Milwaukee’s National Public Radio affiliate, WUWM-FM/89.7, put the spotlight on a UW–Madison teacher residency program that is designed to place special education teachers in the Milwaukee Public Schools — but that was halted last month by the Trump administration. Funding for the program has since been reinstated by a federal judge, but its future remains uncertain pending additional legal action.
The U.S. Department of Education announced in February it had cut $600 million in grant funding to train educators, despite the fact that there is a shortage of teachers and special education teachers across the country and in every corner of Wisconsin.
The program reported on by NPR is led by Kimber Wilkerson and Beverly Trezek, who are professors with the UW–Madison School of Education’s Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education. The yearlong residency program was designed to produce three cohorts of students over three years for a total of 36 licensed special education teachers.
The NPR report explained that a judge in Massachusetts put a temporary stop to Trump administration actions cutting programs like UW-Madison’s in eight states. However, everyone is still in limbo as that temporary order expires this week.
The NPR report adds: “The funding uncertainty has a direct impact on students: MPS chief of school administration Michael Harris says the district’s vacancies in special education outnumber all other teacher vacancies combined.”
The report goes on to quote John Carlos Sanger, a current UW–Madison student in the program who is on track to graduate with a master’s degree this spring and teach at MPS in the fall.
“I don’t see how this helps students who are in wheelchairs, or blind, or deaf, or have autism, or who have learning disabilities,” Sanger tells NPR. “How does this service them? And if they’re not being serviced, do you think they just go away?”
He adds: “None of the people who have decided to cut this funding have any understanding of the impact (of) that funding. Because they didn’t study this long enough to make that determination. What I would like is for the government to remember its job, which is to help facilitate serving its people. And that’s what I do, and that’s what I want to do for a living.”
Check out the full NPR report here.