Minnesota Proposing Teachers Integrate ‘Racial Consciousness and Reflection’ to Receive License
The other seven new standards have “subsections focused on racism, cultural differences or bias.”
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Fox News discovered the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (MPELSB) proposed new teacher licensing requirements to replace the ten “Standards of Effective Practice.”
MPELSB listed eight possible new standards, including a “Racial consciousness and reflection.”
Oh man, they must have looked up “Progressive Buzzwords” because the board implemented those words throughout the document.
I see buzzwords like “equity,” “white supremacy,” and “intersectionality,” which Legal Insurrection has dissected numerous times. From the document (emphasis mine):
- A.The teacher understands multiple theories of race and ethnicity, including but not limited to racial formation, processes of racialization, and intersectionality.
- C.The teacher understands how ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, deficit-based teaching, and white supremacy undermine pedagogical equity.
- E.The teacher understands the histories and social struggles of historically defined racialized groups, including but not limited to Indigenous people, Black Americans, Latinx Americans, and Asian Americans.
- G.The teacher understands the impact of the intersection of race and ethnicity with other forms of difference, including class, gender, sexuality, religion, national origin, immigration status, language, ability, and age.
The other seven standards have “subsections focused on racism, cultural differences or bias.”
I read through the document and picked out a few parts within these sections.
I understand people learn in different ways, and some have learning disabilities. It doesn’t help that the schools push teachers to pass students to receive funding instead of looking out for the child’s needs.
Teachers must identify the disabilities, why a student might have emotional outbursts, etc. But the board recommends:
L.The teacher understands the diverse impacts of individual and systemic trauma, such as experiencing homelessness, foster care, incarceration, migration, medical fragility, racism, and micro and macro aggressions, on learning and development and knows how to support students using culturally responsive strategies and resources to address these impacts.
I had success by not making my students feel like victims. Instead, I concentrated on their strengths and gave them an adult they could turn to when they needed to talk. I never took “culture” into consideration.
The recommendations under “Instructional strategies” sound fantastic, encouraging teachers to pay close attention to the learning needs of the students.
But then: “H. The teacher encourages and knows how to nurture critical thinking about culture and race and includes multiple perspectives and missing narratives [to] from the dominant culture in the curriculum.”
While planning for instruction, teachers should make a point to use “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 silenced or omitted from curriculum.”
How does that work for science and math? Renaissance literature? Why is this important? I’m thinking back to my English teaching days, and there weren’t many opportunities to apply this requirement.
Or this requirement with plenty of buzzwords: “H. The teacher creates opportunities for students to learn about power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities and empowers learners to be agents of social change to promote equity.”
Teachers might have to take a “Cultural competency training” program:
“Cultural competency training” means a training program that promotes self-reflection and discussion including but not limited to all of the following topics: racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups; American Indian and Alaskan native students; religion; systemic racism; gender identity, including transgender students; sexual orientation; language diversity; and individuals with disabilities and mental health concerns. Training programs must be designed to deepen teachers’ understanding 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, consistent with part 8710.2000 and Minnesota Statutes, section 120B.30, subdivision 1, paragraph (q).
Under professional responsibilities, a teacher should explore “their own intersecting social identities and how they impact daily experience as an educator.”
The teacher must also assess “how their biases, perceptions, and academic training may affect their teaching practice and perpetuate oppressive systems and utilizes tools to mitigate their own behavior to disrupt oppressive systems.”
The MPELSB also wants the teacher to recognize his or her “responsibility to question normative school knowledge, conventional teaching and other professional practices, and beliefs and assumptions about diverse students, their families, and communities that adversely impact learning.”
The board hopes the teacher can identify “gaps where the current curriculum does not address multiple perspectives, cultures, and backgrounds, and incorporates curriculum to fill these gaps.”
The changes to standards began in 2021, but it looks like the board will resolve it soon. The post-hearing comment period closes on September 13.
This is insanity. Then again, Minnesota Public Schools have a new rule that “if a minority teacher is set to be laid off, the district will instead fire the next least senior teacher who is white.”
