There are challenges ahead, but Minnesota educators can meet them
Donald Trump’s election and hostility to public education will pose new challenges to Minnesota educators in 2025. The most dangerous of them may be his support for school voucher programs that divert taxpayer money from public education to private and religious schools.
Compounding the threat of a significant defunding of public education in Minnesota from a national voucher program or other parts of Project 2025 is the likelihood of a state-level program emerging from the Minnesota House, which is evenly divided as I write this.
However, I believe we can overcome this challenge by coming together in union as we have many times before. Further, our collective action will keep pushing our union’s priorities of improving the pay, pensions, health care and working conditions of our educators.
While the election has made our jobs more challenging, I’m optimistic about resisting vouchers at the state level.
First, voters in other states have rejected them almost every time they’ve had the chance. Despite the backing of a few billionaires and the MAGA majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, most Americans don’t want to weaken their local schools.
On Election Day 2024, pro-education voters defeated vouchers in Kentucky, 65% to 35%, winning all 120 counties. They repealed vouchers in Nebraska, 57% to 34%, and they blocked vouchers in Colorado, 52% to 48%.
The second big reason is Gov. Tim Walz and the pro- education majority in the state Senate. It was only six years ago when Walz was presented a watered-down version of school vouchers to appease the anti-school majority in the Senate that year. As the Washington Post reported in August, our governor was a hard no and was ready to shut down the state to block vouchers.
But these programs are still a top priority for the Republican Party nationally and its allies in the state. In May, the Minnesota Parents Alliance hosted an event with the right-wing Center of the American Experiment, the national anti-union coalition State Policy Network and OAK, a Minnesota-based voucher advocacy group. Twenty-eight states and D.C. have at least one private school choice program, according to an analysis by Education Week, and Texas is poised to implement its own next year.
Voucher programs are marketed by many different names, including education savings accounts and tax-credit scholarships, but they have a few things in common: little oversight, frequent scandals, traditional schools get squeezed and the primary beneficiaries are wealthy parents who already have their children in private schools.
Critiques of vouchers are similar from state to state. Private and religious schools rarely outperform traditional public schools, despite cherry-picking their students. They would take everyone’s tax money but reject students for their special learning needs, religious practices or because their families are LGBTQ+.
The next few years will be more difficult for educators than we had hoped, but we will keep making our case to our communities and our elected leaders. If we’re serious about doing what’s right for the future of all students, Minnesota needs to continue using public dollars for public schools.
That means providing comfortable buildings for students and staff, modern technology, and fully staffed schools with well-trained educators from all walks of life in Minnesota. And we need to give those educators smaller class sizes and caseloads so they can build trusting relationships with each student.
It won’t be easy, but we can get there…
Together,
Denise Specht
Twitter: @DeniseSpecht
