- November 5, 2025: Education Week – “Billions of Federal Dollars Are Spent on Teacher Training. Less Than Half Goes to Tech PD” by Alyson Klein
https://www.edweek.org/technology/billions-of-federal-dollars-are-spent-on-teacher-training-less-than-half-goes-to-tech-pd/2025/11
K-12 schools are grappling with the expanding use of artificial intelligence-powered ed-tech tools, most are supporting programs to provide laptops or tablets for all students, and many teachers still have a lot to learn about how to integrate technology into instruction.
Yet less than half of states and districts direct federal professional development funding to technology-related training, concludes a report released Nov. 5 by the State Educational Technology Directors Association.
Only nine states currently ask districts to prioritize technology-related training in spending their share of the $2.2 billion Title II-A Supporting Effective Instruction grants. And fewer than 40 percent of districts use these funds to support technology-enabled professional learning, according to the SETDA report.
What’s more, few states or districts have a clear definition of what student-centered, technology-enabled instruction looks like, or a process for evaluating the impact of teaching with technology.
Ultimately, much federal professional development money goes to short-term workshops that might center around a particular tool, rather than financing the kind of sustained support that experts recommend if teachers are to be effective in using technology to transform their teaching, the report says.
One of the barriers to using Title II funds as effectively as possible: District and state leaders worry about running afoul of federal regulations, so they are less apt to try something new, said Ji Soo Song, SETDA’s director of projects and initiatives.
“Because Title II-A is such a long-standing program, a lot of things are being done out of compliance,” Song said. That “prevents us from thinking, especially in the age of AI, how we can help build educator capacity” with technology.
The report recommends states work with districts to clearly define what high-quality professional development on education technology looks like and establish more effective ways to measure its impact.
That would mean “making sure that we’re not tracking data just for compliance, but also in ways that we can drive improvement,” Song said.
Right now, many states will enumerate on how many educators participated in a particular training as opposed to asking and investigating questions like: “How did instruction change with ed tech as a result of this professional learning?” Song said.
The report also highlights some promising state initiatives designed to help districts get more value out of professional development funding.
For instance, Virginia has created a library of best practices to help districts learn from one another. And North Carolina and Utah each have a point person in their state education agencies to help facilitate AI implementation.
Federal teacher training money is on the chopping block
At the same time, funding for Title II-A—a program that has existed in federal law for decades—is now uncertain.
The Trump administration proposed eliminating the funding altogether in its fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, which is stalled in Congress.
A House Republican spending bill would follow through on the president’s recommendation to nix Title II-A. But the Senate’s version of the spending measure leaves the program intact.
Over the summer, the Trump administration also temporarily withheld money for Title II and other federal K-12 education programs that it is seeking to eliminate, before reversing course and releasing the funds.
“The future of federal funding when it comes to professional learning seems a little shaky right now,” Song said.
But the recommendations in the report can apply to any source of professional development funding, not just this particular pot of federal funding, Song explained.
The report’s recommendations were informed by surveys earlier this year of leaders who work with federal programs from 24 states and 76 districts as well as three focus groups of educators.
- November 5, 2025: Chalkbeat – “NY is mandating climate education. Will the state also fund it?” by Ananya Chetia
https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/11/05/new-york-mandates-climate-education/
New York will join its neighbors, New Jersey and Connecticut, mandating climate change education for all K-12 schools.
The Board of Regents, New York’s agency that oversees the state’s Education Department and supervises education policies, introduced an amendment this week that would implement climate education as a high school graduation requirement.
Back in July, the Board of Regents approved the “portrait of a graduate,” a framework redefining graduation requirements as the state moves away from relying on Regents exams by the 2027-28 school year. The climate change classes will be a new graduation requirement for high schools.
Grades 5-12 must add climate education to their programs by the 2027-28 school year, followed by grades K-4 a year later. (The amendment also mandates the addition of financial literacy a year before the climate education course requirements. New York City has made its own push for financial literacy.)
The proposed curriculum can be woven into existing courses, including subjects like social studies, health, and math or become a standalone course, officials said. The board provided a broad outline of what climate education entails: understanding what causes climate change, how it affects ecosystems and people, and the possible solutions to confront it.
“The proposed amendment provides districts with flexibility and how they implement climate education,” said Santosha Oliver, assistant commissioner for the Office of Standards and Instructional Programs under the state’s Education Department.
The state is behind its neighbor, New Jersey, which has funded millions since 2020 to support the state’s climate education mandate. Connecticut, Maryland, and states across the country like California, Colorado, and Washington have also made climate education compulsory.
Some climate organizations, however, are concerned about whether the state will adequately fund the initiative. The National Wildlife Federation’s Climate & Resilience Education Task Force Policy Committee, sent a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul in September, asking her to dedicate $536,500 for hiring staff within the state’s Education Department for the 2027 fiscal year. The task force designed the budget proposal in partnership with the Education Department.
