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THE HARRIS-WALZ VISION FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS  
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Jennifer C. Berkshire
August 28, 2024
The Nation
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_ Their agenda breaks with decades of Democratic thinking about
education. The Harris-­Walz education agenda is often inseparable
from the campaign’s economic priorities. Both are part of what the
candidates describe as a pro-family platform. _

Governor Tim Walz gets a huge hug from students at Webster Elementary
in northeast Minneapolis, Minn., after he signed into law a bill that
guarantees free school meals for every student in Minnesota’s public
schools., Photo: Ben Hovland | MPR News

 

In an interview this summer, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz made
the sort of blunt statement about poverty that has long eluded his
fellow Democrats. “People are poor because they don’t have
money,” Walz told _Pod Save America_
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list of what he called “chain reactions” for children in America,
including low performance in school. That vision is at the heart of
the Harris-Walz populist economic agenda, but it also casts the
education policy of a Harris-Walz administration as a means of
supporting kids and families. This contrasts sharply not just with
Republicans but also with previous Democratic administrations.

From the recently proposed $6,000 credit to support newborns
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their first year of life to a universal school meals policy
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provide every child with free breakfast and lunch regardless of
income, the Harris-­Walz education agenda is often inseparable from
the campaign’s economic priorities. Both are part of what the
candidates describe as a pro-family platform.

“It’s so refreshing to see real policy ideas that are actually
targeted to the genuine problems and priorities of parents rather than
this kind of culture-war vision about who is going to which
bathroom,” says Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on
Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The contrast with the goals of a second Trump administration
couldn’t be starker. Eliminating the Department of Education
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GOP talking point for decades and a regular Trump promise on the
campaign trail
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result in deep cuts to federal funding for under-resourced schools
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Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s detailed policy blueprint
for a conservative transformation of government, calls for a host of
policy changes that would make education more expensive for families,
including eliminating Head Start
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the federal school meals program
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and the eventual dismantling of public education
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But the emerging Harris-Walz education agenda, with its emphasis on
supporting families outside of school, also breaks with decades of
Democratic thinking about education. Since Bill Clinton, the party
consensus has been that improving the nation’s public schools is the
best way to lift kids out of poverty. Yet as inequality deepened and
wages stagnated, the party pointed to those schools, and especially
their teachers, as the problem, and competition and privatization as
the solution. This way of thinking reached its apex under Barack
Obama, who sold his get-tough-on-teachers policy as key to the
nation’s economic competitiveness and oversaw an explosion of
privately run charter schools
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The Harris-Walz vision is much different, positioning public education
as one piece of a larger family support system, beginning
with universal pre-K
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including well-resourced public schools, and continuing
through affordable college
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That view doesn’t just represent a shift in “blue” thinking. It
also puts Harris and Walz on a collision course with red states, which
have been moving at rapid speed to privatize public education, often
in the name of “parents’ rights.”
[[link removed]] Fourteen
states have now passed legislation creating expansive—and
expensive—voucher programs
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allow parents to spend public funds on private schools, with little if
any public accountability.

As these programs balloon, they are draining much-needed resources
away from public schools, while crowding out spending on all kinds of
social programs. Arizona, which enacted the largest voucher program in
the country in 2022, recently slashed spending on water infrastructure
projects to help close its $1.4 billion budget deficit
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due largely to vouchers.

Since the onset of the Covid pandemic, Democrats have struggled to
find much of anything to say about public schools. Defensive over
school closures and caught off guard by the Republicans’ embrace of
school culture wars, the Biden administration has often seemed
rudderless on K-12 issues. Beyond Biden’s signature issues of
expanding civil rights protections for LGBTQ students and student
loan forgiveness
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been stymied by the courts—it’s hard to point to a particular
vision of what public schools should do, or indeed why we have them at
all.

There are signs that the Harris-Walz approach will be very different.
For one, Walz’s background as a social studies teacher and a coach
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the epitome of a Midwestern normie, is a powerful rejoinder to the
GOP’s fixation on teachers as groomers. And both Harris and Walz are
the product of public schools, experiences that have clearly shaped
their views about the importance of public education. Reminding
Americans why we have public schools, and what we stand to lose if
they go away, will require not just contrasting their education policy
with the GOP’s platform of abandoning free, secular,
taxpayer-­supported schools, but also moving away from the legacy of
the Democratic brand of education reform.

“Schools are more than just factories where we keep track of how
well kids do on tests. They’re community entities,” says Noliwe
Rooks, chair of Brown University’s Africana Studies program.
“Public education is an audacious experiment that doesn’t exist in
most places, and it’s worth protecting.”

_[JENNIFER C. BERKSHIRE hosts the education podcast Have You Heard
[[link removed]]. She is the author, with
Jack Schneider, of The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and
Defense Manual [[link removed]].]_

_This article appears in the September 2024 issue
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headline “Education Agenda.”_

_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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to The Nation for just $24.95!_

* Education
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* education policy
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* Kamala Harris
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* Tim Walz
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* 2024 Elections
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* Donald Trump
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* neo-liberalism
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* Democratic Party
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* Bill Clinton
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* Public Education
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* public schools
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* privatization
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* Charter schools
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