Count Jan Resseger among the folks who sense in Tim Walz a different approach to education. Reposted with permission.
I was stunned on the morning of August 2nd, when I read an Ezra Klein interview in the NY Times with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, one of the people Kamala Harris was considering as a running mate. Governor Walz had clearly reflected upon the role of public education in American society, and he plainly explained:
“A town that small had… a public school with a government teacher that inspired me to be sitting where I am today. Those are real stories in small towns. These guys, they talk about how evil the public schools are. For many of us, public schools were everything. That was our path. That’s the great American contribution.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has now chosen Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in her own campaign for President. With Vice President Harris, Walz has been traveling the country for a series of rallies, where he has talked about his two decades as a high school social studies teacher, a football coach, and a teacher who cared enough about all of his students that when students at Mankato West High School set out to establish a gay-straight alliance, he volunteered to be the faculty advisor.
The concept that Walz described to Ezra Klein is explored in more depth by Claudia Goldin, the Nobel Prize-winning economic historian at Harvard University: “The creation of publicly funded common schools and their spread throughout much of America was the first great transformation of education in America… (T)he second great transformation… picked up its greatest steam with the diffusion of public high schools, and in the first few decades of the twentieth century these school reached even the smallest rural communities in America.” (The Race Between Education and Technology, p. 162) Universal public education—the promise of schools that are free and available to every child and adolescent and are required by law to protect the rights and meet the needs of all students— is one of our society’s greatest accomplishments.
What does it mean that after two decades of attacks—first with No Child Left Behind’s branding schools by their test scores as “failing,” and now since 2019, with blaming schools and teachers for school closures during COVID—someone running for Vice President of the United States just casually drops a comment celebrating public schools as America’s great contribution?
Governor Walz knows, of course, that public schools are not perfect, which is why he worked with his legislature in Minnesota for all sorts of major reforms including a significant school funding increase. And just as important, he has shown he understands that broader economic inequality results in serious opportunity gaps that affect school achievement among students living where family poverty is concentrated.
The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson summarize Walz’s record on public education policy as Governor of Minnesota: “Walz… fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students—including undocumented immigrants—whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them… The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years… The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.”
For Chalkbeat, Erica Meltzer analyzes what all this says about Governor Walz’s theory of support for public education in contrast to the old test-and-punish school accountability agenda that infected the Republican Bush administration and the Democratic Obama administration: “As governor, Walz focused on providing schools with more money and resources, addressing the affordability of child care and college, and working to reduce child poverty. Walz has connected these policy priorities to his time in the classroom, and Democrats increasingly have embraced them as the solution to what ails public education. The emphasis on resources and social factors outside the classroom sidesteps education issues that have divided Democrats and differs in key respects from former President Barack Obama’s tenure, when Democrats backed education reform priorities like merit pay for teachers and pushed low-performing schools to improve or face closure. It stands in even sharper contrast to Republican attacks on public schools as places where children are at risk of indoctrination… ‘It feels like an opportunity to turn the page on the way education has been discussed for the last few years,’ says Jon Valant, who heads the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. ‘Democrats have been reluctant to engage on some of these issues, and now we’ll have someone on the forefront who is very natural and compelling when he talks about it.’ ”
Consider the history of attacks on public schools.
- After the passage of No Child Left Behind in January of 2002, the federal government required test-and-punish school reform that judged schools by their students’ test scores, expected rapid improvement in every school’s test scores, and punished the schools where scores did not quickly rise with mandatory school reconstitution, transformation into charter schools, or school closure. Test-based accountability was also imposed on teachers based on their students’ test scores. The law declared that all students across the U.S. were to be proficient by 2014, but of course that did not happen anywhere. While we know that this strategy was a failure, its policies—all based on punishing schools and their teachers—still affect schools in many ways.
- For years across the states, legislators have blamed teachers in school districts serving our nation’s poorest students for the schools’ lagging test scores. They have issued state report cards with “F” grades for the schools in the poorest communities. My state, Ohio, imposed state takeovers on the Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland public schools. Only after the state takeovers did further damage and failed to improve test scores, did the legislature consider creating a plan that permitted the school districts to earn the right to emerge from state takeover, though some have still not made it back to local control. It has been a punitive process all the way along.
- In more recent years, Ron DeSantis and groups like Moms for Liberty have wildly attacked teachers who they claim are thrusting a “woke” curriculum about race and human sexuality on students.
- When nobody knew who to blame for the massive COVID disruption, lots of politicians pressed parents and everyone else to blame the teachers’ unions for school closures despite that infection was rampant and nobody had an adequate solution.
- In the past couple of years in Ohio and a number of other states, attacks on the public schools have been used as the justification for million dollar, sometimes even billion dollar, private school tuition voucher expansions that will suck essential resources for public schools out of the states’ budgets.
- Finally, the Heritage Foundation ‘s Project 2025 playbook for a future Trump administration would phase out federal Title I funding that helps school districts serving masses of children living in poverty. The 2024 Republican Platform, although it is less extreme, promises to implement universal school choice in every state; elevate parents’ rights; target “Critical Race Theory” and “gender indoctrination”; end teacher tenure, and adopt merit pay for teachers; and shut down the U.S. Department of Education.
Imagine what all this has done to undermine the morale of teachers, a condition exacerbated for many teachers who were under enormous pedagogic pressure when teaching online and in-person simultaneously during COVID and who are still being blamed for test score declines after COVID school closures. Morale has been undermined as well by chronically low salaries. Last September, in an update of a series of annual reports on teachers’ salaries nationwide, the Economic Policy Institute documented: “Teacher pay has suffered a sharp decline compared with the pay of other college-educated workers. On average, teachers made 26.4% less than other similarly educated professionals in 2022—the lowest since 1960… On average, teachers earned 73.6 cents for every dollar that other professionals made in 2022 (the most recent data available). This is much less than the 93.9 cents on the dollar they made in 1996.”
Press reports portray Walz as every student’s favorite teacher—the kind of model that directly confronts the disdain for schoolteachers that dominates Republican culture war rhetoric. Education Week‘s Libby Stanford quotes Walz comparing political campaigning to teaching high school. In politics, “The biggest thing is communicating an idea.. It’s trying to get people to be involved and to look at the facts… Teaching is the same way. You’re trying to present a system of facts; you’re trying to teach students what’s the best way to think about problems to solve them in a rational way.”
The teachers I know are so grateful that Governor Tim Walz is validating what they do and standing up for public schooling at a time when our schools have been under attack for decades. It is a surprise and a very welcome turn of events.
