Last spring, Minnesota kindergarteners traced their hands on white paper, carefully cut out the shapes, and colored them different shades of tan, peach, and brown. Some added pink and purple fingernails or bracelets. The colorful hands were then mounted on a poster board, on which a teacher wrote, “Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone else’s. Everyone is special!”
Their principal, Katie Mahoney, proudly shared their work on Twitter.
She had no idea that her tweet would show up a few months later on the conservative daily talk show “Fox & Friends” with the headline “Trouble with Schools,” turning the paper hands into a political lightning rod. “We’re reminding kids of their skin color and blaming some people for melanin,” said co-host Pete Hegseth. Katherine Kersten, a fellow at conservative Minnesota-based think tank Center of the American Experiment, added, “It’s racial identity politics, white supremacy, white privilege, blamed for all the problems that minority groups might have.”
The lesson was part of the school district’s “equity plan,” a 2013 strategy to address the achievement gap between white students and students of color — Minnesota has one of the widest gaps in the country. Efforts to educate students of all races equally used not to be controversial. But since President Donald Trump’s election, the school district and its equity plan has landed at the center of a national debate over whether race should be taught in schools.
It hasn’t stopped Edina Public Schools, Mahoney’s school district, from continuing to implement the equity plan. But the political battle has spiraled: racist graffiti appeared in a school bathroom, students have experienced hateful vitriol, and some teachers have received violent threats.
EEdina Public Schools, which educates about 8,500 students a year and regularly ranks as one of the state’s top districts, developed its racial equity plan in 2013, pledging to view all of its teaching and learning experiences through a “lens of racial equity and cultural understanding.”
To implement it, the school district hired an equity specialist and several cultural liaisons, held training programs for its staff, and pledged that students would “acquire an awareness of their own cultural identity and value racial, cultural and ethnic diversities so as to understand, communicate with, and effectively interact with people across cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds.”
The plan includes more learning time, additional avenues for preschool participation for families of color, and hiring “high quality, racially conscious” teachers and administrators. One hope is that if the school itself is open to discussing topics like race, it will become a more welcoming place to learn, and will ultimately begin closing the achievement gap.
The school district declined to comment for this story, but from talking with students and parents, implementation of the equity plan varies from classroom to classroom. While elementary school students learn through coloring, Edina High School junior Charlie Heinecke says he read Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” the 1952 classic about being a black man in America, because of the equity plan. It has since become one of his favorite books.
“Research consistently demonstrates that children of color, American Indian children, and white children alike benefit from opportunities to expand their knowledge of their own and others’ histories, present conditions, and possible futures,” says Annie Mogush Mason, the director of elementary teacher education at the University of Minnesota, of the equity plan.
Edina is hardly the only school district addressing race; public schools across the country, from Cambridge Public Schools in Massachusetts to Lawrence Public Schools in Kansas, have developed similar plans and these kinds of steps are becoming increasingly popular in districts trying to close similar gaps.
My own family lives in Minneapolis, near the border with Edina, and my daughter takes preschool classes at the district. I first learned about the controversy when a flier from the Center of the American Experiment landed in our mailbox last October, shortly before the “Fox & Friends” special. It read, “Whose values? Educational excellence threatened by ideology in Edina schools.”
It wasn’t the only time national political divisions had struck schools in our area. Just after Trump’s election, racist graffiti in support of the president appeared in a school bathroom in a nearby suburb.
In response, students at the school decided to post positive, multi-lingual signs, reading “All Are Welcome Here,” including in Somali and Spanish. The district, which is not part of Edina Public Schools but is located in another Twin Cities suburb, includes students from homes where over 80 languages are spoken, according to its website.
Inspired by the kids, a local graphic design studio created a similar sign, which soon started cropping up around the city, including on lawns, schools, and office buildings. I noticed it posted in the halls of Edina Public Schools, including the preschool hallways in the Early Learning Center, where my daughter takes classes.
I thought it seemed, well, welcoming. But some Minnesotans consider the signs a political litmus test. The studio says it is “inclusive, non-partisan and positive,” but many see the signs as overtly anti-Trump.
“The reality of the situation is that the posters should read ‘All Are Welcome Here…unless you stand for conservative values,’” says David Buyse, whose daughter is a junior at Edina High School, over email. It’s the same reasoning many parents have applied to the school’s equity plan: Acknowledging race, and certainly teaching it, is driving a liberal political agenda where it doesn’t belong.
BBuyse isn’t alone: The conservative backlash from parents and right-wing pundits against Edina’s equity efforts has continued unabated since last fall. When an article about it appeared on the neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer, Edina teachers say they started receiving threats. “I will do what it takes to get you fired,” read one email sent to an Edina teacher, while another said, “You really need to do society a favor and kill yourself.”
