Beginning in fall 2026, Minnesota public schools will be responsible for determining how Ethnic Studies is implemented in K-12 classrooms. Public high schools will have to offer an Ethnic Studies course, and all grade levels will be required to teach the state’s revised K-12 social studies academic standards that include three Ethnic Studies concepts: Identity, Resistance, and Ways of Knowing and Methodologies.
The definition of Ethnic Studies, created by the 2023 Minnesota Legislature, is designed to promote a critical and liberated framework, positioning ethnic identity and history as content to be interpreted through a prescribed ideological lens.
To support this version of Ethnic Studies, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS) is turning the new standards into free lesson plans for school districts. RIDGS’s self-declared mission is to “challenge systems of power and inequality” and “imagine social transformation.”
In a new video series, American Experiment takes a closer look at these taxpayer-funded lesson plans from the U of M to help educators, parents, and communities better understand what is coming to a classroom near you.
The first video breaks down a lesson plan titled, “Protest Art and the Movement for Black Lives.” Written for sixth graders (12 year olds) the lesson plan fulfills the Ethnic Studies Resistance standard, which instructs students to “organize” and “describe how individuals and communities have fought for freedom and liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power.”
Designed to take place over three days (each day a 50-minute lesson), the lesson
focuses on the Movement for Black Lives and the role of protest art in mediating power in the city. Students will learn more about the 13 guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and how local artists responded to the murder of George Floyd during the 2020 Uprising through mural art. Students will create their own protest art for a cause of their choice, or one related to lesson content.
Among the suggested prompts for students’ protest art is defunding the police.
The lesson plan’s video resources include one on George Floyd Square produced by Unicorn Riot, a non-profit, left-wing media collective that films Antifa and Black Lives Matter demonstrations nationwide.
Students will work through “A Black Lives Matter Principles Activity Book,” which features all 13 Black Lives Matter principles and definitions. The principles include the organization’s thoughts on areas such as families, “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” and transgender affirmation to “dismantle cis-gender privilege.”
The activity book also states that “some systems, like schools and jails, have white supremacy built into them because white people have had so much power for so long.” Additional content emphasizes the goal of “dismantling” multiple “systems of oppression” — including capitalism, patriarchy, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy — and even includes a poem referencing a mother masturbating.
Although school boards are not required to use these lesson plans, their ready-made nature and backing by a major institution may make them seem like the default choice to fulfill the state’s mandates. The materials were already shared with teacher union members during Education Minnesota’s MEA conference.
Concern over this liberated version of Ethnic Studies is specific. Minnesota students deserve a robust education that includes learning hard, historical truths in ways that are honest and complete and frank discussions about where this country has fallen short. Classrooms should be places for inquiry-based learning and exposure to multiple viewpoints, where students learn about people, heritage, and culture without it stoking distrust of their peers. But liberated Ethnic Studies does not live up to this standard; instead, it forces an inadequate framing of human identity based on pan-ethnic group labels and invites protest and activism as reflexive reactions to differences. Not only is tribalism unhealthy for society, advocating for this narrow worldview damages intellectual development.
Informing school boards about quality, balanced alternatives — such as, the the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism’s American Experience curriculum — will help safeguard local decision-making and encourage curriculum adoption that emphasizes a balanced educational approach instead of ideological rigidity.
