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department of education
Teachers Say 'See You In Court' as Trump Tries to Abolish Department of Education
"We won't be silent as anti-public education politicians try to steal opportunities from our students, our families, and our communities to pay for tax cuts for billionaires," said the head of the nation's largest labor union.
Mar 20, 2025
Update:
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday afternoon directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin the process of shutting down the Department of Education.
"Hopefully she will be our last secretary of education," Trump said of McMahon, promising to "find something else" for the billionaire businesswoman to do.
Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate campaign, responded to Trump's move by announcing a Friday "study-in" outside Department of Education headquarters in Washington, D.C.
BREAKING: Students announce a "Study-In" at the Department of Education. If Trump and Musk want to abolish the Department of Education and destroy our futures, they'll have to go through us. Join us tomorrow starting at 10am.
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— Sunrise Movement (@sunrisemvmt.bsky.social) March 20, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Earlier:
As U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to sign an executive order Thursday directing officials to shut down the Department of Education, Democratic politicians, teachers and communities across the nation are vowing legal and other challenges to the move.
Trump is set to check off a longtime Republican wish list item by signing a directive ordering Education Secretary Linda McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the states."
Shutting down the department—which was created in 1979 to ensure equitable access to public education and employs more than 4,000 people—will require an act of Congress, both houses of which are controlled by Republicans.
"Trump and his Cabinet of billionaires are trying to destroy the Department of Education so they can privatize more schools."
Thursday's expected order follows the department's announcement earlier this month that it would fire half of its workforce. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and more than three dozen Democratic senators condemned the move and Trump's impending Department of Education shutdown as "a national disgrace."
Abolishing the Department of Education is one of the top goals of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led roadmap for a far-right takeover and gutting of the federal government closely linked to Trump, despite his unconvincing efforts to distance himself from the highly controversial plan.
U.S. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) called Trump's bid to abolish the Department of Education "more bullshit" and vowed to fight the president's "illegal behavior until the cows come home."
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said on social media: "Trump and his Cabinet of billionaires are trying to destroy the Department of Education so they can privatize more schools. The result: making it even harder to ensure that ALL students have access to a quality education. Another outrageous, illegal scam. We will fight this."
New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin, a Democrat,
warned that "ending the U.S. Department of Education will decimate our education system and devastate families across the country."
"Support for students with special needs and those in rural and urban schools will be gone," he added. "We will stop at nothing to protect N.J. and fight this reckless action."
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA)—the nation's largest labor union—said in a statement Thursday that "Donald Trump and Elon Musk have aimed their wrecking ball at public schools and the futures of the 50 million students in rural, suburban, and urban communities across America, by dismantling public education to pay for tax handouts for billionaires."
Musk—the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—is the world's richest person. Trump and McMahon are also billionaires.
"If successful, Trump's continued actions will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle-class families, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections," Pringle warned.
"This morning, in hundreds of communities across the nation, thousands of families, educators, students, and community leaders joined together outside of neighborhood public schools to rally against taking away resources and support for our students," she continued. "And, we are just getting started. Every day we are growing our movement to protect our students and public schools."
"We won't be silent as anti-public education politicians try to steal opportunities from our students, our families, and our communities to pay for tax cuts for billionaires," Pringle added. "Together with parents and allies, we will continue to organize, advocate, and mobilize so that all students have well-resourced schools that allow every student to grow into their full brilliance."
The ACLU is circulating a petition calling on Congress to "save the Department of Education."
"The Department of Education has an enormous effect on the day-to-day lives of students across the country," the petition states. "They are tasked with protecting civil rights on campus and ensuring that every student—regardless of where they live; their family's income; or their race, sex, gender identity, or disability—has equal access to education."
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers,
responded to Trump's looming order in four words: "See you in court."
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Columbia Is Now The Front Line in Trump’s Unconstitutional Assault on Higher Ed
If Columbia—with its $14 billion endowment—folds, it’s hard to imagine others won’t follow.
Mar 18, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump has never been coy about his desire to bend universities to his will. Last week, Columbia University became the testing ground to see how far he can push that agenda.
On March 7, the Administration announced it was cancelling $400 million in federal funding from Columbia, alleging that the university violated Title VI by failing to redress the “persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Last Thursday, it issued a list of demands that Columbia must fulfill before any talks on reinstating funds can even begin.
Among them: Place the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department “under academic receivership;” devise a plan to “hold all student groups accountable” for violating university policies; and empower law enforcement to “arrest and remove” students who “foster an unsafe or hostile work or study environment.”
The question is whether Columbia will fight or whether it will sacrifice the free speech rights of its faculty and students to appease the Trump administration.
