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North Carolina: A Charter School Goes Bankrupt

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2026 //
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Parents enrolled their children in a new charter school in North Carolina that offered great promise. But the charter school was deeply entangled with for-profit entities whose first priority was profit, not students. The school never opened. Parents had to scramble to find another school.

Last spring, Dulce Garcia heard about a soon-to-open school that would offer students immersion in both Spanish and Chinese. There was no other in High Point like it, and it didn’t charge tuition. It seemed like a way for Garcia, a restaurant worker, to give her children a long-term advantage. 

She decided to enroll her 6-year-old daughter, Aracely, in Triad International Studies Academy (TISA). In its first year, the school would serve preschool through second grade. She planned to enroll her 9-year-old son, Joel, when the school expanded to higher grades.

Aracely flourished at TISA. Garcia marveled that her daughter was soon counting in both Spanish and Chinese, and credited her swift academic progress and close friendships to TISA’s small class sizes. Aracely’s first-grade class had only 12 students; the entire school had only 45. “I think she does better in that type of environment,” Garcia said.

While the school’s modest enrollment seemed like a benefit to Garcia, it set off alarm bells in Raleigh. Charter schools like TISA—privately run, but publicly funded—must have 80 or more students under North Carolina law. 

Most state funding is awarded on a per-pupil basis, and real estate costs—not covered by a state allocation—can be hefty, making it difficult for even charter schools with more students to remain solvent. 

TISA seemed at risk of buckling under the financial pressure, facing an acute version of the challenges that have begun to slow growth in the once-booming charter school sector. At the same time, its management was pushing the bounds on conflicts of interest.

After learning about TISA’s low enrollment, the state Charter School Review Board summoned school leaders to their October 6 meeting. The board has the responsibility to shut down schools that fail to meet the state minimum, but broad leeway to set terms and make exceptions.

TISA’s board chair, Chaowei Zhu, fielded the state board members’ questions. He largely blamed construction delays. 

The plan to renovate a former church and install modular classrooms on the property had hit one obstacle after another, said Zhu, who is assistant dean for global initiatives at Wake Forest University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. By mid-August, school leaders were on Plan C: putting all the kids in the auditorium until the renovations were finished. Two days before the start of the school year, parents arrived at an open house and found the parking lot a muddy mess. Zhu said that while he was directing traffic that rainy evening, he overheard parents saying that the school wasn’t ready. 

Zhu’s wife, Junlan Li, a veteran educator and TISA’s principal, also told the board that an incident inside the school during the open house did perhaps even more damage. A child with autism hit several other students, she said. The child’s parents had not disclosed the child’s needs, so the school was unprepared. 

TISA had projected 144 students in its first year. Roughly 90 attended the open house, but only about half that showed up on the first day. 

Zhu and Li tried several arguments to persuade the Charter School Review Board to let their school stay open. They pointed out that state law allows the board to grant exemptions from the minimum enrollment if there is a “compelling reason.” In this case, TISA’s leaders said, the reason was the school’s “unique student population”—almost a third of students had a disability or other need for specialized education. 

Zhu described aggressive marketing plans and a commitment from the school’s landlord to defer rent, which would allow them to break even with just 50 students. He requested that the board delay closing the school until next summer even if a waiver was ruled out. “If there’s any way you think we can continue, we’d love to give it a try,” Zhu said. 

Bruce Friend, the charter board’s chair, said he was skeptical that TISA could boost enrollment substantially so far into the school year. “I’m just gonna be honest with you,” said Friend, who is head of school at Pine Springs Preparatory Academy, one of North Carolina’s largest charter schools. “Your track record doesn’t suggest that that’s going to happen.” 

Friend moved to revoke the school’s charter, effective at the end of December. The board, made up largely of people with experience founding or operating charter schools, voted unanimously in support.

Garcia hadn’t considered TISA’s financial viability when she was selecting a school. She chose it for its programming and schedule. Seeing Aracely so happy, she imagined the school a staple of her family’s life for years to come. She didn’t expect to have to find another one just weeks into the school year.

Charting a New Course

North Carolina was among the first states to permit privately run, publicly funded charter schools. In its 1996 authorizing law, the General Assembly laid out its aims: to provide more choice for parents, more educational opportunities for gifted and at-risk students in particular, and new professional opportunities for educators. 

The proposition was more freedom to experiment in exchange for more accountability. Rules on how money could be spent and what lessons could be taught were looser. But if the schools failed to meet student performance standards, they could be shut down. Some level of instability was built into the system.

At first, no more than 100 charter schools were allowed across the state. Legislators removed the cap in 2011 after Republicans gained majorities in both chambers. The number of charter schools doubled over the next decade. Then growth began to slow down. After hitting a peak of 211 in 2023, the number of charter schools fell for the first time ever. But the climb resumed this year. There are now 221 charter schools across the state, including virtual academies.

Even during the height of the boom, schools were regularly closing. Most years, there was at least one; some years, as many as 10. Regulators forced 38 charter schools to close between 1998 and 2024 for reasons that included insufficient enrollment, untenable finances, and poor academic performance. Over the same period, 32 other schools chose to voluntarily give up their charters—three in their first operating year. Another two dozen approved charters never materialized as schools.

While established schools continue to expand, pushing overall charter school enrollment ever higher, new schools are struggling. Every one of the seven that opened in North Carolina this school year came up short of their enrollment projections. Liberty Charter Academy, also in High Point, projected 500 students, but had only 172 enrolled as of the beginning of October. Three other new schools reported October 1 enrollment under 100.

