North Carolina public schools, once considered the best in the South, are under constant attack by the rightwing legislature. The latest salvo is an unfunded mandate to reduce class sizes in the early grades. It is a wonderful idea to reduce class size, but it is costly. Imposing the mandate without funding is a recipe for disruption and chaos.
The Republicans who control the legislature are crazy for privatization, for charters and vouchers and cybercharters. Are the Republicans trying to drive children and families away from public schools by inflicting chaos and stripping away activities that students love?
Despite warnings by district superintendents about massive layoffs of teachers of arts and physical education, the state senate has refused to back down.
“North Carolina’s largest public school system may be warning of “enormous disruptions” without speedy action from state lawmakers on a looming class size funding crisis, but key education leaders in Raleigh tell Policy Watch there’s little sign Republican lawmakers in the General Assembly will act soon.
“It doesn’t seem like there’s any movement planned,” says Sen. Floyd McKissick, a Durham Democrat who sits on the state Senate’s Rules and Operations Committee, a panel that includes some of the chamber’s most powerful lawmakers and sets the agenda for future committee talks.
“McKissick said he met late last week with Sen. Bill Rabon, the eastern North Carolina Republican who chairs the committee, but GOP leaders remain reticent to make any commitments regarding a legislative fix to the funding controversy, despite stiff warnings from district chiefs that thousands of teachers’ jobs are in jeopardy.”
Here is a report from Wake County, once considered one of the best school districts in the nation. Syracuse scholar Gerald Grant wrote a book called “Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Public Schools in Wake County.”
That was then. This is now:
“The state legislature’s plan to cut elementary school class sizes could lead to larger class sizes in all Wake County schools, including 40 or more students in some elementary classrooms.
“State lawmakers lowered maximum class sizes in kindergarten through third grade from 24 students this school year to between 19 and 21 students starting in July. Wake County Superintendent Jim Merrill warned Tuesday that unless the state provides relief, the district will have to consider options such as increasing class sizes for older students, cutting art and music classes, laying off teachers and reassigning students on short notice.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article145287929.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sad. Republicans love OUR money. They are not interested in much more than that and certanly not qualified to make educational decisions that raise class sizes, produce teacher layoffs and program cuts.
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Interesting. They CLAIM that education is so very important and then continually do things like this. First, libraries hours are reduced. Then the assault on public schools the backbone of our nation. PBS is underfunded ad nauseum.
There is so VERY much that is incomprehensible to any thinking person going on now, most especially since Trump has occupied the White House. God help us.
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This is another scheme to push public schools to the brink of failure to turn students over to private interests and private profit.
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Manufactured chaos?? Isn’t that the 2nd page in the deformers playbook, right after reduced funding?
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Yep, at least in my copy of the playbook (surreptitiously garnered without them knowing-got my training on that from the NE Patriots).
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Those all in for corporate education reform always claim that they do MORE with LESS.
Which doesn’t explain why they are always demanding MORE for THEMSELVES while starving the “competition” aka public schools so they have LESS for the MORE they are mandated to do. Leading to both manufactured chaos and manufactured failure for those dreaded “big gubmint monopoly schools.”
A classic rheephorm twofer.
Perhaps they are the next ones up for an AP interview?
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-ap-interview_us_58fdb6fae4b06b9cb917f7ca?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
Remembering that in their own eyes every heavyweight rheephormista is, in the words of their orange-haired inspiration: “Trust me, I’m like a smart person.”
Note the wording: “like” a smart person, not “actually” or “in fact” or “demonstrably” a smart person.
Hard to know whether this should be taken “symbolically” or “literally” or just “unintelligibly.”
😎
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Long time coming. The perfect storm in the wake of RttT and the extreme right election of 2012.
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This is another in a long line of malfeasances coming from the Republicans to our schools and our children. Who are these Republicans? Who votes for them?!? This state is going down the toilet and it appears there is nothing any of us can do about it. Oh, I know who the Republicans are, they are the Deplorables!!!
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The title is perfect! It is, indeed, manufactured chaos. They know exactly what they are doing, AND why they are doing it, although I’m sure they “borrowed” the tactic from ALEC, or another pro-privatization state. I’m sure Dr. Ravitch recalls when the little posse of NC Republicans jetted down to Florida to absorb the “expertise” of education reformers. One of the groups there promoted “Disruptive Innovation” — a BUSINESS phenomenon in which a new, more efficient/desirable innovation dominates the market in such a manner as to render the status quo obsolete. (More or less…). Of course, there are those who feel this is what traditional public education needs, and will stop at nothing to implement it. They may come under different banners, like Blended Learning, but ultimately, they all seek to condemn traditional public education as a failure so THEIR “innovations” (i.e. CORPORATE education via software/testing companies, charter management companies, etc.) can replace traditional classrooms and teachers. I knew we were in trouble when one of its gurus said something to the effect of, ‘A teacher shortage isn’t a problem — it’s an opportunity.’ Yep. Manufactured chaos.
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