On August 19, the first night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton gave an impassioned speech that called on delegates to do all they could to make sure Kamala Harris becomes President of the United States in November.
The next day, The Nation published a recap by progressive writer and activist Robert L. Borosage, who declared that Clinton’s address was little more than a swan song signaling that a torch was being passed—from the “centrist Washington consensus of the Clinton era” to a more politically progressive future under Harris.
How did Borosage measure the Harris campaign’s progressive bona fides? Primarily through her selection of former public school teacher and current Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, along with Harris’s emphasis on her own middle-class roots. In Borosage’s view, Walz represents Harris’s pivot away from the plague of neoliberalism that has gripped the Democratic Party since at least the late 1990s, when Bill Clinton was President.
Without going too far down the neoliberal rabbit hole, Borosage mentions deregulation, austerity measures, and free trade as key hallmarks of the Clinton and subsequent Obama eras. What he leaves out is where Walz comes in: education policy.
Neoliberal education policy has been all the rage among prominent Democrats since Bill Clinton became President in 1993. It was Ronald Reagan’s administration that took the “A Nation at Risk” report, meant to offer a view of public education in the United States and abroad, and spun it into an attack on teachers. Clinton picked up the mantle and embraced choice and competition as solutions to perceived problems within America’s schools.
This coincided with the emergence of the charter school movement, as Minnesota became the first state in the nation to authorize these publicly funded, privately run schools in 1991. Over time, shutting down “underperforming” schools as if they were sluggish retail outlets and replacing them with charter schools staffed by non-union teachers became a cause célèbre among liberal elites.
Today, there are around 8,000 charter schools in forty-three states across the nation, serving more than 3.5 million K-12 students. Groups such as the Network for Public Education have documented the level of fraud within the often-unregulated charter school industry, while advocates maintain that school choice schemes offer an essential way to ensure equal opportunity for all children.
Clinton and his successor, George W. Bush, enacted legislation that cemented neoliberalism as the nation’s defining form of education policy. This was especially evident in the No Child Left Behind Act that Bush signed into law in 2002, which promised to punish teachers and schools that could be deemed failing through the use of standardized test scores. Somehow, public schools in every neighborhood across the United States were supposed to ensure a 100 percent proficiency rate on math and reading tests by the year 2014. Spoiler alert: It never happened.
Instead, decades of investment in a market-based approach to education have weakened many public school systems across the United States, including in Minnesota. Marginalized students with higher needs—students who cost more to educate—are increasingly being left behind in shrinking public school districts while charter schools continue to pop up.
This is true in St. Paul, for example, where Walz lives and works as Minnesota’s governor. The public school district there has lost 5,000 students in the past five years, according to a 2024 Minnesota Public Radio report, and it now serves just 60 percent of the city’s school-age residents.
Meanwhile, St. Paul is home to a number of racially isolated charter schools, including those that enroll a majority of white students. Rural, suburban, and urban districts are constantly facing budget shortfalls and the threat of school closures, yet school choice options continue to abound, diverting public funds.
Connecting Walz to Minnesota’s neoliberal education reform climate would not be fair. He spent years as a public high school social studies teacher and football coach who later served in Congress for twelve years before winning his first term as governor in 2018. Walz then faced a divided government that stalled progress on the policy front, which was exacerbated not only by the COVID-19 crisis and the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, but also by the civil unrest that followed.
Walz has also never publicly voiced one of neoliberalism’s central tenets: that students’ individual educational achievement is the path out of poverty. Instead, when he was re-elected governor in 2022, state Democrats won majorities in both the state house and state senate, and Walz began to drive home a series of pro-child, pro-family policies that have nothing to do with standardized test scores.
He famously made school breakfast and lunch free for all students across the state, something that also takes place in Finland, which has one of the world’s most highly regarded public school systems. Walz has jokingly opined on the campaign trail about what a monster he is for making sure students in Minnesota are not showing up to school hungry and thus unprepared to learn.
Here’s a caveat on this victory for Walz: The program has proven to be so popular that it is expected to exceed the budget set aside for it by more than $100 million.
While governor, Walz has also helped expand access to publicly funded early childhood programs rather than give more funds to a previously established program that directed public dollars to privately run early childhood centers.
The Walz administration includes Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who is a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. Together, they have prioritized making deeper connections with Minnesota’s eleven tribal nations. This includes a commitment to sending more resources to schools on tribal lands, which are often among the most impoverished educational settings in the state.
Perhaps this is why Indigenous leaders from across Minnesota sent a letter to Kamala Harris’s campaign, signaling their support of Walz as her running mate. If Walz does become the Vice President of the United States in November, Flanagan will take over in Minnesota and become the nation’s first Indigenous woman to serve as governor.
Yet Walz’s reputation among Indigenous peoples remains clouded. Other groups, including the woman and two-spirit-led Giniw Collective based in Minnesota, have called out the Walz administration for unanimously approving the final permits on Line 3, the largest new tar sands pipeline project in North America, and helping funnel nearly $8 million in funds to local law enforcement and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources “to surveil harass, brutalize Native women, and anyone speaking out.”
