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8 Things to Know About Tim Walz, the Democratic Ticket’s Top Teacher

A true blue progressive from a deep red pocket of prairie, Minnesota gov has education record that's a master class in threading political needles.

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This article is part of The 74’s EDlection 2024 coverage, which takes a look at candidates’ education policies and how they might impact the American education system after the 2024 election.

Correction appended Aug. 19

Tampon Tim? Try Teflon Tim.

In the days since Vice President Kamala Harris tapped him as her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — a popular former rural high school social studies teacher/football coach-turned-politician — has emerged, on education matters, as a master needle-threader. 

To wit: In 2023, with Democrats in charge of all three branches of state government, Walz signed an avalanche of education legislation. From free school meals for all kids to science-backed literacy instruction to a historic $2.2 billion boost to school funding, there was seemingly something for everyone in the sheaf of bills that crossed Walz’s desk. 

But in the weeks leading up to the 2024 legislative session, the organization representing many of the state’s largest districts put out its policy agenda, topped with a polite request for the Democratic “trifecta”: Please stop. 

Districts were scrambling to pay for new, nationally admired programs extending paid family and medical leave and sick time to all workers, as well as unemployment benefits for hourly, seasonal school employees. 

Lawmakers had set aside a woefully inadequate amount of money to fulfill their promise to reimburse districts for adopting vetted reading curricula. And the list of potentially costly things school administrators were legally required to bargain over with teacher unions — ranging from how e-learning days would be decided to what training for classroom aides would include — swelled.

Most of this, however, was invisible to voters, who enjoyed a steady stream of photos depicting the governor, surrounded by gleeful schoolchildren, affixing his John Hancock to a measure mandating free breakfast and lunch for all. 

And yes, Walz did sign legislation — purposefully written in gender-neutral language — to provide in-school period products to any student who menstruates. A well-tested law gives Minnesota students the right to use the school facilities where they are most comfortable, so tampons and pads should be available in all restrooms, the student activists who campaigned for the menstrual products bill insisted.  

Here are eight things to know about Walz’s record on education: 

1. In Congress … But Kept His Teaching License

Minnesota Professional Educator License and Standards Board file No. 365457, Timothy James Walz’s license to teach secondary school social studies, is currently inactive. It’s a telling document nonetheless.

Walz started his teaching career alongside Gwen Whipple, whom he would later marry, with a one-year stint in China. The Walzes taught in western Nebraska — where he insisted on teaching about the Holocaust as something other than an isolated event unlikely to be repeated — before moving to his wife’s Minnesota hometown, Mankato. There, he was a popular teacher who helped coach the high school football team to its first-ever state championship. 

In 2005, he participated in a boot camp run by Wellstone Action, a grass-roots candidate recruiting and training organization established by intimates of the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone, another educator-turned-politician. The following year, Walz took a leave of absence from teaching to run for Congress — a longshot in the state’s conservative 1st Congressional District. 

His win notwithstanding, Walz renewed his teaching license on June 23, 2008, a year and a half after he was sworn in for his first term in the House. He was re-elected three times before he let it lapse. 

2. ‘I Am Labor’

After six terms in Congress, Walz won Minnesota’s governorship in 2018, in part by appealing to public-sector unions — huge funders of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidates: “I am labor, I stand with labor and as governor, I will keep Minnesota a labor state.” He appointed Mary Cathryn Ricker, then vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, as his first education commissioner. 

In September 2020, Walz convened an education working group not with Ricker, but with his wife and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan. Flanagan is a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe and another Wellstone Action alum who got her start in electoral politics by becoming the youngest person ever elected to the Minneapolis School Board. 

Five months later, Ricker’s office released a report capping the efforts of a school finance working group and a strategic plan titled “One Minnesota.” A few days later, the governor released his own “Due North Education Plan.” 

Both documents called for sweeping changes in racial equity in schools, more diverse educators and classroom materials, and new academic standards covering a host of topics, including the rarely taught history of Minnesota’s American Indian tribes. There was, however, no roadmap for effecting the called-for change. The last progress report on Due North’s implementation is dated April 2022.    

At the time the Due North plan was released, Walz was struggling to reverse course on COVID-related school closures and get kids back in classrooms. Though his administration put educators at the front of the line for vaccination, and Walz repeatedly signaled to local education officials that it was time to reopen schools for all kids, closures persisted — fueled in some places by teachers union resistance to returning to classrooms. 