Ashley Logue has noticed new schools facing ever-greater headwinds over the eight years she has worked in the state Office of Charter Schools. In that time, three first-year schools had their charters revoked for failing to meet the state’s minimum enrollment requirement; two were in the past two years….

She also saw other signs of escalating distress: More boards with approved charters were delaying their school’s opening by a year or more or deciding to give up their charter before the school ever opened. New schools were, on average, missing their targets by higher percentages.

National trends have been following a similar trajectory, according to a report published this summer by the National Center for Charter School Accountability that asked, “Has the charter movement reached its saturation point?” 

Logue, who is now the director of the Office of Charter Schools, said the pandemic shifted how many parents thought about school, and in subsequent years alternatives to traditional public schools multiplied. “Post COVID, parents are much more understanding of the options and also more willing to say, ‘OK, this option that my child had—whether it was a district school or something else—is not working. What are my other options?’”

The alternatives include abundant variants of homeschooling, magnet schools run by public school districts, and private schools ranging from tiny church-run operations to opulent college preparatory academies. Since 2023, the General Assembly has made a massive investment in subsidizing private school tuition—families of any income now qualify for Opportunity Scholarships, though not all private schools accept the vouchers. 

Meanwhile, birth rates in many parts of the state are declining, and high housing prices have changed where families with children live. The combined effects have been hard for schools of all stripes to predict. 

The problem is perhaps most acute for novice independent charter school operators, who are, almost by definition, optimistic. By the time their school is about to open, they have been working toward that goal for years, sometimes racking up significant debt in the process. TISA said in its application that it planned to take out a $210,000 loan with a five-year term and a 7% interest rate to fund its planning year.

Real-estate and financial constraints can have a strong influence on the enrollment projections that operators submit to Logue’s office and the Charter School Review Board. Friend, now the board’s chair, said that was his personal experience when he was preparing his application back in 2015.

He was trying to project enrollment two years out in one of the state’s fastest-growing communities, Holly Springs. “The truth of the matter is my projections were largely based on what the size of my facility was going to be, and the size of my facility was going to be largely based on how much money I could secure,” Friend said.

The board of every school that Logue has warned about low enrollment has come before the oversight board promising that they will make their numbers. “I call it unrealistic optimism,” she said. “There’s a lot of things that we’ve seen over the last couple of years that you wouldn’t want to happen to your school.”

In response, the North Carolina Association for Public Charter Schools has begun organizing new training for schools in the year-long, state-mandated planning period that follows a charter award. First-year schools will also be allowed to participate. “Having names on a list and people telling you they’re going to send their kid—that doesn’t mean much these days,” the association’s Executive Director Rhonda Dillingham said. “We’ve got to make sure that the new schools that are opening understand that and do everything in their power to market the school.”

Dillingham’s group also recently received a $53 million federal grant to help charter schools build out career development; science, technology, engineering, and math; artificial intelligence; and career and technical education programming. Some of that funding will go to new schools.

Logue has proposed several changes to the state’s oversight of charter schools to try to prevent closures that leave families scrambling for a new school for their child in the middle of the school year.

 “TISA,” she said, “was a worst-case scenario.”

High Hopes

Pressed for first-year numbers, Zhu said they had almost 100 students registered, but it was hard to know how many would show up. He estimated no-shows at 30 to 40 percent.

TISA’s plans were exuberantly bullish from the start. 

Its application for a charter describes dual-language immersion programs in four different languages by the school’s fifth year in operation. 

The school would start by serving kindergarten through second grade and add one grade per year until it was a full K-8 school. More than 900 students were expected at full enrollment.

The application named three model schools—East Point Academy in Columbia, South Carolina, and East Voyager Academy and Elbert Edwin Waddell High School, which are both in Charlotte. But only the latter offers multiple languages, and it is a magnet school within the public school district, rather than an independent charter.

Above: In mid-November, a for-sale sign stood on the property that housed TISA. Right: Parent Dulce Garcia was sad to see the school close. (Carolyn de Berry for The Assembly)

Mike Lally, the head of school at East Point, said in an interview that the prospect of running a school offering multiple languages was “scary.” “It’s difficult enough with HR and personnel to do Mandarin immersion,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine trying to manage that with multiple languages.” 

The candidate pool for language-immersion teachers is small and would be smaller still if fluency in multiple languages was required, Lally said. On top of that, there is often extra administrative work related to immigration for those teachers.

Renee Mathews, the CEO and principal of East Voyager, was the founding principal of East Point and said the two schools had very different growth trajectories. The South Carolina school grew quickly, she said, because there was little competition at the time. The Charlotte charter school, facing more competition, has grown steadily, but much more slowly. It offers Spanish in addition to Mandarin, but only introductory classes that are limited to middle schoolers.

Li worked at both East Point and East Voyager, but consulted neither Matthews nor Lally as she prepared to open TISA, they said. Neither did Zhu, who was on the committee that helped to open East Voyager. One member of East Voyager’s board of directors was on TISA’s board for a time, but he declined an interview through Mathews.

In their charter application, TISA leaders cited the success of the charter school movement in the state as one reason to think their enrollment projection was sound. “While some may view this as a concern for too much competition, TISA’s case is different,” the application said. “If approved to open, TISA will be the only public school in Greensboro offering multilanguage immersion programs in Chinese, Japanese, French, German, and/or Spanish under the same roof. … TISA’s program is unique, innovative, and difficult to replicate. Therefore, competition should not be a concern in TISA’s case.” They indicated their break-even number was 138.

