We expect it in California and New York, but Minnesota has become one of the most aggressive states in reshaping education. Defending Education has documented the statewide leftward shift, and it is a civil-rights crisis.
In October, Defending Ed filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education over Minneapolis Public Schools’ racially segregated classes, which appeared to be available only to black students, in violation of Title VI and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
We settled this question in 1954. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court made it clear that segregating students by race in public schools is unconstitutional.
In that same Minnesota district, students in a required Ethnic Studies class conduct a “structural analysis of racism and colonialism,” viewing everything through a race-based, anti-capitalist and Marxist lens.
The course cites Critical Race Theory, promotes the ideas of Karl Marx and peddles the notion that capitalism and Western culture are to blame for slavery, genocide, colonialism and white supremacy. Teachers then ask students to “challenge the ‘white savior’ narrative” and complete a Youth Led Participatory Action Research project that pushes them into activism.
In 2023, lawmakers required that by 2026 every high school add an ethnic studies course that can count toward graduation along with history, geography, economics and civics.
Ethnic studies is touted as a curriculum to promote tolerance and cultural understanding, but we’ve documented how it is a trojan horse for activism in the classroom, framing society as divided between oppressors and the oppressed.
Minnesota is also fighting the Trump administration’s “Gender Ideology” and “Sports Ban” orders as unlawful rewrites of Title IX. At the same time, under the banner of a group called Gender Justice, school board candidates published a joint initiative supporting “the full inclusion of transgender and nonbinary students in school athletics,” which they claim Title IX protects.
While school board candidates in the state are technically nonpartisan, their priorities are not in improving abysmal test scores, but in transgender activism on an issue where roughly eight in ten voters disagree with them.
At the state level, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) funds a litany of race-based programs, including a law passed in 2025 requiring MDE to award grants “to increase the number of teacher candidates who are of color or who are American Indian.”
An MDE grant competition, worth a total of $9.4 million, is open to universities and is explicitly focused on “increasing licensed school psychologists, school nurses, school counselors, and school social workers of Color and Indigenous.” This effectively excludes people who are not “Black, Indigenous or People of Color” and appears to violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.
In Minnesota, an administrative rule sets out the “Standards of Effective Practice” teachers must meet to be licensed. The standard on “racial consciousness and reflection” requires teachers to understand “how ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, deficit-based teaching, and white supremacy undermine pedagogical equity.”
Minnesota also has a statewide “Grow Your Own” program that provides grants to help district employees become licensed teachers. But the program requires any district applying to have at least 30% students of color, and any school that doesn’t reach that 30% threshold is not eligible for the grant.
According to Minnesota statute, the program imposes multiple race-based stipulations, including how grant money is allocated and who can participate.
For example, if a district gets a Grow Your Own grant, it must spend at least 80% of the money on scholarships or stipends for people of color or American Indians who want to get their teaching license. Then, “the remaining funds may be used in a variety of ways, including but not limited to scholarships/stipends for White candidates or providing programmatic supports for all candidates.”
The majority of funds are restricted to people in certain racial and ethnic categories, eligibility for most of the aid is race-based and it requires racial proportionality among student participants relative to district demographics.
Students at secondary schools can apply for the grants, “especially students of color and American Indian students, to pursue teaching,” but to be eligible, the percentage of students of color in the program can’t be lower than their percentage in the district’s total student population. The state also prioritizes applicants with the largest number or highest percentage of students who are of color or American Indian.
It’s clear that these programs aren’t based on merit or need, but instead an explicit effort to change the racial and ethnic composition of teachers.
Minnesota should serve as a warning for the rest of the country: it is teaching children and training teachers in an ideology that reverts back to the pre-civil rights era, treating Americans as members of competing racial groups instead of individuals with equal rights under the law.
From segregated classes in Minneapolis, to race-based licensure standards, to grant programs that explicitly prefer or exclude people based on skin color, state officials are normalizing what the Supreme Court rejected decades ago.
Kendall Tietz is an investigative reporter for Defending Education.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not represent an official position of Alpha News.
Kendall Tietz
Kendall Tietz is an investigative reporter for Defending Education. She previously worked as a writer for Fox News Digital. Before joining Fox, Kendall was a Robert L. Bartley Fellow for the Wall Street Journal Opinion page and an education fellow at the Daily Caller News Foundation. Kendall graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Journalism.
