On Education and the State of the US  

by Colette de Jacobin

I stand before you today as both a member of Handmaids of Minnesota and as a licensed public school teacher here in the Twin Cities area.  I am a Social Studies teacher in an Intermediate district serving the needs of some of our state’s highest needs students.  Social studies is one of those teaching fields that encompasses so many subjects, but to sum it up, it means that we teach Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  We use trauma informed practices to ensure that every student that walks in our doors receives an education that meets their individual needs, honours their cultural history, and provides opportunities for students to prepare to be civically engaged citizenry…practices once considered necessary by the Department of Education and now under fire by the current government.

Teachers began 2025 facing an Executive Order titled, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”  An executive order that sowed the seeds of fascism in our schools and placed blame for perceived societal problems on educators who honour the diversity of our students’ lived experiences and teach them history inclusive of historically absent narratives.  This executive action claimed teachers are guilty of “Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children.”  By this, the order accused teachers of impressing upon students a 250-year history that includes racism, sexism, and homophobia.  This is a history that is immutably proven to be true. This order ignored states’ roles in determining their own standards for education and required educators to replace honest history with one that is, “unifying, inspiring, and ennobling,”….a history that would diminish the stories of most of our population and replace it with the lies of nationalism.  When the regime of the Executive Branch glorified a false history, this opened the doors and ennobled local school boards, organisations made up of minor elected officials, often with no background in education, to impose dangerous and hate fueled policies within our local schools.  Take Forest Lake for example, a district in our northern suburbs where they actually took time to vote on whether or not to allow Confederate flags, swastikas, and symbols of the KKK to be worn by students in their schools.  Our country is no longer flirting with fascism, it is injecting blatantly it into our youth.

Our schools are not just becoming more dangerous ideologically, they are places where our children and educators are in physical danger.  This is not a new issue, but an ongoing threat.  My own district experienced gun violence in 2022 that resulted in the murder and injury of three youth and now, in 2025, there have been 64 school shootings in the U.S. this year alone.  Minnesotans are still mourning the losses of life at Annunciation Catholic School. This isn’t a far away problem…this is a right here and right now problem.  With government officials more concerned about votes and money, they are setting students’ rights to live aside for their own greed and choosing guns over children….a problem that must be solved right here and right now in Minnesota.

Schools are intended to be safe places of learning and spaces in which all students prepare for their futures as adults contributing to society.  The government is currently using its weight to strip that from so many children by declaring that ICE, an organization that the current dictator is using as his personal gestapo to oppress the public, can now arrest children at schools. Handmaids of Minnesota recently travelled to the Broadview Ice Processing Prison to stand in solidarity with the people of Illinois against the unlawful detainment of their community members.  From the dedicated folks there, we learnt that they have had to create groups that watch schools to warn families if ICE is near putting their children in danger of arrest.  While we stood outside Broadview Prison, we saw for ourselves a child being brought in, to be processed amongst adults.  A child…a child that should be free to be in school learning, not manhandled by armed and masked men masquerading as law enforcement.  Recently, Kristi Noem, travelled to Minnesota, with her hate-fueled propaganda machine, to sow fear and threaten Minnesota with the coming of even more ICE agents. Families cannot send their students to school when they have reason to believe that they and their children are put at risk by a government that has declared their existence to be criminal. We have seen the havoc that Noem and her agents have wreaked upon the people of Illinois. Minnesotans must stand and not allow that onslaught of oppression in our schools, on our land, or against any of our people. No human, child nor adult, is illegal and we demand that all people have the right to freedom from tyranny.

Minnesota is referred to as the North Star State.  For as long as people have been traversing the northern hemisphere, our predecessors, the indigenous communities and the voyageurs of the past, have relied upon the North Star to guide their way and lead them through so many journeys.  As our country and our state faces the rise of fascism, both in our schools and out, it is a time for Minnesotans to live up to our name…to be the north star, to be a fixed point for direction in demanding liberty, and to lead our people to a more equitable future. We are Minnesota and we are the North Star.