Understanding Minnesota’s New Ethnic Studies Mandate

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Understanding Minnesota’s New Ethnic Studies Mandate

Starting in 2026, every K-12 school in Minnesota will be required to teach Ethnic Studies as a new strand of social studies. While schools are also required to offer an optional course on Ethnic Studies, these new Ethnic Studies standards are embedded in every social studies class. Every student who takes a Social Studies course (which is every Minnesota student) will be taught by these standards.

This highly politicized and ideologically shaped version of ethnic studies is not about the study of different cultures, student representation in curriculum, or learning about “honest” history. Rather, it requires students to understand the world primarily through a lens of power-centric, race-based social struggles. We believe that this lens diminishes the common humanity of each student and encourages cultural tension at a time when diversity, civic discourse, and individual agency should be valued. Here’s why.

What’s the framework?

Passed by the 2023 Minnesota Legislature, Ethnic Studies includes three distinct standards: Identity, Resistance, and Ways of Knowing and Methodologies. 

These new requirements shift the academic focus away from core factual knowledge and toward protest and social activism. The Minnesota Department of Education’s handpicked national experts to review the new standards expressed significant academic and social concern over them.

For example, from the Ethnic Studies benchmarks:

1. Kindergartners must “retell a story about an unfair experience that conveys a power imbalance.”
2. First graders must “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power” and “construct meanings for those terms.”
3. Fourth graders must “identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.”
4. High schoolers will have to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism, political economy, anti-Blackness, Indigenous sovereignty, illegality and indigeneity.”

Every K-12 school in Minnesota will be required to teach this content in fall 2026. Check out the full set of standards and benchmarks for yourself.

Inside the classroom

The University of Minnesota’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS) is converting these new Ethnic Studies standards into free lesson plans for school districts.

RIDGS’ self-declared mission is to “challenge systems of power and inequality” and “imagine social transformation.” Although school boards are not required to use these taxpayer-funded lesson plans, their ready-made nature and backing by a major institution may make them seem like the default choice to fulfill the state’s mandates. The materials were already shared with teacher union members during Education Minnesota’s MEA conference.

Watch the video below for a closer look at one of these lesson plans.

RIDGS is not the only ideological organization involved in implementing these “liberated” standards. As our next video demonstrates, partisan organizations that helped draft the Ethnic Studies standards regularly encourage participation in political protests as a routine part of students’ education, regardless of whether they are intellectually and emotionally prepared to do so thoughtfully. This reflects the “Resistance” Ethnic Studies standard in action and raises serious questions about whether students are being equipped for critical inquiry or directed toward political mobilization.

And Minnesota’s new Social Studies benchmarks go through no external approval process. The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) writes whatever content it wants and then distributes it to schools to teach. This is worth keeping in mind as you watch the next video and see what these new benchmarks contain and what they replace. And it is no accident. The department has openly stated these changes represent an intentional “shift” away from specific content-based knowledge to conceptual learning centered on “dominant and non-dominant narratives.”  

What is the lens these standards use?

Every student should learn about other cultures and about the history of America’s triumphs and struggles. But after careful review, we, along with national experts like Dr. Wilfred McClay, believe that these standards accomplish something else entirely.

These new standards are part of a strain of thought called “liberated” Ethnic Studies. Liberated Ethnic Studies emerged from the ethnic studies movement of the 1970s, as proponents attempted to correct what they viewed as ideological deficits in ethnic studies. Liberated Ethnic Studies focuses issues of “systemic oppression,” “racial capitalism,” and “structural violence” through a lens of Critical Theory. Recently, California rejected its statewide Liberated Ethnic Studies mandate amid widespread concern that the curriculum promoted antisemitism.

Students are asked to define themselves again and again by certain labels — race, gender, sexual desire, cognitive ability, affluence level, physical ability, transgender identity, family background, and more. Instead of teaching knowledge of the numerous American exemplars of many different backgrounds who have accomplished enormous societal victories, students will be required to consider how their labels correspond to power, privilege, and harm. They will be prompted to resist, fight, and overpower the structures that Liberated Ethnic Studies considers oppressive; examples from RIDGS’ sample curricula include the nuclear family, the school system, “whiteness,” religious perspectives on gender and sexuality, and economic theories like capitalism.

We at the Center are the first to agree that reform and renewal is badly needed for America. However, these standards require that students habituate angry, inaccurate, identity-first ideological and political perspectives.

