The Trump administration plans to inject nearly $500 million into historically Black colleges and tribal universities, a windfall funded largely by cuts to programs elsewhere for minority students.
The administration will also redirect money to other political priorities for President Trump, including an extra $137 million for American history and civics education and $60 million more for charter schools.
The increases follow a White House request for a 15 percent budget cut to the Education Department next year, as President Trump seeks support to permanently shutter the agency. History programs will now receive about seven times their expected funding for this year, and charter schools will see a 13 percent increase.
The changes were described by three people familiar with the plans who insisted on anonymity to speak about private discussions. Two senior officials from the Education Department said the additional funding for President Trump’s priorities would be announced as soon as Monday.
To pay for the changes, the administration cut money from other parts of the education budget. The biggest cut, announced by the department last week, is a $350 million hit to programs that support minority students in science and engineering programs, schools with significant Hispanic enrollment, and other federal grants at minority-serving institutions.
The administration also cut money from gifted and talented programs, which it said use racial targeting in recruitment in some cases, and from magnet schools, which have been used as a tool for combating school segregation.
President Trump has routinely sought to align himself with historically Black colleges and universities as a way to earn good will from Black voters, who have long been skeptical of his leadership.
In his first term, Mr. Trump secured more than $250 million in annual funding and canceled repayment of more than $300 million in federal relief loans for the schools. In April, he signed an executive order that created a job in the White House to oversee a new “Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” although that position remains unfilled.
At the same time, the president has repeatedly minimized the history of Black people in the United States, including last month when he complained that the Smithsonian museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was.”
Traditionally, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has focused a major part of its legal workload on complaints of racial discrimination. Under the Trump administration, the office has prioritized accusations of discrimination against white students and pared back protections for transgender students. New discipline guidance from the White House instructs schools not to consider racial disparities, focusing solely on the behavior of students.
The halt of $350 million in federal funding last week targeted seven grants for minority-serving institutions, which are colleges with significant minority student enrollment. The Trump administration eliminated the funding, saying that programs with racial quotas were inherently racist and violated civil rights law.
Instead, that money will be put toward historically Black colleges and universities, which were created to educate Black students at a time when other colleges would not serve them, and are open to students of all races. These institutions will receive $1.34 billion this year, 48 percent more than was budgeted, according to the department.
Lodriguez Murray, a senior vice president at UNCF, previously the United Negro College Fund, said the extra money is a “godsend” for H.B.C.U.s. They have been underfunded since their inception, he said, and about 70 percent of their students come from low-income families.
“We welcome the additional resources,” he said, adding that he believed the money could be substantial enough to make a difference on campuses, even if it is a one-time boost.
Marybeth Gasman, the executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions, said that new spending should not come at the expense of programs aimed at supporting Black and Hispanic students at other schools. She said minority-serving institutions educate more than half of all students of color, and she urged Congress to push back against the executive branch’s unilateral attempt to allocate money.
“None of these institutions should be pitted against each other, which seems to be what the Trump administration is doing,” said Ms. Gasman, the associate dean for research in the Rutgers Graduate School of Education.
Tribal colleges, which are typically controlled and operated by Native American tribes and receive federal support, will also get about $108 million this year, double their expected allotment from the Education Department, federal officials said.
Tribal colleges also receive money through the Department of the Interior, funding that the Trump administration had proposed cutting earlier this year, though lawmakers on Capitol Hill have resisted.
The Education Department is muscling the money into Mr. Trump’s agenda, with two weeks to go before the fiscal year expires on Sept. 30, taking advantage of what is essentially a loophole created by the ongoing partisan standoff in Washington. The changes are a one-time infusion and apply only to this year’s funding.
The money for history and civics education will go to a pet project of Mr. Trump, who bemoaned on the campaign trail last year what he viewed in American schools as a lack of national pride. He vowed to find a way to “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life.”
As president, he has threatened to strip funding from schools that stray from themes of “patriotic education.” Now, the federal government will spend $160 million on American history and civics education this year, up from $23 million that Congress had authorized.
The money will pay for teachers’ training ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding next year. The program will put an emphasis on primary documents from the era of the founding fathers, an idea popular in conservative circles.
The money will primarily come from a nearly $140 million cut to teacher training programs that federal officials say were promoting racially “divisive ideology” in the classroom.
Charter schools have also long been a key piece of Mr. Trump’s education policy, which emphasizes giving parents more choice.
The first official school visit by Linda McMahon, the education secretary, was to Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in the Bronx. Mr. Trump is also seeking an increase for charter schools through his budget request for next year.
Charters — publicly funded but privately run schools — will have $500 million to spend this year, up from the $440 million that federal lawmakers had approved.
To pay for the new money for charter schools, the administration cut $15 million from magnet schools, $9 million from gifted and talented programs, and $31 million from Ready to Learn, which funded PBS shows for young children.
Congress typically controls how federal money is spent. But without enough support to approve an annual spending bill, Congress has instead relied on stopgap measures to keep the government open. These temporary measures ensure that funding levels are maintained at existing levels but, unlike regular spending bills, do not specify how that money should be spent.
Many Democrats opposed the most recent stopgap measure in March, warning that the lack of explicit directions would essentially create slush funds for the White House.
Now, six months later, the administration is seizing the moment, using flexibility allowed by the stopgap to redirect money toward Mr. Trump’s priorities.
Sarah Mervosh covers education for The Times, focusing on K-12 schools.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
The post Trump Redirects Millions to Historically Black Colleges, Charter Schools appeared first on New York Times.
