Although Donald Trump won Noth Carolina, Democrats made some important gains.
Although Republicans retained supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, Democrat Roy Cooper holds a small lead over incumbent Republican Governor Pat McCrory.
“Cooper claimed victory and it’s unlikely that a canvass and the counting of provisional ballots will change the result.
“Cooper is likely to face a Republican state House and Senate next year emboldened by their victories with one notable exception, their support of the anti-LGBT law HB2 that has written discrimination into the law and cost North Carolina tens of thousands of jobs while damaging the state’s reputation around the world.
“Cooper ran hard against HB2 and blasted McCrory for supporting it as businesses cancelled planned expansions or bypassed North Carolina and sporting events left the state in droves.
“It is not an exaggeration to suggest that McCrory didn’t really lose the governor’s race Tuesday night, he lost it last March when he signed HB2 into law in the dark of night after lawmakers passed it in a rushed special session, setting off a firestorm of protest and outrage across the county.”
In addition, Democrat Josh Stein was elected Attorney General of the state.
“There was one other important silver lining for Democrats. They gained control of the N.C Supreme Court as Superior Court Judge Mike Morgan defeated incumbent Supreme Court Justice Bob Edmunds for the only seat up for election this year. Partisan labels were not listed with those candidates.”
Looks like the Tea Party General Assembly will have to deal with a Democratic Governor and Attorney General.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is good news (assuming the result stands).
It also confirms that there were voters in NC willing to vote for a Democrat. Without the Republican slime machine convincing just enough voters that Hillary was no better than Trump, she had a good chance of winning. Dems didn’t slime the Republican Governor as a liar to win — they pointed a very specific policy that he wanted and voters decided they wanted to reject that policy. I suppose it helped that Big Businesses seemed not to like this so there wasn’t the same propaganda happening to destroy Cooper’s credibility on this issue.
Unfortunately here in the Show Me State everything turned a deep shade of red. It will be a battle on every front.
With Tuesday’s results, Republicans have 33 governors, the most since 1922. They will control at least 68 out of 99 state legislative chambers as they do now , an all-time high for the GOP. And they will have full control of 33 legislatures, up from 31. (That includes Nebraska, which has a technically nonpartisan, single-chamber legislature.)
Democrats will be in full command in 13 states.
Democrats are cautiously optimistic about North Carolina where Democrat Roy Cooper has claimed victory over incumbent Republican Pat McCrory in a tight race that has not been officially called.
Republicans have been the most eager to scapegoat public schools for urban problems well beyond the capacity of schools to address them.
“The nation’s highest poverty school districts receive ten percent lower funding per student while districts serving children of color receive 15 percent less.” Moreover, “School districts serving the most students of color nationwide receive roughly 15 percent less per student in state and local funding than those serving the fewest. Ushomirsky, N. & Williams, D. (March 2015). Funding Gaps 2015. The Education Trust. See more at http://edtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FundingGaps2015_TheEducationTrust1.pdf
Republican governors and legislators are especially eager to take control from local elected officials, including school boards (Layton, 2016, February 1). Layton, L. (2016 February 1). GOP-led states increasingly taking control from local school boards. Washington Post. Retrieved February 12, 2016 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/ gop-led-states-increasingly-taking-control-from-local-school-boards/2016/02/01/c01a8e4e-bad3-11e5-b682- 4bb4dd403c7d_story.html
The state and district “portfolios” of schools forwarded by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) since 2008 are failing on their own and most recently in Massachusetts and Georgia from the work of savvy parents and their allies. A revealing report from CREP called “Sticking Points: How School Districts Experience Implementing the Portfolio Strategy” points to failures among the 30 plus “experiments” that CREP has monitored.
• Only a handful of districts have achieved an “advanced” level of implementing the portfolio strategy.
• The piecemeal implementation in some districts is unlikely to produce significant results for students.
• Major sticking points are the need to restructure the central office and/or change a union contract.
