The Zoom call was supposed to be a regular check-in for the team at Boston University. They’d wrapped up work on a massive, federally funded study on learning to read by developing a system to detect when kids are having trouble with literacy and get them help immediately. The team was just waiting for the data on the early warning system to be analyzed.

But one of the professors, Nancy Nelson, interrupted the call. She had just gotten an email: The Trump administration was canceling the study — the largest experiment on reading ever funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm.

The study had been 6 1/2 years in the making, and results were scheduled to be released in a matter of months. Ninety-three percent of the funds had already been spent. But the Trump Administration was saying the $41 million project was over. Three years of data, collected from more than 100 elementary schools in seven states, was being shelved.

Carol Dissen, a teacher trainer on the Boston University team, was stunned. She never expected it, “never in a million years.” She thought about all the students she believes would have benefited from the early warning system, and the tears flowed.

Disadvantaged kids “rely on our school system in order to change the trajectory of their lives,” Dissen said, still choking up as she recalled the February meeting months later. “We worked hard for three years to show that it works and that you can make a change for those students. And to hear that the data wasn’t going to be analyzed and shared, it’s devastating — absolutely devastating.”

If it hadn’t been for legal action, the results of the study on the early warning system might never have been released. But in response to a lawsuit filed by two research associations, lawyers for the Trump administration said in June that it would voluntarily reinstate the contract for the study on learning to read — a concession it argued should allow the administration to go forward with its other deep cuts to education research.

Read the full article about saving this study on learning to read by Christopher Peak at The Hechinger Report.