Justin Parmenter is a National Board Certified Teacher in North Carolina.
In this essay, he documents the decade-long effort by Republicans to destroy public education in North Carolina and demoralize teachers.
He writes:
Out of all the states that have struggled to provide a quality public education over the past decade, perhaps none have seen as precipitous a decline as North Carolina. Once seen as a regional model of progressive education policy, a succession of unfortunate occurrences has severely damaged our public education system. Activists now fight against difficult odds for the change students need most.
Shift of Political Power to Republicans and Impact on North Carolina Education Policy
Like many states, North Carolina was hit hard by the Great Recession and saw funding cuts that greatly impacted our schools. However, the nightmare for our public schools began in earnest in November 2010 when the Republican Party won control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives (Mildwurf & Browder, 2010) in North Carolina’s state legislature. The following year, Republicans gerrymandered electoral districts (Ballotpedia, n.d.a) to ensure they’d be able to hold onto power for the next decade and then set their veto-proof majority to work passing regressive education policies with no opposition.
The policies included significant de-professionalization of the teaching profession in North Carolina through revoking career status protection (Public Schools First NC, 2017) for teachers, terminating advanced degree compensation (Kiley, 2013), and eliminating retiree health care benefits (Bonner, 2017). The GOP majority lifted the cap (Leslie, 2011) on charter schools, worsening economic and racial segregation across the state given that charters serve an increasingly white population (Nordstrom, 2018). The legislature directed a billion dollars (Wagner, 2019) over a decade to voucher programs, despite the fact that the the schools participating in the program were not required to report on student achievement (Public Schools First NC, 2019). Additionally, the legislature cut thousands of teacher assistants (Campbell & Bonner, 2015) and created a school report card system, in which school ratings were highly correlated with levels of poverty (Henkel, 2016). Finally, state legislators passed a K–3 reading initiative (North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, n.d.), which promised to improve results through increasing assessment volume and threatening our most vulnerable students with grade retention. And when K–3 reading achievement got worse, legislators added financial pay- for-performance incentives (Clark, 2016) based on questionable value-added data.
Many of these harmful initiatives were passed in budget bills rather than being moved through deliberative committee processes, eliminating the debate and public input so essential to the creation of effective policy. In addition to promoting a neoliberal education reform agenda, North Carolina’s lawmakers passed massive tax cuts favoring corporations and wealthy individuals, which have taken $3.6 billion in potential annual revenue (Sirota, 2019) off the table, all but ensuring schools will struggle for adequate resources for the foreseeable future.
In North Carolina’s 2016 general election, Republican Mark Johnson eked out a 1% victory (Ballotpedia, n.d.b) for the state superintendency—the first time in more than 100 years the office had been won by a Republican. State legislators immediately moved to transfer power away from newly elected Democratic Governor Roy Cooper and the State Board of Education and give Superintendent Johnson unprecedented control of North Carolina’s public school system (North Carolina General Assembly, 2016).
As State Superintendent, Johnson has been a disaster. Having only two years as a TFA teacher, he was over his head. His inept leadership outraged teachers and provoked mass walkouts.
Parmenter says that teacher activism is exhausting but worth it.
This year there is an election for state superintendent. The Network for Public Education has endorsed educator Jen Mangrum for the post. There is a chance to revive public education in North Carolina.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Once seen as a regional model of progressive education policy…” Can’t have that!
“Like many states, North Carolina was hit hard by the Great Recession and saw funding cuts that greatly impacted our schools.”
Go back and look at how the ed reform echo chamber all denounced Elizabeth Warren for saying she would reduce new grants to start new charter schools.
And then compare that to their complete silence when public school funding was gutted between 2009-2012. They did nothing for our kids. The only reason some of the funding was restored is because teachers either protested or went on strike. Ed reformers didn’t lift a finger to help them.
The 25-year decline from hopeful progress to public ed debacle in NC has been shocking… but that’s a short-run view. I remember learning through “White Trash: 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America” that the Carolinas have a very long history of poverty [since Colonial days], as well as a base of more than 200 yrs’ class struggle among slaves/ freed slaves/ dirt-poor farmers/ emergent middle class. It strikes me as an uneasy socio-economic history, vulnerable to fits and starts– progression then regression. So that when its longtime rockbed industries – furniture-production comes to mind – get outsourced overnight, it can quickly be reduced to poverty, w/ class struggle re-ignited at the drop of a hat.
N Carolingians: just speculation, correct my blind spots.