JASON LEWIS: Don’t Overlook Tim Walz’s Radical Education Record

In between gaffes, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been wearing his education bona fides on his sleeve. He frequently mentions that he is a former schoolteacher, so it might be worth looking at what type of education policies he implemented in his home state.

Buckle up, it’s all about the teachers’ union and their radical indoctrination agenda.

In 2023, Walz signed into law a progressive indoctrination curriculum called ethnic studies — after the St Paul school system had approved this program at the teachers’ union’s request in 2021. Ethnic studies is a radical curriculum first introduced in California that has now been embraced by Minnesota under Walz.

In Minnesota, it requires all 500 public schools to teach history in elementary through high school by identifying “examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power.” Naturally, this isn’t enough; they also need to “use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.”

According to the Center of the American Experiment’s Katherine Kersten writing in The Wall Street Journal, fourth graders must “identify the processes and impact of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.”

High schoolers are taught to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness,” viewing themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.”

This is just another version of Marxist class warfare.

Of course, who better to help “deconstruct” Western Civilization through our schools than the most radical academic advocate of “critical race theory” Walz could find. Brian D. Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at left-wing Macalester College — who has claimed the United States “must be overthrown” — was actually granted formal input into the ‘ethnic studies’ requirements via state law, as the Daily Caller reports.

In 2022, Lozenski wrote about the George Floyd riots saying they were “mass uprisings against racialized state violence” and advocated for the “the inevitable death” of the American “social order that prioritizes vulgar economics” and “systemic racism.” He also has called for “abolition of policing” and declared that “defunding the police” will build a new and better society.

And no matter your view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Lozenski’s knee-jerk reaction less than two weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre — when his organization retweeted a public call for a “Student Walkout for Gaza” — was callous to say the least. This is the man that Gov. Tim Walz has writing the new Minnesota statewide K-12 Ethnic Studies curriculum. The only thing worse would be for Lozenski to be promoted to implement a federal Ethnic Studies program in a Harris administration’s Education Department.

Walz, like Harris, knows just who it is that got him elected. So, the “Education Governor” engineered a whopping 36% increase in the state’s general fund, spending an unprecedented $18 billion surplus in one biennium, the bulk of it going to schools, but not students. In Minnesota, the teachers’ union gets what it wants.

Like an annual four-day teacher “conference” every October when the school year is just getting underway. Local airlines even advertise for all those educators taking an early vacation instead of sharpening those pedagogical skills at the Education Minnesota union conference — attendance optional. But maybe that’s good because here, too, “wokeness” reigns supreme with past conference sessions addressing “bias in the classroom and tips on supporting transgender students.”

All of it sure to please Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page who said of the Walz “ethnic studies” proposal, “this is about justice. Our educational system has systematically failed children of color, Indigenous, disabled, and poor children.”

Well, it certainly has — under monopoly control where Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) has made of mockery out of K-12 classrooms and parents are seen as obstacles.

As I wrote in Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press: “Today, under the Biden administration, it’s concerned parents that are being flagged instead of ‘60s revolutionary groups. The White House coordinated on behalf of the National School Boards Association to label parents ‘domestic terrorists’ for exercising their First Amendment rights. Democrats had already whet their appetite by siccing the DOJ on Trump in the Russiagate fiasco and using the Capitol Police to spy on a sitting member of Congress over January 6th. Now the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) authoritarians were going after Moms and Dads by once again weaponizing the ‘deep state.’”

This is the real swamp and it shows no signs of abating. When former President Donald Trump announced his proposal for Elon Musk to head up an efficiency in government commission, guess who was first to lambast it? Yep, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees.

Trump and Musk would be right over the target if they started by scrutinizing the millions of federal dollars going to an education elite in Minnesota whose goal seems to be more toxic make-work for activist instructors.

Oh, yeah…and more time off.

Former Rep. Jason Lewis (R-Minn.) writes at jasonlewis.substack.com and is the author of Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press now out in paperback.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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