This is the third year the task force has requested the funding.
“We’re talking about just over half a million dollars, which is 0.001% of the total education budget, and about the same amount of money that was given to a golf tournament last year,” said Emily Fano, the climate education director of the task force.
Hochul is expected to outline her budget plans in January at the State of the State address. Her office is aware of the amendment and will review it ahead of next year’s state budget, said Emma Wallner, spokesperson for the governor’s office.
After the governor endorsed Zohran Mamdani for mayor, Fano reached out to his campaign, hoping it could push the demand for funding. His team has not responded.
“[Mamdani] helped develop the green healthy schools platform. And so we thought that given that recent endorsement, that it would be really wonderful if he could whisper in her ear about this,” she said.
New York students have shown particular interest in climate education, with student enrollment surging from 52,000 to 140,000 between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic year, according to state Education Department data. Queens and Brooklyn saw the highest number of students enrolled in such courses.
“I have gotten so many calls … from students, students who have groups all over the state advocating for climate education,” said board member Frances Wills.
At the Harbor Middle School in Red Hook, Brooklyn, climate education has been at the forefront since its founding four years ago. Students grew 100 pounds of fresh produce and painted a mural about the state’s climate threatened bird species.
“The climate crisis cannot be solved by scientists alone,” said Lynn Shon, a teacher who co-founded the school. “Addressing the climate crisis requires a new kind of learning, a kind of learning that crosses disciplines and not only prepares students for the world they are inheriting, but gives students opportunities to act now.”
If passed, following a 60-day comment period, the change will take effect on March 25.
- November 5, 2025: The Hechinger Report – “Climate change ‘is the new liberal arts’: Colleges build environmental lessons into degrees” by Olivia Sanchez
https://hechingerreport.org/climate-change-is-the-new-liberal-arts-colleges-build-environmental-lessons-into-degrees/
University of California, San Diego, requires all students to learn about climate change, while other schools have added environmental sustainability requirements
LA JOLLA, Calif. — On a Thursday this fall, hundreds of students at the University of California, San Diego, were heading to classes that, at least on paper, seemed to have very little to do with their majors.
Hannah Jenny, an economics and math major, was on their way to a class on sustainable development. Angelica Pulido, a history major who aspires to work in the museum world, was getting ready for a course on gender and climate justice. Later that evening, others would show up for a lecture on economics of the environment, where they would learn how to calculate the answer to questions such as: “How many cents extra per gallon of gas are people willing to pay to protect seals from oil spills?”
Although most of these students don’t aspire to careers in climate science or advocacy, the university is betting that it’s just as important for them to understand the science and societal implications of climate change as it is for them to understand literature and history, even if they’re not planning to become writers or historians. UCSD is perhaps the first major public university in the country to require all undergraduate students to take a class on climate change to earn their degree.
The requirement, which rolled out with first-year students last fall, came about because UCSD leaders believe students won’t be prepared for the workforce if they don’t understand climate change. Around the globe, global warming is already causing severe droughts, water scarcity, fires, rising sea levels, flooding, storms and declining biodiversity; leaders at UCSD argue every job will be affected.
And even as President Donald Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax and cancels funding for research on it, other colleges are also exploring how to ensure students are knowledgeable about the subject. Arizona State University began requiring that students take a class in sustainability last year, while San Francisco State University added a climate justice class requirement to begin this fall.
“You can’t avoid climate change,” said Amy Lerner, a professor in the urban planning department at UCSD. “You can’t escape it in the private sector. You can’t escape it in the public sector. It’s just everywhere.” Students, she said, must be made ready to engage with all of its likely consequences.
UCSD, a public university that serves roughly 35,000 undergraduate students, is not demanding that everyone sign up for Climate Change 101. Instead, students can fulfill the requirement by taking any of more than 50 classes in at least 23 disciplines across the university, including sustainable development, the course Jenny is taking.
There’s also psychology of the climate crisis, religion and ecology, energy economics, and several classes in the environmental science and oceanography departments, among others. And leaders at the university are working to develop more classes that satisfy the requirement, including one on the life cycle of a computer.
Bryan Alexander, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and author of a book on higher education and the climate crisis, said that while colleges have long taught about climate change in classes related to ecology, climatology and environmental science, it’s only been in the last decade or so that he’s seen other disciplines tackle the topic.
Climate change, Alexander said, “is the new liberal arts” — and colleges should take it seriously.
K. Wayne Yang, a UCSD provost who served on the original group that advocated for the requirement, said every industry and career field will experience the effects of climate change in some way. Health care providers need to know how to treat people who have been exposed to extreme heat or wildfire smoke; psychologists need to understand climate anxiety; and café owners need to know how the price of coffee changes in response to droughts or other natural disasters in coffee-growing regions.
Jenny, the senior taking a class on sustainable development, is eager to get answers to a question that has, in their three years as an economics and mathematics major, become difficult not to ponder: How can economic growth be the silver bullet of societal change if it has so many negative consequences for the planet?
