When Laureen Avery received notice in September that the Trump administration was canceling the professional development grant she was using to help train hundreds of teachers, she was devastated.
“I lost my job, my whole staff lost our job, and we had 300-plus teachers enrolled in a program where we had been working with them for years, with a promise of seeing them through certification,” said Avery, whose ExcEL Leadership Academy program was training teachers in Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Washington state to teach English learners. “We had to turn around and tell people overnight, ‘I’m sorry, the funding is gone, there’s nothing we can do about it.’”
The nearly $3 million grant from the US Department of Education to UCLA, which oversaw the Pawtucket-based program, was abruptly canceled, along with more than two dozen others from the National Professional Development program. The National Education Association, a teachers union with 3 million members, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in Rhode Island federal court last week, saying the grant was canceled because it was “not in the best interest of the federal government.” The suit references 28 canceled grants across the country, including one in Brockton, Mass.
The cancellations were among a wider group of $600 million in grants that the Trump administration wiped out last year, calling them “divisive teacher training grants” that were promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
In Avery’s case, the cancellation letter focused on course descriptions from their grant application five years prior, some of which contained the words “social justice.” On appeal, she offered to remove the phrasing, but was denied.
The Education Department said the program reflected priorities from the Biden administration, according to a copy of the letter denying her appeal.
“There’s such an urgent need and shortage for qualified teachers who can work effectively with English learners,” Avery said. “Teachers need training to be able to work effectively with them, and the training is in short supply, and teachers to staff those classrooms are in short supply, while the number of English learners in our schools continues to skyrocket.” (ExcEL is not connected to Excel Academy, the charter school system in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.)
The lawsuit says thousands of teachers were impacted by the grant cancellations, which “inflicted a structural blow to the bilingual and ESL educator workforce.”
The suit describes the National Professional Development program as “the primary federal response to a chronic, worsening national shortage of ESL and bilingual educators.”
The suit says when the grants were cancelled, teachers dropped out of certification programs or had to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for other programs so they could continue with their education.
The shortage of educators certified to teach English learners, also known as multilingual learners, has previously caused the Department of Justice to crack down on both Providence and Boston, accusing their public school districts of violating the civil rights of children learning English. In both cases, the remedy primarily centered around getting more teachers certified to teach those students. (The Trump administration closed its formal monitoring of both school districts last May.)
Now, the administration’s actions have put the brakes on efforts to get those teachers certified, the lawsuit argues.
“I had spent many years on behalf of the federal government trying to get teachers to get ESL certified,” said Amy Romero, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. She previously worked for the US Attorney’s office in Rhode Island, where she enforced the DOJ settlement in Providence.
The US Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment on the new lawsuit. But in a press release in February 2025, the agency said the institutions and nonprofits that would lose grants were “using taxpayer funds to train teachers and education agencies on divisive ideologies.”
The ideologies included teaching about racial bias, equity, and gender-based discrimination.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs suggest the federal government used artificial intelligence tools to find keywords, prompting the cancellations, rather than a wholesale review of the programs.
“This theory is highly plausible given the defendants’ stated rationales for termination, which reflect pattern-matching on terminology rather than substantive analysis,” the lawsuit says. “Defendants have never provided a clear definition of the ‘social justice’ speech they disfavor.”
The lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of violating the First Amendment’s ban on the government abridging freedom of speech, and also of violating the Administrative Procedures Act by cancelling grants from a program approved by Congress.
A hearing date has not yet been set in the case.
Avery said she established a nonprofit to “pick up the pieces” of the ExcEL program, which is still educating a smaller number of teachers, cobbling together funding from tuition, fundraising and a grant from the Rhode Island Foundation.
Without her job at UCLA, she now earns a much smaller salary running the nonprofit, she said. She hopes to keep the program going, as the benefits to English learners who have qualified teachers are innumerable, she said.
“The benefits to families, to communities, to the workforce — pick your metric," Avery said. “It’s so important, and it’s something we know how to fix.”
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