Gov. Walz's appointees will require Minnesota educators to affirm students' gender dysphoria, turn kids into 'agents of social change'

 Minnesota will require all educators in the state to embrace contemporary leftist theories about sex and race and to inflict them on students.

As of 2025, teachers' licenses will be conferred on those individuals in the state proven willing to "disrupt" normalcy, affirm minors' gender dysphoria, reject "eurocentrism," accept that knowledge is racially informed, and embrace various other ideological fads presently in favor with the radical left.

These new requirements will apply to K-12 public and charter school teachers alike, inevitably impacting children statewide.

What are the details?

The teacher licensing board in Minnesota is called the Professional Educators Licensing and Standards Board. The board's eleven members were all appointed by Democrat Gov. Tim Walz.

The PELSB is responsible for approving and overseeing teacher preparation providers in the state. The PELSB's training standards for both public and charter school teachers are defined in the "Standards of Effective Practice for Teachers."

Julie Quist, board chair of the Minnesota Child Protection League, noted that these standards have been transmogrified in recent months. Quist stated, "Because these revisions affect all licensed teachers in Minnesota, nonpublic schools and institutions of higher education that prepare students for licensure will be subject to these new radical teaching standards, contrary to the beliefs and values of many teachers and schools." 

The Federalist reported that an administrative judge ordered the implementation of the revised "Standards of Effective Practice" in December.

To receive or renew a teaching license, applicants will be required to undergo PELSB-approved "cultural competency training." This way, the board can ensure that all teachers in the state embrace the same leftist mode of thinking and being.

The training program offered by PELSB-approved providers "promotes self-reflection and discussion including but not limited to all of the following topics: racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups; ... systemic racism; gender identity, including transgender students; sexual orientation; language diversity; and individuals with disabilities and mental health concerns."

The stated objective behind these programs is to "deepen teachers' understandings of their own frames of reference, the potential bias in these frames, and their impact on expectations for and relationships with students, students' families, and the school communities."

While characterized as a deepening of understanding, the program effectively prescribes a politically specific approach to race, sex, gender, power, and the West, with the intended outcome of rendering educators activists.

The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism stated prior to implementation of the new standards, "The proper focus for the Standards of Effective Practice is to identify what competencies best meet the priority of student learning, not affirmation of student identity or the furthering of activism."

Standardization by a lower standard

According to the PELSB, as of 2025, teaching licenses will be contingent upon an individual's willingness to:

• affirm students' "gender" and sexual identities;
• create opportunities "for students to learn about power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities and empower learners to be agents of social change to promote equity";
• feature, use, and highlight "resources written and developed by traditionally marginalized voices that offer diverse perspectives on race, culture, language, gender, sexual identity, ability, religion, nationality, migrant/refugee status, socioeconomic status, housing status, and other identities traditionally silence or omitted from curriculum";
• "assess how their biases, perceptions, and academic training may affect their teaching practice and perpetuate oppressive systems and utiliz[e] tools to mitigate their own behavior to disrupt oppressive systems";
• "explore their own intersecting social identities";
• understand "how ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, deficit-based teaching, and white supremacy undermine pedagogical equity";
• understand "the impact of the intersection of race and ethnicity with other forms of difference" including gender; and
• conform ideologically in a variety of other ways.

Karin Miller, a Minnesota teacher, suggested that Minnesota's new standards will both replace academic standards with socio-political standards and violate teachers' First Amendment rights: