With only a few weeks vetting for her running mate, (the usual process takes months), the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris selected a former social studies teacher as her VP candidate among five other contenders.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Midwesterner who taught high school social studies and coached football before he was elected to Congress and later as Minnesota’s governor, will be Harris’ running mate in the 2024 presidential campaign.

This may be the first time for “vice presidential teachers” unlike the 11 “presidential teachers” in the past. The list of “presidential teachers” (US presidents who also worked as teachers) started with the second President, John Adams. The most common occupation among the Presidents is a lawyer, with 25 future Presidents practicing the law in some capacity. (Constitution Daily Blog)

On National Teacher’s Day, Constitution Daily listed 10 Presidents who were teachers in some capacity before they occupied the White House – including one who later married his own teacher.

First, it was John Adams who taught for a brief period after graduating from Harvard. Adams taught at a Latin school in Worcester, to earn money to pay for his legal education. As a child, he’d considered formal education tiresome and yearned to be like his father, a farmer. While he weighed his options, the future second U.S. president taught a dozen boys and girls in a one-room. Adams left teaching to study law and was admitted to the bar in 1758.

Then, John Quincy Adams was as a professor at Harvard University from 1806 to 1809, and he also lectured at Brown University. Adams taught oratory and logic classes.

Millard Fillmore was also a teacher at one point. In 1819, the 19-year-old Fillmore attended a school for several months, and he eventually married his teacher, Abigail Powers, a minister’s daughter two years his senior. then taught elementary school to help pay for his law school tuition.

James Garfield was born into poverty in an Ohio log cabin. His first occupation was as a part-time teacher in rural schools in Ohio. Garfield later taught penmanship at the same Vermont Academy, the North Pownal Academy.

After graduating from Union College, Chester AlanArthur spent several years teaching school at Vermont Academy, the North Pownal Academy and studying the law until he passed his bar exam.

Grover Cleveland was a teacher at the New York Institute for the Blind in Manhattan. When Grover Cleveland’s minister father died suddenly in 1853, the 16-year-old Cleveland abandoned his dream of attending college and took a post alongside his brother, a teacher at the New York Institute for the Blind in Manhattan. Cleveland served as secretary to the school’s president and as an assistant teacher of reading, writing, arithmetic and geography.

William Howard Taft, between 1896 and 1900, was the first dean and a professor of constitutional law at the University of Cincinnati. After failing in his 1912 re-election bid, Taft became the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale Law School, before returning to public service as a Supreme Court justice.

Woodrow Wilson, after graduating from Princeton University, the University of Virginia Law School, and Johns Hopkins University, entered into a prestigious academic career. He was named president of Princeton in 1902 before he went into politics.

The 36th U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson before he entered politics attended a teachers’ college and pursued a career in education. At 20, he taught underprivileged children of Mexican descent at a small school in Cotulla, Texas, earning a reputation for his dedication, high standards and encouragement of his students.

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, BarackObama served as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and was a Senior Lecturer until 2004.

Aside from the 10 “presidential teachers”, Jimmy Carter also taught Sunday school in the Maranatha Baptist Church since leaving Washington in the early 1980s. It is something he has done for most of his adult life, including as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy and even occasionally at First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. when he was president.

How about the “vice presidential teachers”?

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday selected Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and a former high school history teacher and football coach, as her running mate on the Democratic ticket.

Unlike many past vice-presidential candidates, Walz did not attend law school and instead earned two education degrees and for a decade taught at a Minnesota high school.

Walz is a Midwesterner who taught high school social studies and coached football before he was elected to Congress and later as Minnesota’s governor serving his second term as the North Star State’s governor.  In his time as governor, he has negotiated increases to school funding and made Minnesota one of the handful of states with universal free school meals for students. ((article by Libby Stanford)

In the July 23 interview on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” that kicked off the trend of Democrats labeling the Republican ticket “weird,” Walz touched on public schools while saying that Republicans were “destroying” rural America and “telling us what books to read.”

Walz worked as a high school teacher in Nebraska before moving to Minnesota and working as a social studies teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School in Mankato, Minn. His wife, Gwen Walz, also taught at the school before becoming a district administrator and, later, Minnesota’s first lady.

Before he was elected Minnesota’s governor in 2018, Walz served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. In a 2007 interview with Education Week shortly after he took office in Congress, Walz said “campaigning was a lot like teaching.”

“The biggest thing is communicating an idea,” Walz said. “It’s trying to get people to be involved and to look at the facts. … Teaching is the same way. You’re trying to present a system of facts; you’re trying to teach students what’s the best way to think about problems to solve them in a rational way.”

Walz’s track record as governor includes passing several policies of significance to the state’s K-12 schools. In 2023, he signed the Minnesota Free School Meals Law, making Minnesota one of the eight states where school breakfast and lunch are free for all students, according to the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center.

Last year, the Minnesota governor signed a sweeping education budget law to increase spending for K-12 schools by $2.3 billion. The law also made school employees eligible to collect unemployment benefits during the summer when schools are closed.

In recent interviews with the Washington Post, former students and teaching colleagues of Walz described him as passionate and upbeat. He was known for hosting “Jeopardy!”-style tournaments and inviting other teachers to debate him on current events. He offered to serve as the first faculty adviser to the newly formed gay-straight alliance at the southern Minnesota high school in the mid-1990s, the Post reported.

David Bloomfield, an education law and policy professor at Brooklyn College and City University of New York Graduate Center said: “Walz’s background as a teacher makes him an attractive running mate for the Harris campaign.”

While Minnesota is not considered a swing state… Bloomfield said, “Walz is a candidate who feels relatable to rural and blue-collar voters in states Harris needs to win to become president, Bloomfield said. The southern Minnesota district Walz represented in Congress is rural, and rural voters have largely drifted from Democrats in recent election cycles.”

Bloomfield further said: “His background as a teacher is consistent with his general attraction as a middle-class, common-sense politician. The litmus test of him as a strong proponent of public education and a former teacher is a draw for Harris’ team.”

Bloomfield added, “Ultimately, Walz’s policy positions on public schools aren’t likely to be of major consequence. It’s going to be the Harris campaign that drives the education conversation and not the individual policy positions of the vice-presidential nominee.”

But Walz’s background as a teacher, Bloomfield explained, could give him a more prominent voice on education issues and the selection of an education secretary.

Watch out… “vice presidential teacher” Tim is “waltzing” his way to the White House with Harris!