[[link removed]]

WILL TIM WALZ MAKE DEMOCRATS THE EDUCATION PARTY AGAIN?  
[[link removed]]


 

Jeff Bryant
August 12, 2024
Independent Media Institute [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Kamala Harris’ decision to choose a teacher as her running mate
creates an opportunity to remake the Democratic Party’s image as an
advocate for public schools. _

,

 

In choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate, Vice
President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has not
only picked a progressive governor and a Midwestern populist
[[link removed]] to
lead the party’s national ticket but she also may have signaled that
the Democratic Party is ready to take back its reputation as the
education party.

Walz, a former public school teacher
[[link removed]] and
football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, draws on his experience as an
educator to inform his political persona and policy beliefs, saying in
a 2007 interview with Education Week
[[link removed]]—after
he was elected to Congress—that teachers are “more grounded in
what people really care about.”

As governor of Minnesota, he acted on that philosophy of caring by
pushing for and signing into law a $72 billion
[[link removed]] state
budget in May 2023 that significantly increased funding for the
state’s public schools, provided for a new $1,750-per-child tax
credit
[[link removed]], free
college tuition
[[link removed]] for
families earning less than $80,000 per year, funding for free school
meals
[[link removed]] for
K-12 students statewide, and paid sick leave
[[link removed]] for
workers, as well as a paid family and medical leave.

The “historic
[[link removed]]”
education spending Walz approved included a $5.5 billion increase over
the next four years, a substantial raise to the state’s per-pupil
funding formula, and an increase in funding for full-service community
schools consisting of $7.5 million for two years and then $5 million
per year in the future. Community schools practice a holistic
education approach
[[link removed]] that entails
attending to the non-academic needs of students and families,
including access to technology, social services, physical and mental
health care, adult education, and after-school and summer programs.

It’s also telling that in picking Walz to be her running mate Harris
rejected Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who prominent centrist
Democrats claimed was Harris’s “best chance
[[link removed]]”
of wooing political moderates in an election that is expected to be
a close race
[[link removed]] to
the finish.

But Shapiro had set off alarms among public school advocates. In
a letter
[[link removed]] sent
in July 2024 to the Harris campaign, which was picked up by numerous
[[link removed]] media
[[link removed]] outlets
[[link removed]],
more than two dozen grassroots education groups warned
[[link removed]] against
selecting Shapiro because of his support for taxpayer-funded private
school vouchers.

The letter stated
[[link removed]] that
Shapiro “has supported education policies mirroring Project 2025
[[link removed]],” the right-wing
manifesto from the Heritage Foundation that is expected to provide a
blueprint for a new Trump administration and “includes measures to
funnel federal education funds directly to families through education
savings accounts,” stated
[[link removed]] WITF.

“Through Project 2025,” the letter further read,
“[conservatives] have made it abundantly clear the end goal of
gutting public education and privatizing what is left via
irresponsible voucher systems like those in Florida and Arizona.”

“Walz has pretty much been the best governor on education in
Minnesota in decades,” wrote Sarah Lahm in an email to Our Schools.
Lahm is a veteran education journalist based in the state and an Our
Schools contributing writer
[[link removed]]. Choosing
Walz to be the nominee “is good news,” she said, “especially
compared to Shapiro and his school choice record.”

No doubt, in selecting a running mate, the Harris team
weighed numerous issues
[[link removed]],
but the fact that opposition to school vouchers came to the fore is
unusual in Democratic political circles where education is often not
considered to be an important national issue
[[link removed]].

When Democrats Were the Education Party

The last time the Democratic Party had a former K-12 school teacher
running for vice president was in 1960, and the candidate was Lyndon
Johnson
[[link removed]].
Although most experts insist that vice presidents have little
influence on federal policies, Johnson ultimately became president and
was instrumental in pushing through the landmark
[[link removed]] Elementary
and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 that is still, in
its current version [[link removed]] called Every
Student Succeeds Act, and is the blueprint for federal education
policy today.

The Democratic Party burnished its reputation as the education party
in 1979 when then-Democratic President Jimmy Carter approved
legislation to create the U.S. Department of Education
[[link removed]] as
a Cabinet-level entity.

In 2004, Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly of the right-wing American
Enterprise Institute wrote
[[link removed]],
“Historically, Democrats have enjoyed a substantial advantage over
the Republicans on education due to their support for education
spending and their decades-old alliance with unions and public
employees.”

But that advantage began to erode in the late 1980s, Hess and Kelly
contended, due to “Reaganite critiques of liberalism and expensive
social programs.” Democrats responded to those attacks by
“seek[ing] a more moderate course on domestic policies, including
education,” they noted, and by late 2002, when Congress passed the
bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, popular opinion on which
party was best on education was nearly split.

Nevertheless, Democrats seemed to have regained the advantage by 2012
when polling by Pew Research Center found
[[link removed]],
“By about two-to-one (53 percent to 27 percent), more [voters] say
Democrats can do a better job improving the education system in the
country.”

But the Democrats’ resurgence as the favored party for education
didn’t last, and when Pew surveyed voters again in 2014, the party
had only a 4 percent advantage
[[link removed]] over
Republicans in handling education.

