Parent-led school boards are declaring their independence from progressive control over public education and Minnesota’s largest district is at the forefront.
School board elections driven by parents made news in 2021. Now we hear little about them. Journalists are asking what’s happened to the parent movement. Does it still exist? Were parent successes around the country a few years ago worth all the effort and disruption?
The answer is yes. We hear little about them because board members elected then are now doing the unglamorous, behind-the-scenes work of governing, which, when done well, attracts little media attention.
A prime example is underway in the Twin Cities’ Anoka-Hennepin school district — Minnesota’s largest, with about 40,000 students. There three parent-endorsed board members, elected in the past three election cycles, are successfully standing up to powerful, entrenched educational interests, as they promised concerned parents they would do in their campaigns.
The board members’ primary aim is to raise student outcomes by improving curriculum and instruction and safeguarding the district from ideologically driven decision-making in those areas — in particular, implementation of the most heavily politicized K-12 Social Studies standards in the nation. Their case is emblematic of the impact the parent movement continues to have, especially in blue states.
Minnesota is a “local control” state. School boards are public corporations with broad legal authority — derived from the legislature — to interpret academic standards and decide how best to meet them for the students they serve. Until recently, however, boards throughout the state have delegated this power to their district’s superintendent and curriculum staff, largely without question.
Today in Anoka-Hennepin, the three parent-endorsed members of an evenly split board are reclaiming their authority to ensure the new ideologically charged Social Studies standards are implemented in classrooms with the smallest possible footprint that complies with law.
Opponents portray the board as obstructionist and dysfunctional, and charge that the three are preventing teachers from teaching and students from getting the resources they need to learn. They insist that the district must “follow the law” and argue this requires complying with the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE)’s preferred interpretation of the standards and recommended classroom resources.
But the parent-endorsed board members respond that Minnesota law is clear. School boards’ obligation is to use their judgment to ensure that academic standards are implemented in a way that is right for the students in their district. That is the essence of “local control” governance, and the reason every Minnesota school district is legally designated an “ISD,” or “independent school district.”
MDE itself acknowledges this fact. Its June 2026 “guidance” on the new standards’ implementation states that each district is “responsible for determining how [it] will meet academic standards.” This “include[s] the ethnic studies mandates” — the controversial component of the standards now at issue in Anoka-Hennepin and many other districts across the state.
Minnesota has no state test, rubric or official measure of mastery of Social Studies standards. That means there are hundreds of ways to meet the standards. What is right for Minneapolis or St. Paul may not be right for Anoka-Hennepin or rural Ely, Minnesota, board members say.
Today, they are carefully determining what “minimal compliance” with the Social Studies standards will look like in their district.
The stakes in this dispute are high. The state’s new “top-down” K-12 Social Studies standards — drafted and imposed by MDE — are animated by a pedagogical ideology called “liberated” ethnic studies.
Ethnic studies’ three “anchor” standards focus not on basic academic knowledge, but on race-based group identities and political activism. They are broadly and vaguely worded, though MDE’s preferred “liberated” interpretation is clear.
The first of these, entitled “Identity,” requires students to “analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography, ethnicity, and gender” and apply these “to one’s own social identities and other groups,” “centering” those who have been “marginalized, erased, or ignored.”
The second, entitled “Resistance,” instructs students to “describe how individuals and communities have fought” for “liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power locally and globally” and to “organize with others” to engage in similar activities.
The third, entitled “Ways of Knowing and Methodologies,” requires students to “use ethnic and Indigenous studies methods and sources” to “understand the roots of contemporary systems of oppression and apply lessons from the past that could eliminate historical and contemporary injustices.”
MDE’s new Social Studies standards weave this politicized worldview throughout history, geography, citizenship and government, and economics instruction, and also add ethnic studies as an independent “fifth strand.” In coming years, these concepts must be embedded in standards for all required subjects, including math, science, language arts, health and even physical education.
Anoka-Hennepin’s parent-endorsed board members believe that the “liberated” ethnic studies approach, with its emphasis on activism, identarian politics and racially-charged narratives about power and oppression, is harmful to the hearts and minds of their district’s young learners.
As implementation begins in Fall 2026, “We are trying to comply, but you have made this difficult with such politicized curricula,” says board member Zach Arco. “’We have to meet the standards’ and ‘we have to do it this way’ are two very different statements.”
“Board members must ask questions, request the evidence, read the documents themselves and check the work,” Arco says. “’The experts say’ cannot be the end of the conversation. Trust should follow verification, not replace it.”
As the district’s ultimate decision-maker, the school board has full authority to decide what to emphasize, downplay and contextualize, how much faculty and class time to spend on each topic, what trainings to adopt and what curricula to select or exclude.
The heart of the controversy
The current flashpoint is a sixth-grade Minnesota history textbook entitled “Northern Lights,”published by the Minnesota Historical Society. The board voted against authorizing purchase of the third edition, which has been updated to reflect ethnic studies ideology.
