Government to vigorously maintain that the Department was legally entitled to all but eliminate two grant programs that Congress established a decade ago,” Jackson wrote. “But in this Court, the Government offers no defense against the Plaintiff States’ claim that the Department’s erasure of the grants at issue was arbitrary and capricious.”
Jackson also noted that while part of the Trump administration’s legal logic appeared rooted in his executive order against diversity, equity, and inclusion, the statutes authorizing these grants “expressly contemplate that grant recipients will train educators on teaching ‘diverse populations’ in ‘traditionally underserved’ schools.”
“It would be manifestly arbitrary and capricious for the Department to terminate grants for funding diversity-related programs that the law expressly requires,” she wrote.
Jackson questioned her colleagues’ decision to allow the Trump administration to cancel the grants on the emergency docket for a case that, for the government, was not an emergency. She enumerated harms already caused by the grant cancellations: the firing of multiple full-time employees at Boston Public Schools; the cancellation of the teacher-residency program at the College of New Jersey; the termination of financial support for more than 70 aspiring teachers in California.
“Indeed, other than paving the way for the Plaintiff States’ immediate suffering, it appears that the primary effect of today’s emergency stay is to hand the Government an early ‘win’ — a notch in its belt at the start of a legal battle in which the long-term prospects for its eventual success seem doubtful,” she wrote.
On April 10, the U.S. Court of Appeals issued a stay in the Maryland case, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling. Then, early this week, the Department of Education notified the U and St. Thomas that it had again terminated their teacher training grants.
No harm?
The Supreme Court’s logic relied on the idea that no irreparable harm would come from cancelling the grants. But that reasoning rang hollow to people at the universities hoping to train more teachers.
Samuel Carlson, a student teacher resident earning a special education master’s degree at St. Thomas, described the legal logic as “silly.”
“People are not going to have the same resources that they had the day prior, which will immediately cause harm,” Carlson said. “It’s a really weird consideration on what happens when people’s resources get taken away. If you were driving a car and someone took away your car, did that hurt your chances of getting to work?”
The federal grant funding covered Carlson’s tuition for most of the school year. When the grant was initially canceled in February, St. Thomas told students that it would fund the rest of their spring tuition, but they’d have to come up with their own funds for their summer classes. After the grant was reinstated in March, Carlson hoped his summer tuition would be covered as well. But now he’s not sure what will happen.
“I’d like a mental break from thinking about how I’m going to complete the year,” Carlson said. “The harm is definitely psychological as well as monetary.”
In a statement, St. Thomas said that it had previously told students the March reinstatement “would possibly allow funding through the summer.”
“At this time, the status for funding through the summer is unknown, but the university is continuing to examine its options,” St. Thomas said.
Franke hopes the appeal process will prevail and the funds will be reinstated in a timely manner. In the meantime, she plans to forge ahead with her teacher apprenticeship program. But she may have to cut some of its more innovative aspects to train and retain teachers.
For example, she said, she’ll have to reexamine whether she can still hire a full-time recruiter to work one-on-one with interested teacher candidates, an adviser to help coach teachers-in-training, and professional development funds for teachers helping to train their apprentices.
“The innovative parts of it are the things that will have to go away, and then we’re back at where we were,” she said. “And we all know that where we were was a critical teacher shortage that had no solution.”
