Lawsuit Targets Wisconsin Minority Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program
Conservative law firm says $30,000 loan relief for minority educators violates equal protection.
School lockers. Photo by Phil Roeder (CC BY 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabor-roeder/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Seven years ago, lawmakers expanded a program aimed at getting more teachers from minority communities into Wisconsin classrooms.
The bipartisan bill broadened the Minority Teacher Loan program from Milwaukee to qualifying school districts statewide.
At the time, lawmakers said doing so would “promote a population of teachers in Wisconsin that better reflected the state’s diversity.”
Now the Minority Teacher Loan Program is being challenged in court.
On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty filed a lawsuit in Waukesha County Circuit Court against the state’s Higher Educational Aids Board alleging the $30,000 loan forgiveness program for minorities excludes qualified students from taxpayer aid based solely on race.
The lawsuit is being brought on behalf of Citizens Defending Liberty, a Milwaukee-based taxpayer association.
In June, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled undergraduate retention grants for certain minority students are unconstitutional.
Since that ruling, several lawsuits have been filed against minority-based scholarships.
Citizens Defending Liberty is a co-plaintiff in another WILL case filed in July against the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the university’s use of race-based scholarships.
Both cases argue a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
“Wisconsin cannot decide who receives taxpayer-funded educational opportunities based upon the color of their skin,” said WILL deputy counsel Rebecca Furdek. “By imposing this race-based barrier, the current program also undermines a near-universal goal of addressing Wisconsin’s teacher shortage.”
a representative from the Evers administration told WPR they can’t comment on pending litigation.
During the 2025-26 school year, $259,500 was appropriated to spend on the Minority Teacher Loan Program. The state Legislature has appropriated that same amount for this school year.
According to the lawsuit, the state goal of the program is to “increase the number of minority teachers.” Doing so is unconstitutional, according to the lawsuit.
Furdek says the state Department of Education has highlighted there is a teacher shortage in Wisconsin. She says only incentivizing minorities to go into the profession seems “counterintuitive.”
Research has shown minority students have better classroom outcomes when they have minority teachers. But, the majority of students in public schools are students of color, while most teachers identify as white.
Wisconsin’s Minority Teacher Loan program challenged in new lawsuit was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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