WASHINGTON — The University of St. Thomas has lost a $6.8 million grant deemed DEI-related and other Minnesota colleges and K-12 schools are also feeling the tremors from Trump administration efforts to reshape the nation’s education system.
Using his executive authority, President Donald Trump has vowed to stamp out what he determines are diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in American schools, imposing his will by cutting federal funding from those his administration has deemed non-compliance.
Late last week, the Trump administration gave schools and universities two weeks to eliminate diversity initiatives or risk losing federal money.
The directive, in a memo from the U.S. Department of Education, gives schools 14 days to evaluate the risks. It builds on a Supreme Court decision in 2023 that barred the consideration of race as a factor in college admissions but goes much, much further.
For instance, college application essays and even extracurricular clubs are targeted by the memo.
“Race-based decision-making, no matter the form, remains impermissible,” the memo said. “For example, a school may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student’s race and favoring or disfavoring such students.”
Many colleges, including several in Minnesota, use the personal experience of students shared in these essays to help diversify their student bodies.
But the Trump administration says these attempts at diversity have hurt Asian and white applicants who may have had better high school grades and scored higher on standardized admissions tests.
Financial aid programs, including the free tuition offered by the University of Minnesota to Native American students, are also under scrutiny.
“If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law,” the memo said.
On Monday, the Education Department announced it cut $600 million in grants for organizations that train teachers.
The University of St. Thomas was just one of many schools affected by those cuts. The $6.8 million federal grant the school lost was for a program that aims to address teacher shortages through scholarships and recruiting for special education and elementary school teachers in Minnesota.
Although it is not a “DEI” program, the college asked applicants how they would address DEI issues as teachers. The grant would have provided 120 scholarships over the next three years and the college is appealing the U.S. Department of Education’s decision.
Like some of his GOP predecessors, Trump wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. But that can only be done by Congress and the GOP’s narrow majority in the U.S. House would make that difficult.
So, the Trump administration, Elon Musk and his DOGE team are starving it of some of its funds and planning to send other functions of the department to other agencies.
The $1.6 trillion student loan program, for instance, would likely be transferred to the Treasury Department under Trump’s plan, which could cause major disruption, especially during a transition.
Scrubbing curriculums
The state’s K-12 schools are also reeling from Trump administration education policies.
Although Minnesota receives only about 10% of its annual education budget – or a little more than $1.4 billion this year — for its public elementary and secondary schools from the U.S. Department of Education, that money goes to programs that help the state’s most vulnerable young students.
For instance, the U.S. Department of Education gave Minnesota nearly $194 million last year to bolster the education needs of low-income students. More than $233 million was allocated to the state from the department under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to help pay for programs for children with learning disabilities.
David Perry, a writer and historian at the University of Minnesota, has a 15-year-old son with attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) and an 18-year-old son with Downs syndrome who attends a Twin Cities suburban public high school. Perry said IDEA’s goal is to make education accessible to all students and that may now be threatened.
“There are hundreds of thousands of parents like me in Minnesota that should be concerned but don’t know the role the U.S. Department of Education plays in supporting special education in public schools, especially when things go badly, like during Covid,” Perry said.
Like the state’s colleges, Minnesota’s public schools were advised by the U.S. Department of Education’s memo to scrub their curriculum of DEI, gender issues and “wokeness.”
That could put some federal education grants Minnesota’s schools receive in peril, including a nearly $2 million IDEA grant that the state’s education department says “focuses on improving graduation rates for American Indian and Black students with disabilities through school mentoring programs, family engagement, and improving the representation of American Indian teachers and administrators in the special education workforce.”
Minnesota public schools are also slated to receive nearly $330 million for school meals this year from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That would account for about 55% of the cost of providing free breakfasts and lunches to all the state’s students.
That money could shrink as Republicans in Congress are looking to cut USDA nutrition programs as part of their effort to trim the federal budget, putting more pressure on the state budget to make up for shortfalls.
The uncertainty the Trump administration’s actions have unleashed has prompted the Minnesota Department of Education to urge its hundreds of school districts to seek reimbursements for grant-approved expenditures as quickly as possible.
Earlier this month, Minnesota Department of Education Commissioner Willie Jett sent a letter to Minnesota families and teachers, with a copy to U.S. Department of Education acting secretary Denise Carter, that said “like many of you, I am concerned about recent executive actions and reports indicating plans to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education and eliminate investments in our schools.”
Jett vowed his department would try to shield Minnesota’s public-school students from adverse impacts.
But he also wrote that “this lack of clarity, along with other broad executive actions taken in recent days, puts key programs at risk by uprooting longstanding protections and supports students and schools depend on every day.”
Denise Specht, president of Education Minnesota, the statewide teachers union, said there’s “frustration and distress to see the president throwing everything at the wall to see if anything sticks.”
“The uncertainty around school funding is something that is making people very nervous in Minnesota,” Specht said.
Trump’s former head of the Small Business Administration, Linda McMahon, who with her husband Vince established the multi-billion dollar World Wrestling Entertainment empire, will soon likely be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to head the Education Department.
But Trump told reporters earlier this month he hopes McMahon will “put herself out of a job.”
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license,