In the final analysis, Republican Pres. Donald Trump’s decision to end educational grants that prioritize intentional diversification of the teaching profession gives Louisiana an opportunity to improve how it trains future teachers.

Expressions of concern, if not outright apoplexy, followed the Trump Administration’s announcement that it would end hundreds of millions of dollars of grants that had components designed to give preference to racial minorities in teacher training. In Louisiana, under the Teacher Quality Partnerships Program, it would appear three grantees with about $13 million in remaining budget authority were affected, and under Supporting Effective Educator Development grants it would appear one grant with $3 million in budget authority remaining was affected. All explicitly prioritized serving minority applicants to create a more racially diverse teacher workforce.

Complaints came from those involved in the grants and from special interests benefiting from them, who decried that the move would damage teacher recruitment generally, but particularly efforts to diversify the educator workforce. Yet the facts show such hand-wringing as misplaced.

The shibboleth that students—especially minority students—perform better with a more diverse set of teachers has gained, with little merit, a great deal of currency among educrats and certain policy-makers. The problem with that argument is that so little evidence backs it. While some studies suggest that matching teacher and student ethnicity produces measurable performance gains, especially for minorities, these effects are typically small and more frequently observed in subjective areas like classroom behavior rather than objective measures of academic achievement.

The most recent research confirms this pattern for elementary education. Its authors caution that their findings cannot be generalized to secondary education and that regional effects, such as those in the south, might be washed away in a national sample.

By and large this means a better use of teacher training funds would be to channel these into programs not designed to favor applicants by race. Research suggests that such an approach would yield better outcomes for the money invested. There’s no reason why the canceled grant recipients can’t reformulate their proposals to exclude preference towards diversity and continue as before.

Whether they will have the opportunity to do so remains unclear. However, if the programs continue to receive congressional funding, Louisiana teacher training initiatives–minus racial preferences–could likely score the same future dollars but also improve effectiveness by deploying these without diversion to the un- to little-productive diversity goal. After all, schools are there to teach and effectively so, not to engineer social outcomes in the construction of their teacher workforce.

Ultimately, this policy shift gives Louisiana’s teacher training programs a better chance to produce more and better teachers through smarter allocation of funds, and they should seize that opportunity.