“It’s definitely my hope that this is a class that will teach me something new about how to consider humanity’s path forward without destroying this earth, without destroying each other, without sacrificing quality of life for any person on this planet,” Jenny said.
Jenny isn’t subject to the requirement because they entered college before it rolled out. But they said they like the idea of encouraging students to step outside their comfort zones and fields of study and, in many cases, consider their future career paths in the context of the changing climate.
Other students, like junior Pulido, don’t see a specific link between climate change and their future careers. Pulido, who has spent the last few years working in the visitors center at San Diego’s Balboa Park and aspires to work in museums, said she signed up for the gender and climate justice class simply because it sounded interesting to her. She believes climate change is important, and she’s hoping that taking this class will help give her a better idea of how its role in history and might play into her career.
Colleges are taking different approaches to teaching their students about climate change, with some requiring a course in sustainability, a broad discipline that goes beyond the specific scientific phenomenon of climate change.
At Arizona State, sustainability classes can cover anything about how human, social, economic, political and cultural choices affect human and environmental well-being generally, said Anne Jones, the university’s vice provost for undergraduate education.
Dickinson and Goucher colleges have had such requirements since 2015 and 2007, respectively.
At San Francisco State University, leaders said they instead chose to require climate justice for all students, beginning with the class of 2029, because of the urgency of understanding how climate change affects communities differently.
Students need to understand broader systems of oppression and privilege so that they can address the unequal effects of climate change for “communities of color, low-income communities, global south communities and other marginalized communities,” said Autumn Thoyre, co-director of Climate HQ, the university’s center for climate education, research and action.
Yang and other UCSD leaders believe that, despite the increased politicization of climate change under Trump, they’ve received little pushback on the new requirement because of the university’s reputation as a climate-concerned institution. (It descended from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, initially founded in 1903.) But this model may not work as well on other campuses.
In communities where people’s livelihoods depend on activities that contribute to climate change, like coal mining or oil production, educators may have to modify their approach so as to not come off as offensive or threatening, said Jo Tavares, director of the California Center for Climate Change Education at West Los Angeles College.
“Messaging is so important, and education cannot be done in a way that just forces facts upon people,” Tavares said.
At UCSD, to meet the graduation requirement, a course must be at least 30 percent about climate change: For example, a class that meets twice a week for a 10-week term must have at least six of its 20 sessions be about climate change. And the course syllabus must address at least two of the following four categories: the scientific aspects; human and social dimensions; project-based learning; or solutions.
The first time Lerner, the urban studies professor, applied for her sustainable development course to count toward the requirement, in July 2024, the committee told her she needed to better explain how the class addressed climate change. It wasn’t enough to simply have “sustainable” in the course name, committee members told her; she had to better articulate the role of climate change in sustainable development, a course she’s been teaching some version of for nearly 20 years.
Her students helped her go through the syllabus and identify all the points where she was teaching about how development contributes to climate change, even if she wasn’t explicitly putting those words to paper. After Lerner revised the descriptions of the class topics and made a few additions, the class was approved, she said.
On that fall Thursday, Lerner walked around her large glass-walled classroom while discussing development and globalization with the 65 undergraduate students in her sustainable development class. They covered how to balance equity, economy and environment in development, as well as various ways to measure the well-being of societies, including gross national income, food security, birthrate and infant mortality, happiness, fertility, education and lifespan. Lerner peppered her lecture with jokes and relatable examples, asking, for example, how many siblings students had before explaining the role of fertility and birth rate in a healthy society. (One student had 12, but the average was closer to two.)
Lerner, who now chairs the committee that decides which classes meet the requirement, said most of her students come in with the understanding that climate change is caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, and some have even used an online tool to calculate their own carbon footprints. Often, their education has been focused on the hard science aspect of climate change, but they haven’t learned about what society has experienced as a result of climate change, she said.
When she asks them what can be done about climate change, she said, “they’re deer in the headlights.”
Across campus, economics professor Mark Jacobsen teaches a lecture class every Thursday night on the economics of the environment. It meets the climate change requirement, but it also covers a core economics idea, he said: achieving efficiency.
Jacobsen is teaching students the formulas and methods they’ll need to answer questions like whether it’s worth it to spend $1 billion now to build renewable energy sources to avoid $10 billion in natural disaster cleanup in 30 years.
Though Jenny hasn’t taken Jacobsen’s class, this is exactly the type of dilemma they’re worried about.
Jenny, a public transit enthusiast so dedicated that they got a commercial driver’s license just to drive for Triton Transit, the campus bus system, said the requirement encourages students to face the climate crisis rather than shy away from it.
“It can be easy to kind of put your head down and be like, ‘That is too big for me to think about, and too scary,’” Jenny said. But it’s imperative, they added, that students be “forced to reckon with it and think about it and talk about it, to have that knowledge kind of swirling around in your head.”
