Government-funded college program for teachers of color accused of discrimination  

A teacher training program run by University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Kansas State University has been accused of discrimination for prioritizing teachers of color.  

The program, called Project RAÍCES (Reenvisioning Action and Innovation through Community Collaborations for Equity across Systems), received millions in government grants, The College Fix reported.  

The project’s goal is to recruit more minority youth into the teaching profession and to “address challenges of White normative spaces that frequently impeded retention of TOCs [Teachers of Color] in U.S. schools.”  

“Raíces” is also the Spanish word for “roots.”  

UNL Associate Professor Amanda Morales leads the program, and told local media its purpose was to “center” minority culture.  

“Oftentimes, we focus on recruiting and getting students into teaching,” she began, “but we put them through programs that are essentially designed for the majority, right? They’re designed for the majority students. And so, the identities of Black and brown pre-service teachers are often not well-represented or understood in our teacher ed programs.  

The project will “really center” black and Hispanic students’ “identity, their expertise, their language, their culture in a way that we prepare them to be future teachers of the diverse students in our classrooms,” Morales explained.  

“Kids deserve to see someone who looks like them at the front of the classroom,” added Lauren Gatti, a professor at UNL who helps run Project RAÍCES. “What this grant allows us to do is have a small part in helping to create a teaching force more representative of the students in our schools and really being there for them throughout the entire process.”  

However, the program is being accused of discrimination for its obvious favoritism toward non-whites.  

“Project RAÍCES is a blatant payoff to a political constituency and will do nothing at all to improve K-12 education in Nebraska,” said S.T Karnick, a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute. “Nebraska’s children, parents, and taxpayers will get nothing out of this scam.”  

Karnick encouraged Nebraskans to report Project RAÍCES to the state and federal government. 

“This program violates federal nondiscrimination law, which states explicitly that ‘an employer cannot discipline, harass, fire, refuse to hire or promote a person because of his or her national origin,’” he added.  

Boise State University Professor Scott Yenor agreed with Karnick’s assessment.  

“This Nebraska program shows that anti-DEI criteria need to be sewn into grant proposals at the state level and hopefully, eventually, at the national level,” Yenor told The College Fix.  

States such as Florida, Oklahoma and Texas have already taken steps to ban DEI in higher education.  

However, others – including Kansas – still spend millions peddling what is arguably racial discrimination in their universities.