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Washington Update

This Week: A New Name on the OSERS Door, Two Days Left on EDGAR, a Court Ruling on the TQP and SEED Cuts, and a Contest for the Top Democratic Seat on Education

September 21, 2026

Friends and colleagues,

Staying on brand, we have a lot to cover so let’s jump right in,  here is what was going on this week: a leadership change at OSERS right as its staff moved to HHS, a Wednesday deadline on the grants rule that sits behind every award you hold, a federal court ruling on the 2025 TQP and SEED terminations, a contest among House education Democrats, an old friend of a bill back in the hopper, a very quiet civil rights data release, and the first real contract language on AI in classrooms.

If you only have five minutes this week, spend them on EDGAR. Comments close Wednesday, and I pulled every resource you need into one place..

1. OSERS Has a New Lead, and Its Staff Have a New Address

Here is the skinny. On Wednesday, September 9, Kelly Rogers told staff she was resigning as Deputy Assistant Secretary and Acting Assistant Secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, effective that Friday, September 11, to return home to Florida. She had been in the job since late May. NPR had it first, and the timing is the story: the announcement came less than a day before nearly all OSERS staff were scheduled to start moving over to HHS under the interagency agreement signed in June. Politico put the number at more than 100 staff that week.

So who is in charge? Kirsten Baesler, the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, took over OSERS on September 14. I went looking for the paper trail and there isn't much of one. Meaning no press release so far and she is serving as Acting, not permanent in that role, so it’s likely you will see a shift. The Department's organizational chart dated September 16 lists Baesler in the OSERS box, with the Principal Deputy slot sitting vacant. Which means one person is now (it seems, for now) carrying both the K-12 office and the special education office, while most of the special education staff now are working in HHS (the building is almost directly across from the old Department of Ed building for reference). 
 

2. EDGAR: Comments Close Wednesday

If you have been meaning to get to this one, this is your week. The Department's proposed rewrite of EDGAR, the rulebook behind every Department of Education grant (yours included), closes for comment this Wednesday, September 23. The Federal Register count stood at 891 comments over the weekend. Remember, there are four pieces that matter most for our field: new authority to terminate awards "for convenience"; a looser standard for continuation awards; a competitive preference for applicants who charge less than their negotiated indirect cost rate; and frontloading, which obligates the full multi-year cost of an award up front and shrinks the number of awards a competition can make.

TED's presidential line approved our comment last week and I am filing it this week. We join the Friends of IES coalition in asking the Department to withdraw the rule, and then we walk through eight specific fixes using Part D personnel preparation and IES research training as the examples. The short version: a scholar who signed a service obligation should not be left stranded because a grant was ended for convenience, and a regional university should not lose a competition for charging the rate the federal government negotiated with it.

Our friends at InnovateEDU and EdCounsel ran a great webinar on the rule and shared everything. Here are the resources, all in one place:

Recording: Watch the webinar
Presentation: View the slides
Q&A: Read the Q&A document
Higher ed template: Individual Comments Template & Guide
Institutional sign-on: Higher Ed Sign-On Form
Submit your comment: Regulations.gov, docket ED-2026-OPEPD-2542
Read the proposed rule: 91 FR 54666, Federal Register

What I would ask of you:File an individual comment by Wednesday if you can. Three sentences is plenty: who you are, what one provision would do to your program (give them something concrete- a cohort, a continuation year, your indirect rate), and what the Department should do instead. If you want to see TED's comment as a model, you should reach out to me directly and I will send it your way.
 

3. A Federal Judge Strikes Down the Directive Behind the TQP and SEED Cuts

This one broke late last week, and a lot of you lived the front end of it. You will remember February 2025, when the Department terminated roughly $600 million nationwide in Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) and Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grants, more than 100 awards in all, under an internal directive aimed at diversity, equity, and inclusion. Eight states sued: California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York, and Wisconsin. Last week Judge Angel Kelley of the federal district court in Massachusetts ruled for the states on summary judgment. She found the directive arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. It never defined what it meant by DEI, it swept in topics as broad as social-emotional learning and family and community in the classroom, and it brushed past how heavily grantees had relied on those awards. The Department is now barred from carrying the directive out.

Now the part that matters if you held one of those grants (and I know some of you did). The ruling does not put the money back. In April 2025 the Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 emergency order in this same case, said that claims to be paid under a grant belong in the Court of Federal Claims, and Judge Kelley followed that- anyone looking to recover lost funds has to go there. The Department can also appeal. A Department spokesperson told Courthouse News that grant dollars should go toward preparing and retaining teachers, and not toward what the Department considers divisive ideology.
 

What this means for our field: Two things. If your program lost a TQP or SEED award, talk with your sponsored programs office and your general counsel about what this ruling does and does not open up for you. I am not your lawyer, and any path to the money runs through a different court. Second, connect this to EDGAR. The proposed rule cites that same April 2025 Supreme Court order, Department of Education v. California, as support for its new authority to terminate awards "for convenience." Nineteen months after the terminations, a court concluded the Department needed an explanation that holds together. The proposed rule would add a way to end an award that does not depend on one. That is worth a sentence in your comment this week.