After school leaders couldn’t find acceptable property in Greensboro, they shifted their sights to High Point. The former church they settled on required a special use permit, which meant school leaders had to plead their case before the city council. 

What city leaders most wanted to know during the March hearing was how many students TISA was expecting. 

“We just want to build a very small school,” Zhu told them. “Because that’s always my dream. At a small school, teachers get to know everybody, give them individualized care, and particularly help them to learn the language.”

High Point’s planning staff recommended that the special use permit restrict the school’s enrollment to 250. TISA was arguing for up to 390 students, with a plan to have students arrive on a staggered basis each day to minimize traffic.

Minutes from a TISA board meeting three days earlier indicate the school had sent out acceptance notices to 76 families. Enrollment wasn’t meeting expectations, Li told the board. She noted that another new charter school, Liberty Charter, was also opening in High Point.

‘Came Out of Nowhere’

The families with children enrolled at TISA learned about the Charter School Review Board’s vote to revoke the school’s charter the following evening, on October 7.

“Please know that our staff and leadership team are fully committed to ensuring a smooth, supportive transition for every student and family in the coming months,” Li, the principal, wrote in the email, which said the school would close at the end of December.

Garcia was shocked. To her, the information “came out of nowhere.”

She had no idea that board members were discussing a shortfall of $58 million in September or that state charter school regulators had advised against TISA’s management structure. 

A deeper look at public records tied to the school might have prompted additional questions about ethics and finances. TISA Board Chair Zhu is also a partner in LinguaVista, the for-profit company that owns the school’s property and holds its management contract. Additionally, he is president of TISA Child Care Center, a for-profit company with a contract to run the on-site preschool. 

TISA said in its 2023 charter application that it “does not foresee any existing relationships that could pose actual or perceived conflicts if the application is approved.” Zhu was identified as the board chair, and Li was identified as the likely principal candidate. It made no mention of the fact that they are married. 

North Carolina law allows charter schools to hire relatives of board members as long as the conflict is disclosed, and TISA’s board meeting minutes indicate that Li and Zhu left the room for certain discussions due to a conflict of interest. 

But the minutes and a financial journal shared with some board members in February also show Zhu had deep involvement in managing the school’s finances—including scheduling $40,000 in payments to Jun-Chao Consulting, a company registered to his wife, for “supporting in planning year” and “writing charter.” 

The board had also experienced high turnover. The only members named in the application that were still involved by late 2024 were Zhu and Hua Qin, who is described in the application as a certified public accountant. Records from the CPA oversight boards in North Carolina and South Carolina list no one by that name. (The Assembly tried to reach a Forsyth County resident by that name, but did not receive a reply.)

It’s not clear from the minutes how seriously the board considered contracting with companies unconnected to Zhu. Neither Li nor Zhu provided copies of full board packets and contracts in response to multiple requests from The Assembly. Li declined an interview; in response to detailed questions, Zhu provided a written statement that said TISA complied with all state disclosure requirements and followed the conflict-of-interest policy its board approved. Other board members either declined to speak with The Assembly or did not respond.

“Without subpoena powers, it is very difficult to figure out what is going on financially” at a charter school, particularly one with a for-profit management company, said Tom Kelley, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has written about charter schools and nonprofit law. While there are federal and state legal doctrines intended to prevent self-dealing, investigations are rare, he said.

The second email Garcia received about TISA’s closure really shocked her. That email, sent about 24 hours after the first, retracted many of Li’s previous assurances that school would continue as normal through the end of the year. 

“Effective immediately,” there would be no more breakfast or lunch service, no transportation, and no before- or after-school care. 

Garcia attended an emergency board meeting the following evening. Parents gathered in the school cafeteria to encourage the board to appeal. 

Lisa Noda, an attorney who drove her children from Davidson County to attend TISA, went first. She told the board that her second-grade daughter, who has dyslexia, now loves to go to school and wants to read. Her younger daughter, who is in the preschool program and advanced academically, is also happy at TISA, Noda said. “Please consider appealing and allow students to finish.”October 15 was students’ last day at TISA. (Carolyn de Berry for The Assembly)

Breanne Kraft said the teachers were so patient as her daughter, who has autism, processed her father leaving the family. “She does not want to leave. It hurts her and it hurts me,” Kraft said. “We both cried.”

Cailey Oates said, “To us, TISA is more than a school, it is a community.”

When it was her turn to speak, Garcia suggested things she could personally do to try to boost enrollment. She could hand out flyers and spread the word among Spanish speakers. 

But Zhu told the parents that he did not see much of a chance to reverse the Charter School Review Board’s decision. “We told them everything, but it did not change their mind,” he said. “I am the saddest person. I sold my house to build the school.” (County records indicate the house listed on the school’s charter application is still owned by Zhu and Li.)

After a half-hour closed session, the board voted unanimously not to appeal.

The following week, the board held another meeting, voting unanimously to relinquish the charter. TISA would not keep operating through December as state regulators allowed; instead, October 15 would be students’ last day.

Left in the Lurch

Amanda Cook, a former public school teacher who served on the High Point City Council, immediately started to coordinate a meeting to help the families left in the lurch. 

“I felt like with the number of kindergarteners that they had, there were a lot of families that had never been part of the school system before, so they hadn’t been through the process,” said Cook, who has since been appointed to the state House to replace Rep. Cecil Brockman. 

On the day TISA closed, Guilford County Schools held an event at one of the district’s two Spanish-immersion schools, Kirkman Park Elementary School, to introduce parents to other local options. 

