The Justice Department sues over a program that attempts to recruit ‘teachers of color.’
Teacher recruitment has a racial discrimination problem. On Sept. 16, the U.S. Justice Department sued the Rhode Island Education Department and the Providence Public School District over a debt-relief program that allegedly used more than $3 million to forgive student loan debt for “teachers of color.” Many schools consider race when awarding scholarships and debt relief under so-called Grow Your Own teacher initiatives.
Grow Your Own programs are marketed as solutions to teacher turnover in hard-to-staff schools, recruiting future teachers—typically high school students—from the surrounding community. Teacher attrition peaked at 10% during the 2021-22 school year and remains a serious challenge in high-need districts. Nearly all states have a Grow Your Own program, with some using scholarships and loan forgiveness as incentives. The bipartisan effort is supposed to reduce barriers to entry in the teaching profession, but some proponents want to use it to promote racial diversity.
Roughly 25% of Grow Your Own programs are explicitly designed to recruit minorities. Minnesota law, for example, requires grant recipients to spend at least 80% of the funds on scholarships and stipends on candidates who “are of color or American Indian.” According to the Minnesota Education Department, Monticello Public Schools awarded $20,000 scholarships to “candidates of color” and only $10,000 to white candidates.
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Neetu Arnold is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
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