<p>The persistent teacher diversity gap in U.S. urban schools has spurred interest in Grow Your Own (GYO) initiatives, which aim to recruit and prepare local community members as teachers to address both workforce shortages and the cultural mismatch between educators and students. While these programs hold promise, their potential is often undermined by the influence of neoliberal policies that prioritize standardization, market-based choice and competition, and technocratic accountability. This article situates GYO initiatives in the context of current reforms and critically examines their broad appeal through the lens of critical race theory and interest convergence. Findings highlight how core aims of GYO intersect with core elements of neoliberalism in adverse ways, such as commodifying teacher diversity to improve test-score outcomes and to staff under-resourced schools while perpetuating inequitable working conditions and diminished collective power for teachers and their students. The discussion draws further attention to barriers that constrain GYO programs’ transformative potential to create and sustain diverse teacher pipelines. Ultimately, by interrogating deep tensions between the equity-oriented promise of GYOs and patterns of precarity in the wake of neoliberal reforms, the article offers recommendations for the design and implementation of GYOs that should be tied to broad justice-oriented advocacy projects and seek to empower teachers of color as agents of change rather than instruments of organizational compliance and productivity.</p>