Teachers and other staff were available to translate, Cook said. The district also brought people to answer questions about transportation, enrollment, exceptional children’s services, and English language support. As of mid-November, 18 former TISA students have enrolled in district schools, a spokesperson for Guilford County Schools said. 

Garcia learned at the open house that she could send Aracely to Northwood Elementary School, where a weekly Chinese class was offered. There was also a spot for her son and room for both children in the afterschool program. She enrolled them the next day, but Garcia was still out of work for the better part of a week.

Aracely Lopez Garcia flourished at TISA, her mother said. She credited her swift academic progress and close friendships to TISA’s small class sizes. (Carolyn de Berry for The Assembly)

Noda lost much more work time getting her daughters resettled. She felt that Davidson County schools did not have the resources to do right by her daughter with autism and dyslexia, so she looked into private options. 

“My older child was out of school for a month where we were trying to find something, and she did trials at different schools that did not accept her because of the needs that she has,” Noda said.

She ultimately enrolled her older daughter at another school in High Point, The Piedmont School, which serves children with attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, and received some state funds toward the private school’s tuition. Her younger daughter now attends a private pre-K program.

Zhu and Li received a bill from the state the same day the board voted to relinquish the charter. TISA had received state funding based on its projected enrollment; charter schools that end up enrolling fewer students have to give a proportional amount of money back. TISA now owes the state $112,789. 

LinguaVista, the for-profit company that owns the school property, is facing legal action for another apparently unpaid bill. In late November, Dobbins Electric Company Inc. filed a claim of lien against the school property, asserting that it’s owed $68,351.86. 

In mid-December, after repeatedly reminding Li that the school is obliged to disclose public records, The Assembly received an email from the address tisabankruptcyperiod@tisanc.org. The email, signed “TISA Board of Trustees,” said the board was “in transition and in the process of retaining bankruptcy counsel.” No public records requests would be fulfilled in the meantime.

Carli Brosseau

carli@theassemblync.com

Carli Brosseau is a K-12 education reporter for The Assembly. She previously worked at The News & Observer, where she was an investigative reporter and a ProPublicaLocal Reporting Network fellow.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, North Carolina

North Carolina: Four “Home Schoolers” Found Dead; Father Arrested

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2025 //
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The News & Observer reported on a shocking case. A father who claimed to be home-schooling his five children—ages 3, 6, 9, 10, and 18–called the police to report that he found the four older children dead. The youngest was alive. The father was arrested.

T. Keung Hui of the News & Observer reported:

The four Johnston County children allegedly killed by their father appear to have fallen through the cracks in the state’s education system, according to homeschool advocates.

Wellington Dickens III is charged with killing four of his five children, ages 6 to 18, over what authorities believe was a four-month period. Dickens appears to have run an unregistered homeschool at his home in Zebulon, which may have kept his children away from prying eyes.

“In a state like North Carolina, parents with ill intent can exploit those loopholes to essentially disappear their kids, which I think is the case that happened here,” Tess Ulrey, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Coalition For Responsible Home Education, said in an interview Thursday with The News & Observer.

Here’s a look at what The N&O found about state education and homeschool laws.

What is North Carolina’s compulsory school attendance law?

North Carolina law requires parents to make sure their children are regularly attending school between the ages of 7 and 16.

Parents are also required to make sure that younger children enrolled in a public school in kindergarten through second-grade are attending regularly.

Violation of the compulsory school attendance law is a Class 1 misdemeanor.

Operating an unregistered homeschool

None of the Dickens children attended public school in Johnston County, according to a school system spokesperson.

Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell said the children were apparently home-schooled.

But the state Department of Administration’s Division of Non-Public Education says it does not have a record of a homeschool at Dickens’ address or registered under his name.

Dickens would not have been required to register the 6-year-old and the 18-year-old he’s accused of murdering. But he would have had to register the 9-year-old and 10-year-old he’s charged with killing.

“It appears that people who are not caring for their kids would want to remove them from school settings,” Matthew McDill, president of North Carolinians for Home Education, told ABC11, The N&O’s newsgathering partner. “And so you know, it’s interesting that these aren’t actually, you know, normal homeschool families. There are people who are trying to hide something.”

What are North Carolina’s homeschool requirements?

North Carolina has several requirements for people to begin and maintain a homeschool.

*Homeschool administrators must have at least a high school diploma.

*A notice of intent to start a homeschool must be sent to the Division of Non-Public Education.

*Maintain immunization and annual attendance records for each student.

*Administer a nationally standardized achievement test each school year.

The Division of Non-Public Education is also responsible for overseeing the states’ private schools. The division is so understaffed that it has historically asked home-school families to come to its office in Raleigh to help its staff with paperwork for other families.

Ulrey of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education said North Carolina has better home schooling laws than some states. But Ulrey said there other states, such as Pennsylvania, which do a better job of keeping track of where all their children are being educated.

“We depend on the larger social fabric and network to help us find these kids so they don’t disappear,” said Ulrey, who was a home-schooler. “A lot of those resources come from either a school system or they come from more robust oversight. That’s how we can make sure we’re keeping track of kids and that kids are safe.”

Nearly 200 homeschool deaths since 2000

The Coalition for Responsible Home Education argues that stronger oversight is needed to prevent child abuse and neglect in homeschooling. The group cites its Homeschooling’s Invisible Children national database, which found 423 cases of abuse and 191 child fatalities among home-schoolers since 2000.

