Stuart Egan is a National Board Certified Teacher in North Carolina. The state legislature (the General Assembly) just passed legislation removing educational authority from the state board of education and handing it to the just-elected state superintendent of education, who is a Republican with only two years of teaching as a member of Teach for America.

 

Egan wrote to Mark Johnson, the 33-year-old neophyte who is suddenly in charge of the state’s schools.

 

The young man who will control the state school system ran against “the status quo,” which was imposed by the legislature that just put him in charge. Will he tangle with the legislature? Will he fight for teachers? Will he roll back over-testing, as he promised?

 

If you have …, “taken issue with what (you) sees as a lack of support for teachers and schools coming from the department and a failure to respond quickly to such issues as the state’s academic standards and over-testing” will you really seek to empower or enable those very teachers and schools the way that people in the GOP controlled NCGA special session just empowered you before you even step foot inside of your new office?

 

When the chair and vice-chair of the GOP controlled State Board of Education say that the General Assembly overstepped its boundaries in granting you as the incoming state superintendent this much power, then that sends more than one red flag into the air.

 

When two former governors, one of whom is Republican Jim Martin, says the special session has gone too far with bills such as the one which enables you, then sirens are screaming.

 

When the John Locke Foundation says that the power grab that involves the role of your office has gone too far, then many are saying that part of hell is freezing over.

 

So, what will you do now that you will have much to say about charter schools and the Achievement School District, the management of monies for public schools, and who is hired in DPI as well as some who may sit on the State Board of Education?

 

Because if someone who was as experienced as your predecessor was as handcuffed as she and was still able to wage battle against the very forces that have actually controlled the very “status-quo” you seem to have run against, will you be willing to battle those very people for the sake of the students and schools now that they have politically enabled you?

 

Or will you bend to the wishes of those who have placed this power within your office through a politically motivated special session that was undertaken solely as a coup against the fact that a democrat won the governor’s election?

 

I eagerly await your answer through your actions in the coming years.