On Monday and Tuesday, April 15-16, members of the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) Ethnic Studies Working Group began developing the framework for the state’s Ethnic Studies legislation, which was passed during the 2023 session.
According to the list of group members provided by MDE, the 27-member group consists of ethnic studies teachers, parents, community members, college-level faculty, school board members, administrators, and four high school students. They will determine the necessary resources for districts to meet ethnic studies’ operational requirements.
Geographic and social diversity among members will likely cause disagreements about what this framework should encompass, as the working group includes members from Burnsville, Rochester, Cloquet, Stillwater, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Roseville.
According to the MDE, “Ethnic Studies” means the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity and indigeneity, focusing on the experiences and perspectives of people of color within and beyond the United States. Ethnic studies analyzes how race and racism have been and continue to be social, cultural and political forces, and the connection of race to the stratification of other groups, including stratification based on the protected classes under Minnesota Statutes 2022, section 363A.13.
Others who push back on Ethnic Studies cite it as white guilt heaped upon their kids, causing white students to reexamine who they are. It is unclear how Ethnic Studies will transfer to Minnesota classrooms. The MDE information continues with what is expected from the framework. It reads:
“The Minnesota Department of Education supports Ethnic Studies achievement for all students through statewide collaboratives so that all students achieve academic standards and are equipped in postsecondary and career success.”
A member spoke with the MSR before the group sessions began and told us that while genuinely excited to contribute to this purpose, they don’t think there is enough time, as this process will be completed in October. “Six months just doesn’t seem long enough to work through the development of something this important,” the group member said.
Why is Ethnic Studies critical?
For many, the importance of Ethnic Studies is raised by first asking why legislation was needed to teach it. Why wasn’t it being taught? Others attribute it to the historical whitewashing of education in our classrooms as a purposeful tool of racial identity, empowerment, and privilege.
“Ethnic Studies is also American history,” said activist and former St. Paul educator Yusef Mgeni. “The fact that the legislature and the MDE have both endorsed Ethnic Studies requirements in the schools is a real plus for giving people the opportunity to explore and learn more about American history, and more importantly, to see themselves reflected in that learning.”
The Ethnic Studies terrain in Minnesota is filled with potholes. In September 2021, Becky Z. Derbach wrote on social studies standards for the Sahan Journal:
“The new ethnic studies strand is already facing threatened legal challenges and questions about compliance with state statutes from state lawmakers and a conservative think tank. Even the committee members who created the new ethnic studies strand say they felt frustrated with the released draft.
The revised standards will form the backbone of how Minnesota schools teach social studies for a decade, starting no sooner than the 2024–25 school year. On a basic level, these standards will inform lesson plans in history, government, geography and economics in K-12 schools throughout the state.
But on a larger level, these social studies standards will shape the ways young Minnesotans learn to think about themselves, their state, and each other. Now, those questions sit at the center of a political firestorm currently playing out on conservative media airwaves and in school board meetings across the state.
The debate over how to revise these standards can seem incredibly specific: Should Minnesota students be required to learn about major world religions, such as Sikhism? It can seem philosophical: Were there any benefits to colonization, or is colonialism inherently bad? It can resemble a Lin-Manuel Miranda lyric: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
The standards debate can also feel like an election strategy to fuel white grievance politics. All summer, parents have stormed school board meetings demanding the removal of critical race theory from their children’s schools, after hearing about it on Fox News and in town halls across the state.
(Unless they studied it in graduate school, most of those viewers had probably never heard of critical race theory until the past year. An active misinformation campaign from Fox News has redefined critical race theory—a scholarly legal framework for understanding systemic racism—as a weaponized catchphrase for anything related to race.)”
The discussions on Monday and Tuesday continue the historical process of including Ethnic Studies across Minnesota. However, pushback is expected throughout this legislative mandate, which many view as long overdue. Others say it is just education forced upon their children.
The MSR will report on the progress of the Ethnic Studies meetings.
Becky Z. Derbach’s excerpt is courtesy of the Sahan Journal.
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