“One of the reasons that we advocate for homeschool oversight is to ensure that children are coming into contact with mandated reporters, with a larger community so that they can have more opportunities to hopefully not fall through the cracks,” Ulrey said. “We want all of our children to have access to an open future, and that does mean coming into contact with more safe adults. It sounds like these children were unfortunately victims of that process.”

But the Oregon-based National Home Education Research Institute argues that students who are in public schools or private schools are more at risk of abuse or fatalities than those who are in a homeschool.

“There is no clear evidence of an increase in reported incidents of abuse or other harm in states that move toward laws recognizing and allowing fuller homeschooling freedom,” according to the National Home Education Research Institute.

How popular is homeschooling?

In the 2024-25 school year, there were 101,880 homeschools registered with the state. North Carolina’s estimated enrollment is 165,243 home-schoolers.

The majority of North Carolina homeschools (53%) are religious based.

In a 2017 court filing, Dickens claimed he shouldn’t be subject to federal statute 42 US Code section 666, which governs state child support procedures, because the number 666 violated his religious beliefs, The N&O previously reported.

The number 3.7 million is often cited as the nationwide total for home-schoolers. Enrollment numbers rose during the pandemic even as they shrank in traditional public schools

Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article312710244.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Home Schooling, North Carolina

North Carolina Continues to Downgrade Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2025 //
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Not so very long ago, when North Carolina had forward-looking governors like Terry Sanford and James Hunt, North Carolina was considered the best state in the South for its public schools and universities.

Since the Tea Party takeover in 2010, the Republican-dominated legislature has done its worst to shed that reputation. Now it strives to be a state that ignores and underfunds public schools while pouring money into substandard charter schools and segregated voucher schools.

Where once North Carolina boasted of having more National Board Certified teachers than any other state, it now treats teachers disrespectfully, underpaying them and driving out some of its best teachers.

North Carolina is in a race to the bottom, hoping to fall behind Mississippi, Alabama, even Florida, in its maltreatment of the teaching profession. The state Republicans don’t want its children to be well-educated.

Just recently, the Republican leaders in the State Senate decided to increase class sizes and to lower the percentage of licensed and certified teachers in its classroom.

The North Carolina News & Observer reported:

Legislation filed Monday by state House Republican education leaders would eliminate class-size requirements in schools and allow school districts to hire unlicensed teachers. The “Public School Operational Relief” bill would change class-size requirements in elementary schools to class-size “recommendations.” House Bill 806 also would only require 50% of the teachers in a public school to have a license — down from the 100% requirement for traditional public schools.

The bill comes at a time when schools are struggling to find enough teachers. A state report released last week showed the teacher turnover rate was 9.88%, meaning nearly one out of every 10 teachers left the profession between March 2023 and March 2024.

If adopted, the bill would have major ramifications for how North Carolina public schools educate their students. Three of the legislation’s primary sponsors are the Republican co-chairs of the House K-12 Education Committee: Rep. David Willis of Union County, Rep. Brian Biggs of Randolph County and Rep. Tricia Cotham of Mecklenburg County. The bill’s fourth primary sponsor is Rep. Heather Rhyne, a Lincoln County Republican and House Majority Freshman Leader.

Eliminating school class-size requirements Under state law, class sizes are capped in K-3 class sizes with no limits for other grade levels. Charter schools are exempt from the class-size limits. State GOP lawmakers lowered K-3 class size limits in 2017, saying it would help improve instruction.

But school districts, such as Wake County, have complained it’s led to them reassigning students and putting enrollment caps at some elementary schools.

Currently, the state funds one teacher for every 18 students in kindergarten, 16 students in first grade and 17 students in second and third grades. Individual classrooms are allowed to go three students above that number. The bill would make K-3 the same as grades 4-12, with class size limits being recommendations only.

Lowering the number of licensed teachers under current law, school districts are required to have all their teachers be licensed. This includes people who have received temporary licenses allowing them to teach while they meet their training requirements.

Nearly half of all the new teachers in North Carolina enter classrooms under alternative licensure routes, according to the state Department of Public Instruction. Charter schools are only required under state law to have 50% of their teachers be licensed. The new bill would have all public schools — charter schools and traditional public schools — use the 50% teacher licensure requirement in each school.

While the bill says school districts can hire unlicensed teachers, it says you’d need to be a college graduate to teach the core subject areas of mathematics, science, social studies, and language arts.…

The legislation could run afoul of a 2022 N.C. Supreme Court ruling requiring the state to transfer funds to public schools to help provide every student with a sound, basic education and access to highly qualified teachers. But a pending ruling by the Supreme Court could throw out the 2022 ruling in the Leandro case.

Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article303662976.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Budget Cuts, Class size, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, North Carolina, Teachers

How a Democrat Won as Governor in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2025 //
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Thomas Mills writes a blog called PoliticsNC. In this post, he explains how a Democrat won the Governor’s race in North Carolina, which is now a red state. North Carolina used to be considered the most progressive state in the south, electing Democrats to state level offices and the General Assembly with regularity.

But in 2010, the Tea Party Republicans swept the state legislature. They gerrymandered the state so adeptly that Democrats had no chance to win control of the legislature again.

While the legislature has a Republican supermajority, the governorship has been captured by a Democrat in the last three elections: by Dr. Roy Cooper in 2016 and 2020, and by Josh Stein in 2024.

Governor Josh Stein

Political observers have long wondered about North Carolina’s split ticket voting. The state routinely elects Democrats to top statewide jobs like governor and attorney general while voting for Republicans for president and US Senate in the same election cycle. Josh Stein has won three elections, two for attorney general and one for governor, while Trump carried the state. His State of the State address offers insight into how Democrats win here. National Democrats should take notice. 