• Progress is likely to require states to: (a) have more “permissive state laws and regulations” allowing cities more control over school leaders, staffing, and budgets and (b) eliminate laws and regulations that prevent portfolio strategies from flourishing.
With a diminished federal role in education, look for and lookout for more state action to make market-based education possible by any means, whether by the failed project of creating portfolio districts ( also called achievement or recovery districts) or by means of voucher, “scholarships,” and so on.
Lake, R., Posamentier, J., Denice, P., & Hill, P. (2016, October). Sticking Points: How School Districts Experience Implementing the Portfolio Strategy. Retrieved from http://www.crpe.org/publications/sticking-points
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I fear we will see a “divide and conquer” strategy by the Republicans.
If you completely abandon the poor, you can distribute a small bit of the savings to the middle class while the bulk of it goes to the rich.
Pit the middle class against the poor and pretend your opponent favors the poor over the middle class. It garners a lot of votes and ignores the people in power who are really benefitting at the expense of both the poor and middle class. They just get richer.
Sadly, the message is “we can’t do it all anymore and we have to make choices”. We either help the middle class or the poor but not both. So voters, which one do you choose?
To me, this false choice is exactly how the pro-charter movement has become successful. Divide and conquer. We don’t have the resources anymore to help make all schools good. So do you want good schools for some kids (like yours), or do you want to try to help the most vulnerable kids at the expense of yours and no one gets good schools? We can’t do both. And if the rich get richer by creating better schools for the worthy kids, what’s wrong with that? Isn’t your kid benefitting? Would you rather be stuck in that failing public school instead because that’s your only 2 choices?
It’s not a bad strategy if all you care about is power. The middle class is far more likely to vote and it’s easier to put up barriers designed to disenfranchise the poor.
And it’s all good until you’ve reached the tipping point of a huge and angry underclass abandoned by all. That we can all ignore because it was all their own fault anyway. Those kinds of countries are incredibly unstable and violent. I sure hope that’s not where we are headed.
Good analysis. It is where we are headed. There is also the racial element of pitting the white working-class against minorities. Trump did exactly this with all the scapegoating of minorities during the campaign. The Democrats need to appeal to both the white and minority working and middle classes. It will be difficult. Neither Bernie nor Hillary were able to do this during the primaries.
Unfortunately, we did not do as well as we would have liked here in North Carolina. While HB2 backlash did help us get rid of McCrory and kept Buck Newton (one of the architects of HB2) out of the AG’s office, not much else went as public school advocates would wish at the state level. The only other bright spot was Mike Morgan ousting Bob Edmunds to give the state Supreme Court a Democratic majority. Other state-wide offices were a Republican sweep, including GOP charter advocate Mark Johnson edging out the incumbent Democrat June Atkinson as Superintendent of Public Instruction. With the Legislature so gerrymandered that even in a Democratic wave year it would have remained in GOP hands but in this year having super-majorities that can override gubernatorial vetoes, we now have no check on the push for more charters, fully implementing the “recovery school district”, and funneling ever more state education dollars to vouchers. It still a pretty dark time for those of us who teach in NC. The only bright spots for schools were in local races and bond referendums: the anti-charter forces kept hold of the Wake county (Raleigh) school board and both the Durham and Orange county school bonds passed by large margins.
I am afraid that you are right about charter schools in NC. Only a long grass-roots campaign against charter schools has any chance of success now. Otherwise, the state will go heavily to charters and become like Ohio, etc.
Some districts may resist the trend, like my own (Chapel Hill – Carrboro) but too many will be overwhelmed by the money that pro-charter forces can bring to the fight. What we’re really afraid of is a state-wide authorizer that can over-ride districts and place charters wherever they like. My district is probably the only one in the state where that might not succeed. We have a very supportive and (relatively) wealthy community behind us, one where people actually move into our district to get their kids into the public schools. They will resist any attempt to undermine those schools fiercely. But for most of the state, and especially the other urban areas (Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, Greensboro, Fayetteville, Asheville, etc.) this won’t be the case, since they don’t have our advantages.