‘I Want to Stand Up for Higher Ed’: Protesters Rally Against Education Dept. Cuts

Dozens of people raised signs and rang cow bells along Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C., on Friday morning as commuters drove by and honked in support. Behind them stood the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Education, which fired half its employees this week.

Former Education Department staff — either recently let go or retired — gathered with teachers and other advocates to protest the mass layoffs announced Tuesday that affected 1,300 employees. Before that, an additional 600 employees had accepted a deferred resignation package offered to all federal employees.

Government officials didn’t share breakdowns of who lost their jobs, but tallies of fired union members and previous employment data show that the branches hit hardest were the Office for Civil Rights, Federal Student Aid, and the Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research and statistics arm. People who rely on the department’s services have serious doubts that it will continue to maintain them.

“It’s nowhere near possible that that number of people can continue to perform the tasks at the level they were being performed in the past,” said Jordan Matsudaira, a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University who served as deputy under secretary at the Education Department during the Biden administration.

Among the protesters was Lori Stratton, a high-school English teacher in Kansas who came to D.C. for a National Education Association meeting. “I want to stand up for higher ed, and I want to stand up for the cuts they’re making in higher ed, specifically in the research programs.”

Stratton teaches high-school seniors who are worried about delays to their financial aid. “I’ve had students tell me, ‘I don’t know if I can afford to go to school.’” The Education Department said in its announcement of layoffs that it will “continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview,” including Pell Grants and student loans. Yet financial-aid experts wonder how billions of dollars of federal aid will be distributed with significantly less staff.

A former Education Department probationary employee who was let go in February told The Chronicle at the rally Friday that the dismantling of the department’s staff has caused her and colleagues “overwhelming dread.” She requested to speak anonymously because she fears speaking out could jeopardize people she knows who still work for the government. Offices handling financial aid, data collection, and civil-rights complaints won’t be able to operate efficiently because of the layoffs, she said. “I don’t see how they can.”

She said moving key functions of the department to other agencies, like financial aid to the Treasury Department or the Office for Civil Rights to the Justice Department, would be “producing another problem than fixing anything.” People in her professional network who work at those agencies tell her they’re stressed and already stretched to capacity.

At least 105 people were fired from the Institute of Education Sciences. The research arm had already suffered a major blow last month when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashed $900 million worth of grants and contracts.

“They basically eviscerated the nation’s data-collection mechanism,” said a former department employee who requested to speak anonymously because of the ongoing lawsuits filed aiming to reinstate federal employees.

The Education Department collects data on K-12 and higher-education student enrollment, outcomes, and aid, among many other areas. With the research arm operating with a drastically reduced staff, people are concerned about how that data will continue to be collected. For example, administration officials have said that the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, will not be affected, according to reporting in the The Washington Post. The former department employee told The Chronicle that would be “impossible.” “They just fired all the staff that did it,” she said.

About two miles away from the Education Department, education researchers gathered at the Mayflower Hotel for a conference hosted by the Association for Education Finance and Policy. Many education practitioners and researchers presented findings that relied on federal data.

“There’s definitely a cloud around the conference,” said Jon Becker, an associate professor of education leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University. In his study of distance education, he frequently uses the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, commonly known as IPEDS. If that data disappears or diminishes in quality, issues around student success and student outcomes will be difficult to understand, he said. While states will still produce data, he said there are “a lot of issues that we need to understand through a national perspective.”

Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education at the University of Delaware, led a session on college access at the conference. She began her presentation by acknowledging that the United States “no longer has an effective federal apparatus for education policy” and discussed how a diminished department will affect the policy implications outlined in the papers presented at her session.

Christine Dickason, a policy analyst at the education nonprofit Bellwether, uses federal data sources like the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study to make policy recommendations. Losing that data would be like “if you ask your doctor to diagnose and treat a patient but you don’t let them see the patient and you don’t let them run any tests,” she said.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, worries about how the department will continue its predoctoral training programs, which offer financial support to Ph.D. students doing education research. Polikoff’s Ph.D. research was funded by that program, as was the work of many others at the conference. “The quality of the work here and its impact wouldn’t be possible without those IES predoc grants,” he said. “Without those dollars from IES, I really worry about the future training of education researchers.”

Kate Harris, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida, said she removed restricted federal data sets from her dissertation because she worried that the Institute of Education Sciences would be ill-equipped to conduct a disclosure review. The department requires those reviews to ensure that studies using federal data do not reveal identifiable information of its respondents.

“About a month ago I had a tough conversation with my adviser on the likelihood that there would be someone in IES to review this,” she said. “My adviser and I just did not feel confident that that would exist.” The American Educational Research Association released a statement Friday saying it had learned that all restricted-use National Center for Education Statistics data licenses will be canceled, possibly as early as March 20.

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A postdoc student at Boston University who was attending the Association of Education Finance and Policy conference joined the protest Friday morning. She said the conference felt different this year because of the reductions in force both in and outside the federal government. American Institutes of Research, for example, reduced its staff by 18 percent this week. “We have this data that we’ve collected and want to get out, but we’re losing the places that we can disseminate it,” said the student, who spoke anonymously because Boston University is one of the 60 universities under investigation by the Office for Civil Rights for Title VI violations. She noted that she was speaking on behalf of herself, not the university.

After an hour of hoisting signs by the street, the protesters migrated to the front of the department building. Advocates took to the microphone to speak against President Trump, Elon Musk, and Linda McMahon’s attempt to dismantle the department.

“I’m looking at this building, and I see empty windows,” said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association. “I see empty windows with people who should be at their desks helping students achieve their full potential.”

In one window high above the crowd, an employee still working inside had hung a sign. It read “We miss you.”