'Back to the Dark Ages': Education Research Staggered by Trump Cuts
The Trump administration’s dramatic strike at U.S. education research had been underway for months before Mark Warschauer learned that his own work would become a casualty.
The renowned education professor at the University of California, Irvine, had spent years studying how the newest technologies can be used to improve English language instruction. His latest efforts, funded through the National Science Foundation, aimed to create a series of bilingual Spanish-English e-books that would use artificial intelligence to guide young readers through each text and prompt them with questions.
But in the last week of April, he learned that the supporting grant for the project had been cancelled, along with hundreds of others issued by NSF’s education division, at the direction of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The substantial majority of the cuts, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, targeted education studies like those conducted at Irvine’s Digital Learning Lab, which Warschauer directs.
The professor grew more concerned as he considered the possible consequences of DOGE’s moves. He spent the last few years helping design programs that fostered parent-child reading within families of English learners, even partnering with PBS Kids on a set of AI-powered videos that measurably improved students’ science knowledge. The results had been impressive. But without federal dollars, they couldn’t realistically be sustained, let alone expanded.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/back-dark-ages-education-research-103000138.html
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