In March 2021, with school district leaders in Minneapolis and several other communities showing few signs of bucking their unions by reopening, Walz ordered all schools statewide to provide some in-person learning. 

A few days later, Ricker announced her resignation, saying she missed being a classroom teacher. (She would go on to head the union-aligned Shanker Institute.) To replace her, Walz tapped an assistant state Education Department commissioner who had come from his home school district, Mankato. 

3. ‘I Am Labor,’ But … 

When Walz first tapped Ricker, Minnesota proponents of education reform feared that the administration would seek to curtail school choice, to roll back standardized assessments and to deliver on the state teachers union’s long wish list. Minnesota had been the first state in the nation to enact a charter school law, in 1991.

Walz and his statehouse partisans have taken nibbles, last spring introducing legislation to push back the statutory deadline for making public the results of annual statewide reading, math and science tests from Sept. 1 to Dec. 1. Advocates were quick to complain that this would obscure the degree to which children of color were not bouncing back from COVID learning losses but were, in fact, falling further behind. The push failed.

The administration has not taken up calls for lawmakers to step into a nearly decade-old school desegregation suit that would likely place major constraints on charter schools and inter-district open enrollment. The plaintiffs have not found Democrats willing to consider the wholesale rewrite of state integration laws that they have pitched as a possible settlement to the suit. 

Potentially most notable, over the last three years Minnesota lawmakers have moved to rectify a wrinkle in the state school funding system that Democrats had long resisted touching. With state aid for students in special education lagging badly behind costs, school districts have been forced to use rising portions of their general budgets to cover the shortfall. For decades, offsetting this “cross subsidy” was seen as politically inexpedient by both parties. 

In 2023, Democratic legislators proposed spending up to $2 billion to close this gap. Walz countered with less than half that amount, despite having campaigned on the issue. In the end, the governor and lawmakers compromised, with more cash directed to new benefits for school employees and a plan to increase the amount of state aid directed at the special education shortfall to 50% of the cost over the next three years. 

4. A Scandal That Might — or Might Not — Stick

In June, Minnesota’s legislative auditor released a scathing report on the Department of Education’s role in one of the country’s largest pandemic aid-related scandals. The nonprofit child nutrition organization Feeding Our Future had engaged in fraud that drained at least $250 million in COVID relief funding that was supposed to be used to distribute food to needy kids outside of schools.

Whether the scandal will taint Walz’s candidacy remains to be seen. His name does not appear in the audit, which says the department’s lack of oversight over Feeding our Future preceded his administration. The department has refuted the report. 

However, most of the defendants in the massive fraud are Somali, and supporters of former President Donald Trump have begun to pepper attacks on Walz’s military record with allusions to Somalia. 

“Tim Walz has finally told everybody he hasn’t been to Iraq,” the chair of the Montana GOP proclaimed at a Trump rally days after the governor was tapped. “But he wanted you all to know that he has been to Minneapolis. He has some Black Hawk Down problems there.” 

When COVID forced the closure of schools and day care centers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture loosened its rules for distributing free meals for children. The number of kids supposedly being fed by a network of distribution sites overseen by two Minnesota nonprofits mushroomed, continuing to rise by tens of thousands well after the pandemic was under control. 

Very little of the federal funding was spent on meals, the FBI and auditor eventually found. The U.S. attorney general began indicting participants in the scheme in September 2022. The first seven defendants out of 70 charged went on trial in May. 

The director of the state Education Department’s nutrition division testified that in spring 2021, as the number of invoices submitted for reimbursement swelled — “I had never seen payments of that magnitude before,” the official testified — she contacted the USDA and the FBI and then stopped the payments pending documentation from Feeding Our Future and another nonprofit meal provider.

Feeding Our Future’s two founders are white, but most of the defendants are Somali. In April 2021, the group went to court, arguing that the department was engaging in racial discrimination. A judge ruled that the department did not have the authority to stop paying the nonprofits. Claims continued to rise.      

No one associated with the second meal distributor investigated, Partners in Nutrition, was charged. The state dropped the group from the program. 

Near the end of the six-week Feeding Our Future trial, the judge was forced to sequester the jury when a juror’s family notified officials that a woman had dropped a bag containing $120,000 on the juror’s front stoop, along with a promise of more if the defendants were acquitted. 

Five of the seven have now been convicted, and the mastermind of the bribery scheme pleaded guilty. Forty-four more of those indicted were slated for trial in the future, though the initial convictions could spark some to seek pleas.  