But there’s one demand that gives the others their bite: Columbia must adopt a new definition of antisemitism. This definition matters because it will determine what speech gets muzzled in the departments under receivership, and what speech results in discipline, removal from campus, and expulsion.
While the letter stops short of explicitly mandating a specific definition, it unsubtly reminds the reader of the Trump administration’s embrace of the so-called IHRA definition, which declares it antisemitic to hold Israel to a “double standard,” “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or compare its policies to those of the Nazis.
The implication here is clear: Adopt IHRA or kiss a half billion dollars goodbye.
The purported interest in protecting Jewish students from antisemitism is a transparent pretext. The Trump administration is a den of antisemites. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews. The Pentagon’s deputy press secretary is an avid spreader of antisemitic conspiracy theories. And let’s not forget about Elon Musk, who turned X into a safe space for white supremacists, promoted tweets downplaying the Holocaust and blaming Jews for the “great replacement,” gave two Hitler salutes at a rally, and then jetted off to a right-wing convention in Germany where he opined that Germany’s real problem was “too much focus on past guilt.”
If Elon Musk were the president of Columbia, the university would have lost its Title VI funding long ago.
Nor is the right-wing’s love affair with IHRA rooted in its solicitude for Jews. IHRA is their definition of choice because, unlike other working definitions of antisemitism, IHRA is broad enough and vague enough to sweep up virtually any criticism of Israel. Pro-Israel litigants have invoked IHRA to argue that it is inherently antisemitic—and creates a hostile environment for Jewish students—to criticize Israel for supporting “Jewish supremacy,” notwithstanding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that Israel is a “state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.” Or to suggest that Israel is maintaining an apartheid in the occupied territories, even though Israeli’s third-largest newspaper, its human rights NGOs, and the International Court of Justice agree with that assessment. Or to accuse Israel of committing ethnic cleansing, even though Israel’s former defense minister came to the same conclusion and Israeli officials openly advocate mass expulsions. Even calling for Palestinians and Jews to have equal immigration rights has been labeled antisemitic on the grounds that the influx of Palestinians would make Jews a minority and “obliterate the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.”
There’s a malign genius to the administration’s approach. Trump and his enablers know they can't directly muzzle students or faculty without facing First Amendment lawsuits. To be clear, that doesn’t mean the administration won’t try. ICE has already begun arresting foreign student activists, and DOJ has signaled plans to charge protestors under federal counterterrorism laws. But the administration surely understands that most of those actions will be thwarted in the courts.
As a private institution, however, Columbia is unconstrained by the First Amendment. There’s no redress in the courts if Columbia starts expelling students for criticizing Israel. So the trick is to find a way of outsourcing the censorship to university administrators. And that’s where the funding cuts come in. As explained by one of the strategy’s architects, the threat of defunding is designed to create an “existential terror” that will “discipline [universities] in a way that you could not get through administrative oversight with 150 extra Department of Ed bureaucrats.”
To be clear, this tactic is also blatantly illegal. The Executive cannot withdraw Title VI funding without making findings of fact, providing an opportunity to be heard, and submitting a written report to Congress—none of which has happened here. And the Executive can only defund the specific programs that are found to be out of compliance. The law doesn’t allow the sort of blanket cuts that have been imposed.
And even if the administration complied with these requirements, the First Amendment bars the government from conscripting universities into their efforts to censor protected speech. It likewise bars the government from leveraging public funds to force a university to endorse a state-sanctioned view on a matter of public concern (i.e., whether criticism of Israel is antisemitic). In a 2013 case, Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring an NGO to have “a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking” before it could receive grant money to help combat the spread of HIV. Writing for a 6-2 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that the NGOs (like Columbia) were free to turn down the funding, but held that the government could not force the NGO to choose between its First Amendment rights and federal largess: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
The question is whether Columbia will fight or whether it will sacrifice the free speech rights of its faculty and students to appease the Trump administration.
The Trump Administration is clearly counting on the latter, and not without cause. Columbia has been a case study in preemptive acquiescence: In recent weeks, university administrators have threatened disciplinary measures against students for writing op-eds calling for divestment from Israel, for sharing social media posts in support of the protests, and for co-hosting an art exhibition in a private building about the occupation of a campus building. After two students—one a recent IDF soldier—showered protesters with a foul-smelling spray, Columbia responded by forcing into retirement a professor who expressed concern about Israeli students coming to Columbia “right out of their military service,” and then paid a $400,000 settlement to the students who sprayed the chemical.
