Beginning in fall 2026, every K-12 public school in Minnesota will be required to align instruction with the state’s new social studies standards. School boards will have to decide how these standards, which now include ideological ethnic studies concepts, will be incorporated into classrooms.
School boards also have the authority and responsibility to ensure that the curriculum selected to teach the standards is academically rigorous and balanced. As the body charged with approving instructional materials, the board sets the direction for what is taught and how it is taught.
American Experiment has well documented why school boards should avoid the taxpayer-funded lesson plans from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS).
Another curriculum also warrants scrutiny. The Minnesota Historical Society’s sixth-grade “Northern Lights” curriculum is being overhauled to meet the new social studies standards and is expected to be released summer 2026.
According to publicly available draft materials, this curriculum is less about a shared civic narrative and more an interpretation of history filtered through grievance and oppression frameworks.
For example, in Chapter 7, students learn Minnesota statehood through narratives and perspectives that “explore the concept of settler-colonialism.” Settler-colonialism also appears in Chapter 10. This terminology is not politically neutral. Settler-colonialism embodies an ideological framework rooted in oppressor/oppressed binaries.
Chapters 6 and 9 ask students to “interpret” points of view that include “unequal power dynamics” in the treaty-making process and U.S.-Dakota War. Power imbalances have existed throughout history, but interpreting historical events primarily through the lens of power disparities can flatten complex historical realities, turning history from an effort to understand those complexities into an exercise in identifying systems of oppression. It also risks students projecting today’s assumptions about race and privilege onto people who lived in an entirely different world.
The curriculum’s recurring emphasis on identifying “absent narratives” encourages students to view history primarily through competing group grievances and power relationships. History should include multiple perspectives, but this approach risks reducing the past to a struggle between dominant and marginalized groups.
Other chapters place heavy emphasis on identity-based perspectives, elevating group identity over a shared civic identity. This risks students seeing themselves less as individuals participating in a shared national story and more as members of demographic groups with competing historical grievances.
The problem with these frameworks and lenses is not whether difficult history should be taught but how it is taught. When grievance becomes the dominant lens, students develop a narrow understanding of their state and country. When students are guided toward predetermined interpretive conclusions, that’s not teaching critical thinking. And what gets left out when grievance and power dynamics become the primary lenses to frame history? (My colleague Kathy Kersten has previously documented the many ways the Minnesota Historical Society presents one-sided history.)
The Minnesota Historical Society has already begun marketing the curriculum for the 2026-27 school year. But it is not mandated by state law. School boards are not required to use it.
School boards have a real choice before them. They can adopt one of the curricula described above and accept the interpretive frameworks embedded throughout the materials, or they can select a more balanced, constructive alternative without the political framing.
There are good options to consider. For example, the 1776 Unites’ curriculum covers K-12 social studies. Hillsdale College offers a K-12 history and civics curriculum. Wilfred McClay’s “Land of Hope” has a young reader’s edition for middle schoolers in grades 6-8. For high schoolers, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism offers a constructive ethnic studies curriculum called “Many Stories, One Nation,” and the Coalition for Empowered Education’s “Out of Many, One” ethnic studies curriculum is another option. A two-part high school history series called, “The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition” is also worth considering.
School board members should insist that any new curriculum adoption go through a full board review process — not just administrative approval. Ask for a comparison of alternatives. Ask what the state standards actually require.
Parents have a role to play too. Ask your child’s school what curriculum they plan to use for the new standards this fall. Remember, under Minnesota Statute 120B.20, you have the right to review instructional materials and can opt your child out and request alternative instruction. Most parents don’t know that.
Informing school boards about quality, balanced curricula options, such as those listed above, and informing parents about their rights, can help safeguard local decision-making and keep social studies instruction focused on knowledge rather than ideology.
