Walz’s Even-Handed Approach to Chartering
By Tressa Pankovits and Joe Nathan
By this stage of the election, it’s difficult to find something to write about the candidates for president and vice president that hasn’t been repeated dozens of times, but here’s one.
Conventional wisdom has it that because Kamala Harris and her running mate have courted the teachers unions, they believe that charter schools are the enemy. Maybe there’s hope that they don’t.
Harris picked Governor Tim Walz even though during the pandemic he listened to the pleas of charter school students with a serious problem The story that hasn’t gotten national attention, but as Harris and Walz seek to rally the youth vote in the final days of the campaign, the campaign should amplify Walz’s willingness to listen to a bunch of teenagers and act on their concerns.
During the pandemic, thousands of businesses laid off Minnesota high school students from their part-time jobs. This created an acute hardship for many of them. As 18-year-old Cole Stevens of Bloomington, explained, “The money I earned helped pay for rent and food for me and my father.”
Encouraged by employers who had paid into Minnesota’s unemployment fund for their student employees, a number of students applied for state unemployment assistance. Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) resisted, citing a 1939 Minnesota law that prohibited students from receiving state funds if they were in school. Ironically, if they dropped out — a terrible option — they would get unemployment benefits.
With Governor Walz as their champion, the students lobbied state legislators from both parties. Amid spiraling pandemic expenses, skittish lawmakers failed to reach a deal to help the unemployed teens.
But several students from public charter high schools discovered that federal legislation provided unemployment assistance if they had lost their jobs due to the pandemic and weren’t covered by state programs. They shared the CARES Act with DEED. But DEED insisted that Minnesota’s law prohibiting students from receiving state unemployment benefits trumped the federal law saying they could.
In December 2020, the students sued DEED. The Minnesota Court of Appeals immediately and unanimously ruled in the students’ favor. Ultimately, roughly $40 million went to Minnesota high school students who were laid off during COVID-19.
Walz promised students that he would continue to work to change the state’s unemployment law. In 2021, he brokered a deal, and kept his commitment.
It’s not surprising that the students who fired up the campaign to reclaim their rights were public charter school students. Charter schools are free, public schools, open to all. They operate independently from elected district school boards, and they’re often innovation centers.
Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter school law in 1991, after years of legislative battles. Those conflicts are described in the 1997 book, “Charter Schools,” and the 2012 book, “Zero Chance of Passage.” Three decades on, charter school political battles remain intense.
While every U.S. president from Bill Clinton through Barack Obama supported charter public school growth, too many Democrats, held captive by teachers union campaign contributions, have turned their backs on charter schools. This, despite charters’ success in educating millions of low-income, minority children. Today, pro-charter school bills in Democratic-controlled state legislatures are very controversial.
That’s a shame, because most Democrats have easy access to decades of credible data that proves charter schools, when implemented with strong accountability measures, work as intended. Charters serving students failed by large urban high schools provide a “billion dollar benefit” by transforming youngsters’ lives, helping them graduate and get good jobs. Former Milwaukee Public School Superintendent Dr. Howard Fuller is one of millions of African Americans supporting charters as an option to sometimes mediocre district public schools. Many Democrats stubborn refusal to acknowledge the truth — while letting poor families languish in substandard schools — is infuriating and embarrassing.
From what we’ve seen, Walz is not cut from that same cloth. Yes, he’s a former teacher, strongly supported by the teachers unions. But he has acknowledged that chartering is a legitimate part of the public education ecosystem, a basic reality that puts some denialist Democrats up there with “flat earthers.”
When some Minnesota districts complained that they had to send too much money to charters to pay for students with special needs, Walz proposed and worked out a compromise. The state of Minnesota put millions of additional dollars into funding for students with special needs — so districts had to pay less but charters continued to receive significant funding — with exact amounts based on the specific form of disability. He also ensured charter schools were explicitly included when he enacted a free universal school lunch program.
As vice president, Walz would have far less influence over education policy than he does as governor, because most education policy is made at the state level. And in a presidential campaign, Democrats need teachers union muscle But having a pragmatic, student-focused leader — and former coach — as vice president might encourage many Democrats to adopt his equitable, even-handed approach to chartering.
Tressa Pankovits is the co-director of the Reinventing America’s Schools Project at Progressive Policy Institute; Joe Nathan is a former urban public school teacher, founder and senior fellow at the Center for School Change, and helped write and defend charter public school laws in Minnesota and 30 other states.
