Welfare fraud in Minnesota under Governor Tim Walz may total $9 billion, according to U.S. prosecutors. The good news is that we know the government can pull public funds preemptively, prosecute bad actors and send them to jail.
But unfortunately for Minnesotans, the pernicious ideology of racial identity politics—which facilitated the fraud and rendered Walz vulnerable to savvy Somali criminals’ threatened claims of racism—has metastasized, and now permeates the architecture of our public education system.
This far more egregious scandal can’t be cured by withholding funds or sending people to jail, and has received no national attention. Under the governor’s direction, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE)—the agency responsible for the massive Feeding Our Future debacle—is entrenching the race-based ideology that underlies it in the state’s K-12 schools and the minds of Minnesota’s children.
MDE is teaching students, in every grade and subject, to view the world through the lens of race and power, and to regard our nation’s fundamental institutions with suspicion and hostility.
The same toxic racial politics and duplicitous tactics that we saw in Feeding Our Future and other social service frauds are on display here. At the center are politically sophisticated actors who use charges of racism as a rhetorical weapon and employ guilt and shame to extract concessions, with the goal of converting the state’s public schools to a racial and ethnic spoils system. The Walz administration’s tactics include under-handed state facilitation, stonewalling, and efforts to hide their miscues.
The consequences of Walz’s hijacking of our K-12 schools will be much more damaging and far-reaching than the social services fraud. This is a fraud on the minds of vulnerable young people. The governor’s actions ensure the permissive culture that facilitates race-based self-dealing and encourages anarchy in the streets will become a fact of life in our once beautiful, livable state.
What’s happened
The vehicle for Walz’s transformation of our public schools is an extremist pedagogy called “liberated” Ethnic Studies, which sprang from the San Francisco State student riots and strikes of the 1960s. Walz has made Ethnic Studies a top priority since his first year in office.
Liberated Ethnic Studies ideology instructs students to embrace race-based group identities. For disfavored groups this identity is rooted in guilt and shame, for favored groups, in grievance and resentment.
Ethnic Studies depicts social life as a zero-sum power struggle between oppressors (bad) and victims (good) and maintains that a power imbalance is at the heart of every injustice. It exhorts students to shift power to “marginalized” groups by engaging in “resistance”—of the kind now causing chaos in Minneapolis streets—to our nation’s allegedly racist social and political institutions. To criticize this is branded, by definition, racist.
Walz and his legislative allies have erected our state’s new comprehensive K-12 Ethnic Studies regime on three foundations:
- New academic standards in Social Studies/Ethnic Studies, which MDE adopted in 2024;
- A 2023 law embedding Ethnic Studies ideology in every grade and required subject—including math, science, language arts, health and physical education—in coming years; and
- Rules and laws that hardwire this belief system into state teaching standards, licensing requirements and fundamental school mechanics.
What students will learn
Here’s what Minnesota students will be learning when the new Walz Social Studies standards go into effect in classrooms in Fall 2026.
First graders must “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 schoolers are instructed 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.”
Meanwhile, the standards teach history through the lens of skin color and imperialism, and even turn geography to political ends. For example, fourth graders will not be required to learn the names and locations of continents, the Atlantic Ocean, the Amazon, England or China. Instead, they will “describe places and regions, explaining how they are influenced by power structures,” and “recognize the indigenous land” that states and capitals “were built on.”
The bad actors
The Walz administration and its legislative allies knowingly chose committed political activists to design and direct the new Ethnic Studies regime.
Most were leaders or allies of the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition, which works to “center” K-12 public school instruction on groups “erased from mainstream curricula due to persistent racism, patriarchy, xenophobia and linguistic imperialism.” These activists dominated MDE’s Social Studies standards drafting committee and led the lobbying campaign at the Capitol. After the standards’ adoption, they controlled MDE’s “Ethnic Studies Working Group,” charged with recommending course guidelines, curricula, teacher training and instructional resources.
Center of the American Experiment, where I serve as a policy fellow, began sounding alarm bells about the extremism of the Walz administration’s hand-picked advisors in 2021. But Walz ignored his critics. When concerned parents flooded MDE’s Social Standards drafting committee with objections, members dismissed them as racists or “white supremacists.”
Walz and his legislative allies sold Ethnic Studies as promoting racial understanding—something all kind, empathetic Minnesotans should support.
But at the State Capitol in St. Paul in 2023, Ethnic Studies advocates’ legislative strategy was marked by calculated deception and lack of transparency. Sweeping proposals to infuse “liberated” ideology through K-12 schools were subtly woven throughout bills that were pushed through at breakneck speed, using slickly packaged testimony and often omitting examination of the legislation’s actual text.
