Repeal Radical Ethnic Studies
Instead of entrenching cultural antagonism, Minnesota’s academic standards should focus on teaching reading and math.
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, and eventually, every academic subject.
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.
Within the new Ethnic Studies framework and standards:
- First graders must “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power” and “construct meanings for those terms.”
- 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.”
- High schoolers will have to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism, political economy, anti-Blackness, Indigenous sovereignty, illegality and indigeneity.”
The more we learn about Minnesota’s plan to implement radical ethnic studies, the more we realize it must be repealed.
To read more about these ethnic studies standards and the significant problems they bring to our classrooms, visit our ethnic studies page.
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, including the graphic below, 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.
The core tenets of Ethnic Studies center on a “power analysis of race” and “activism and resistance.” The law also mandates all subjects must be taught through this divisive ethnic studies lens.
That’s the law in Minnesota unless legislators choose to repeal the ethnic studies mandate on local schools.
Make your voice heard! Support the repeal of Minnesota’s divisive ethnic studies law. Fill out the form above to fight for Minnesota’s future.
The founders of the mandate:
The 2023 ethnic studies law created an Ethnic Studies Framework Working Group, which consisted of deeply ideologically partisan members. The leader of the group was Brian Lozenski, founder of the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition (MESC) and a professor at Macalester College. You can learn more about Lozenski’s view of America here:
Professor Lozenski and the bureaucrats at MDE went to work last summer devising the Ethnic Studies Framework that teachers would use to accomplish the radical change in teaching and learning called for in the new law.
As you’ll see in this video, 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.
Not convinced yet? Read more:
March 25, 2025: Why all Minnesotans should support H.F. 29
February 2025: Policy Analysis: MDE’s Ethnic Studies Framework for Implementation
Apr. 1, 2025: Tim Walz Minnesota education standards will push ‘racial capitalism’ materials on students (National Review)
Feb. 16, 2025: Trump memo puts Walz administration on notice re: ethnic studies
Sept. 13, 2023: Follow the Money: The ethnic studies racket in Minnesota
VIDEO: Ethnic Studies leader: U.S. needs to be ‘overthrown’
Oct. 5, 2023: ‘Ethnic Studies’ is CRT peddlers’ sneaky new way to stoke racial division in schools
Oct. 17, 2024: Tim Walz brings ‘liberated’ ethnic studies to Minnesota
Oct. 25, 2023: Missing the mark: The proposed MN version of ethnic studies and its narrow ideology
October 2024: Ethnic Studies Working Group Recommendation Draft
Apr. 10, 2025: Connect the dots from teacher union dues to student failure
Apr. 8, 2025: MDE pays $7,000 to American Experiment for stalling data request
January 2025: ‘Liberating’ students from education
Feb. 25, 2025: (Podcast) Stop the Tape: Exposing the Ethnic Studies Gaslighting
Feb. 18, 2025: (Podcast) Episode 63 – Land of 10,000 FRAUDS, DEI, and RADICAL Ethnic Studies!
March 29, 2023: What ‘critical’ ethnic studies looks like in action
Oct. 23, 2024: U of M is writing ethnic studies lesson plans for K-12 teachers
Dec. 3, 2024: American Experiment sues Minnesota Department of Education
What is 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.
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. But these topics 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.
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.
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.)
Minnesota’s recently adopted Social Studies standards — adopted by MDE in 2024 — are permeated by this extremist, combative, politicized agenda.
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.
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.
Liberated Ethnic Studies will mandate racialized groupthink throughout our state’s public schools. Fill out the form at the top of this page to urge your legislator to support H.F. 29 and repeal this mandate now.