Tom Rademacher

Because every school deserves what Tim Walz has done for Minnesota schools

Under the leadership of Tim Walz, something like one of every three dollars spent by the state of Minnesota is spent on schools. One in three, adding up to around $23 billion. Those dollars are spent with the health, safety, and education of every child in Minnesota in mind. Those dollars fail.

Any dollar spent on schools is bound to fail, because success in schools is too damn hard.

Not so long ago, America sent a group of guys from our rock (moving at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour) to another rock two hundred thousand miles away (that circles us going two thousand miles per hour). We landed them and we brought them back. Success.

School is harder than that. School is more impossible than that.

That’s why it’s so easy to attack school funding, school professionals, and leaders who believe in the promise of schools and back up that promise with funding, policy, and protection.

If you bet against schools, you will always be right. Schools, all schools, every school, falls short of its promise, fails to teach and inspire and feed and include every student.

We fail. And yet…

Count each student who is fed, who has access to good teachers and a good curriculum, who is told that, “In this school and state, you are welcome, your family is welcome, your culture and your language and your faith are welcome.”

Count each teacher who doesn’t need a second job, every book that goes unbanned, every time a school board meeting or protest doesn’t call into question the humanity and identity of children.

If we count the good that we do for our schools and everyone in and around them, we know every dollar is well spent, every dollar an investment toward the kind of place where students thrive and people are productive, creative, caring, and cared for. 

We are an education state. We are a state committed to its youth and their promise. We spend one of every three dollars on our kids, and that’s not nearly enough, but it’s a start.

In Minnesota, our schools fall short of their promise, and not because we haven’t managed incredible things through extraordinary efforts, but because schools—our schools and every school—carry a promise that is incalculably, impossibly beautiful. We are getting closer and closer to that promise.

Every school deserves what Tim Walz has done for Minnesota schools, not because it’s perfect, not because it’s complete, but because his leadership, vision, policy, and passion have given us one tremendous step in the right direction.

Tom Rademacher is an educator, author, and Teacher Champion for the Teacher Salary Project.