DRAFT 1.1 • POLICYMAKER START PAGE • Audience: legislators, agency leaders, school boards
Use now vs. change state law later
Separate what a district can do under current law from what requires statute, rule, or statewide standards changes.
A district can act now
- Adopt local purpose language centered on literacy, numeracy, knowledge, reasoning, and adult competence.
- Post major proposed instructional units, recurring digital materials, and vendor contracts for reasonable review before adoption.
- Make the Minn. Stat. §120B.20 curriculum-review and alternative-instruction process clear and usable, including for digital lessons.
- Protect elementary instructional time for structured reading instruction and mathematics before adding new recurring requirements.
- Offer an optional adult-competence course or pilot practical-life sequence where consistent with graduation and course requirements.
- Use Run Your Life as an elective or pilot capstone rather than a diploma condition.
- Adopt a local rule that academic grades do not depend on real-world political organizing, ideological allegiance, or unnecessary sensitive personal disclosure.
State law or rule change is needed
- Replace Minnesota’s statewide academic standards with the full MLP standards architecture.
- Amend or replace requirements in Minn. Stat. §120B.251.
- Replace or materially revise Minn. R. 3501.1350.
- Make Run Your Life, or any successor applied capstone, a statewide diploma rule.
- Give MLP mastery gates statewide legal force.
- Impose a statewide mandate-opportunity-cost test with binding legal effect.
Sequence
First, build a local platform around transparent curriculum, protected foundational time, neutral grading, and measurable outcomes. Second, pilot practical adult competence, mastery supports, and mandate review without making untested pilots high-stakes. Third, make the first state asks narrow: clearer purpose language and a requirement that new statewide mandates identify competency, evidence, time, cost, and displaced instruction. Fourth, evaluate results before expanding legal requirements. Fifth, replace the full standards architecture last, after the model has been tested and publicly debated.
Status: Draft framework; not adopted law. Whether a particular district action is lawful depends on the current facts and applicable law; this page separates the MLP proposal into local and later-state tracks rather than offering legal advice.
The Minnesota Learning Project 