Tim Walz’s K–12 Racial Ideology Regime

President Trump has flooded my home state of Minnesota with investigators and law enforcement agents to address massive social services and immigration fraud. But so far, his administration has done nothing about a far more egregious and consequential scandal—Gov. Tim Walz’s entrenchment of the toxic racial identity ideology that facilitated that fraud throughout our state’s K–12 public education system. 

During Walz’s tenure, differential treatment by race and ethnicity has become the bedrock organizing principle in public schools. A comprehensive regime of ideologically driven academic and teaching standards and statutes is embedding this belief system in every grade and required subject, transforming our schools’ mission from providing students with academic knowledge and skills to creating race-focused political activists. 

President Trump moved to remedy such unlawful discrimination in January 2025 with an executive order entitled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling.” Title VI prohibits schools that receive federal funds from operating discriminatory programs or policies that engage in explicit race-consciousness or create a racially hostile environment. 

Walz-era mandates compel Minnesota schools to violate the law in both these respects, making our public education system the most egregiously discriminatory in the nation. 

According to the executive order, schools engage in impermissible race qua race conduct when they treat students not as unique individuals, but as fungible members of racial groups that share predictable viewpoints or traits that reflect crude racial stereotypes.

In Walz’s new K–12 regime, the relentless race qua race drumbeat begins in kindergarten. The vehicle is an extremist pedagogy called “liberated ethnic studies,” which teaches that race determines identity and conditions students to think of themselves as members of unjust racial hierarchies. 

A new K–12 ethnic studies “anchor standard” entitled “Identity” declares this discriminatory principle forthrightly. It requires elementary students to “analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race” and “ethnicity,” and to “apply” them “to one’s own social identities” and “other groups.” High school students must examine “racialized hierarchies” and explain how “the social construction of race” has been “used to oppress people of color.” 

As implementation of the new educational regime proceeds, students will be coached to view all social life and history through this one-dimensional, zero-sum racialist lens. 

The Walz administration has adopted professional teaching standards that reinforce its racially discriminatory instructional mandates. They require educators to “affirm” their students’ purported race-and-ethnicity-based identities in the classroom—to treat them not as individuals but as what the Trump administration terms “flattened group identities.” 

The inevitable result is creation of a discriminatory hostile environment for students of disfavored racial groups. The hallmarks of such an environment are devaluing those students on the basis of race, stigmatizing or shaming them, or ascribing them less value in class discussions—thereby denying them the ability to participate fully in the life of a school, according to the Trump administration.

Both the Walz administration’s academic and teaching standards—designed to advance a race-and-power agenda—compel schools to violate the law in all these ways. 

Instead of encouraging students to examine evidence and think for themselves in the classroom, the standards are designed to lead easily manipulated young people to preordained race-centered conclusions. The ethnic studies “identity” standard, for example, requires teachers to “center”—promote and endorse—the “stories” and perspectives of allegedly oppressed racial and ethnic groups.

This kind of skewed, ideologically freighted approach to learning shames and humiliates students of disfavored races, impermissibly teaching that they bear unique moral burdens and assigning them intrinsic guilt, according to the executive order. It stigmatizes the classroom contributions of students of “dominant” racial groups—disparaging them as inevitably distorted by power considerations and self-interest, while framing marginalized groups’ perspectives as accurate and valid. 

The Walz administration’s “Standards of Effective Practice” pressure teachers to conform to this state-mandated racialized groupthink. They require new educators to understand how “white supremacy undermine[s] pedagogical equity” and to assess “how their biases” may “perpetuate oppressive systems.”

Both students and teachers who object to unlawful differential treatment risk being branded racists or “white supremacists.” 

Tim Walz’s K–12 racial ideology regime will train the next generation of Minnesota citizens to embrace a racialist view of life that should be “odious to a free people,” in the words of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a precedent-setting 2023 Supreme Court decision. Adding to this threat, a new K–12 ethnic studies standard entitled “Resistance” requires students to understand how “individuals and communities have fought” against “systemic and coordinated exercises of power,” and to “organize with others to engage in” similar activities. We are already seeing this mindset’s results on the streets of Minneapolis.  

Center of the American Experiment, a Minneapolis-based public policy institute where I serve as a senior policy fellow, filed a request for investigation of the racialization of Minnesota’s public schools with the U.S.  Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in July 2025. We have not been advised of any action taken to date. 

The racial capture of our state’s K–12 education system will continue unabated unless the federal government steps in to expose and put an end to it.