Why all Minnesotans should support H.F. 29

The Minnesota Legislature is currently considering H.F. 29, a bill that does two important things:

• It repeals Minnesota’s K-12 liberated Ethnic Studies mandates enacted in 2023, and
• It suspends implementation of the Minnesota Department of Education’s new Social Studies standards — which include Ethnic Studies.

Here’s how American Experiment Senior Policy Fellow Katherine Kersten explained why we need H.F. 29 to the House Education Finance Committee on Feb. 27, 2025:

The way Ethnic Studies is sold, and what it really is, are very different things.

Ethnic Studies supporters make two primary claims.

First, we need Ethnic Studies because our students need to learn “warts and all” American history — about, say, World War II Japanese internment camps, lynchings, Indian relocation and reservations.

These three specific examples were recently listed by a testifier at this bill’s hearing before the Education Policy Committee.

But these topics — Japanese internment camps and the others I just named — are already taught in our schools. In fact, they are required under the Social Studies standards used in our classrooms today, which were adopted in 2012. Please see the list of examples at the end of my testimony.

H.F. 29’s focus is very different: It calls for the pausing of implementation of Social Studies standards and the repeal of laws that mandate instruction in liberated Ethnic Studies — in every grade and subject, including math, science, language arts, arts and physical education. (That’s Minn. Stat. § 120B.021, subd. 4(k), which was adopted in 2023 and which this bill repeals.)

Liberated Ethnic Studies teaches every subject through the “lens” of “race,” “power” and “resistance,” according to MDE’s Ethnic Studies Working Group’s new Ethnic Studies implementation framework. (A “lens,” in this sense, means distorting or omitting facts to conform to a particular ideological agenda.)

Specifically, Ethnic Studies “center[s] a power analysis of race…and racial formation” and “how these produce marginalization, discrimination and oppression and construc[t] identity.” A “core” Ethnic Studies tenet is “activism and resistance” to our nation’s fundamental institutions.

Minnesota’s recently adopted Social Studies standards — adopted by MDE in 2024 — are permeated by this extremist, combative, politicized agenda.

For example, a new Ethnic Studies standard entitled “Resistance” requires K-12 students to “describe how individuals and communities have fought for freedom and liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power locally and globally.”

Typical Ethnic Studies grade-level benchmarks include the following:

• First graders must “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power” and “use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.” That’s six-year-olds.

• High schoolers must “examine the construction of racialized hierarchies based on colorism and dominant European beauty standards and values.”

We can look to the St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) to see what our children’s classrooms will look like after statewide implementation of liberated Ethnic Studies. The St. Paul schools’ required Ethnic Studies course does not cultivate mutual understanding, but pushes students to form tribalized identities and stokes defiance of authority.

The curriculum exhorts 16-year-olds to “build” a race-and ethnicity-based “narrative of transformative resistance,” to “challenge and expose” “systems of inequality,” and to “resist all systems of oppressive power rooted in racism through collective action and change.”

Related artwork, labeled “seeds of resistance,” promotes the liberated Ethnic Studies “abolitionist” agenda, and features protest signs that read “No Bans/No Walls” and “Abolish Prison.”

When an MDE spokesman testified before the Education Policy committee, a primary reason he gave for opposing H.F. 29 was that many school districts are already spending money on Social Studies/Ethnic Studies implementation.

In fact, this makes H.F. 29’s passage even more urgent and important. It is imprudent and wasteful to spend money and time on this destructive initiative when a majority of Minnesota students can’t read or do math at grade level.

In this academic crisis, Ethnic Studies/Social Studies implementation will be a huge, costly sinkhole of funds, time and teacher training for our state’s public schools.

Integrating Ethnic Studies ideology into current history, geography, economics and citizenship and government — this alone will be a monumental task — requiring a “fundamental shift in most courses,” according to MDE’s implementation framework. There’s also the cost associated with creating new stand-alone Ethnic Studies courses, and eventually embedding Ethnic Studies ideology in all required subjects.

In addition, the Framework states, all K-12 teachers, support personnel and school administrators must “undergo” “transformative” professional development that “fosters a paradigm shift” in their understanding of the purpose of education.

Only in this way can “educators be adequately prepared to effectively implement Ethnic Studies,” the Framework declares.

H.F. 29 will eliminate this massive, counterproductive unfunded mandate for Ethnic Studies and pause it for the Social Studies/Ethnic Studies academic standards until 2030-31.

The second reason we need Ethnic Studies, its supporters claim, is that it allows students to “see themselves in the curriculum” — to learn who they really are, to discover “their identity.”

Now, it’s true that Ethnic Studies puts student “identity” front and center. But what kind of identity? Racialized “identity construction” is at the heart of liberated Ethnic Studies, which relentlessly drills into young people’s heads — starting in kindergarten — that “who they are” is determined by their skin color and ethnicity.

A new K-12 Ethnic Studies standard entitled “Identity” states this explicitly:

Analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography, ethnicity and gender. Apply these understandings to one’s own social identities and other groups living in Minnesota, centering those whose stories and histories have been marginalized, erased or ignored.

Using soft, therapeutic language — “this instruction helps me see myself in the curriculum, see who I really am” — Ethnic Studies pressures students to embrace a divisive, tribalized identity based on crude racial stereotypes. For some students, depending on their skin color, this identity will be rooted in guilt and shame, for others, in grievance and resentment.

In this way, Ethnic Studies manipulates and reshapes the psychology of vulnerable, inexperienced young people in order to line them up behind an extremist politicized agenda. 

Minority students will suffer most from Ethnic Studies. It will deprive them of their birthright as Americans, conditioning them to view themselves as oppressed victims, instead of teaching them the “success formula” — character, resilience and hard work — that has lifted so many Americans in the face of discrimination and adversity. 

Liberated Ethnic Studies will mandate racialized groupthink throughout our state’s public schools. I urge you to protect Minnesota’s next generation from this profoundly damaging ideology by supporting H.F. 29.

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Tell your legislators — repeal radical Ethnic Studies by supporting H.F. 29.