Tim Walz Brings ‘Liberated’ Ethnic Studies to Minnesota

Tim Walz was a schoolteacher before entering politics, so what is his approach to teaching? The Minnesota Department of Education will soon release the initial version of a document that lays out how new “liberated” ethnic-studies requirements will be implemented in the state’s roughly 500 public-school districts and charter schools.

Mr. Walz signed the law establishing this initiative in 2023. The department’s standards and benchmarks, approved in January, require first-graders to “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power” and “use those examples to 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-school students are told to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” and are taught to view themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.”

The Walz administration has relied on committed political activists to design and guide implementation of the state’s education agenda. One of them is Brian Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College in St. Paul and a leader and a founding organizer of Education for Liberation Minnesota, or EdLib MN, a group that aims to “be a political force” in Minnesota and “contend with the status quo of colonial education that prioritizes Eurocentric curricula.” Starting in 2020, EdLib MN’s ideological allies, who dominated the state’s social-studies standards drafting committee, made liberated ethnic studies a top priority. {snip}

Mr. Lozenski’s ideological commitments were on display in a 2022 article about the George Floyd riots titled “The Black Radical Tradition Can Help Us Imagine a More Just World.” The riots, he wrote, were “mass uprisings against racialized state violence,” which portend “the inevitable death” of the American “social order that prioritizes vulgar economics.” {snip}

As part of its campaign to build support for the liberated ethnic-studies mandate, EdLib MN retweeted a graphic calling for “the abolition of policing” and declaring that “defunding the police” means “abolishing the social order and building a new society.”

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