Stein delivered his address to the legislature on Wednesday night. At its core, the speech was people-oriented. He put the struggles of the state in human terms instead of political ones. He downplayed political divisions and his swipes at Republicans were muted. 

He led off with the recovery from Hurricane Helene, recognizing several families and business owners who are recovering from the disaster. He praised their resilience and the commitment of both individuals and community organizations like Baptists on Mission. He declared, “[T]he people who have been aiding folks out west don’t care a whit about the politics of the people they are helping.”

Stein never mentioned FEMA. His only reference to the federal response to the disaster was his declaration that he’s working with the Trump administration and Congress to get more money into the state. He kept the focus on the people who were most affected by the storm. His only political shot was urging the GOP led legislature to pass a bill giving $500 million more to disaster recovery. 

He moved from disaster recovery to job development. He leaned heavily into apprentice programs and community colleges. The focus was inherently working class. Stein said, “Folks should not have to get a bachelor’s degree to get a good-paying job and provide for their family.” He never mentioned the university system. 

Stein next shifted to child care and education. He highlighted the shortage and expense of child care in the state, calling for a task force to find “innovative solutions.” He called for family friendly tax cuts instead of reducing the corporate income tax. He called for raising teacher pay and pointed out that North Carolina is 48th in the nation in per pupil spending. He proposed a $4 billion bond to build more schools and fix existing ones.

He challenged the Republicans on their voucher program. While he didn’t focus on the vouchers themselves, he called out the tax breaks offered to wealthy families who receive voucher money and the unregulated schools that tax dollars support. He framed the debate in terms favorable to Democrats, looking for wins on accountability and shifting resources to working families instead of wealthy ones. 

Stein also built on one of his priorities as attorney general, combatting fentanyl. He highlighted the death of a young man and asked the legislature to fund a Fentanyl Control Unit. He’s getting on the right side of an issue that concerns much of rural North Carolina and setting up a challenge for Republicans if they rebuke his request. 

Stein stayed away from divisive cultural issues. He was inclusive in the broadest sense of the word. He focused on shared priorities that cross ethnic, racial, and gender lines. 

Stein’s overall tone was bipartisan or nonpartisan. He laid out priorities that are widely shared—Helene recovery efforts, creating jobs and developing our workforce, increasing access to child care, improving public education, combatting fentanyl deaths—while acknowledging we might differ in how to achieve these goals. He offered hope instead of pointing fingers. 

When Stein did pick fights, they were subtle and put Democrats on the side of working people —child care tax breaks for working families instead of the corporate tax cuts, raising teacher pay instead of subsidizing tuition of wealthy families. He brought a populist tone to his education and tax arguments. He made direct appeals to the working class voters that Democrats need to attract. 

Democrats across the country should take notice. Stein turned down the heat instead of inviting divisions. He gave very little red meat to the base, but stayed true to core Democratic values, like supporting public education and helping working families. While he set up subtle contrasts with Republicans in the legislature, he also celebrated bipartisan victories like Medicaid expansion. 

Stein gave a unifying speech, one that was hard for Republicans to attack. He laid down the foundation for working across party lines. He focused on solutions instead of problems. He set priorities that were largely noncontroversial. He made clear that he would be governor of the whole state, not just the leader of a party. He offered a sharp contrast to the divisive politics of Washington. That’s how Democrats win in a state like North Carolina.

Categories Education Reform, Health, North Carolina, Supporting public schools

Heather Cox Richardson: Republicans Abandoned Democracy to Stay in Power

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2025 //
6

Heather Cox Richardson wrote the following brilliant article about the machinations of the Republican Party in North Carolina. Since winning control of the General Assembly (legislature) in 2010, the state GOP has gerrymandered Congressional districts and state districts to hold onto power. Democrats win statewide races, as they did in 2024, but the legislature strips the powers of the Governor and the state Attorney General.

It’s a shocking story .

She writes:

Almost ten weeks after the 2024 election, North Carolina remains in turmoil from it. Voters in the state elected Donald Trump to the presidency, but they elected Democrat Josh Stein for governor and current Democratic representative Jeff Jackson as attorney general, and they broke the Republicans’ legislative supermajority that permitted them to pass laws over the veto of the current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. They also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the state supreme court.

Republicans refuse to accept the voters’ choice.

In the last days of their supermajority, under the guise of relieving the western part of the state still reeling from the effects of late September’s Hurricane Helene, Republican legislators stripped power from Stein and Jackson. They passed a law, SB 382, to take authority over public safety and the public utilities away from the governor and prohibited the attorney general from taking any position that the legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans, does not support.

The law also radically changes the way the state conducts elections, giving a newly elected Republican state auditor power over the state’s election board and shortening the amount of time available for the counting of votes and for voters to fix issues on flagged ballots.

Outgoing governor Cooper vetoed the bill when it came to his desk, calling it a “sham” and “playing politics,” but the legislature repassed it over his veto. Now he and incoming governor Stein are suing over the law, saying it violates the separation of powers written into North Carolina’s constitution.

There is an important backstory to this power grab. North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In 2010, Republican operatives nationwide launched what they called Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take control of state legislatures across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census.

It worked. In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in more than 100 years. They promptly redrew the map of North Carolina’s districts so that the state’s congressional delegation went from a split of 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans in 2010 to a 9–4 split in favor of Republicans in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won over 80,000 more votes than their Republican opponents. By 2015 that split had increased to 10–3.

