The Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) plans to adopt a package of new teacher licensing rules without a public hearing unless at least 25 people request one. Included is a new license for teaching ethnic studies to students in grades 5 through 12 and a companion endorsement for social studies teachers. According to PELSB, K-6 teachers are “already eligible to teach ethnic studies.”
The proposed pathways are not ideologically neutral. Teachers will have to “analyze social and human relationships with the natural world through Indigenous, precolonial, decolonial, and postcolonial lenses” and apply critical frameworks to “historical and ongoing social constructions of race and white supremacy” as well as “the history of slavery, settler-colonialism, genocide, neocolonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.”
Teachers must also understand how counter-narratives “deconstruct dominant narratives that reproduce the status quo, power, and oppression” and how identity is “constructed by systems of power and people in positions of privilege.” Both the full license and the endorsement require teachers to understand “the historical relationship between educational debt among low-income children, Black and Indigenous children, and other children of color and the erasure of ethnic studies in Minnesota.” The full license adds that teachers must know how to “hold schools accountable to colonial structures in educational settings.”
These standards go well beyond teaching students about different cultures and histories, which is how supporters have often pitched ethnic studies. The proposed rules make that distinction themselves. Teachers must know “the difference between ethnic studies and multiculturalism, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Activism shows up too, as teachers must “understand and apply critical frameworks to analyze histories of collective liberation, resistance, and social transformation,” and know about counter-narratives of “resistance and activism.” The community section requires teachers to understand “skills central to community organizing.” For the full license, assessments should help build “student agency in their communities.”
With no apparent expectation that teachers examine competing interpretations or criticisms of these frameworks, the proposed rules look less like a list of content knowledge and more like a prescribed worldview for analyzing history and society. The rules also do not define or explain the loaded and contested vocabulary used throughout, such as “white supremacy,” “settler-colonialism,” “neocolonialism,” “oppression,” and “decolonial.”
Needed and reasonable?
PELSB says the ethnic studies pathways are needed now that Minnesota requires ethnic studies content in schools. “Since these classes are being formalized to meet an academic requirement, the Board has determined it necessary to define and set knowledge requirements for teachers of these courses.” The proposed license, PELSB says, will help ensure that teachers are “ready to teach a stand-alone course.”
But the new licensure pathways would not take effect until July 2027, even though the requirements that high schools offer an ethnic studies course and that schools teach new K-12 social studies standards incorporating ethnic studies are already in effect.
The push for a separate ethnic studies license came from working groups facilitated in 2022 and 2023 by the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition. The Coalition’s mission is to “center” K-12 public school instruction on groups “erased from mainstream curricula due to persistent racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, and linguistic imperialism.”
Brian Lozenski, an organizer with the Coalition, has been “instrumental” in the development of ethnic studies in Minnesota, including with the PELSB licensure requirements, according to his bio.
In a 2022 Convergence magazine article, Lozenski explicitly acknowledges ethnic studies’ political agenda and its anti-Israel sentiments. “Ethnic Studies explores the colonial roots of the dispossession of Palestinian land and the creation of Zionism,” Lozenski wrote. “Given the devastating impact of Israeli colonialism,” “studying Israeli settler colonialism in comparison to U.S. settler colonialism” is “at the heart of the discipline of Ethnic Studies.” The article’s co-authors denounced, by name, “Islamophobic and Zionist organizations” like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Lozenski also made headlines in 2024 for comments he made during an online discussion in 2022:
So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with, it
must be overthrown, right. [Critical race theory] is about overthrow. … You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. … It is an anti-state theory that says
the United States needs to be deconstructed, period.
The Coalition lobbied for Minnesota’s 2023 ethnic studies legislation, and Lozenski was the chief testifier.
According to PELSB, the Coalition’s working groups concluded that social studies teachers are licensed to teach ethnic studies content in a social studies class, “but are not well-prepared to do so.” Outside of this conclusion from the working groups, though, PELSB does not cite a survey, study, teacher-performance data, or other empirical evidence showing this.
It is also unclear whether the new license would be required. Nothing in the proposed rule text says existing teachers would be barred from teaching ethnic studies, and PELSB doesn’t say the license will be mandatory.
Request a public hearing!
A public hearing on the proposed ethnic studies rules will be conducted by an administrative law judge only if 25 or more people submit written requests for one.
Those requests must be received by 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 2, 2026 and must include the person’s name, address, and which part of the ethnic studies rules they object to, or that they oppose the two rules in their entirety. The proposed ethnic studies rules to reference are 8710.4810 (the grades 5-12 ethnic studies license) and 8710.4815 (the grades 5-12 ethnic studies endorsement for social studies teachers).
Email requests to Steven Rollin at [email protected] with “Request for a Hearing” in the subject line, or mail them to:
Steven Rollin
Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board
1021 Bandana Blvd. E
Suite 222
St. Paul, MN 55108
A sample request:
Dear Steven Rollin,
I am writing to request that the Board hold a hearing on proposed rules 8710.4810 and 8710.4815, and I object to both in their entirety.
Thank you,
[NAME]
[ADDRESS]
___________________