4. A Contest for the Top Democratic Seat on Education and Workforce

Ranking Member Bobby Scott of Virginia has led Democrats on the House Education and Workforce Committee since 2015. For the first time, he has company. Politico reported September 1 that Representative Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, the 2016 National Teacher of the Year, was weighing a run, and she has since made it official. Then on September 16, Politico reported that Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, who has been on the committee since 2013, says she is "not ruling anything out." For his part, Scott has told colleagues in writing that he is running to keep the post and will let his record speak for itself.

Why am I putting caucus politics in a special education newsletter? Because the caucus decides after the November election, and if the House changes hands, whoever wins holds the gavel, the hearing calendar, and the oversight agenda on the Department's restructuring- the OSERS agreement included. How aggressive that oversight ought to be is part of the argument. One data point worth knowing: H. Res. 1391, the resolution to impeach Secretary McMahon that Bonamici introduced June 25, listed Hayes, Takano, and DeSaulnier among its 16 original cosponsors. Scott was not among them. Keep your eyes on this one.

5. DIVERSIFY Is Back

Senator Cory Booker and Representatives Jesús "Chuy" García and Jahana Hayes reintroduced the DIVERSIFY Act, which TED has endorsed. If you are new to it: the bill fixes the TEACH Grant, the federal service scholarship for candidates who commit to four years teaching a high-need subject in a high-poverty school. The award was set at $4,000 a year when the program was created in 2007, has never been raised, and has been cut every year since 2013. DIVERSIFY doubles the maximum to $8,000, ends the annual cuts (which otherwise keep coming through 2029), and gets rid of the penalty that converts the grant into a loan.
 

The text is unchanged from last Congress. The Senate bill is S. 5431, introduced September 17.

 

6. The Civil Rights Data Arrived, Quietly and Raw

The Office for Civil Rights has released the 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection. By the agency's own deadline, it was due at the end of 2025. And what showed up, NPR reported September 4, is 37 raw data files and not much else: no First Look report (the plain-language summary that has come with this collection for more than a decade), and data on nonbinary students removed from every file. The Department has said most of the data could be forthcoming. For now, the data files and the data quality snapshot are what we have.

7. AI in Classrooms: The First Contract Language

On September 9, the American Federation of Teachers, the United Federation of Teachers, and Microsoft announced a National AI Safety & Privacy Standard for schools. The commitments: student and educator data will not be used to train AI models, sold, or repurposed; schools control retention and deletion; AI does not make decisions without a human in the loop; and families get plain-language information about what these tools actually do. The part I would pay attention to is the mechanism. Districts can write the protections directly into their Microsoft customer agreements, which makes them enforceable as contract terms and not just a nice pledge. Politico, citing a Microsoft fact sheet, reports ten protections in all, available to every district beginning November 1, and that AFT is in talks with OpenAI and Anthropic to sign on too.

Days earlier, New York City announced a one-year moratorium on AI for its elementary and middle school students, and Los Angeles Unified banned it for all students, according to Politico. There is no federal legislation, so unions, vendors, and districts are writing the rules themselves, one contract at a time.
 

Thank you, as always, for the work you do. If you file an EDGAR comment this week, tell me how it went- and if you get stuck, never hesitate to reach out.

With appreciation,

Kait Brennan, PhD

Policy Advisor, Teacher Education Division, Council for Exceptional Children

Sources: NPR (September 9, 2026, updated September 11 and 13; and September 4, 2026); U.S. Department of Education organizational chart (September 16, 2026); Politico Pro (September 1, 9, 10, and 16, 2026); CEC Policy Insider (September 11, 2026); Federal Register document 2026-17239, 91 FR 54666, and docket ED-2026-OPEPD-2542; TED comment on the EDGAR proposed rule (September 21, 2026); InnovateEDU and EdCounsel webinar materials; Associated Press via WBUR (September 18, 2026), Courthouse News Service (September 18, 2026), and NBC News on the ruling in State of California v. U.S. Department of Education, No. 1:25-cv-10548 (D. Mass.); Department of Education v. California, 604 U.S. ___ (2025) (per curiam); Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse case record; Politico Pro (November 13, 2025) on the earlier jurisdiction ruling; H. Res. 1391, 119th Congress, as introduced June 25, 2026 (GovInfo); Rep. García press release (September 18, 2026), Congress.gov record for S. 5431 (introduced September 17, 2026), and the sponsors' DIVERSIFY Act one-pager; Learning Policy Institute, An Overview of Teacher Shortages: 2026; civilrightsdata.ed.gov and the 2023-24 CRDC data quality snapshot; AFT and Microsoft press releases (September 9, 2026).

A nonpartisan, informational summary for TED membership. The views expressed in this update do not necessarily reflect the views of the Council for Exceptional Children.