How Minnesota lawmakers disappointed the office of the Dalai Lama

In March of 2025, Namgyal Choedup, the Dalai Lama’s North American envoy, wrote a letter to Minnesota’s state legislature, pleading for their support. 

Choedup’s plea to lawmakers came amidst a powerful Minnesotan-Tibetan relationship. The Tibetan community in Minnesota is one of the largest Tibetan communities in the United States. Indeed, Minnesota is home to a young man said to be a reincarnated lama. The Minnesota community is important to Tibetans. As China has continued to oppress Tibetan communities in their homeland, the Tibetan diaspora worldwide has become a significant part of preserving their culture until a return is possible. 

What was the request from this envoy representing a beleaguered people?  The letter reads in part,

I am writing this letter to support charter schools including the Ocean of Wisdom charter school which is driven by the vision of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to promote the education of not just the brain but our hearts. The Office of Tibet strongly supports preserving funding for underserved and “at-risk” students and continuing Minnesota’s important record of educational innovations in the charter school arena. Charter schools in Minnesota have given critical educational support and opportunities to immigrant students with high-quality general education, language education, and effective teacher-family involvement for a wide array of students in atmospheres that foster intellectual curiosity, dignity, and learning efficacy.

Choedup made an impassioned plea for charter school funding, mentioning the Tibetan community’s intention to open Ocean of Wisdom charter school, an innovative school that would be one of the first to offer formal Tibetan language instruction and Social, Emotional, and Ethical curriculum instruction. For Tibetans, language instruction is particularly significant due to Chinese efforts to stamp out the language. 

Choedup additionally noted that charter schools in Minnesota are significantly underfunded compared to their public school counterparts, and warned that further cuts would cripple the charter school program. 

While charter schools are currently asked to operate with 30% less funding than their public school counterparts, we implore Governor Walz to suspend plans for further budget cuts affecting charter schools. Charter schools and our charter school students cannot bear the weight of these funding cuts.

In response, Minnesota lawmakers rejected the plea, ultimately passing a package that included a $20 million cut for charter school aid and a reduction in charter school billback aid. While these cuts are significant, they pale before the initial slew of cuts proposed by Gov. Tim Walz. The proposal included a $40 million cut in charter funding, eliminating the Long-Term Facilities Maintenance fund (which charters typically use to pay for building leases), and scrapping the Special Education Charter Tuition Adjustment (which helps charters cover the gap between the actual cost of educating special-needs students and the insufficient reimbursement from local districts).

Before the budget cuts were passed, Choedup told Minnesota lawmakers that the Tibetan Ocean of Wisdom school would open in fall 2025. The school website now notes that it will open in fall 2026. There were no press releases explaining the schedule change.

Perhaps the next state budget will lend more financial support to the Tibetan charter school — but the path is murky. An American Enterprise Institute (AEI) national expert on education, Naomi Schaefer Riley, believes that Minnesota’s lawmakers have enacted a war on charter schools. She writes that  

the federal government awarded $38.5 million between 2017 and 2023 to be distributed to charters. Yet Minnesota has disbursed only about $15.5 million and is returning $12.5 million to Washington. That’s right—the state is sending money back to the federal government, even as the governor proposes cuts to programs serving Minnesota’s charter students.

She added that lawmakers create significant burdens for charter schools by requiring overwhelming amounts of paperwork, misspending funds, and starving them of resources. 

Criticisms of Minnesota’s charter schools often cite several dramatically underperforming schools that have little to no authorizer accountability. While it is true that some of Minnesota’s charter schools deserve to be closed, the ethos behind the charter school model is that underperforming schools should and will close (unlike public schools, which remain open at almost all costs). 

Despite low funding and spotty authorizer oversight, Minnesota charter schools rank in the middle of the pack nationally, and some regularly earn recognition as some of the state’s top schools. 

My colleague Catrin Wigfall analyzed how some charter schools measure up to their local schools (i.e. the schools that students would have attended if they had not attended charter school). She found that, even though some charter school scores were low, they were in almost every case dramatically better than the local school scores. She argued that charter school critiques should emphasize nuance in order to ensure best practices in charter school policy and reforms. Simpler authorizer policies that mandate higher school outputs could be a great place to begin. 

The ongoing process of education reform and budget funding will continue. If the next education funding package includes more support for charter schools, then Minnesota’s lawmakers will have overcome the legislative disappointment they gave to the Dalai Lama’s office.