Originally published August 8, 2024 in National Review. Reprinted by permission.

If someone asked me to name the most radical state education standards in the country, I’d point to Minnesota. I did just that last year when I singled out Rhode Island, Illinois, and Minnesota as the embodiments of our “Blue State Education Nightmare.” Truly, Minnesota is the worst of the lot, and I’m going to tell you why.

Note first, however, that the story of Minnesota’s nightmare education standards isn’t just about Tim Walz’s radicalism, although it certainly establishes that. No, the problem is that America is still largely blind to the threat that Minnesota’s standards represent. Minnesota’s reworked education standards, steeped in the benign-sounding “ethnic studies” approach, are a kind of stealth critical race theory.

Ethnic studies derives from a different radical tradition than CRT, although the two traditions now blend and overlap. But while critical race theory is known and understood, ethnic studies still sounds to most Americans like innocent heritage boosterism.

In reality, ethnic studies — especially the brand of it Tim Walz has brought to Minnesota — is race-based neo-Marxism. Essentially, ethnic studies is a kind of anti-civics in which students are taught to reject and replace America’s system of government.

And the same neo-Marxist radicalism that now has Minnesota’s public schools in its grip pervades the new Advanced Placement African American Studies course. That AP African American Studies course is being contested in a few states but is still accepted in most. Once AP African American Studies is established, AP Ethnic Studies is sure to follow, not to mention AP Gender Studies and more. So between the College Board and state-standards takeovers like we’ve seen in Minnesota, a bizarre and radical brand of race-based Marxism — a kind of cousin of CRT — is on the march through our schools. Most Americans still don’t get that, so here’s the story you should know.

In 2021, in the wake of the George Floyd demonstrations and riots, Governor Walz introduced what he called his “Due North” education plan, featuring funding for a major ethnic-studies initiative. With Republicans in control of the state senate, Walz’s initiative went nowhere. After Democrats took control of both legislative houses in 2022, however, Walz’s ethnic-studies proposal took off. But what is ethnic studies and where does it come from?

The ethnic-studies movement is based in California and traces its origins to the 1968 student strike at San Francisco State College that ushered in the first Black Studies department, along with the associated founding of the Third World Liberation Front, which demanded and got the first college programs in Ethnic Studies (Chicano Studies, and the like). That famous strike at San Francisco State was conducted by one of the first college black student unions.

The Black Student Union at San Francisco State College was decidedly radical, guided as it was by members of the Black Panther Party who’d enrolled at the school for the express purpose of mobilizing student strikes. The Panthers, in turn, were deeply influenced by revolutionary movements sympathetic to communist Cuba and China. Those movements swept through the Bay Area in the mid 1960s.

The story of the radical origins of ethnic studies has been lovingly unearthed and chronicled, not by conservative sleuths but by proponents of ethnic studies themselves. They see their radical origin story as a paradigm for what ethnic studies should be — not a professionalized academic discipline but a practice of revolutionary agitation dedicated to uprooting and replacing the American system. The intellectual lodestars of this movement are Cedric Robinson, author of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, and his student, Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

As I’ve argued, both last year’s pilot AP African Americans Studies course and the newly revised and finalized AP African American Studies course were designed to teach and promote the perspective of Robinson, Kelley, and the black-studies and ethnic-studies movements they guide. As we’ll see, the same is true of Minnesota’s ethnic-studies standards.

For years, the neo-Marxist radicalism of ethnic studies was largely confined to university programs of black studies, Latino studies, ethnic studies, and such. Things began to change, however, in 2016. That’s when California then-governor, Jerry Brown, signed a law mandating the creation of a high school ethnic-studies course, with a model curriculum to be designed by a committee of ethnic-studies professors and like-minded K-12 teachers.

The model curriculum released in 2019 was, according to Williamson Evers, an education expert and prominent critic, “revolutionary anti-capitalist propaganda.” The draft was filled with critical race theory and held up militant and violent revolutionaries as models for students to follow. California’s draft ethnic-studies curriculum also defined the campaign to boycott Israel as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.”

