ST. PAUL, Minnesota (LifeSiteNews) — Starting this summer, Minnesota teachers who refuse to affirm LGBT student “identities” may be forced out of their careers under new regulations backed by Democrat Governor (and failed 2024 vice presidential nominee) Tim Walz.
The College Fix reported that Minnesota’s “Standards of Effective Practice,” slated to take effect in July, will mandate that current and prospective teachers cultivate an “environment that ensures student identities” (including “sexual orientation”) are “historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves.”
They also require educators to teach students “power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities,” help them become “agents of social change to promote equity,” and use so-called “anti-racist” teaching techniques.
The new standards “don’t simply require teachers to teach a certain curriculum” but rather “appear to require teachers to adopt practices that could violate their constitutional rights” by forcing them to agree with certain ideas, including “teaching practices that violate their religious beliefs,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Tyson Langhofer said.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even socially “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas, regardless of their treatment of or rapport with gender-confused students.
The College Fix noted that while working to make learning even more activist, the Minnesota education system is falling short on the basics, including failure to equip minority students to succeed. Just 12 percent of black 8th-graders, 15 percent of Hispanic 8th-graders, and 35 percent of white 8th-graders are proficient in reading, according to 2022 state educational data.
Advancing left-wing ideology in public education is a priority for Walz. During his tenure, he tapped Macalester College associate professor of urban and multicultural education Brian Lozenski, who believes that “the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist,” to draft a plan for implementing state “ethnic studies” standards.