5. The Politics of Policing

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, which touched off days of riots involving both peaceful protesters and outside instigators, Walz called a special session of the legislature to take up police reform. Among other things, lawmakers banned the use of chokeholds. 

In 2023, after years of lobbying by advocates for children of color, Walz signed legislation barring police officers stationed in schools from using prone restraints — a maneuver that stops short of a chokehold but nonetheless is dangerous to students. Saying the new law would make it impossible for their officers to work in schools, numerous law enforcement agencies threatened to sever their contracts with districts. 

Public opinion on police reform is divided in Minnesota, with many people who live outside of the Twin Cities strongly opposed. Throughout his governorship, Walz has walked the urban-rural divide very carefully. In 2024, one of the first debates taken up by the administration and lawmakers was the rollback of the 2023 prone-restraint law — a proposition critics charged was directly tied to maintaining statewide Democratic voter support in an election year. 

​​Prone restraints are now legal again, though advocates say work on a model policy for police in schools called for as part of a political compromise is going poorly. 

6. The First Lady’s Own Education Record

Little known even in her home state, Gwen Walz is a major proponent of providing higher education to prisoners. She features prominently in a 2019 documentary, “College Behind Bars.” The four-hour deep dive on Bard College’s Bard Prison Initiative aired on PBS.  

“It is incredibly expensive, both financially and emotionally, to have people in prison,” Gwen Walz told the Star Tribune newspaper in advance of the program’s debut. “And I think very much about victims, and I think the best way I can support victims is by trying to ensure that there aren’t more of them.”  

7. St. Paul Public Schools’s First Family 

The governor’s younger child, Gus Walz, attends St. Paul Public Schools’s Central Senior High. Located within walking distance of the governor’s mansion, the school is integrated: almost 45% of the student body is white, with 27% Black and 10% Asian.

Central’s academic outcomes are illustrative of Minnesota’s nation-leading racial disparities, with 13% of all students passing the 2023 state math assessment and 36% reading. Among white students, however, passage rates were 20% and 55%, compared with 3% and 10% for Black children. 

Asian students — who in St. Paul tend to be Vietnamese, Hmong and of other Southeast Asian origins — scored poorly as well, with 15% passing the math test and 37% reading. 

The Walzes’ older child, Hope, has featured prominently in the governor’s cheeky social media campaigns, among other things cajoling her dad onto daredevil state fair rides. Gus has not been as visible.

Shortly after Harris announced Walz as her running mate, the family revealed to People that Gus has a nonverbal learning disorder, ADHD and anxiety. The Walzes were careful to avoid describing their son’s disabilities as deficits, telling the magazine that, “W​hat became so immediately clear to us was that Gus’ condition is not a setback — it’s his secret power.”  

Gus Walz will turn 18 in October. 

8. The Football Coach and the Gay Kids

About the presence of tampons in restrooms: In Minnesota, long-settled law allows students to use the restroom they are most comfortable with. Some schools are doing away with gendered facilities altogether, creating single-stall bathrooms for all kids.

In March 2023, Walz issued an executive order declaring the state a sanctuary for transgender individuals, protecting the right to gender-affirming medical care and shielding patients, parents and care providers from efforts by officials in other states to obtain health care records or punish those involved. The legislature — which boasts a sizable, multiracial “Queer Caucus” — quickly enshrined the protections in law. 

Over the last few years, as “Don’t Say Gay” laws and bans on sports participation and medical care for gender nonconforming youth have swept statehouses, LGBTQ families have streamed into Minnesota — asking on Facebook and other sites for help in finding affirming school systems and providers with room for new patients.

Walz has repeatedly said he realized early he was uniquely positioned to act on behalf of LGBTQ youth. In 1999, with the brutal murder of gay Wyoming student Matthew Shepard still in the headlines, Walz volunteered to help a handful of students organize the first gay-straight alliance at Mankato West, the rural high school where he taught social studies.

It was a risky move for a teacher at the time. But a member of the National Guard, a hunter and a popular football coach, Walz said, provided impeccable cultural credentials in his conservative southern Minnesota community. The half-dozen students who formed that first GSA went on to campaign for Walz when he made his first congressional bid in 2006. 

Correction: The June report about the Minnesota Department of Education was released by the state’s legislative auditor.

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Beth Hawkins is a senior writer and national correspondent at The 74.

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