The curriculum set off such an outcry that the California Department of Education was ordered back to the drawing board. The 2020 model, however, was no better. Still pervaded by Marxism, the curriculum refused to focus on any but a few “marginalized” ethnic groups. The Jews and the Irish were even criticized for assimilating and securing white “racial privilege.” The California legislature soon bottled up a bill to make ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement. The sponsor, however, was able to dislodge the bill and pass it just before the session ended as a response to the death of George Floyd. Governor Gavin Newsom, however, vetoed the bill, citing the need to revise the model curriculum. Opposition from Jewish groups was the biggest factor in the veto, but Newsom’s presidential aspirations probably played a role as well.

A year later, in 2021, with Governor Newsom’s signature on a barely changed bill, California became the first state to require a course in ethnic studies for high school graduation. The mandate doesn’t take effect until the 2025-26 school year. Some school districts, however, have already adopted the original radical curriculum. Meanwhile, districts that abhor that curriculum are scrambling to find a moderate alternative, which at present does not exist.

Newsom has played his hand deftly. By criticizing the optional model curriculum, he’s distanced himself from it for purposes of a possible presidential run. Even so, there is nothing to stop individual districts from adopting the radical and antisemitic version of ethnic studies embodied in the controversial model curriculum, and many California districts have already done so. The authors of the original radical curriculum, and their allies, have reconstituted themselves as advocates for “Liberated Ethnic Studies” and hired themselves out as consultants. Meanwhile, radical versions of ethnic studies have spread to other states: Oregon, Washington, Connecticut, and Vermont. In those states, however, ethnic studies remains an elective.

Things are different in Minnesota. Not only has Minnesota made ethnic studies a required part of classroom instruction, it has mandated the infusion of radical ethnic-studies ideology into every required subject, even math and science. Worse, Minnesota has adopted a radical leftist version of ethnic studies, a version closely allied with California’s original Liberated Ethnic Studies advocates. In fact, the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition, a project of Education for Liberation Minnesota (the group allied with the California radicals), has been formally granted input into the development of Minnesota’s model ethnic-studies implementation framework by state law.

In other words, even California’s Newsom hasn’t gone as far as Minnesota’s Walz. Newsom vetoed California’s original ethnic-studies bill to force at least a modest rewrite of the radical curriculum. That, and some other features of the California approach, gave individual school districts at least a degree of flexibility. Walz, in contrast, has embraced the radical approach, imposed it on every district, infused it into every subject, and handed power to the most extreme curricular radicals in the state — counterparts and allies of the very group that Newsom has labored to keep in check. Blue states that have made ethnic studies a mere elective don’t begin to compare. Walz takes the prize for education radicalism, no contest.

Although Minnesota’s turn toward ethnic studies has been radical, that’s not how the public was sold on the change. On the contrary, to the extent that the public has been informed at all, ethnic studies has been portrayed not as an anti-capitalist ideology or a blueprint for identity politics but as a unifying force, a way of bridging ethnic divides.

Walz initiated the drive for ethnic studies in 2021, in direct response to the George Floyd protests/riots. Expansion of ethnic studies was a key plank in his “Due North” education plan, and he touted Due North in his 2021 “State of the State” message. Although the legislature specifically rejected the governor’s request to include ethnic studies in the state’s social-studies standards, Walz’s commissioner of education began working with Minnesota’s education radicals to put ethnic studies in the standards anyway. Any objection to this administrative end run was removed after Democrats took over the legislature in 2022 and went on to incorporate ethnic studies into state standards by law.

In 2022, Walz even moved to incorporate ethnic studies into the “knowledge and skills” listed in the state’s “compulsory attendance law.” That would have forced ethnic studies on even private schools and homeschoolers, an overreach that leaves Gavin Newsom in the dust. The ethnic-studies mandate for private schools and homeschoolers was removed in later drafts, but the effort gives you some sense of where Walz is coming from.

Despite these bold moves, Walz has generally kept a low profile on this issue, while his Democratic allies have falsely presented ethnic studies as a program of moderation. The term “ethnic studies” sounds innocent enough. Sadly, the public has been fooled up to now, and there’s been relatively little pushback against this revolution in education.

The great exception is Minnesota’s conservative think tank, The Center of the American Experiment. There, education experts Katherine Kersten and Catrin Wigfall have churned out a steady stream of exposés of Minnesota’s ethnic-studies radicalism.