How Walz’s Minnesota track record will translate onto the national stage also remains unclear. That’s partly because Vice Presidents often don’t actually do much, as Lois Weiner points out in an interview with The Progressive.
Weiner is professor emerita of education at New Jersey City University and has written extensively about democratization and social justice in education and in teachers unions. She acknowledges that Walz is an undeniably likable candidate—especially for teachers, whose perspectives have been “neglected in schools and in decisions about policies.”
Through Walz’s nomination alone, “it can feel like the profession has been elevated.” Still, Weiner insists, Vice Presidents do not have much say when it comes to enacting policies that impact teachers’ lives, from education to health care or the bloated size of the nation’s military budget.
Weiner also remains skeptical of the Democrats’ track record on education policy. She points out that Kamala Harris has been closely aligned with both the Clinton and Obama factions of the party. Barack Obama, in particular, appointed many high-level proponents of neoliberal education policy during his time in office, including Arne Duncan and Rahm Emanuel.
Both of these men advocated for school closures and the spread of school choice schemes. Beyond naming individual exemplars of these policies, Weiner notes how embedded privatization already is in public education in the United States, partly through data collection, which is often managed and sold by Big Tech companies.
The bottom line? Democrats—whether or not they come with a record like Walz’s—cannot be counted on to save public education.
For Weiner, the strongest line of defense against neoliberal education policy has come from social justice unionism. A call to action published in 1994 by the progressive education publication Rethinking Schools defines social justice unionism as a form of organizing that prioritizes workers’ rights alongside those of children and families.
Simply put, it is the linking of education workers’ struggles with those of their students—an increasing number of whom live in poverty, according to federal census data. An example of this comes from Walz’s current hometown of St. Paul. There, members of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers have spent years cultivating strong relationships with families in the public school district.
Those families, in turn, have become allies not only during contract negotiations between the union and the Saint Paul Public Schools, but also during times when the union has announced its intention to strike. This has occurred numerous times in recent years, including in 2020, when union members actually did go on strike in March before the COVID-19 pandemic brought the action to an abrupt end.
At the core of St. Paul educators’ activism has been the fight not only for smaller class sizes and salary increases, but also for more access to things like mental health services and restorative justice opportunities for students.
When teachers and education support professionals in Minneapolis went on strike in 2022 for the first time in fifty years, Walz did not show up on the picket line or otherwise publicly voice his support for union members. Openly supporting public school teachers is a politically charged act these days—and a specter Walz may have been trying to avoid as he pursued his own ultimately successful re-election campaign for governor.
Minneapolis teachers ultimately ended the 2022 strike after earning a significant hike in pay for classroom support workers, who represent the most racially and economically diverse portion of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.
When asked to consider what Walz’s nomination as Vice President might mean for education politics, Jennifer Berkshire—a podcast host and author whose latest book is The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual—mentions his humble background.
Born in rural Nebraska, Walz attended a small public college in a small Nebraska town—a pedigree that offers a sharp divergence not only from his rival J.D. Vance, who has a law degree from Yale, but also from that of many prominent Democrats. Walz is the first member of a Democratic White House ticket since Jimmy Carter who does not have a law degree at all, let alone one from an Ivy League school.
Walz also, Berkshire points out, “speaks a refreshing language about public education as a common good that we haven’t heard Democrats use for a long time, and by doing so, he calls attention to how extreme GOP education policy has become.” Walz’s experience in the classroom and his success at implementing policies that feed all kids and offer families paid leave stand in stark opposition to the views espoused by today’s Republican Party leaders.
Take the frequently mentioned Project 2025. This document was crafted by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation and is widely regarded as a playbook for a potential second Trump term. Its view on public education can best be described as dystopian.
Schools should not teach about race for fear that white students might get offended, Project 2025 advises. The plan would also replace the federal Department of Education with a national voucher program. This would completely privatize the nation’s public schools by putting tax dollars directly into families’ hands, for use in largely unregulated school settings.
Several states, including Arizona, have already experimented with making vouchers available to everyone, no matter their income level. In July, ProPublica published an exposé of this failed experiment, stating it has caused a “budget meltdown” for Arizona—largely because state funds are now going to subsidize private school tuition for families whose kids were already attending these schools.
While wealthy families in Arizona can now use public dollars to send their kids to even religious private schools, funding has been slashed for plans that address issues such as the state’s shrinking water supply or heat mitigation efforts amid climate change. Rather than give other states pause, Arizona’s full-throated adoption of universal vouchers is part of the ongoing spread of school privatization schemes that shows little sign of abating.
Given how many of these policies, from charter schools to school vouchers, are deeply woven into state law across the nation, Walz alone cannot defeat neoliberal education policies. Democrats are partly to blame for this, but, in choosing Walz, they seem ready to forge a new path.