The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday sued the Rhode Island Department of Education and Providence Public Schools over a loan-forgiveness program aimed at enticing teachers of color to work in the state’s largest school district.
The loan-forgiveness program is just the latest local or state initiative to come into the Trump administration’s legal crosshairs, as it tries to crack down on programs aimed at bolstering racial equity.
The more than $3 million Rhode Island program, which started in 2021, was created through a partnership between the state, the district, and the Rhode Island Foundation. It offers new teachers of color who agree to work in Providence up to $25,000 in student loan forgiveness, part of an effort to recruit up to 127 teachers who identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, or two or more races.
The Justice Department argues the program runs afoul of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, or national origin, because white teachers aren’t eligible.
“This is race discrimination in public employment, pure and simple,” the Justice Department wrote in its complaint, filed in federal court in Rhode Island. “Helping new teachers pay off their student loans may be a worthy endeavor for public school districts. But excluding white teachers is racist and unlawful.”
Providence Public Schools and the Rhode Island Department of Education said in a joint statement that they tried to work out a solution with the Justice Department and were caught off guard by the filing.
“Over the last few months, PPSD and RIDE worked in good faith with the U.S. Department of Justice to reach a resolution on this matter,” the organizations said. “PPSD and RIDE officials have not been served, and we were not informed by federal representatives that they would proceed with a lawsuit. Since there is active litigation, PPSD and RIDE will not be commenting further.”
The move is part of a systemic effort to roll back equity-focused programs
The lawsuit is just the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration to slap down district and state initiatives focused on students of color—even as it trumpets local control for schools.
For instance, the U.S. Department of Education launched a civil rights investigation into Chicago Public Schools in late April, alleging its “Black Student Success Plan” is racially discriminatory and violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race-based discrimination in federally funded programs. The Chicago initiative includes goals such as hiring more Black male educators, accelerating Black students’ achievement growth, enhancing Black students’ sense of belonging, and reducing disciplinary actions against Black students.
The Providence school district serves more than 19,000 students, the overwhelming majority of whom are students of color. More than two-thirds—69%—are Latino, while 14% are Black and 6.5% are white. Forty percent of the district’s students are English learners.
Students from all backgrounds benefit from having a teacher of color in their classroom, according to research from multiple organizations, including the Education Trust, a nonprofit aimed at improving outcomes for poor children and students of color.
“The Justice Department’s lawsuit against the Rhode Island Department of Education and Providence Public Schools echoes a painful chapter in our nation’s history,” Eric Duncan, the organization’s director of P-12 policy, said in an emailed response to questions from Education Week.
“Too often the untold story of Brown v. Board is that while students gained legal access to desegregated schools, tens of thousands of Black educators lost their jobs, and we have never recovered those numbers in our classrooms,” Duncan added. “Today, amid growing attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, we risk repeating that history.”
But Max Eden, the director of federal education policy at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank closely associated with the Trump administration, said it’s hard to imagine a program that awarded scholarships only to white teachers passing legal muster.
The discriminatory nature of the program “should be clear to anybody who just thinks ‘well, what if the races were reversed?’” said Eden, who served in the White House early in Trump’s second term.
Schools looking to recruit teachers whose backgrounds are similar to their students’ could instead focus their efforts on finding educators who grew up or live in the neighborhood the school serves, Eden said.
“Having people from the community be teachers makes perfect sense,” Eden said. “They should be your default labor pool anyway, right?”
