Minnesota Governor Tim Walz made his state’s education system worse and more inefficient. Students’ performance on math and reading tests went down, even as spending went up and administrative bloat and red tape increased. “Walz pushed” the agenda of left-wing teachers unions in Minnesota, says education writer Joanne Jacobs. “New mandates, inflation, cost-shifting ate up new school $$. Reading, math scores fell,” she notes.
“Minnesota had one of the worst records on in-person school in the US….Gov. Walz needs to explain what he has learned & promise never to repeat it. Defending failure while MN kids still pay the price is not acceptable,” says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
In a blog post, Jacobs adds than in Minnesota, “Reading and math scores are down…and Minnesota’s national education ranking has slid.” Before Walz was governor, Minnesota frequently ranked near the top nationally, and even in 2021, the state still ranked #7. But today, it has fallen to #19, according to a new report by the Casey Foundation. State mandates gobbled up so much money that some school districts are facing “layoffs or school closures.”
“Under Walz, student achievement tumbled even as spending on schools skyrocketed,” notes a Minnesota think-tank, the Center of the American Experiment.
I was disturbed by a video of Walz on MSNBC saying, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.’
Walz also told the Wall Street Journal in a recent interview that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
Again, he taught social studies? Is he just not very bright?
Walz does seem pretty ignorant of the First Amendment. For example, he was wrong to say that free speech guarantees don’t include hate speech. They usually do. In fact, in 2017, the Supreme Court said that “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.'” That language is found in its decision in Matal v. Tam (2017).
Misinformation is generally protected by the First Amendment, too, because it is just too dangerous to allow government officials to censor speech by labeling it “misinformation.” Too often, they themselves are misinformed about what is true or false. As the Supreme Court explained in Thomas v. Collins (1945), “It cannot be the duty, because it is not the right, of the state to protect the public against false doctrine. The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion. In this field, every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.”