The officials said: “To remedy the continuing effects of past discrimination, Minneapolis Public Schools and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) mutually agreed to contract language that aims to support the recruitment and retention of teachers from underrepresented groups as compared to the labor market and to the community served by the school district.”
It’s never about the student. When I taught in Texas, it was about passing students to receive more funding from the state. Gotta have those positive passing and graduation numbers! That’s way more important than the quality of education and well-being of the children.
But go ahead Minnesota. Your agenda is more important than education. Parents are obviously sick of it because enrollment in Minnesota public schools has been dropping for more than a year.
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Comments
Renaissance literature is not taught in public school anymore. My son’s Catholic high school taught it, his friend(s) in public school never saw it.
History is another thing being lost. It can only be taught through the lens of “equity”. I have a friend who taught history for over 25 years who just got moved to Biology to be replaced by a fresh out of school History teacher.
He is ‘white’ but he ticks a ‘disability’ box on their employment stats so they didn’t just get rid of him.
Maybe Mn. teachers will leave the state.
Keep the teachers in Minnesota, we do t need anymore Karen’s than we have in Texas amd we have plenty
Next, they’ll be asking you to chant sutras and open up your anal chakra.
Minnesota use to be the Canada of the US. Now it’s full of Somalian Muslims and this is the sh!t you get
Diversity is our strength
BS
Next: Hutu vs Tutsi, Xhosa vs Zulu and rainbow residuals, or Kenyan elite (i.e. Obama’s caste) vs deplorables.
“I am old enough to remember” when Minnesota was white, and acted like it.
Now Mn. looks more yellow.
Especially those storied Norwegian Bachelor Farmers who won’t speak up.
Norwegians are cool (in the winter)..
Got your update from previous thread. You should be good for another 20 or 30 years. New treatments are coming along every day.
Bear Lives Matter.
MrP: I figure 5 is pushing it.
Well push it then, my Gentle Grizz Bear. Push it for all it’s worth.
Diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), Inequity, and Exclusion (DIE) under the Progressive Cult’s ethical religion that denies the dignity and agency of women and men, and reduces human life to color blocs, carbon cells, etc.
enrollment in Minnesota public schools has been dropping for more than a year
Progress.
Marxists making sure their indoctrination is to their standards
Tell me again how this isn’t an establishment of religion?
If someone objects to agreeing to these points and is not given a license, can they claim a 1st Amendment violation based on viewpoint discrimination?
They can and should. It’s a matter of establishing a religion and requiring you to go along with it.
I agree with the spirit of the article but IMO it is very confusing in places as to what is and is not in the proposed licensing standards.
I hold or have held full secondary English certification in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Florida in my 32-year career with endorsement in Gifted Education.
There’s NOTHING I’d rather do than teach.
However, if I had to subscribe to Minnesota’s nonsense, I would bail.
Hmmmm…upon review, that prepositional phrase, “with endorsement in Gifted Education,” should follow “certification.” I regret not proofreading more carefully.
Abolish the license
Looks like Minn. is a good place NOT to live.
This just highlights what has been a problem for YEARS – schools are more interested in certified teachers than they are in qualified ones, and to be “certified” there’s all sorts of gobbledygook nonsense courses you have to pass. It’s part of the reason (the other part largely financial) why many competent would-be teachers are staying away from the profession in droves, and why there are so many indoctrinators in the classroom these days.
Bring the whole diseased temple down on their heads. We were more educated and had a higher degree of literacy before the introduction of compulsory and/or public education. Let the money follow the student, and let the parents decide how best to educate them.
I would disagree. They are more interested in certified teachers than effective ones. Certifications are qualifications. Even restricting it to appropriate degrees (Math, Biology, History, etc.) would just be credentialism.
What you want is teachers who can actually teach the subject matter. And credentials are a substitute for actually figuring that out.
But I agree with the rest.
I taught physics. Physics doesn’t care about feelings. The balls fall at the same acceleration no matter what color they are or what culture created them. While I taught in a high school with a large non-white population. few students of color elected to take physics. It must be because it’s a racist science.
This is the implementation of the Communist mandate to a T! People lack knowledge of what Communism is and its tactics. Such ignorance is taken advantage to indoctrinate people, and the Dem/Communists are succeeding.