The same change showed in the state legislature. North Carolina’s House of Representatives has 120 seats; its Senate has 50 seats. In 2008, Democrats won the House with 55.14% of the vote to the Republicans’ 43.95%. And yet in 2012, with the new maps in place, Republicans won 77 seats to the Democrats’ 43. The North Carolina Senate saw a similar shift. In 2008, Democrats won 51.5% of the vote to the Republicans’ 47.4%, but in 2012, Republicans held 33 seats to the Democrats’ 17.

When they held majorities in both chambers, Democrats passed laws that made it easier to vote, and voter turnout had been increasing with more Black voters than white voters turning out in 2008 and 2012. But in 2012, Republicans used their new power to pass a sweeping new law that made it harder to vote.

When courts found those maps unconstitutional because of racial bias, the state legislature wrote a different map divided, members said, not according to race but according to political partisanship, despite the overlap between the two.

“I’m making clear that our intent is to use the political data we have to our partisan advantage,” said state representative David Lewis, who chaired the redistricting committee. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage of 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Lewis declared: “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

That map, too, skewed representation. Although Democrats won a majority of votes for both the state House and the state Senate in 2018, Republicans held 66 out of 120 seats in the House and 29 of 50 seats in the Senate. Although they had lost the majority of the popular vote, Republican leaders claimed “a clear mandate” to advance their policies.

The fight over those maps went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in Rucho v. Common Cause that the federal courts could not address partisan gerrymandering. Plaintiffs then sued under the state constitution, and in late 2019 a state appeals court agreed that the maps violated the constitution’s guarantee of free elections. A majority on the state supreme court agreed.

The court drew a new map that resulted in an even split again in the congressional delegation in 2022 (North Carolina picked up an additional representative after the 2020 census). But Republicans in that election won two seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court. In late spring 2022 the new right-wing majority said the state courts had no role in policing gerrymandering. The state legislature drew a new congressional map that snapped back to the old Republican advantage: in 2024, North Carolina sent to Congress 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats.

But they also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the North Carolina Supreme Court, by 734 votes. Her challenger, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has refused to concede, even after the two recounts he requested confirmed her win. He is now focusing on getting election officials to throw out the ballots of 60,000 voters, retroactively changing who can vote in North Carolina.

There has been a fight over whether the case should be heard in federal or state court; Griffin wants it in front of the state supreme court, which has a 5–2 majority of Republicans. Last Tuesday the state supreme court temporarily blocked the state elections board from certifying Riggs’s win while it hears arguments in the case.

As Will Doran of WRAL News explains, Republicans currently have a court majority, but three of the seats currently held by Republicans are on the ballot in 2028. Taking a seat away from Riggs would ensure Democrats could not flip the court, leaving a Republican majority in place for redistricting after the 2030 census.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives North Carolina an “F” for its maps. In states that are severely gerrymandered for the Republicans, politicians worry not about attracting general election voters, but rather about avoiding primaries from their right, pushing the state party to extremes. In December, Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Washington Post noted that Republican leaders in such states are eager to push right-wing policies, with lawmakers in Oklahoma pushing further restrictions on abortion and requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, and those in Arkansas calling for making “vaccine harm” a crime, while Texas is considering a slew of antimigrant laws.

This rightward lurch in Republican-dominated states has national repercussions, as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in December sued New York doctor Margaret Daly Carpenter for violating Texas law by mailing abortion pills into the state. Law professor Mary Ziegler explains that if the case goes forward, Texas will likely win in its own state courts. Ultimately, the question will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.

The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. But the political machinations that supported their efforts came from the work of New York politician Martin van Buren, whose time in the White House from 1837 to 1841 ultimately had less effect on the country’s politics than his time as a political leader in New York.

In the early 1800s, van Buren recognized that creating a closed system in the state of New York would preserve the power of his own political machine and that from there he could command the heavy weight of New York’s 36 electoral votes—the next closest state, Pennsylvania, had 28, after which electoral vote counts fell rapidly—to swing national politics in the direction he wanted. Van Buren’s focus was less on reinforcing enslavement for racial dominance—although he came from a family that enslaved its Black neighbors—but on money and power.

Van Buren set up a political machine known as the Albany Regency, building his power by taking over all the state offices and judgeships and by insisting on party unity. He opposed federal funding of internal improvements in the state, recognizing that such improvements would disrupt the existing power structure by opening up new avenues for wealth. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1820, he used his machine to elect Andrew Jackson to the White House on a platform promising “reform” of the federal government calling for economic development, a government the Democrats claimed had fallen into the hands of the elite. Once in power, Jackson used the federal government to benefit the enslavers who dominated the southern states.

That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment. After the 1950s, as federal courts upheld the power of the federal government to regulate business and promote infrastructure projects that took open bids for contracts, they threatened to disrupt the economic power of traditional leaders. While state power reinforces social dominance as a few white men make laws for the majority of women and racial, gender, and religious minorities, it also concentrates economic power in the states, which in turn affects the nation.

When a Republican in charge of state redistricting constructs a map based on his idea that “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” and when a Republican candidate calls for throwing out the votes of 60,000 voters to declare victory in an election he lost, they have abandoned the principles of democracy in favor of a one-party state that will operate in their favor alone.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, North Carolina

Autocracy in North Carolina: Who Won the Election for State Supreme Court?

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2025 //
8

Typically, in this country, elections are decided by the voters. The candidate who gets the most votes wins. But that’s not what is happening in North Carolina, where a corrupt Republican Party pulls every imaginable trick to steal seats, gerrymander districts, and throw out votes–anything to win.

