On Thursday, hundreds of University of California, Berkeley students, many from the university’s School of Education, gathered at the steps of Sproul Hall in what they say is the first of many protests against President Donald Trump’s March 20 executive order dismantling the U.S. Department of Education.
“Where were you on March 20, 2025?” Ethan Collier-Moreno asked the crowd. He is the president of California Teachers Association Aspiring Educators , a statewide union of educators and students majoring in education.
“We were getting educated!” someone shouted.
Collier-Moreno told a story about walking to class in the new undergraduate program in UC Berkeley’s Educational Sciences program, which encompasses teaching, research, educational policy and administration. On that day, he received an urgent phone call from his mother, a veteran school teacher of nearly 30 years, who was in a frenzy after learning about the dismantling of the Department of Education.
“This is the day. This is the day my life, my mom’s profession, and the lives and future professions of millions of students around this country change forever,” he said. “March 20th is the day when the government attempted to show us that we the people must object to their will or be forced to abide by it!”
In the executive order, Trump stated that the Department of Education’s main functions should be returned to the states.
According to Michelle Young, professor and dean of the UC Berkeley School of Education, public education is already run by states and local school districts, but the federal government strengthens the weaknesses of those programs and provides extra funds to help level the system for disadvantaged and underserved communities.
She said the Title I federal grant program is about providing supplemental funds to schools that have low-income students. Title II provides teachers with professional development and leadership training. In addition to that, there’s the funding that comes through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
“The department of education provides the resources that students with disabilities need in order to have an equitable educational environment and full inclusion,” she said. “Because that’s the law. It aids schools that serve rural and native education populations, as well as English language learners.”
Trump’s executive order states that discrimination is illegal, but it uses a new definition:
“The Secretary of Education shall ensure that the allocation of any Federal Department of Education funds is subject to rigorous compliance with Federal law and Administration policy, including the requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”
Young said the second area of the U.S. Department of Education is civil rights enforcement. “You’ve probably heard a lot about the Office of Civil Rights and the investigations that they do, primarily when the law is thought to be broken and students are not receiving the services that they need or are experiencing some sort of discrimination,” Young said. “That can be based on race or color, national origin, and sex, disability, all the different vulnerable population groups.”
The third area of the department is data collection and research, which results in a yearly report card on how the nation’s students are doing. The department also administers other surveys through the National Center for Education Statistics about school performance, graduation rates and staffing.
This is not an isolated protest. We are only the beginning of globalized action by thousands upon thousands of K12 students and higher education students that are across the country.
Ethan Collier-Moreno, president of California Teachers Association Aspiring Educators
“This is how we know about teacher shortages,” she said. “It’s how we learn how students are disciplined and whether there’s any disproportionality based on different student populations. That data also informs future policy making and ensures that current policies are doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
That data collection is one way to level the field, she said.
“If you don’t have data across the state, if you’re only working in silos, on a state-by-state basis, then it’s very hard to diffuse the innovations and improvements that are happening in one state to scale,” she said. “It ensures that states are fulfilling their responsibilities to each and every child.”
The Trump administration’s restructuring involves moving the federal student loan system from the Department of Education to the Small Business Administration and moving the programs for student with disabilities and nutrition programs to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Young said that having individuals who have deep expertise under one department makes all this possible.
“President Carter put together the Department of Education because there were very few well developed nations that don’t have a ministry of education or a department of education,” she said. “There was a federal notion that this is something that’s important to the United States.”
At Thursday’s rally, Ethan Collier-Moreno said that teachers unions in other states are starting to mobilize.
“This is not an isolated protest,” he said. “We are only the beginning of globalized action by thousands upon thousands of K12 students and higher education students that are across the country.”
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