Jan Resseger has some good news– a federal judge has thrown out Linda McMahon’s declaration that teachers aren’t professionals. A good explainer of the decision. Reposted with permission.
Phew! A federal judge has declared that Linda McMahon and her Department of Education cannot reclassify teachers as nonprofessionals and thereby reduce the federal loans that enable them to earn advanced degrees.
Education Week‘s Matthew Stone reported last week: “The U.S. Department of Education violated the law when it set a definition of “professional” graduate degree that excluded education and several other fields, a federal judge has ruled. The Wednesday ruling from Judge Beryl Howell came in response to lawsuits from professional health care organizations and the National Education Association that challenged the agency’s May regulation limiting the definition of ‘professional’ degrees to just 11 mostly doctoral-level degrees.”
Why did Judge Howell rule the Department of Education’s list of professional degrees unconstitutional? Stone explains: “According to Howell, an appointee of President Barack Obama, the Education Department didn’t have the authority to narrow the definition to those 11 degrees. ‘Congress did not direct the Department to evaluate and update the regulatory definition … with any new eligibility criteria, let alone five material changes to the statutorily adopted regulatory definition,’ she wrote in a 52-page opinion.”
What will happen now that Judge Howell has voided the rule that omits education degrees from professional status? In her recent decision, Judge Howell directed the Education Department to develop a new list of professional degrees, leaving the outcome unclear: “Whether education fields join the ‘professional’ degree ranks is uncertain. Howell set aside the Education Department’s new definition of professional degree and told the agency to… effectively develop a new list of degrees that qualify for the higher borrowing cap.”
Some background The Trump administration’s reclassification of teachers and nurses as nonprofessionals was a response to the “One Big Beautiful Bill”(OBBB) which set caps on the amount of federal loans for graduate school and allowed people earning professional degrees to take on larger loans. Stone explains: “Congress didn’t define a ‘professional’ degree…. (I)nstead it referred to a regulatory definition dating back to 2007 that mentioned 10 degrees—including pharmacy, dentistry, podiatry, theology, and law—as examples as those that could qualify but didn’t include an exhaustive list. When the Education Department developed its regulations this year to implement the new borrowing caps, though, it limited the definition of professional degree to include 11 degrees, excluding fields such as education and nursing.”
Back in the fall when the changes were being considered, Jessica Blake reported for Inside Higher Education that the Trump administration hoped to reduce the overall cost of graduate school education by setting limits on federal student loans: “(B)etween 2000 and 2024, the median net tuition and fees among graduate degree programs have more than tripled and the median debt principal among graduate borrowers has grown from $34,000 to $50,000. The Trump administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill say that results from a lack of limits on federal loans. They argue that with essentially unlimited graduate loans, colleges and universities have no incentive to keep costs low and students are convinced to take out more debt than they can handle.”
It is impossible to know why the U.S. Department of Education would create a rule that disregards the professional status of the over three million teachers who serve the students in the institution it oversees. Perhaps it was merely a thoughtless bureaucratic oversight—the unconscious use of an old list of different professionals. One factor seems to be that teachers are certified with only a four year degree. Stone explains: “The department said education didn’t qualify because entry-level teaching positions only require a bachelor’s degree.” Of course many administrative positions and teacher specialties require advanced degrees.
If Howell’s court decision is appealed and eventually overturned, the omission of education degrees from professional status will pose financial challenges for candidates seeking advanced degrees and undermine teachers in other ways. Stone quotes Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, the president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education: “Given the significant shortages across multiple professional roles in education, and the lower salaries that educators can expect compared to other professionals, it is essential that those pursuing these careers have access to the most affordable forms of credit….” Stone describes another worry: that the OBBB limits borrowing for part-time graduate students. Many students seeking advanced degrees in education earn advanced degrees one class at a time while they work full time in schools.
Inside Higher Education‘s Blake describes others who worry that the new rule, if appealed and overturned, “will force more students—particularly low-income, first generation students and students of color—to depend on the private loan market (which) could mean higher interest rates and more debt to be paid off…. Some, especially those with low credit scores or no credit history, might not be able to access any loan and then wouldn’t be able to pursue certain degrees.”
Blake insists that the Education Department’s new classifications were merely technical and would likely be understood solely as a response to federal loan qualification: “Education Department officials repeatedly said during the negotiations that the narrow definition reflected Congress’s intent—to limit federal spending on graduate student loans.” Another kind of damage would, however, inevitably follow the reclassification of teachers as nonprofessionals. A word’s evolving definition across our society cannot be limited by one federal department’s technical understanding.
What may begin as a word’s technical definition is likely slip away as language evolves through common usage. The public may not grasp, for example, that Linda McMahon defined the term “nonprofessional” to mean that the graduate student in question is not headed toward a PhD. A technical, bureaucratic word usage like this may, in fact, come to reinforce what has been for years been a mass of old derogatory stereotypes—that teachers are a really just babysitters—that, as No Child Left Behind told us, the problem is teachers’ low-expectations—that aggregate standardized test scores are lagging because teachers are failing. When the Department of Education, which exists to uphold education across the states, fails to respect teachers, it just feels like more policy created by politicians who have little understanding of what teachers do, and who fail to grasp he daily challenges and stress that teachers experience, especially in our era when public schools are inadequately funded, salaries are low, and classes are too large.
When the Department of Education creates the new list of professional degrees which Judge Howell has demanded, all of the graduate school degrees in education—to further the academic preparation of school counselors, school psychologists, school principals, school superintendents, English as a Second Language teachers, school librarians, and special education teachers among other specialties—ought to be defined as professional and qualify for professional level student loans.