Will Tim Walz Make Democrats the Education Party Again?
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 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 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—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 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, free college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 per year, funding for free school meals for K-12 students statewide, and paid sick leave for workers, as well as a paid family and medical leave.
The “historic” 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 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” of wooing political moderates in an election that is expected to be a close race to the finish.
But Shapiro had set off alarms among public school advocates. In a letter sent in July 2024 to the Harris campaign, which was picked up by numerous media outlets, more than two dozen grassroots education groups warned against selecting Shapiro because of his support for taxpayer-funded private school vouchers.
The letter stated that Shapiro “has supported education policies mirroring Project 2025,” 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 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. 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, 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.
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. 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 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 that is still, in its current version 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 as a Cabinet-level entity.
In 2004, Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute wrote, “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, “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 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 in 2022 when he again examined 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, 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 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 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 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.”
Although many media outlets have reported these narratives as factual, they really aren’t.
First, surveys 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 with the schools.
Also, as the above survey data from Pew in 2014 show, 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 were so disastrous that Congress was spurred to rewrite ESEA 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.
It bears noting that when Joe Biden ran for president, he did not continue with 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, returned to a relatively safe narrative of education as an essential “investment.” But he never really gave the Democrats a programmatic education brand 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. He also eschews policy gimmicks that have been favored by both parties.
In his 2007 interview with Education Week, 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 to the Baltimore Sun, and opposed Minnesota’s Republican-controlled Senate that wanted to create education savings accounts 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 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
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools, 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.
The Independent Media Institute (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.