Education official: Concerns about new social studies standards are ‘white supremacy’

As reported by alphanews.com, Minnesota is in the process of revising those standards to cover “LGBT issues, race, and climate change,” while excising those for “World War I and World War II, the American Revolution, and the Civil War.”

The campaign known as Raise Our Standards sent a letter, signed by over 5,000 individuals, to the state’s Standards Review Committee expressing misgivings over the changes.

For example, the letter requests that benchmarks regarding World War I, World War II and the Holocaust be kept, along with “the rise and effects of communism and socialism, the American Revolution and the Civil War.”

It also questions how the study of racism is framed in the new standards: It’s “political and controversial and comes at the expense of more important topics.”

According to the Center for the American Experiment (of which the Raise Our Standards campaign is part), at a January 11 Standards Review Committee meeting where the revisions were discussed, Director of Academic Standards Doug Paulson praised the committee for “rejecting th[e] white supremacy language” of the Raise Our Standards letter and other correspondence.

Paulson’s peer Danyika Leonard wondered if the committee could just do a “select-all delete sort of thing” for all of the comments in question.