At the center was a coordinated bait-and-switch campaign. Savvy activists lobbied for liberated Ethnic Studies using a benign, inclusive “kumbaya” message. They framed Ethnic Studies as unifying an unequaled opportunity to “bridge the ethnic and cultural divide” in Minnesota classrooms by “invit[ing] students to more deeply explore” the state’s “many diverse cultures and histories.”
Throughout the campaign for Ethnic Studies, Brian Lozenski— a leader of the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition, a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul and a national Ethnic Studies strategist—has played a pivotal role.
Lozenski has declared in an online video that the United States must be “overthrown.” In 2022, he described the George Floyd riots as “mass uprisings against racialized state violence,” which portend “the inevitable death” of the American “social order that prioritizes vulgar economics.” He urged schools reopening after Covid to “join the social unrest and actively combat the greater public health crisis of systemic racism.”
As a leader of the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition, Lozenski has been a primary advisor to the Walz administration. But when he served as chief testifier for the Ethnic Studies bill at the legislature, he did not reveal his radical connections. Instead, he held himself out as a concerned parent who endorses Ethnic Studies because it gives students the “intra- and inter-cultural knowledge” they need in a “globalized world.”
The Walz administration knew exactly what to expect from Lozenski when it sought his guidance on its statewide implementation of Ethnic Studies.
In 2021, the St. Paul public schools made “critical ethnic studies” a graduation requirement, with Lozenski serving as a consultant. The St. Paul course instructs 16-year-olds to “build” a race- and ethnicity-based “narrative of transformative resistance,” and to “resist all systems of oppressive power rooted in racism through collective action and change.”
Accompanying artwork, labeled “seeds of resistance,” features protest signs that read “No Bans/No Walls” and “Abolish Prison.”
The smoking gun—MDE’s implementation framework
In June 2024, MDE assigned Brian Lozenski as a primary author of its Ethnic Studies Working Group’s Implementation Framework for Minnesota’s roughly 500 school districts and charter schools. MDE promised to release the 62-page draft for public comment when the group finished in Fall 2024.
Then in August, Kamala Harris named Tim Walz as her vice-presidential running mate.
Abruptly, MDE refused to make the framework public. The agency employed tactics familiar from the welfare fraud—duplicity, interminable delay, and attempts to engineer deniability—to prevent public scrutiny. After months, Center of the American Experiment, my organization, was compelled to file a lawsuit to get MDE to hand it over.
The framework’s content explained MDE’s stonewalling. The document lays out a multi-faceted ground plan to transform our schools’ mission from providing students with academic knowledge and skills to creating race-conscious political activists committed to “resistance.”
The framework has three primary objectives. The first is to indoctrinate students.
Since the Social Studies standards’ adoption, it has been unclear how MDE intends to interpret or measure student mastery of an Ethnic Studies “anchor standard” entitled “Resistance.” The standard requires students to “organize with others to resist systemic and coordinated exercises of power” against “marginalized,” oppressed groups.
The framework clarifies this. It recommends skewed, ideologically freighted lessons designed to enlist vulnerable children in an extremist political agenda.
For example, in one recommended series of lessons, third graders study “solidarity movements like the Third World Liberation Front and the Delano grape strike”; learn about “the need for organizing” in “a racialized society”; and create “their own original dances of resistance.”
Throughout the lessons, teachers manipulate these nine-year-old schoolchildren with leading questions like the following:
“What is power?”; “Who holds it?”; “How do institutions, like schools, oppress groups based on race?”; and “How do we redistribute power to create equitable…ecosystems?”
The framework’s second objective is to re-educate teachers to conform their personal beliefs to the new state-endorsed ideology. The first vehicle it employs is “professional development”—mandatory for all teachers, staff and school leaders—that “fosters a paradigm shift” in their understanding of public education’s mission. In these sessions, they are pressed to develop tools to “challenge white supremacy” and cultivate the “identity” of “anti-racist advocate.”
The framework also directs teachers to engage in intrusive, cult-like “self-assessments.” In this connection, for example, it instructs them to “continuously reflect on my identities” and “my relationships to structure and power.”
They are also directed to consider questions like the following:
- “How do I decenter my voice in the classroom and place students/community voices at the forefront?”
- “How am I disrupting the binary between teacher and student and instead working to co-construct knowledge in my classroom?”
- “How am I creating opportunities for Black, Indigenous and racialized youth…and their communities to hold me accountable for engaging Ethnic Studies authentically?”
The effect of psychologically manipulative exercises like these is to condition teachers to automatically view their students and co-workers through the lens of race and ethnicity; to sow self-doubt, guilt and shame in teachers of disfavored races (generally white); and to lead them to question their ability both to understand and effectively serve their minority students.
The desired outcome appears to be to delegitimize the authority of school leaders, structures and policies and to condition white teachers to hand over control of their classrooms to vocal, self-appointed “community activists” from “racialized groups.” This is framed as a necessary element of becoming an advocate of “liberation,” and those who balk are presumed guilty of white supremacy.
