Protesters and supporters said they fear axing the Department of Education will hurt learning outcomes.
WASHINGTON—Students, educators, and supporters gathered outside the Department of Education building on Friday morning to protest the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the agency.
The event, billed as a “study-in,” began at 10 a.m. with students reading and doing homework at desks lined up in front of the building, followed by a rally in the afternoon.
The protest was scheduled for the morning after President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to return education authority to the states and, “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
McMahon told reporters on Thursday after the signing of that order, that some of the department’s work, such as its Office of Civil Rights, may be taken up by other agencies like the Department of Justice.
She said Trump’s goal was to disburse schoolhouse-bound tax dollars to the states with “as few strings and regulations as possible.”
“Right now for about every dollar of funding that goes to the states, one statistic that’s shared with me is that 47 cents is spent on regulatory compliance. The President would clearly like to see that money used to educate our students, and that’s the goal,” McMahon said.
The protest, organized by climate political action group Sunrise Movement, drew a modest crowd, but former educator Emily Griswold told The Epoch Times she expects public outcry to gain steam.
Griswold also said she was concerned about how funding would be reallocated under the new system.
“What I’m most scared about, and why I came down today, is the potential cuts to special education. I’m very scared that we will go back to when children were institutionalized when they had disabilities,” she said.
Griswold’s concerns echo those of other critics of Trump’s plans.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said in a statement Wednesday that shuttering the department would “hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, [and] making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle-class families.”
McMahon issued a statement on Thursday saying the government would continue funding programs for “K-12 students, students with special needs, college student borrowers, and others who rely on essential programs.”
Adah Crandall, a 19-year-old freshman at MIT and organizer with Sunrise Movement, shared Pringle’s view that the closure was a net negative and said she felt the Trump administration’s efforts to cut government spending were not helpful to the general public.
“I also really want to bring light to the fact that, you know, it’s the Department of Education today that’s getting cut, but tomorrow it could be anything else,” she told The Epoch Times.