Kersten, of course, has highlighted the ethnic-studies standards themselves. These emphasize “resistance,” requiring students, for example, to “organize with others” to resist “systemic and coordinated exercises of power” against “marginalized” groups. But Kersten has also shown how ethnic studies now permeates other subjects. Fourth-graders, for example, “will no longer be required to learn the names and locations of continents, the Atlantic Ocean, the Amazon, England, or China.” Instead, geography students will “describe places and regions, explaining how they are influenced by power structures.” And do Minnesota’s ethnic-studies advocates follow California by coming down on Israel? You bet they do, as Kersten shows. Minnesota ethnic-studies advocates helped spark anti-Israel student walkouts in the immediate aftermath of October 7.

Wigfall dug up a PowerPoint slide show detailing St. Paul’s ethnic-studies curriculum, crafted by some of the same radicals from the group, Education for Liberation Minnesota, that will be putting together the statewide ethnic-studies framework. The slide that explains the concept of “resistance” (a theme present throughout the new state standards) blatantly endorses a set of leftist political causes by advertising a series of protest signs: $15 minimum wage, No Human is Illegal, Black Lives Matter, Food Justice, Climate Justice, No Bans, No Walls, Abolish Prison, a gender-queer symbol, and more.

Historian Wilfred McClay, author of the acclaimed U.S. history textbook Land of Hope, reviewed an earlier draft of Minnesota’s reworked social-studies standards and called them “among the worst in the country.” According to McClay, Minnesota’s ethnic-studies-infused standards make “radical political activism,” not academic knowledge and the cultivation of civic identity, the goal of education. Implicitly, McClay says, Minnesota’s new standards call into question “the very legitimacy of the regime under which we live.”

That is precisely the goal of advocates for Liberated Ethnic Studies, the key Midwest outpost of which is Education for Liberation Minnesota (EdLib MN). A leader of that group, Brian Lozenski, is arguably the most influential Minnesota voice when it comes to ethnic studies. Lozenski gave key legislative testimony in support of the ethnic-studies bill of 2023. As a leader of EdLib MN, and as a member of the official working group charged with advising the state on its ethnic-studies framework, Lozenski embodies the radicalism of Minnesota’s new ethnic-studies-based education standards.

In a 2020 piece, “The Black Radical Tradition Can Help Us Imagine a More Just World,” Lozenski touts the work of Cedric Robinson and Robin D. G. Kelley — leading thinkers of the radical ethnic-studies movement — as the answer to Minnesota’s education woes. To Lozenski, the George Floyd “uprising” of 2020 presages the “inevitable death” of the current “social order.” Lozenski oozes contempt for “the egoistic pursuits of U.S. society and its desperate cling to individualism.” Educationally, he adds, transforming the social order requires reforms like agitation for defunding the police and an end to all standardized testing.

Robinson, perhaps the leading thinker for radical ethnic-studies advocates, is known for elaborating a theory of “racial capitalism,” which holds that capitalism is inherently racist. The liberation of oppressed minorities can never be achieved without the death of capitalism, Robinson says. This is what he and Kelley teach; this is what was embedded in California’s 2019 ethnic-studies model curriculum; and this sweeping hostility to capitalism is embedded in Minnesota’s new ethnic-studies standards as well. Those standards require students to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism,” an otherwise obscure neo-Marxist bit of jargon that puzzled and dismayed even liberal reviewers of Minnesota’s new social-studies standards. It all makes sense, however, once you understand the radical, anti-American, and anti-Western foundations of ethnic studies.

This is what Tim Walz has unleashed in Minnesota—the teaching of a radical ideology that consciously rejects the legitimacy of America’s system. Minnesota now has the most radical education regime of any state that I know of. That regime was adopted at the behest of Tim Walz, under false pretenses of moderation. That sort of bait and switch is exactly what we have to fear on this and a great many other issues from the Harris-Walz ticket in 2024.

Stanley Kurtz is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Beyond his work with Education and American Ideals, Mr. Kurtz is a key contributor to American public debates on a wide range of issues from K-12 and higher education reform, to the challenges of democratization abroad, to urban-suburban policies, to the shaping of the American left’s agenda. Mr. Kurtz has written on these and other issues for various journals, particularly National Review Online (where he is a contributing editor).

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