The new “Northern Lights” text reframes Minnesota history through the lens of race-and-ethnicity-based group identity. It portrays the state’s juvenile justice system as racist (“a young person’s race can impact how they are treated”) and holds up political activists who took over the University of Minnesota’s Morrill Hall in 1969 and 1971 as models of “resistance” for 12-year-old students to emulate.
“Do we invest our limited resources and professional development hours toward a curriculum that is ideologically skewed and unhealthy?” asks Arco.
Arco has completed a side-by-side analysis comparing the new standards and benchmarks with the district’s current Social Studies curriculum — the previous edition of “Northern Lights” — and determined that the current curriculum largely meets the new Social Studies standards and related benchmarks.
“Our current curriculum is pretty close, if not exactly what is needed for minimal compliance,” he explains. The district can supplement, for example, by using primary documents to fill in the gaps, he says. The board has the authority to make purchasing decisions and it has other pressing priorities, most importantly investing in literacy.
In designing Anoka-Hennepin curriculum, “we aren’t limited to what the state requires,” adds Arco. “That’s a myth. We can expand on that, go beyond it.”
In fact, he points out, the district’s “Respectful Learning Environment” policy, adopted in 2012, requires exactly that. It mandates that “curricular discussions” about “contentious” political or social issues “be presented in an impartial, balanced and objective manner,” and that lessons include “techniques for examining and understanding differing opinions.”
“We can require that the Social Studies standards’ worldview be presented in the classroom, not as fact, but as opinion, and that alternative perspectives be included,” he says. “We can insist that teachers give an opposing view in each case, and that equal time be devoted to both views in every assignment and test.”
Arco cites a seventh-grade benchmark that requires students to examine the “consequences of power and privilege on issues associated” with “accumulation of wealth.” This can be met, he observes, by studying Japanese-Americans interned in World War II camps. “They unjustly lost their businesses and property, but their work ethic and lack of victim mentality allowed them to recover effectively within a single generation.”
Other critics of the standards note that the district can use the American Revolution as an example of “resistance,” and the board can allot five minutes to ethnic studies in kindergarten.
As a result of the three members’ insistence on keeping the politically charged content at bay, the district will continue to use their existing social studies textbooks and teachers are reminded that all instruction and materials must comply with the district’s longstanding policy requiring ideological balance in the classroom.
New boards elsewhere are on the same trajectory
Anoka-Hennepin exemplifies the parent movement’s trajectory in 2026.
In Anoka-Hennepin, the movement began in 2021, when one lone parent intent on safeguarding children from the dramatic increase in progressive activism in the classroom stepped up to run. Public awareness and community support grew, and in 2023, two like-minded candidates were elected, creating a 3-3 split on the district’s 6-member board.
The newly elected board members worked quickly to acclimate themselves to their role and identify areas where they could use their statutorily defined oversight and decision-making authority to lead change on curricula and other pressing matters. Today, they are doing vital work on issues ranging from budget to teacher contract negotiations.
Along the way, district parents filed numerous public records requests that surfaced thousands of documents revealing how once-trusted curriculum staff had used their delegated authority to prioritize extremist “social justice” curricula and teacher training unrelated to high-quality instruction. The data requests also exposed deeply troubling emails in which teachers expressed disdain for parents who questioned the direction the district was taking.
These document productions resulted in a significant fracture of trust between the community and staff and continue to be cited as evidence of the need for additional oversight by the board.
One of the greatest challenges the board has faced, however, is to contend successfully with abuse of power and lack of accountability at the state level. The high-handed way MDE rammed through the new Social Studies standards exemplifies this.
In 2020, MDE appointed a hand-picked drafting committee to write the standards. The committee was dominated — not by subject matter experts — but by activists allied with the “Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition,” a political advocacy group whose mission is to “center” K-12 public school instruction on groups “erased from mainstream curricula due to persistent racism, patriarchy, xenophobia and linguistic imperialism.”
In 2023, MDE retained four national experts to review its draft standards. In confidential reports obtained through a public records request, several critiqued the standards as politically imbalanced, deeply divisive and in many respects, unmeasurable and unteachable.
One reviewer — a prominent academic who has written and reviewed academic standards for more than 30 years — deplored both the standards’ pervasive bias and the highly skewed process that MDE used to create them.
The purpose of educational standards in a democracy, he explained, is to reflect a “broad consensus” by citizens on the knowledge and skills that “every child (future citizen)” should “gain in school.” In terms of political bias, he described the results of his “careful semantic analysis” of the entire document as “deeply dismaying.”
The reviewer called on MDE to “seriously consider discarding the entire set of Ethnic-Studies standards and benchmarks, and starting over.” He admonished MDE as follows: “I beg the [standards drafting] committee to re-read these benchmarks in light of the very high likelihood that such a clumsy and glaringly unbalanced package will prove to be deeply counter-productive.”
