Trump admin wants Congress to end ‘anti-racist’ teacher training grants to universities

The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal asks Congress to eliminate the Teacher Quality Partnership Program, which has spent millions of tax dollars on “anti-racist teaching,” among other things.

The program funds training for teachers through discretionary grants to historically black colleges and universities, tribally controlled colleges and universities, minority serving institutions, and educational agencies. 

“Teacher training which promotes woke dogma has undermined an ethos of hard work and personal responsibility, nurtured notions of grievance and victimhood, and eroded trust with a huge swath of students and families,” American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess told The College Fix when asked about the grants.

Since 2016, the Education Department has disbursed millions of dollars to universities through this program. During the Biden administration, some of the grants went to hiring teachers based on their race and to promoting what some have described as “divisive” progressive ideologies.

For example, the program awarded nearly $5.8 million in 2024 to California State University at Monterey Bay to “diversify the teaching workforce” by recruiting, training, and supporting “certified BIPOC teachers.” BIPOC stands for black, indigenous, people of color.

Other grants reviewed by The Fix on the department’s website, such as those awarded to American University and University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2023, emphasized “anti-racist teaching” in their project descriptions.

Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Budget and Management, requested that the $70 million program be removed from the 2026 budget in a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee in May.

While the Trump administration already cut the program’s 2025 funding, the president’s proposed budget aims to eliminate it entirely next year.

Vought wrote that the program “weaponized” federal taxpayer dollars to train teachers on “divisive ideologies.” Training materials included “inappropriate and unnecessary” topics such as Critical Race Theory, DEI, social justice activism, and white privilege, he wrote.

One product of the program has been academic consultants, or “trainers.” That role is much to blame for the “toxic agendas” that have “cropped up” in schools across the nation, political scientist Frederick Hess wrote in a Fordham Institute article in March.

His article cited several examples of trainers promoting controversial ideas. These include when Loudoun County, Virginia teachers were instructed that America is a “race-based white-supremacist society,” and when teachers in Eau Claire, Wisconsin were told that parents are not “entitled to know their kids’ [gender] identities.”

Hess, a senior fellow in education policy at AEI, told The Fix in an email Monday that the federal government shouldn’t fund the programs because the “lion’s share” don’t actually improve teaching, and the field is “shot through with politicization masquerading as pedagogy.”

When asked how he’d respond to those who say cutting the program could exacerbate the teacher shortage, Hess told The Fix: “I’d chuckle. To paraphrase Twain, notions of a teacher shortage are greatly exaggerated. The problem is that lots of teachers leave the field because they feel unsafe and disrespected … and because STEM professionals don’t want to endure Mickey Mouse courses to become educators.”

“These programs, with their disdain for discipline and tough grading, and their embrace of faddish nonsense, are a big part of the problem,” he said.

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education criticized the cuts in a statement in May, calling them “a clear effort to instill injustices and inequalities in the American education experience.”

“Eliminating funding for this vital work threatens student success, weakens community education systems, and undermines the nation’s long-term educational progress,” it stated.

The Fix emailed the association’s media relations office twice for comment on the Trump admin’s budget request, but it did not respond.

The American Federation of Teachers union also criticized the cuts on its website earlier this year, arguing they are exacerbating an already bad teacher shortage.

But others also have spoken out against the taxpayer-funded program.

Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, told The Fix that the Constitution gives the federal government “no authority” to fund teachers’ professional development.

The government’s involvement is “almost certain to fuel a culture war because education is inherently about shaping young minds, including inculcation of values,” McCluskey told The Fix in a recent email.

When asked about the program cuts and teacher shortage, he told The Fix that is not “constitutionally” a concern of the federal government.

“Washington can only get the money to expand the teaching by taking it from taxpayers, money that would otherwise be with people who live in school districts and states,” he said.

“If having more or differently trained teachers is important to a state or district it could pay for that itself, and without burning a bunch of money off in federal bureaucracy,” McCluskey said.

The Fix also contacted several recipients of the grants, including the Center for Collaborative Education and the Southwest Center for Educator Excellence, to ask about the effectiveness of the program and the ramifications of the cuts. None responded.

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