This is not going to end with Columbia: the Department of Education has sent similar letters to 60 other universities. And the assault on academic freedom is not going to be limited to discourse about Israel. This battle is, in a real sense, the front lines. If Columbia—with its $14 billion endowment—folds, it’s hard to imagine others won’t follow. If Columbia’s administrators cannot find the backbone to protect free speech on its campus, students and faculty will have to defend their constitutional rights themselves, in court.
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'National Disgrace': Sanders and Senate Dems Call Out Trump Attack on Education Dept
"Our nation's public schools, colleges, and universities are preparing the next generation of America's leaders—we must take steps to strengthen education in this country, not take a wrecking ball to the agency that exists to do so."
Mar 17, 2025
In a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders led more than three dozen of his Democratic colleagues in dismissing the Trump administration's "false claims of financial savings" from slashing more than 1,000 jobs at the Education Department, emphasizing that the wealthy people leading federal policy "will not be harmed by these egregious attacks" on public schools.
"Wealthy families sending their children to elite, private schools will still be able to get a quality education even if every public school disappears in this country," reads the letter spearheaded by Sanders (I-Vt.), the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. "But for working-class families, high-quality public education is an opportunity they rely on for their children to have a path to do well in life."
The decision by President Donald Trump and his unelected billionaire ally, Elon Musk of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE), to slash the Department of Education (DOE) workforce by 50%—or 1,300 people—and take steps to illegally close the agency has already had an impact on students, noted the senators, pointing to a glitch in the Free Application for Federal Financial Aid (FAFSA) that preventing families from accessing the applications "not even 24 hours after the staff reductions were announced."
"The staff normally responsible for fixing those errors had reportedly been cut," reads the letter, which was also signed by lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
"Without the Department of Education, there is no guarantee that states would uphold students' civil and educational rights."
The letter was sent as The Associated Pressreported that cuts within the DOE's Office of Civil Rights have placed new barriers in front of families with children who have disabilities. Families who can't afford to take legal action against schools or districts that are not providing accommodations or services for students with disabilities have long been able to rely on on the office to open an investigation into their cases, but the AP reported that "more than 20,000 pending cases—including those related to kids with disabilities, historically the largest share of the office's work—largely sat idle for weeks after Trump took office."
"A freeze on processing the cases was lifted early this month, but advocates question whether the department can make progress on them with a smaller staff," reported the outlet.
The reduction in force has been compounded by the fact that the remaining staff has been directed to prioritize antisemitism cases, as the Trump administration places significant attention on allegations that pro-Palestinian organizers, particularly on college campuses, have endangered Jewish students by speaking out in favor of Palestinian rights and against Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza and the West Bank.
An analysis of more than 550 campus protests found that 97% of the demonstrations last year remained non-violent, contrary to repeated claims by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers that they placed Jewish students in danger. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, pro-Israel advocates, and Republicans have dismissed outcry over Musk's display of a Nazi salute at an inaugural event in January.
"Special needs kids [are] now suffering because of a manufactured hysteria aimed [at] silencing dissent against genocide," said writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer. "Utter depravity."
In their letter, Sanders and his Democratic colleagues noted that "several regional offices responsible for investigating potential violations of students' civil rights in local schools" have also been shuttered, expressing alarm that many cases will likely "go uninvestigated and that students will be left in unsafe learning environments as a result."
They noted that at a time of "massive income and wealth inequality, when 60% of people live paycheck to paycheck," the federal government's defunding of public education "would result in either higher property taxes or decreased funding for public schools, including in rural areas."
"It is a national disgrace that the Trump administration is attempting to illegally abolish the Department of Education and thus, undermine a high-quality education for our students," wrote the lawmakers. "These reductions will have devastating impacts on our nation's students and we are deeply concerned that without staff, the department will be unable to fulfill critical functions, such as ensuring students can access federal financial aid, upholding students' civil rights, and guaranteeing that federal funding reaches communities promptly and is well-spent."
Trump, they noted, has expressed a desire "to return education back to the states" despite the fact that state governments and local school boards already make education policy, with just 11% of public education funding coming from the DOE.
However, "the Department of Education has a necessary and irreplaceable responsibility to implement federal laws that ensure equal opportunity for all children in this country," they wrote. "These laws guarantee fundamental protections, such as ensuring that children with disabilities receive a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment, that students from low-income backgrounds and students of color will not be disproportionately taught by less experienced and qualified teachers, and that parents will receive information about their child's academic achievement."
"Without the Department of Education, there is no guarantee that states would uphold students' civil and educational rights," said the lawmakers. "We will not stand by as you attempt to turn back the clock on education in this country through gutting the Department of Education. Our nation's public schools, colleges, and universities are preparing the next generation of America's leaders—we must take steps to strengthen education in this country, not take a wrecking ball to the agency that exists to do so."
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