Ethnic Studies was presented to the 2023 Minnesota Legislature as a commonsense way to ensure K-12 students “learn about other cultures” and “see themselves in the curriculum.” These standards do not focus on global cultures, religions, and histories. Instead, they force a polarizing, narrow political worldview into schools.

The Minnesota’s Ethnic Studies working group published this draft framework to explain the core tenets of Ethnic Studies, clarifying that Ethnic Studies is not “multicultural education.” While the Minnesota Department of Education stated it does not intend to publish the document in its draft form, it clearly shows why this version of Ethnic Studies is so concerning.

Here’s the first paragraph of the working group’s definition of Liberated Ethnic Studies, shortened for length.

Ethnic Studies center a power analysis of race, racialization and racial formation including how racial categorization impacts human relationships to land, access to property rights, how these produce marginalization, discrimination and oppression and constructs identity.

1. Power analysis should include discussions of colonialism, conquest and empire building and the impact of these practices on economics, culture, society, and policy.

2. Power analysis should be intersectional with the acknowledgment that even though Ethnic Studies centers a power analysis of race, power is constituted… through layered identities that may include “color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, age, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, sexual orientation, or disability” (Minnesota Statutes 2023, section 363A.13)…

4. A power analysis of race should be approached from comparative and relational perspectives, meaning there should be comparative analysis among racial groups not limited to a single racial group’s relationship to whiteness.

This lens, by design, leads to system upheaval, dissatisfaction, and permanent racial tension. The current Ethnic Studies standards do not promote a culture of shared humanity, civic discourse, and individual possibility.

Minnesota’s new law also mandates that all required K-12 academic subjects must be taught through this lens as their respective academic standards undergo review and revision.

There are strong and legitimate concerns about these standards. Children will no longer be required to learn some basic historic facts. Nor will they learn the strength of individual conviction and virtue. Certainly, they will not learn about global ethnicities, traditions, and religions. Instead, they will learn to analyze the world through the lens of power, race, and harm, incentivized to become young activists in a system they remain ignorant of.

Does this build the Minnesota we want?

What’s next?

Faced with public upheaval and pressure on lawmakers, California chose not to fund its ethnic studies mandates. Unless public upheaval in Minnesota reaches similar levels, it is highly likely that these standards will enter classrooms in fall 2026.

However, parents and school board members do not have to accept the RIDGS curriculum. There are numerous quality, balanced alternatives — such as, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism’s (FAIR) American Experience curriculum — that will help safeguard local decision-making and encourage curriculum adoption that emphasizes a balanced educational approach instead of ideological rigidity.

Minnesotans who are worried about these developments should invest in their families, schools, and communities by exercising their rights and considering a run for school board or serving on a school board district advisory committee.

To learn more about how to make achievement-focused local changes and choose quality alternative curricula, visit our School Board Toolkit website.

The Social Studies Standards will be up for review and potential rewrites in 2031.

Ethnic Studies News & Analysis

Voices at the Capitol

Mother Testifies Against Ethnic Studies Bill: “Not Everything That Sounds Good IS Good”

Kofi Montzka, a Minnesotan attorney and mother of three, testified against H.F. 1269 on March 21, 2023. “We used to have a race-based system. We got rid of it, and now you all are trying to bring it back.”

Testimony Against Ethnic Studies Bill: “I Am What It Means To Be Black In America.”

Lifelong Minnesotan Hillary Swanson testified against H.F. 1269 on March 21, 2023. “I will not allow anyone to tell me that they have privilege over me because of my skin.”

Ethnic Studies Bill: A “Hateful,” “Cynical And Demoralizing” Message

Take Charge MN board chair Alfrieda Baldwin testified against H.F. 1502 on March 23, 2023. “This isn’t an ethnic studies bill. It is a critical social justice bill that will strip students of their individuality and slot them into the role of either victim or victimizer depending on their skin color.”

The (white) committee chair’s response: “Let’s just tone the rhetoric down and tone the name-calling down, otherwise we’ll have to do a course correction.”

Ethnic Studies Bill: “Illiberal and Un-Minnesotan”

American Experiment Senior Policy Fellow and activist Katherine Kersten testified against H.F. 1269 on March 29, 2023. She quoted directly from the Minnesota activists and organizations pushing for ethnic studies, revealing their true agenda.

“If this… becomes law, students and teachers will flood out of our public schools, which will—over time—be transformed beyond recognition. I urge you to find the moral courage to stop that from happening.”