Tim Walz education record shows teachers union capitulation and left-wing priorities

Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the Democratic nominee for vice president, is beloved by teachers unions, but his dedication to them and their left-wing policy preferences have deteriorated education in Minnesota, critics say.

From dropping reading and math scores to pandemic-era lockdowns and controversial school curriculums, including critical race theory and transgender ideology, Walz’s tenure as governor since 2019 has served as a primary example of what sparked the conservative education backlash during and after the pandemic.

“As governor, Walz has an abysmal record on K-12. He locked down schools for a very long time, dismissed the notion that learning loss was real, and presided over plummeting test scores and attendance,” Erika Sanzi, director of outreach at Parents Defending Education, told the Washington Examiner. “Adding insult to injury, he opposes school choice and basically lives in the pocket of the teachers unions. However affable he may be doesn’t erase the damage he has done to children.”

Teachers unions have consistently funded and supported Walz, and according to the Harris-Walz presidential campaign. The top profession donating to the ticket in the first 24 hours after Walz was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate was teachers.

According to the Minnesota Department of Education, from 2019 to 2023, reading proficiency among students plummeted nearly 10 percentage points, from 59.2% to 49.9%. Over the same period of time, math comprehension fell from 55% to 45.5%.

The American Enterprise Institute found that chronic absenteeism (students missing more than 10% of the school year) also skyrocketed under Walz, jumping from 14% in 2019 to 30% in the 2021-2022 academic year.

Under Walz, a former teacher, the state education department also mandated an “ethnic studies” component for K-12 students, which has been slammed by critics as “stealth critical race theory” and “race-based neo-Marxism.”

Walz introduced the “Due North” education plan during the George Floyd riots of 2020, which included the ethnic studies programming. It required that a racial lens be placed on all curriculums, including in math and science. The plan also established a diversity, equity, and inclusion center at the Minnesota Department of Education in order to “address systemic racism.” The plan was approved when Democrats took control of the state Senate in 2022.

In 2022, Walz made an effort to add the ethnic studies programming part of Minnesota’s “compulsory attendance” law, which would have mandated the curriculum for private schools and homeschoolers as well, but that mandate was never finalized.

The ethnic studies standards do, however, emphasize “resistance” as a major part of the messaging to students, and the standards encourage students to become political activists and fight “systemic and coordinated exercises of power” against what they deem to be “marginalized” groups, according to the Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment.

One slideshow from the St. Paul ethnic studies program expressly promoted left-wing social causes such as a $15 minimum wage, No Human is Illegal, Black Lives Matter, Climate Justice, No Bans, No Walls, Abolish Prison, and a gender-queer symbol, according to a report from the CAE.

“He spent most of the last two years working to accommodate far-left demands in his party rather than working to address real education issues in our state,” Republican Minnesota state Sen. Carla Nelson, a former teacher, told the New York Post. “The Walz agenda has included burdensome mandates on schools … [that] have since led to budget shortfalls across the state and pulled teachers away from their students to comply with requirements.”

Walz’s school lockdown protocols followed closely with the political advocacy of teachers unions and kept children out of their classrooms longer than the average state. The governor set an extraordinarily high bar for school districts to reopen, requiring them to achieve community spread of 10 per 10,000 people in the county. That was not a metric for schools, students, or teachers but rather the residents of the community as a whole, making it essentially impossible to achieve for most school districts — and certainly more difficult for the most populous ones, such as St. Paul and Minneapolis, which would keep the most students out of school.

Even if a district could meet the threshold, children were still forced to comply with strict social distancing and masking requirements.