01-03-2025
EDITORIAL: Send legislators back to school? Shouldn't be necessary
Mar. 1—Regular readers of the Post Bulletin's Opinions Page should have a pretty good notion of our views about teachers. We've long argued that they are overworked and underpaid, and that in the past 20 years the complexities of the job have grown in inverse proportion to the respect they receive.
Simply put, teaching is an increasingly difficult, thankless job.
Therefore, one might guess that we would support a recently introduced bill that would require Minnesota legislators who serve on the Education Policy Committee and the Education Finance Committee to get a firsthand look at what's happening in public schools. The bill calls for these legislators to spend at least 12 hours "shadowing" a K-12 teacher or administrator, and then write a publicly available report on what they observed.
The bill's chief author is Rep. Andrew Myers, a Republican from Tonka Bay, and his proposal already has garnered some DFL support in both the House and Senate. Myers also has introduced similar bills that would require members of some other committees to do a ridealong with law enforcement or firefighters, or to observe the operations at a child care center.
There is some logic in such proposals. When Minnesota legislators are assigned to committees, we assume that they have a certain level of experience/expertise in that area — or at least a strong interest and a desire to learn. It's possible that some committee members lack these qualities, but do we need a law that mandates 12 hours of homework and a term paper?
No, we do not.
We elect legislators to a job; namely, to represent the interests of their constituents, to introduce and/or support legislation that furthers those interests, and to be well-informed on all manner of issues that affect the people they represent. And Myers is correct about one thing: This job can't be accomplished merely by making phone calls and reading emails while sitting behind a desk in St. Paul.
To serve their districts, legislators must be present and visible. They should attend meetings of school boards, county boards and townships. They should attend high school basketball games, middle school plays and PTA meetings. They should visit assisted-living facilities. They should know which ambulance services operate in their districts.
That's the gig. It's not a punch-in, punch-out position. If there are gaps in a legislator's knowledge base, we expect them to do whatever is necessary to fill those gaps, so that they can make good arguments and cast informed votes. We should not and do not need laws to mandate a certain amount of participation and learning. We hold elections, and voters get regular opportunities to replace representatives who aren't getting the job done.
That's the big-picture perspective, and things don't get better when we consider the practical ramifications of mandated "shadowing" of teachers, firefighters and child care workers.
Several members of the Post Bulletin editorial board have experience in front of a classroom, and we can safely say that few teachers would be eager to host a legislator for a day. It's tough enough to teach when the principal is "observing" you, and it might be worse to have a legislator sitting at the back of the class, compiling notes for a report on what happened on your watch. We doubt that police officers and the owners of child care centers would be excited about this prospect, either.
Also, who would enforce this law? Who would check to make sure that every committee member spent the mandated number of hours "in the field" every two years? Who would read the reports? What penalties, if any, would fall upon legislators who ignored such a mandate?
Finally, what's the logic in limiting this new mandate to just a few committees? If the current proposal becomes law, one could reasonably argue that health policy committee members should spend 12 hours sitting in an emergency room or shadowing a nurse. Children and Families committee members should spend a day or two with a social worker. Agriculture committee members should put on boots and spend a day on a dairy farm, and the Environment and Natural Resources committee should have first-hand experience checking duck hunters in a swamp while the wind howls on a cold, rainy October morning.
Granted, the written reports on such experiences might be entertaining reading, but after a year or two, this entire process would become just another piece of busy work — and our legislators aren't federal employees who need bullet points to include on their "What I did last week" lists.
