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For 33 years, the Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship’s mission has been to steer more people of color into the state’s teacher workforce, which is largely white. But in October, state lawmakers quietly stripped race and ethnicity requirements and made the program open to students of any race.
The changes are a response to a lawsuit by a conservative group that challenged the scholarship in 2024 and the Trump administration’s push against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at K-12 schools and higher education. A spokesperson for the Illinois Student Assistance Commission confirmed that the lawsuit was dismissed in court earlier this month. The motion to dismiss cited changes in Illinois’ law.
Illinois lawmakers passed House Bill 3065, which replaces the Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship with the Teachers of Illinois Scholarship, during the General Assembly’s veto session by a vote of 96-0 in the House and 59-0 in the Senate. It was signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker in November.
Under the new law, students are eligible for the scholarship if they went to an Illinois K-12 school with 70% of students receiving free or reduced lunch and a 3-year average teacher vacancy rate or vacancy number at or above the state level. Students who receive the scholarship will be expected to teach at public schools where the rate or number of teacher vacancies is at or above the statewide average to fulfill their teacher requirement.
The changes make Illinois one of several states that have amended initiatives meant to help people of color and other underserved groups to avoid being targeted by the Trump administration’s anti-DEI — or diversity, equity, and inclusion — push.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, the conservative group that brought the lawsuit against the scholarship program on behalf of the American Alliance for Equal Rights, sees the changes as “positive.”
“Our whole goal was to eliminate these kinds of racial qualifications for grants from the government,” said Samantha Romero-Drew, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation. “We’re pleased to see that Illinois changed this law so that it’s open to everyone.”
Despite rolling back the scholarship for aspiring teachers of color, Illinois lawmakers say they want to continue efforts to diversify the teacher workforce, which is 78.9% white, according to the Illinois State Board of Education’s 2025 report card. But they also want to protect the state from lawsuits from the federal government.
“It’s not us conceding. It is ensuring that the resources that are going to those who need it the most does not stop,” said House Rep. Maurice West, a Democrat representing Rockford and chief sponsor of HB 3065.
He added that he was worried that fighting the lawsuit would prevent students from accessing scholarship funds. The state paused the program in August 2025 as a result of the lawsuit.
A spokesperson from the governor’s office said he remains “fully committed in our efforts to build a teacher pool that better reflects the varied backgrounds and experiences of the people of our great state as well as our work to uplift historically marginalized communities throughout Illinois.”
Teaching scholarship now open to all
The Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship was created in 1992 to support students of color who want to become educators in Illinois schools. In recent years, the scholarship program offered up to $7,500 a year to help students pay for tuition, room and board, and other fees. Upon graduation, students were expected to work full-time at an Illinois school with at least 30% of students of color.
The scholarship was originally meant to help place teachers of color in classrooms with students of color. According to the Illinois 2025 Report Card, about 78% of Illinois teachers are white, while 6.3% are Black, 8.9% are Latino, and 2.1% are Asian American.
By contrast, white students make up 44% of students enrolled in public schools, while 16.3% are Black, 28.6% are Latino, and 5.7% are Asian American.
Research shows that having a teacher of color improves outcomes for all students regardless of race. Students, regardless of race, who had a teacher of color had an increase in reading and math scores and were less likely to be chronically absent, according to a working paper in 2021 from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
Rep. Laura Faver Dias, a Democrat who represents communities in Northern Illinois and was a co-sponsor of HB 3065, believes changing the language and eligibility requirements for the Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship was “practical and necessary” because of attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at schools from conservative groups and the federal government.
The scholarship is a “real casualty of the current atmosphere that we’re in,” Faver Dias said.
“It is a lack of acknowledgement of the role that systemic racism and inequity has had that has led to a teacher of color shortage,” said Faver Dias. “When we change how people are eligible for it, we change what we’re acknowledging and what we’re willing to tell the truth about our history.”
Under the new law, scholarship recipients must be enrolled in a teacher preparation program in Illinois. The Illinois Student Assistance Commission said in an email to Chalkbeat that it will publish a list of districts and schools that meet the requirements for students interested in the program and for students who have to complete their teaching requirement.
The commission noted that students who have received the scholarship in the past and are trying to renew their grants will have to apply to the new Teachers of Illinois Scholarship. A spokesperson said they could roll out an application by the end of this year or early next year.
Illinois joins other states in changing diversity scholarships
Illinois joins other states, such as Missouri and Wisconsin, that have made changes to state-funded higher education scholarships in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and University of North Carolina, which struck down race-conscious language in admissions policies.
In 2023, the University of Missouri system said it would no longer offer scholarships that consider race and ethnicity, a month after the state’s former Attorney General Andrew Bailey wrote a letter calling on colleges and universities to adopt criteria for scholarship excluding race and ethnicity.
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court is set to hear a case about that state’s Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant Program, a scholarship program created to serve Black, Latino, Native American, and Southeast Asian students from Laos, Cambodia, or Vietnam who immigrated to the U.S. after 1975, according to Wisconsin Public Radio. This comes after an appellate court ruled earlier this year that the scholarship program violated the constitution because it discriminated on the basis of race.
Wisconsin’s state-funded scholarship had been challenged in court by a family in 2021 as reported by Wisconsin Public Radio, prior to the Students for Fair Admissions Supreme Court ruling and Trump’s second term.
Cedric Merlin Powell, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law at the Howard University School of Law, says states and institutions have taken the Supreme Court’s decision as a sign to erase anything that mentions race and argues that it is an overreaction.
While he understands that states and institutions are trying to be proactive, he said, “they’re actually neutralizing and limiting a broader way of approaches that they can look at that still considers the whole person.”
Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.