Buyse wrote in an email that skin color doesn’t matter and all kids should see themselves as “Edina green” after the school’s color. (The idea that the world is colorblind is considered by psychologists and race experts to be misguided and its own form of racism.)
“I don’t think kids should be taught about race, skin color, melanin, etc.,” Buyse, a commercial real estate broker, says. “I believe that teachers should abide by their code of conduct, and remain apolitical, and agnostic to issues of race, religion and sexual identity…from K–12th grade!” Buyse claims he has spoken with several hundred other parents that feel the same way.
Over the last few months, neighbors and parents have been debating the issue in heated threads on apps like NextDoor and on Facebook. They have formed private groups like Edina Parents for Accountability and Transparency and Edina Families for Diversity and Inclusion.
Katherine Kersten, the “Fox & Friends” guest, joined the local debate. In an op-ed for the local Star Tribune newspaper last October, she wrote, “Educators have no business prompting immature and impressionable children to classify themselves and others by skin color.” Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote a column about the school district the same month, saying the teachers were imposing “left-wing views.” And in a glossy magazine distributed to area homes before the school board election, Kersten’s think tank connected the district’s focus on equity with a decline in its reading and math proficiency scores on state tests. (While Edina High School’s scores in state tests have declined in the past few years, according to the state Department of Education, the district continues to perform about 20 percentage points higher than the rest of the state).
The debate even inspired a Republican state representative from the southern Minnesota city of Rochester to introduce a bill this March that would require “academic balance” in public schools, including a policy controlling how and when teachers can ask students for their “social or political viewpoints” and mandating a “broad range of serious opinions.”
In response, English teacher Tim Klobuchar told state lawmakers during a hearing on the bill in March that he believes teachers’ current mission at Edina is to “educate all children and prepare them for the world by teaching them to think for themselves and ask tough questions. That world includes people who look and think differently than they do.”
Klobuchar, whose views reflect most Edina teachers who have spoken publicly, says he believes the backlash comes from “people’s own fears of losing a tiny bit of their perceived power in our society. Why are they so afraid of their children being exposed to anything that might make them question their world or confront uncomfortable truths?”
Heinecke, the high school junior, put together a counterpoint to what Kersten wrote about his school district, and was published in the local newspaper. His teachers liked it, he said recently, making him feel proud — but he was still upset because he believed his school was unfairly characterized. He said he didn’t understand the fuss over teaching kids about diversity. “How is this a liberal or a conservative issue?” he says. “How is teaching that you should respect people that aren’t the same as you a liberal or conservative topic? It’s universal.”
EEthelind Belle, a Ghanaian immigrant and mom of three who moved to Edina from Minneapolis in 2014 largely because of the schools, didn’t realize her family’s new district had an equity policy until the recent debate. But she says she loved her son’s elementary experience. Belle, a legal marketer, recalls being asked to bring in traditional Ghanaian food for the kids and talk with other parents at dinners and discussions the school hosted.
“For me, even with the parents, it never felt like race was an issue, because it was talked about very freely,” she says. “Maybe the reason why people are having all this discomfort around race is that they never had that conversation. These children, I feel very positive that if it’s not stifled along the way as they grow up, they will be much more ready and equipped to handle these things than we are.”
While much of the national conservative outrage has been over the idea of race being in the curriculum of the youngest learners, locals say the real tension is among the parents of kids going to the high school. There, political debates have become personal since the 2016 presidential election. Belle says her daughter, who attends Edina High School, was the victim of a verbal attack based on her skin color.
This past November, a group of conservative students and parents sued the school in Minnesota federal court, saying their first amendment rights were violated. Some students decided to stay sitting when the national anthem was played at a Veterans Day assembly, angering members of the schools Young Conservative Club, who criticized the protesters online while making disparaging comments about their Somali-American classmates. The suit claimed that the district revoked the club’s sponsorship because of these disrespectful comments. The district denied this but they ended up settling the case in a closed session. The group has since been reinstated. Minnesota Public Radio blogger Bob Collins said of the case: “Oh, Edina kids! This is the hill you want to die on? Racism Hill?”
The week of the lawsuit, Belle’s oldest daughter came home and said she wanted to change schools.
“She said, ‘I just want everybody to get along.’ She was so heartbroken about this, I hugged her, and she cried,” says Belle, who then spent all weekend wondering if a different school might actually be better for her kid. Then she changed her mind.
“That Monday, before she went to school, it hit me,” she said. “We’re living in a [human rights] era right now. We’re fighting for these things and it almost feels like a revolution. I told myself, ‘Running away from it, you’re going to regret it.’ Because revolutionaries, they don’t pack up their bags and leave.”
