Minnesota teacher licensing board under fire for woke ‘mafia tactics’

Minnesota’s teacher licensing board has adopted new standards that incorporate key tenets of LGBT and critical race ideologies, critics say.

Rebecca Friedrichs, a veteran public-school teacher of 28 years who successfully sued the state of California for forcing teachers into a union, blasted the new requirements.

“This is called bullying. These are mafia tactics. This is being run by a cartel,” Friedrichs told Fox News Digital.

She also said the new standards are an attempt to force teachers to adhere to a woke political agenda controlled by progressive teachers’ unions – an agenda that has been roundly rejected by voters and alarmed parents.

“We are hired to educate children, not push a political agenda. And we are hired to serve children and their parents and work in connection with them,” she said. “We’re being told by a teaching licensing board, and by a union that claims to represent us, and by legislators that claim to represent we the people – that we’re forced to do this,” Friedrichs added.  

The new requirements, which are expected to go into effect in 2025, say teachers must adhere to “diverse perspectives on race, culture, language, sexual identity, ability.” 

Teachers are thus required to promote progressive values in the classroom about “power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of the various communities,” Fox reports.  

In addition, the new standards would require teachers to use details of their private lives to teach children to explore “their own intersecting social identities and how they impact daily experience as an educator.”  

“The teacher assesses how their biases, perceptions, and disciplinary training may affect their teaching practice and perpetuate oppressive systems and accesses tools to mitigate their own behavior to disrupt oppressive systems,” said one section (emphasis added). 

The language mimics Marxist critical theory which contends society is made up of oppressors and the oppressed. Critical theory says society must “dismantle all societal norms through relentless criticism.”  

Beyond just agreeing with the standards teachers must “demonstrate” how they will use the woke ideology “in their coursework,” warned Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment (CAE), an education think-tank that advocates for school reform and is organizing teacher and parental opposition to the new standards.  

CAE warns that universities and colleges which don’t adhere to the new standards could lose their ability to certify teachers. It also lists resources concerned citizens can contact to help protest the changes.   

“Let’s stand together to promote our common humanity and challenge imposition of an illiberal worldview that treats students and teachers as mere representatives of their race and gender groups instead of as unique, complex individuals,” said CAE.