In this powerful post, NBCT teacher Stuart Egan describes the calculated attack on democracy and social justice in North Carolina.
The state was once considered one of the most enlightened in the South. It is now one of the most regressive, taken down by the Tea Party, by a legislature dominated by ALEC, and by politicians determined to destroy opportunity for people of color and poor people.
Egan provides a timeline of North Carolina’s descent, which accelerated after the Tea Party capture of the General Assembly in 2010. Behind the scenes, big money pushed ALEC bills.
Egan writes:
That timeline is filled with actions that are calculated, highly crafted, delicately executed, and driven by dogma deliberately done to hurt public education and communities that rely on public schools. Each occurred before the May 16th, 2018 march in Raleigh.
Citizens United, you may remember, allowed for corporations and other entities to donate to political candidates. It gave rise to PACs and SUPERPACs. It’s why you now see an incredible amount of money in political races donated by people who have a vested interest in a race or candidate but cannot vote in that race.
HB17 was the legislation produced in a special session in December of 2016 right before Roy Cooper took office. It was a power grab that granted the incoming state superintendent, Mark Johnson, the most power any state super had ever had. Johnson might be the most unqualified person to ever hold the job. What ensued was a lawsuit between Johnson and the State Board of Education that lasted for 18 months. Ultimately, it cemented Johnson’s role as a puppet and led to DPI’s reorganization and reduction of personnel.
The Innovative School District is an educational reform that allows the state to select “poor” performing schools to be taken over by an out-of-state entity. In three years, it has only one school under its umbrella, but has gone through multiple leaders.
And then there was the Voter ID law, racially driven gerrymandered political maps, and the abolishment of automatically paycheck deductions for groups like NCAE. (Yes, the Voter ID law and the gerrymandered districting has been overruled, but we still as a state have not had an election cycle since both were overturned.)
It used to not be this way, but after the Great Recession of 2008 and the rise of a new wing of the Republican Party, a noticeable shift occurred in North Carolina politics. Decades ago, public education was championed by both Democrats and Republicans alike. Think of governors like Holshousher and Martin and you will see a commitment to funding public education like NC saw with Sanford, Hunt, and Easley. The governor’s office and the General Assembly were often in different hands politically speaking, but on the issue of public education, they stood much more united than it is today.
That unification is not there anymore. And it wasn’t caused by public education or its advocates. It was planted, fed, fostered, and championed by those who came to power after the Great Recession. These are not Eisenhower Republicans or Reagan Republicans; they are ALEC Republicans whose sole purpose is to politicize all things and try and privatize as many public goods as possible. And on a state level, nothing is more of a public good than public schools.
They have been very adept at combining racial and social issues with public education to make it hard not only to compartmentalize each through legislation, but easy to exploit how much social and racial issues are tied to public education without people thinking they are interlinked. Laws and mandates like HB2, the Voter ID Law, the gerrymandered districts, and the attempted judicial system overhaul have as much to do with the health of public schools as any other factor.
When you keep people from being able to vote, you affect public education. When you keep people below the poverty line, you affect public education. When you gerrymander districts along racial lines, you affect public education. You cannot separate them exclusively. And we have lawmakers in power who know that very well. It’s why when you advocate for public schools, you must be aware of social and racial issues and be willing to fight along those lines.
Public school advocacy that was “successful” before 2008 will not work as effectively in 2020. No ALEC aligned politician who is in a right to work state that outlaws collective bargaining is going to “work with” advocacy groups like NCAE.
For NCAE and other groups to truly advocate for public schools, they must fight for issues outside of school rooms that affect the very students, teachers, and staff who come into those school rooms.
By every measure, North Carolina has regressed and opposed equity and democracy.
For example, “Now name the only state in the country with the lowest legal minimum wage, no collective bargaining rights, no Medicaid expansion, loosely regulated voucher and charter school expansion, and a school performance grading system that measures achievement over growth. North Carolina.“
The legislators who have passed regressive laws are not interested in dialogue or reason. They knew exactly what they were doing. They don’t negotiate. They don’t listen. They must be voted out of office.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Slowly I turned, step by step…
North Carolina, free yourself from ALEC’s chains, and vote them out. It is the only way to secure a better future.
Of course, the NC General Assembly gerrymandered the state to protect their own seats, but even gerrymandered seats can be overturned with enough energy.
Excellent!!
Reblogged this on caffeinated rage and commented:
As always, thanks to Dr. Ravitch.
“They have been very adept at combining racial and social issues with public education to make it hard not only to compartmentalize each through legislation, but easy to exploit how much social and racial issues are tied to public education without people thinking they are interlinked.”
Thank you Stuart Egan for this is a brilliant analysis. The last paragraph is a concise summary of the way legislatures are dismantling public education and social wellfare programs while pontificating about equity and conjuring new ways to stengthen school segregation. A relative new technique for increasing segregation is authorizing the creation of new district lines with any rationale that creates more communities segregated by race and social class.
When I lived in North Carolina, it was a paradox of good folks and the conservative tandem of Jesse Helms and John East. It was the seat of higher learning in the South, with four excellent universities, several excellent small liberal arts colleges, and great state universities. What happened?
While Egan gives us an excellent analysis of the modern shenanigans of political leadership, he does not speak to the demographic. I have a theory that all those years of great universities produced a talent pool that mostly moved out of the state. The educated always move more. The people who came into North Carolina were from rust belt states like Pennsylvania (I cannot tell you how many transplanted folks from Ohio and Pennsylvania I met when I lived there from 1979 to 1984) and were generally more conservative than the people who stayed in those places. This is true of Tennessee as well.
Meanwhile, the Nixon Southern Strategy was ripping the rural southerner from the democratic party by overtures to latent prejudices in those communities. From Willie Horton to the Swift Boat references, conservatives were successful in painting their opponents with the broad brush of extremism.