The framework’s third objective is to engineer a permanent, central role for race-essentialist activists in Minnesota’s K-12 public schools.
To accomplish this, the framework redefines the mission of education as reclaiming “histories and narratives that have been erased and/or marginalized by dominant historical narratives,” and centering “knowledge production” by “racialized groups.” It recenters schooling around student choices and “voices.” Young people are now to be seen as “co-creators of knowledge,” who “use their own inherent genius to create pathways to learning.” As a result, teachers must change how they evaluate “racialized” students’ classroom performance, deferring on this to parents and the students themselves.
Most importantly, the framework places “partnerships” with local “racialized” political advocacy community groups at “the heart of Ethnic Studies.” These groups’ input, it asserts, is “vital” to the creation of both instructional resources for students and professional development for teachers. So are regular meetings of activists with students “to build and sustain relationships.”
To lock in this privileged status, the framework lays out a system of “racial equity audits” and the like that empower “community members” to ensure that implementation remains “accountable” to the “movements” at the center of “Ethnic Studies praxis.”
MDE deflects public scrutiny by handing off responsibility
When MDE surrendered the Ethnic Studies Working Group’s framework to the Center, it indicated that it didn’t intend to adopt the document in its current form, but mentioned no potential modifications or a timeline. Instead, it pressed forward with its agenda behind the scenes in ways that deflected public scrutiny.
For example, in 2025, the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender and Sexuality Studies (RIDGS) at the University of Minnesota launched its own statewide, “comprehensive” K-12 Ethnic Studies initiative, financed by a grant of taxpayer funds.
RIDGS is an amalgam of “oppression studies” departments that grew out of the student takeover of a U of M building in 1969. Its self-declared mission is not academic, but political—indeed, revolutionary: to “challenge systems of power and inequality” and “imagine social transformation.” RIDGS is now producing “free” K-12 Ethnic Studies lesson plans that avoid the appearance of a direct tie to Walz and MDE.
A lesson for sixth graders, titled “Protest Art and the Movement for Black Life” is typical. Sixth graders will study the Black Lives Matter movement’s “13 guiding principles” and “the role of protest art in mediating power in the city,” and “create their own protest art.” In the process, they will learn that being “Unapologetically Black” “requires the dismantling of multiple systems of oppression: capitalism, patriarchy, anti-Blackness and white supremacy.”
For years, the Walz administration has used its board of teaching—the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB)—to advance the racialization of public education. All board members are Walz appointees.
But in December 2024, PELSB went a step further. It proposed what appears to be the nation’s first rule for licensure of pre-K-12 Ethnic Studies teachers. (In the future, most Minnesota teachers will be teaching Ethnic Studies in some respect.) The rule is slated to go into effect just before the implementation of Ethnic Studies in Fall 2026.
The new licensure rule requires teachers to structure their classrooms around race-based power dynamics, and is designed to push students into activism by compelling teachers themselves to become race-focused “community organizers.” Teachers must study the history of local “solidarity movements”; “understand” the “skills central to community organizing”; and “find local contexts” in which to “engage youth” in the “ethnic studies strand”—that is, the “Resistance” standard’s mandate to “organize with others” for activism.
The racial spoils system
Walz’s comprehensive K-12 Ethnic Studies regime creates a full employment plan for Minnesota’s booming Ethnic Studies industry, guaranteeing a permanent and expanding demand for services.
The Framework endorses a long list of organizations for “partnership” and consulting work—many likely with their hands out for public funds—and creates numerous opportunities for self-dealing and conflicts of interest. Recommended organizations include Lozenski’s Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition and a national group with which he is affiliated.
Conclusion
Today in Minnesota we are seeing a toxic combination of the racial grievance culture and “disrupt-and-dismantle” mentality that have sprung up on Walz’s watch. In recent days, the governor has fanned the flames further—dismissing the seriousness of the welfare fraud in racial terms (“white men” are responsible for more crimes) and praising protestors who take to the streets to interfere with immigration enforcement as nobly standing in solidarity with their neighbors.
The fundamental tenet of Walz’s vision for our schools—differential treatment based on race as the norm—is a violation of law. In July 2025, Center of the American Experiment filed a Complaint and Request for Investigation with the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. We have not been advised of any action taken to date. The Trump administration is flooding Minnesota with fraud investigators and immigration officials. Will it also investigate the racially discriminatory capture of our public schools?
U.S. prosecutors can’t turn this around. They can’t send the Walz education administration to jail. But the consequences of mandated, racialized groupthink—bitter racial/ethnic division and anarchy in our streets—will long outlast Tim Walz. After Fall 2026, when this dangerous ideology is routinely preached in Minnesota classrooms, we can expect a generation of what’s been called “the child soldiers of Ethnic Studies.”
