Advance Illinois Statement on HR0942/SR1303 Affirming Illinois’ Commitment to Teacher Diversity and the Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship

For 32 years, the Minority Teachers of Illinois (MTI) scholarship has been helping Illinois improve student access to the support and educators they need to succeed. We were therefore deeply disappointed to see that a lawsuit has been filed in an attempt to halt MTI and its work to diversify Illinois’ teaching force – a strategy, which, research tells us, has a beneficial effect on student learning. We urge state leaders to stand firm in their commitment to the state’s vision for equitable student outcomes, and to continue to support and defend MTI as a proven and valuable state program. 

Illinois school districts have long produced inequitable outcomes for students of color. Data shows that as recently as last year, fewer than half as many Black students were proficient in Math and English Language Arts as White or Asian students. Our state continues to make commendable efforts to understand what is driving the gaps and deploy evidence-based strategies to close them. Teachers of color are a key resource and asset in this effort. Decades of research show that when teachers share racial and ethnic identities with their students, student outcomes ranging from academic proficiency to disciplinary incidents to overall educational attainment improve. However, in Illinois, there is a steep mismatch between student and teacher diversity where more than half of all students in Illinois are students of color, but less than 18% of our teaching workforce are teachers who share their racial and ethnic backgrounds. 

The causes of this disparity are numerous, including systemic barriers to accessing the profession that begin early in students’ educational journeys (for example, unequal high school graduation rates) and compound over time. Among the points in the teacher pipeline where the disparity is most evident is at the postsecondary level where Illinois’ teacher preparation programs prove to be much less diverse than the colleges that house them. 

In Illinois, it costs an average of $22,500 per year to become a teacher, unfairly screening out individuals who cannot access and persist along this pathway into the profession based only on affordability. The impact of this is devastating for students, particularly students who come from less generational wealth. But these barriers can be addressed. 

Since 1992, MTI has been helping to attract talented students interested in teaching who might otherwise be unable to afford the cost of educator preparation, having provided more than 8,500 scholarships to aspiring teachers in our state. Its role in increasing the number of teachers who look like the students they instruct makes it an accelerant for helping close the equity gap and a winning strategy for helping every Illinois student succeed. Further, MTI is an impactful strategy for our schools and state generally. By requiring scholarship recipients to teach in schools with at least 30% students of color, or for bilingual recipients, at least 20 English Learners, MTI is helping address our state’s most pressing educator pipeline needs in a targeted way.  

We have been pleased to support Illinois’ strategic efforts to increase teacher diversity, and they are paying off. Educator preparation programs have gone from 20% candidates of color to 36% in the last decade. The recently filed lawsuit that questions the constitutionality of MTI, wholly overlooks the program’s research basis and its targeted K-12 student-centered mission and parameters. This misguided effort threatens further progress and is antithetical to the vision the state itself possesses to be the best in the nation to raise a child.  

For that reason, we applaud the General Assembly for filing joint resolutions (HR0942/SR1303), affirming Illinois’ commitment to teacher diversity and the Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship. We call on both chambers to pass them and to continue appropriating and supporting this important program. Being the best and doing right by every child in our state requires doing everything in our power to foster their success. This includes heeding relevant data and research and investing in strategies we have every reason to believe will help all students reach their full potential.