Photo Source: Office of Governor Tim Walz and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan – Public Domain
By choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has not only selected a progressive governor and a Midwestern populist as the frontrunners for her party’s national slate, but may also have signaled that the Democratic Party is ready to reclaim its reputation as the party of education.
Walz, a former public school teacher and football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, uses his experiences as an educator to shape his political persona and beliefs. In an interview with Education Week in 2007 – after he was elected to Congress – he said that teachers are “more rooted in the things that really matter to people.”
As governor of Minnesota, he put that caring philosophy into action by championing and signing into law a $72 billion state budget in May 2023 that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools, created a new tax credit of $1,750 per child, provided free college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 annually, funded free school meals statewide for students in grades K-12, and provided workers with paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave.
The “historic” education spending Walz approved included a $5.5 billion increase in state funding over the next four years, a substantial increase in the state’s per capita funding formula, and an increase in funding for full-service community schools that amounts to $7.5 million for two years and then $5 million annually. Community schools take a whole-school approach to education that includes addressing the extracurricular needs of students and families, including access to technology, social services, physical and mental health care, adult education, and afterschool and summer programs.
It is also telling that Harris’ nomination of Walz as her running mate was a rejection of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who prominent centrist Democrats claimed was Harris’ “best chance” to win over moderates in an election that is likely to be a close one until the end.
But Shapiro had raised alarm among public school advocates. In a letter sent to the Harris campaign in July 2024 and picked up by numerous media outlets, more than two dozen grassroots education groups warned against selecting Shapiro because he supports taxpayer-funded education vouchers for private schools.
The letter said Shapiro had supported “education policies similar to Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation’s right-wing manifesto designed to serve as a blueprint for a new Trump administration and “includes measures to channel federal education funds directly to families through education savings accounts,” according to WITF.
“With Project 2025,” the letter continued, “(the Conservatives) have made the end goal more than clear: the erosion of public education and the privatization of what remains through irresponsible voucher systems like those in Florida and Arizona.”
“Walz has been pretty much the best governor on education in Minnesota in decades,” Sarah Lahm wrote in an email to Our Schools. Lahm is a veteran education journalist from the state and a guest writer for Our Schools. The selection of Walz as the nominee “is good news,” she said, “especially when compared to Shapiro and his record on school choice.”
Harris’ team undoubtedly weighed many issues in selecting its running mate, but the fact that opposition to education vouchers came to the forefront is unusual in Democratic political circles, where education is often not viewed as a major national issue.
When the Democrats were the education party
The last time a former elementary school teacher from the Democratic Party ran for vice president was in 1960, and the candidate was Lyndon Johnson. Although most experts insist that vice presidents have little influence on federal policy, Johnson eventually became president and was instrumental in passing the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, which in its current form still stands today as the Every Student Succeeds Act and provides the blueprint for today’s federal education policy.
The Democratic Party cemented its reputation as the party of education in 1979, when then-Democratic President Jimmy Carter approved legislation creating the U.S. Department of Education at the Cabinet level.
Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute wrote in 2004: “Historically, Democrats have had a significant advantage over Republicans on education because of their support for education spending and their decades-long alliance with unions and public employees.”
But that advantage began to wane in the late 1980s, Hess and Kelly note, due to “Reagan criticism of liberalism and expensive social programs.” Democrats responded to these attacks by “pursuing a more moderate course on domestic policy, including education,” they note, and by the time Congress passed the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law in late 2002, opinions were nearly split over which party was best on education issues.
Nevertheless, Democrats seemed to have regained their upper hand in 2012, with a Pew Research Center poll finding that “by a two-to-one margin (53 percent to 27 percent), more (voters) believe Democrats could do a better job of improving the nation’s education system.”
But the Democrats’ resurgence as the most popular party on education issues did not last long. When Pew conducted a new poll in 2014, the party was only four percent ahead of the Republicans on education.
“Overall, the data suggests that Democrats are having more trouble on education than at any other time in the past two decades,” Hess wrote in 2022 when he re-examined which party has the best reputation on education.
The Democratic Party’s declining reputation for supporting public schools does not mean that Republicans are gaining much in popularity, Hess noted. But “Democrats have been losing voters’ trust for half a decade, and that decline has accelerated significantly in the past two years,” he wrote, noting that nearly one in five voters trusts neither party.
Also in 2022, a poll of voters in key swing states by Hart Research for the American Federation of Teachers found that 39 percent of voters trusted Republicans, while 38 percent trusted Democrats on education issues. Another poll conducted the same year by Democrats for Education Reform, an organization that advocates for the privatization of schools with charter and voucher programs, found an even more significant Republican lead: 47 percent said they trusted Republicans to “handle education” and 43 percent said they trusted Democrats.
What happened?
Republicans would have us believe that the reason for the Democrats’ shift in popular support for education policy is the mask requirement supported by Democratic officials during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Another narrative often spun by right-wing activists is that when students were forced to attend distance learning due to the pandemic, parents experienced first-hand that their children were being taught so-called left-wing ideology and “democratic indoctrination.”
Although many media outlets present these reports as facts, in reality they are not.
First, surveys of parents during the pandemic years found that they largely supported schools’ response to the situation. And even when schools returned to in-person instruction, parents remained satisfied with the schools.
As the 2014 Pew poll data cited above show, voters also began to become angry about the Democratic Party’s education policies. before the COVID-19 outbreak.
Undoubtedly, the Democratic Party’s declining popularity on education issues has something to do with the policies the party has supported or not supported. During the years Pew tracked the party’s declining reputation on education issues, the Obama administration’s education agenda and its inept Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, were so disastrous that Congress felt compelled to rewrite the ESEA to limit some of the federal government’s power to shape local education policies.
And while Republicans agreed during President Trump’s term in office on a so-called school choice policy that gives parents the opportunity to take their children out of public schools using taxpayer money, the Democratic Party did not oppose this in principle.
It is notable that Joe Biden did not continue the Obama administration’s education policies in his presidential campaign. His administration returned – probably at the urging of first lady Jill Biden, who championed public schools – to a relatively safe portrayal of education as an indispensable “investment.” But he never really gave the Democrats a programmatic education brand that the party could rely on.
Tim Walz’s participation in the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign is an opportunity to change this.
“We are sitting on the edge of our seats”
Through his success in Minnesota, Walz has shown that he supports the education policies he cares about most and avoids political gimmicks favored by both parties.
In his 2007 interview with Education Week, Walz criticized NCLB as a “bureaucratic nightmare” and said its application had “very little impact on actual student outcomes.”
As governor, he “strongly opposed school voucher programs,” according to the Baltimore Sun, and he also opposed the Republican-dominated Minnesota Senate’s plan to create education savings accounts that would allow parents to use taxpayer money to take their children out of public schools and give them other educational options.
Now that Walz has been named the vice presidential nominee, “public education advocates and policy experts are sitting tight-lipped about the political implications of having a teacher as vice president of the United States of America,” education professor Phelton Moss wrote in an August 2024 opinion piece for Education Week. “A Harris-Walz administration could be a historic next phase in education policy,” he wrote.
Of course, it is still early in the long presidential campaign to say whether or not education will be a major issue. A Harris-Walz victory is far from certain, and vice presidents often have little influence on the policy direction of a presidential administration.
But Harris’ decision to select Walz as her running mate presents an opportunity to overhaul the Democratic Party establishment’s outdated education policies and revamp the party’s image as a true hero for public schools and children.
This article was created by Our Schools..
