'Underrepresented' teachers in Minneapolis achieve tenure-like status after union defends anti-White policy

Minneapolis’ new policy echoes race-based trends on college campuses.

The Minneapolis Teachers Union defended implementing a new policy requiring schools to lay off White employees.

The Minneapolis Teachers Union defended implementing a new policy requiring schools to lay off or rehire employees based on race. 

The policy states that schools must, “excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.” 

When rehiring, the Minneapolis school district must prioritize “the recall of a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented.” 

Certain programs will also exempt teachers from layoffs. If an educator belongs to a “Racially Isolated School” or “Native and Heritage language literacy programs,” they are protected from a “district-wide layoff outside of seniority order.”

Teachers of these “underrepresented” groups achieve an almost tenure-like status in hopes that the program “remed[ies] the continuing effects of past discrimination.”

[RELATED: Master’s candidate submits thesis on ‘Teaching White Privilege’]

The policy resulted after teachers in Minneapolis went on strike for two weeks in the spring 2022 semester, keeping over 30,000 students out of school for weeks. 

Minneapolis Federation of Teachers Chapter President Greta Callahan told The New York Times, “They continue to look at our proposals and say, ‘These are add-ons that we can’t afford.’ And we’re saying, ‘No, you need to rewrite the whole system and do things differently.’”

Callahan also posted on Twitter that the policy “is one tiny, minuscule way to retain educators of color and other underrepresented groups IF THEY choose to destabilize our schools by slashing building budgets and cutting the humans who have relationships with our students.”

The adopted policy will run through the 2023 school year. 

The actions of the Minneapolis Teachers Union are undoubtedly influenced by the ever-evolving woke ideologies propagated on college campuses. 

The University of South Carolina, for example, changed its application requirements for its Business Success Academy after it was revealed that the program only accepted high school students identifying as “African American or Black, Hispanic, LatinX, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or Two or More Races.”

Off-campus housing at the University of California, Berkeley bans White people from using the common spaces. One of the house rules requires occupants to “announce guests…if they are white.”

[RELATED: Students must pass new ‘Race and Ethnic Studies’ requirement to graduate]

Campus Reform also analyzed scholarships offered by wealthy individuals at five colleges with race requirements in the application. 

As Harvard University and the University of North Carolina await the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action admissions policy, both universities have been receiving criticism for “discriminat[ing] against Asian-American and white applicants.” 

Campus Reform reached out to the Minneapolis Teachers Union and will update this article accordingly. 

Follow @kliseanderson on Twitter.