But MDE moved ahead, ignoring both its own reviewers and more than 34,000 comments submitted by concerned parents.
Local school boards are the last line of defense
The national parent movement has exposed the clash of agendas between parents, who pay for and entrust their children to public schools, and the education establishment and teachers’ union that control those schools.
Parents’ primary interest is academic achievement. (Today fewer than half of Minnesota K-12 students can read or do math at grade level.) But teachers’ unions and their allies prioritize social change and political activism.
School boards are the final authority on local curriculum decisions. But highly organized union leaders have an unlimited war chest. According to campaign finance reports, organized labor has spent as much as $100,000 per board member to make sure their preferred candidates are elected.
Cristine Trooien is founder of the Minnesota Parents Alliance, an organization formed in 2022 for the purpose of helping parent-endorsed candidates run and win in school board races statewide. After two successful election cycles, it became clear that newly elected, reform-minded school board members supported by parents and voters in their communities did not have the training and support they needed to lead change effectively. The non-profit Minnesota Partnership for Achievement — which Trooien now directs — formed in 2024 to meet this need.
“The union strategically frames its public messaging around vague priorities that sound good to most voters — supporting public education, supporting teachers, increasing funding for schools, addressing student mental health, creating safe and welcoming schools, smaller class sizes,” she says. “Their political strategy relies on the fact that most voters will not do any further investigation into what those terms mean to union-aligned candidates and elected board members, or how they plan to accomplish those things.”
Education Minnesota, through its local affiliates, “uses member dues to pay for campaign material that features their endorsed candidates alongside simple ‘pro-public education’ messaging, and no- and low-information voters take it at face value and vote for them.”
Despite organized labor’s injection of progressive partisan politics into these local contests, school board elections in Minnesota are classified as nonpartisan races. Hardworking, independent challenger candidates simply cannot compete with the money and organization that organized labor easily and routinely deploys. Running against union-endorsed candidates is a daunting proposition. This year, about 300 Minnesota school districts will hold elections and a third of the seats are uncontested, says Trooien. Most districts struggle to find qualified people to fill these seats.
To have a chance at victory, the parent movement must continue to identify and educate strong, capable candidates; equip them to understand and use their power effectively once in office; and support them as they stand up to well-organized educators and activist parent groups.
Minnesota Parents Alliance and Minnesota Partnership for Achievement, along with similar parent organizations across the country, provide this support, operating on the slimmest of resources. “People think decisions about K-12 education are locked up at the state level, but it matters greatly to elect common-sense people to school boards, especially in states like Minnesota where there is such misalignment between our legislature and what our local communities want for their students and their schools,” says Trooien.
Trooien points out that, withthe Anoka-Hennepin board’s 3-3 split, its parent-endorsed members can hold the line on important issues but need a majority to pass their own initiatives. It’s a challenging fight. In 2023, the member who is now spearheading the Social Studies pushback executed an aggressive door-to-door campaign throughout the largest district in the state and won his seat by 12 votes in a recount. He will be up for election again in 2027.
“This is hard work, no one’s dream job,” Trooien counsels. Unpaid parent board members devote countless hours to the welfare of their district’s children and are the constant target of hostile activists. “Volunteering to actively manage and govern your local school district is a deep act of service, and under the current conditions that reform-minded candidates and elected members face, it’s nothing sort of heroic.”
“Supporters need to stay engaged and continue to encourage newly elected board members to stay the course,” she advises. For two years, the three parent-centered board members currently serving on Anoka-Hennepin’s board slogged through endless meetings about the Social Studies standards before their good work saw the light of day.
“In 2022, Minnesota Parents Alliance supported more than 120 dedicated candidates and approximately half of them won their race,” Trooien observes. “Dozens are up for reelection in 2026 and remarkably, most of them are running again.”
“They have every valid reason to walk away, but they’re running again because they’ve seen first-hand how vitally important this role is and they know that organizations like Minnesota Partnership for Achievement are here to support them every step of the way,” she says. She emphasizes that to sustain this movement, organizations committed to equipping reform-minded, parent-centered leadership in public K-12 education need robust financial support and a huge public awareness effort.
“If we want education reform, we need to invest in the support systems to sustain it — and that takes donors and doers,” Trooien concludes. The days of allowing the entire K-12 system to operate under the unchallenged power of organized labor are gone. “The number of parents and voters who are awakening to the dramatic decline in our public education system continues to grow, as communities confront the financial and academic repercussions of progressive leadership.”
Our state’s and our nation’s future depends on whether citizens like those in Anoka-Hennepin have the desire, support, and equipping they will need to organize and self-govern. We can have great public schools, but to get them, we must cultivate competent leaders who are willing to roll up their sleeves and deliver.