Last month’s Education Reporter, as well as Stanley Kurtz’s revealing essay in the August issue, highlighted the dangerous impact Democrat vice presidential candidate and current Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz has had on education in his state. But there is much more to the candidate’s regular-guy persona than meets the eye, and astute observers wonder what it might mean for education nationally if the Harris-Walz ticket prevails in November.

In a recent issue of National Review, Stanley Kurtz further exposed the radicalism of Macalester College Professor Brian Lozenski, who was appointed by Governor Walz’s education department to write the “ethnic studies” curriculum for K-12 students, and who has been an influential voice in Minnesota education with the approval of Walz.

Kurtz writes:

• Minnesota’s version of ethnic studies, known as “liberated ethnic studies,” is more radical than that of any other state. The scholars and teachers who created liberated ethnic studies are based in California, but even California governor Gavin Newsom has distanced himself from the extremism of their approach. As a proponent of liberated ethnic studies, Lozenski was the founding organizer of Education for Liberation Minnesota, the first and only state-level branch outside of California of the liberated-ethnic-studies movement.

Perhaps even more troubling is the revelation that Lozenski openly “called for the ‘overthrow’ of the United States” in a 2022 YouTube video about his book, My Emancipation Don’t Fit Your Equation: Critical Enactments of Black Education in the US, which has since been taken down. Kurtz found the entire video of interest, but in particular Lozenski’s comments “calling for the overthrow of the United States that can be found from 54:30 to 57:00, during a discussion of the debate over critical race theory (CRT).” Kurtz says the book dovetails with the video, and that it demonstrates Lozenski’s approval of CRT as invented by Derrick Bell and applied to schooling through the work of Gloria Ladson Billings. (See Education Reporter, Brief #3, July 2022.)

During the video discussion, Lozenski chastises CRT’s critics by alleging that their “supremacist education” prevents them from having the “cognitive ability” to understand it. He states:

• The first tenet of critical race theory is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then ... it must be overthrown, right. And so we can’t be like, “Oh no, critical race theory is just about telling our stories and divers[ity].” It’s not about that. It’s about overthrow. It’s insurgent.... You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. Okay, it is an anti-state theory that says The United States needs to be deconstructed, period ... and so I think it’s an interesting argument there. And that’s why I’m a critical race theorist.

As Kurtz observes, “Walz has had many warnings and plenty of opportunities to pull back from the extremism of liberated ethnic studies — as Gavin Newsom has pulled back in California. Instead, Walz has continued to delegate power to Lozenski and his supporters, whom he has now charged with designing an ‘implementation framework’ for ethnic studies.” The question to be considered then becomes, will Lozenski play an even larger role in education on the national level in a Harris-Walz administration?

Ditching the Electoral College

Early this month, Walz restated his opposition to the electoral college while campaigning for himself and Harris. The National Review’s David Zimmermann quoted Walz as saying: “I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go. We need national popular vote, but that’s not the world we live in.”

The website National Popular Vote.com shows that 17 states and the District of Columbia have enacted what is called the “national Popular Vote Compact,” including the large population states of California, Illinois, and New York. This compact is an agreement among approving states to “guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.”

Liberals and progressives have been chomping at the bit for years to abolish the Electoral College. Hilary Clinton called for its demise after losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump, and in 2019, Elizabeth Warren proposed eliminating the Electoral College and urged moving to a popular vote. But in an October 2011 radio commentary, Phyllis Schlafly clearly and succinctly explained why doing away with the Electoral College is “a major attack against our Constitution by those who want to ‘fundamentally transform’ the United States.”

Phyllis aptly called the scheme “a plot” that has “big money behind it with highly paid lobbyists who go around asking state legislators to enact identical bills requiring their own presidential electors to ignore the winner of their own state’s presidential election and cast all their state’s votes for the presidential candidate they think received the most popular votes nationwide.” Phyllis explained that due to the siphoning off of votes by third-party candidates, “in most elections no candidate receives a popular majority and is elected only because he receives a majority in the Electoral College.” She urged Americans “to rise up and say No to those who are promoting the campaign for the National Popular Vote.” In 2024, Governor Walz will doubtless be a prominent voice saying Yes should he ascend to the role of vice president.

Of unions and library books

Writer and education policy staffer for the Independent Women’s Forum, Neeraja Deshpande, warned in an August Real Clear Wire (wnd.com) article that the NEA’s enthusiastic endorsement of VP nominee Walz, “should be worrisome for Americans who are actually concerned about the state of education in the country: for years, the NEA has put radical politics above children. Unfortunately, so has Tim Walz.”

Deshpande reiterated what has already become public about Minnesota education under Walz’s governorship, that students have lost ground academically in a significant way. She wrote:

• Indeed, when Walz took office as governor of Minnesota in 2019, 59.2% of Minnesota students were proficient in reading and 55% were proficient in math. Four years later, in 2023, those numbers fell to 49.9% and 45.5%, respectively. Over that same time period under Walz, Minnesota’s chronic absenteeism rate more than doubled, from 14% to 30%. In 2018, before Walz took office, Minnesota’s schools were ranked 5th in the nation; five years later, in 2024, they are ranked 17th. With such disastrous numbers, one would expect Walz to focus on getting back to the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic.

But the Walz agenda has proven to have more to do with radical politics than education. Deshpande pointed out that instead of focusing on academics — although Walz did approve a bill mandating “evidence-based reading methods” in 2023 — he “has spent much of his time in office fear-mongering about so-called conservative book bans, which have been debunked repeatedly.”

The Minnesota legislature in May passed legislation, signed into law by Walz, that essentially prohibits any restrictions on any books or other materials in a school library “based solely on the viewpoint, content, message, idea, or opinion conveyed.” In practice, Deshpande explained, “this means teachers and librarians in Minnesota can expose children to explicit books without accountability.”

She concludes, and many conservatives agree, that “Minnesota’s radical curriculum and education policy failures are a direct reflection of Walz’s priorities and judgments. If he is elected alongside Kamala Harris in November, Minnesota’s educational problems will be sure to spread across the nation.”

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