The North Carolina General Assembly, controlled by extremis of the right, passed legislation to use charter schools to promote resegregation. Towns that want to create their own charters for white students may do so under this legislation. Thus, charters have become the white flight academies of the South. National corporations whose workforce is diverse should avoid North Carolina, to avoid humiliating their executives and other employees. Jesse Helms, George Wallace, and Storm Thurmond would be proud to see their dream of school choice and segregation revived in North Carolina.
Statement on NC Senate’s passage of House Bill 514
Keith Poston, President & Executive Director
Public School Forum of North Carolina
Our nation abandoned “separate but equal” long ago – we don’t need to bring it back in North Carolina.
House Bill 514 would allow four towns in Mecklenburg County to run their own municipal charter schools and give preferential access to their residents. This bill, along with its companion municipal funding measure in the state budget, are terrible ideas for North Carolina. Taken together, they set the stage for a slippery slope toward further resegregation of NC public schools.
Two major education challenges we are confronting in North Carolina are inequities in school funding across the state and the growing resegregation of our schools. They both contribute to lower overall academic results and drive the achievement gap between white students and students of color, as well as between poorer students and their more affluent peers. HB 514 will only exacerbate these profound challenges.
Last night the NC Senate made a bad bill even worse by stripping the State Health Plan and retirement benefits from any teacher employed by these new municipally-run charter schools.
At a time when we are courting major new investments from Apple, Amazon and the U.S. Army, the last thing we need are national headlines about a new NC law driving resegregation. HB 514 threatens to become our state’s education version of HB 2.
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The Public School Forum of North Carolina is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on public education in NC. Follow us on Twitter @theNCForum and visit our website at http://www.ncforum.org/.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Last night the NC Senate made a bad bill even worse by stripping the State Health Plan and retirement benefits from any teacher employed by these new municipally-run charter schools.”
Only those teachers who are desperate for a job will work under such conditions, and only until they can find better employment. It is a guaranteed high teacher turnover. Charters don’t want to spend money on teachers. Parents who are looking for ‘white only’ should be cautious of what is happening to make these schools inferior.
Sometimes I wonder what guides these ultra-conservatives. They spend a lot of time hating others to make themselves feel superior.
The bill I looked at did not require certified teachers for every subject, but being a college graduate was required for specific subjects, excluding foreign languages, the arts, physical ed.
Yes, that stood out sharply for me as well. If the charters don’t step up and offer competitive benefit packages, they will not attract any great teachers at all unless there is a follow on plan to remove even more benefits from public sector workers. We’ve seen those who are able fleeing states where things like this have been imposed, yet by some bizarre anti-logic, conservatives appear to think that giving people less, giving people too little to make a life with will produce better results.The assumption also seems to be that those wealthy white communities think this will produce better (or just whiter?) schools. Perhaps those NC communities are just cannon fodder, a beach head for a wider re-segregationist push. Sounds DeVos-ian to me.
Charters don’t care about great teachers. They want low cst, high turnover teschers.
It is now clearly obvious that the major focus of this campaign — includes the privatizing of the public schools and breaking the teachers’ unions —that dates back for decades is based on an agenda to crush the middle class (strip them of the financial ability to offer resistance to the extreme-right autocratic want-to-be overlords), and bring back the segregation and racism that existed before the Civil Rights era.
Judge Roy Moore revealed just how far back the extremist autocrats behind this movement want to go when he said that we should only keep the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution and get rid of the rest and bring back slavery and take the vote away from women.
posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/North-Carolina-General-Ass-in-General_News-Charter-Schools_Diane-Ravitch_Education_Law-180605-425.html#comment702480
withthis comment which has embedded links at the above address.
Comment:
What is important to me, is that our people learn what is happening as the privatization goes on! https://www.opednews.com/Series/PRIVITIZATION-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-150925-546.html?f=PRIVITIZATION-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-150925-546.html
Look at Kentucky RIGHT NOW. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/education/2018/04/17/kentucky-education-commissioner-wayne-lewis-stephen-pruitt-charter-schools/524314002/
.. Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin is moving fast to smash public schools. First, he ousted several members of the state board of education, which promptly ousted the state commissioner of education. The board hired Wayne Lewis, an outspoken charter school advocate as interim state commissioner. Lewis announced that he recommends a state takeover of the state’s largest school district, Jefferson County, which includes Louisville. Lewis is an education professor, with no prior experience as a superintendent.
The Demolition of American Education is ongoing.
“House Bill 514 would allow four towns in Mecklenburg County to run their own municipal charter schools and give preferential access to their residents.” – Isn’t it what all public schools do: give preferential access to the resident of their catchment area?
No, not “preferential”. Many places have residency requirements, but those typically are targeted at/affect wealthy kids trying to go to elite selective enrollment, big city schools on someone else’s dime (as you sort of referred to) rather than deal with the cost for private schools or go to their own communities perfectly fine schools. Doing so also steals a place from actual residents kids. Poor families usually don’t have the financial/time capability of sending their kids long distances to better schools in other communities, let alone renting an apartment to pretend to live in the city in question.
ALEC is winning. The war on drugs led to the school to prison pipeline for minorities, especially black males, now the charter school movement is leading to resegregation.
A strong push against the Civil Rights Movement. It’s today’s version of the Jim Crow Laws.
The Terminator 2 always recombines.
More foolishness from North Carolina…
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/latest-news/article212485969.html
This is off topic but relevant to education. Red state Indiana has politicians who send out letters saying how much funding they are giving schools and expect a pat on the back and a cheer for their great work. I sent this news item along with my comments to my state Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] and Representative Slager [R-IN].
This news comes from By Sue Loughlin Tribune-Star Apr 21, 2018.
…Strikes are illegal in Indiana, and state law does provide penalties for unions and teachers that participate in a strike.
Average teacher salaries in Indiana have declined by more than 15 percent in the past 15 years after adjusting for inflation, according to an analysis by Vox, drawing on data from the National Education Association.
“This is worse than the nation as a whole, where teachers have had their pay cut by an average of 3 percent when we adjust for inflation,” according to the Vox report.
In addition, Indiana has one of the lowest per pupil funding levels in the country, according to the National Education Association. On average, Indiana schools receive $7,538 per student, lower than the four states where teachers have staged strikes or other large-scale protests.
According to the NEA’s “Rankings of the States 2016 and Estimates of School Statistics 2017,” average teacher pay in Indiana for 2016 was $50,715 and nationally, it was $58,353; in 2017, in Indiana, it was $50,554 and nationwide, $58,950.
In terms of average teacher starting salaries in 2016-17, nationwide it was $38,617 and in Indiana it was $35,241, according to NEA.
Terry McDaniel, Indiana State University associate professor of educational leadership, says issues associated with teacher pay are contributing to the state’s teacher shortage. “Considering Indiana’s beginning salary is about $3,000 under the national average and the beginning salary of a teacher in the U.S. is far lower than most beginning college grad jobs, this does add to the shortage,” he said.
Many districts, especially those losing enrollment, have seen little or no new money and have been forced to lay off teachers and offer one-time stipends rather than increase salaries, he said…
Charters have no oversight. Charters are “private factories” using our tax dollars. SICK!