“Taken as a whole, the data suggest that Democrats are struggling
more on education than at any other time in the past two decades,”
Hess wrote
[[link removed]] in
2022 when he again examined
[[link removed]] which
party had the best education cred.

The Democratic party’s declining reputation for supporting public
schools did not mean Republicans were gaining much favorability, Hess
found, but “Democrats have been losing voters’ confidence for a
half-decade, and that decline has become noticeably steeper over the
past two years,” he wrote
[[link removed]],
noting that nearly one in five voters didn’t trust either party.

Also in 2022, a poll of voters in key battleground states conducted by
Hart Research for the American Federation of Teachers found
[[link removed]] 39
percent of voters trusted Republicans compared to 38 percent who
showed confidence in the Democrats on education issues. Another poll
conducted the same year by Democrats for Education Reform, an
organization that advocates for privatizing schools with charters and
vouchers, found
[[link removed]] a
more lopsided Republican advantage, with 47 percent saying they
trusted Republicans “to handle education” and 43 percent saying
they trusted Democrats.

What Happened?

Republicans would have you believe that the source for the shift in
popular approval on education policy away from Democrats was due
to mask mandates
[[link removed]] that
Democratic government officials supported during the COVID-19
pandemic.

Another narrative that right-wing operatives like to spin is that when
the pandemic forced students to shift to remote learning, parents saw
firsthand that their children were being instructed in so-called
leftist ideology and “Democratic indoctrination
[[link removed]].”

Although many media
[[link removed]] outlets
[[link removed]] have
reported these narratives as factual, they really aren’t.

First, surveys
[[link removed]] of
parents during the pandemic years found that they were mostly
supportive of how schools responded to the situation, and when schools
went back to face-to-face learning, parents remained satisfied
[[link removed]] with
the schools.

Also, as the above survey data from Pew in 2014 show
[[link removed]],
voters started to sour on the Democratic Party’s education
politics _before_ the COVID-19 outbreak.

Without a doubt, the Democratic Party’s declining popularity related
to education has something to do with the policies the party supported
or failed to support. During the years that Pew was tracking the
party’s declining reputation on education issues, the Obama
presidential administration’s education agenda and his ham-handed
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
[[link removed]] were
so disastrous
[[link removed]] that
Congress was spurred to rewrite ESEA
[[link removed]] to
rein in some of the federal government’s powers to shape local
education policies.

Further, during President Trump’s administration, while Republicans
coalesced around so-called school choice policies that give parents
taxpayer funds to pull their kids out of public schools, the
Democratic Party countered with, well, basically nothing
[[link removed]].

It bears noting that when Joe Biden ran for president, he did not
continue with
[[link removed]] the
education policies of the Obama administration, and his
administration, likely at the urging of the strong public school
advocacy of First Lady Jill Biden
[[link removed]],
returned to a relatively safe narrative of education as an essential
“investment.
[[link removed]]”
But he never really gave the Democrats a programmatic education brand
[[link removed]] the
party could hang its hat on.

Having Tim Walz on the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign is
an opportunity to change that.

‘Sitting on the Edge of Our Seats’

Based on his accomplishments in Minnesota, Walz has demonstrated his
inclination to back education policies that matter most
[[link removed]].
He also eschews policy gimmicks that have been favored by both
parties.

In his 2007 interview with Education Week
[[link removed]],
Walz criticized NCLB as a “bureaucratic nightmare” and said “the
application of it [had] very little impact on real student
achievement.”

As governor, he has “stood firmly against school voucher
programs,” according
[[link removed]] to
the Baltimore Sun, and opposed Minnesota’s Republican-controlled
Senate that wanted to create education savings accounts
[[link removed]] that
give parents taxpayer money to pull their children out of public
schools and use other education options.

With Walz now elevated to a vice-presidential nominee, public
education advocates and policy experts are “sitting on the edge of
our seats to see the policy implications of a teacher as the vice
president of the United States of America,” wrote
[[link removed]] education
professor Phelton Moss in an August 2024 op-ed for Education Week.
“A Harris-Walz administration could be a historic next phase in
education policy,” he wrote.

Of course, it’s still early in the long presidential campaign season
to say whether or not education becomes a prominent issue. A
Harris-Walz victory is far from being assured, and vice presidents
often have little influence over policy directions in a presidential
administration.

But Harris’s decision to choose Walz as her running mate creates an
opportunity to overhaul the outdated education policies of the
Democratic Party establishment and remake the party’s image of being
a genuine hero for public schools and children.

_THIS ARTICLE WAS PRODUCED BY OUR SCHOOLS
[[link removed]]_

_JEFF BRYANT is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our
Schools [[link removed]], a
project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications
consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the
Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for
progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and
reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he
speaks frequently at national events about public education policy.
Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm [[link removed]]._

_The Independent Media Institute
[[link removed]] (IMI) is a nonprofit
organization that educates the public through a diverse array of
independent media projects and programs. We work with journalists and
media outlets to shine a spotlight on stories that are vital to the
public interest, using multiple media formats and distribution
channels._

* Tim Walz
[[link removed]]
* Kamala Harris
[[link removed]]
* Public Education
[[link removed]]
* Democratic Party
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]