Jay Kuo writes an excellent blog at Substack–called The Status Kuo–where he dissected a political theft in broad daylight. Among other things, Kuo is a lawyer.

He writes:

There’s little that stuns me these days from Republican bad faith actors. But yesterday’s headlines out of North Carolina made me catch my breath, at least until I heard myself cursing aloud.

Here’s the top line news: The GOP-dominated North Carolina state supreme court has halted the election certification of one of its Democratic members, Justice Allison Riggs. That’s right, the Court has decided that it will decide who will sit on the bench among its justices.

Let me be very clear. This election is over, and Justice Riggs won. The race was very tight, as it often is in that state. Riggs won by just 734 votes out of a total of 5.5 million cast. No less than two recounts confirmed her victory. As a point of comparison, when a Democratic supreme court candidate lost an even closer race by 401 votes in 2020, he conceded after the second recount.

The recounts should have been the end of it, but no. The Court has now agreed to hear a case filed by Justice Riggs’s opponent, Judge Jefferson Griffin of the state Court of Appeals, demanding that over 60,000 mail-in votes cast in that election be disqualified. If the Court agrees with this madness, state law would require a complete do-over of that election (and of course, no other election, including Trump’s electoral win in the state).

It’s an unprecedented, dangerous, anti-democratic move that, as I’ll discuss below, even the most extreme election denialists wouldn’t touch as part of their strategy. Together with the GOP’s other recent attacks on democracy in that state, North Carolina is in danger of tipping into one-party rule, just as we’ve seen in Florida. This is happening even as—or perhaps precisely because—the state’s voters have consistently elected Democrats to the highest statewide offices.

Filling in the missing blanks?

The gist of the lawsuit is so absurd as to be laughable, except that no one is laughing now.
To understand how we got here, we need to go back to 2004. The North Carolina legislature passed a law that year requiring a driver’s license or social security number when registering to vote. That’s a bit stricter than other states and often results in disproportional disenfranchisement of minority voters, but it’s not unheard of.

But here’s where it gets wonky. A widely used voter registration form printed at the time failed to include a place for registrants to actually provide the required ID. As a consequence, over the years thousands of voters unwittingly registered without providing an ID required under state law.

It is reasonable, and logical, to presume that completing an official state form as printed should result in a proper voter registration. But no! Griffin now argues that any registrations that failed to provide an ID number simply should not count today.

In his challenge, Griffin has targeted over 60,000 mail-in votes, with the greatest impact on racial minorities who tend to vote Democratic. An analysis of the voter challenges by the local News & Observer in North Carolina found that Black voters were twice as likely to have their votes challenged as white voters.

Further, mail-in votes in general tend to skew Democratic ever since the pandemic and as a result of Trump’s false and conspiratorial statements about the security of mail-in voting. And in a twist, the affected registrations happen also to include both of Justice Riggs’s elderly parents.

Griffin asserts this claim, and the state Supreme Court has agreed to hear it, even though there is no evidence that any voter who cast a ballot was otherwise ineligible to vote; most mail-in ballots provided proof of identification anyway; and the missing information was not the applicants’ fault.

In short, the GOP is seeking to change the rules after the fact and get handed a win by a partisan court. So you can understand Justice Riggs’s astonishment and frustration and the profound concerns of democracy activists.

Indeed, the idea of going back to the voter registrations and trying to find ones you could throw out on technicalities like this was raised and considered by some of the worst organizations that promote outright election denialism, such as the so-called “Election Integrity Network.” And even there, the idea met with resistance and got shot down. As ProPublica reports,

“Months before voters went to the polls in November, a group of election skeptics based in North Carolina gathered on a call and discussed what actions to take if they doubted any of the results.
“One of the ideas they floated: try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number.”

But that idea was resisted by two activists on the call, including the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network. The data was missing not because voters had done something wrong but largely as a result of an administrative error by the state. The leader said the idea was “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, according to a recording of the July call obtained by ProPublica.

Similarly, when Griffin first lodged his protest in December before the state’s Elections Board, lawyers for Justice Riggs argued that the claim “amounted to a ludicrous request for a do-over”:

“Whether playing a board game, competing in a sport or running for office, the runner-up cannot snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by asking for a redo under a different set of rules,” they said. “Yet that is what Judge Griffin is trying to do here.”

Democrats in North Carolina are understandably fighting mad about the suit, accusing Griffin and the state GOP of seeking to overturn the election results. As state Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said in a news release, Justice Riggs “deserves her certificate of election and we are only in this position due to Jefferson Griffin refusing to accept the will of the people. He is hellbent on finding new ways to overthrow this election but we are confident that the evidence will show, like they did throughout multiple recounts, that she is the winner in this race….”

The state’s Supreme Court has already shown its partisan stripes before and even affected national politics. Recently, it allowed the GOP to re-gerrymander the state’s district lines and squeeze three Democratic congressional seats out of realistic contention. This happened just one election after the same Court, then with a liberal majority, approved maps apportioning the purple state fairly at seven seats for each party.
Those three lost seats cost the Democrats the Congressional House majority in 2024, proving that local and state politics can have lasting national consequences.

This past fall, following statewide elections that saw Democrats prevail up and down the ticket, the GOP legislature, which itself is ensconced through brutal gerrymandering, voted to strip the new Democratic governor of his power to appoint state Elections Board members. This is a dangerous move now under challenge by the governor’s office. If ultimately successful, it would hand the GOP the power to control and administer elections in the state.

If the move to disenfranchise over 60,000 North Carolina voters over an immaterial and unknown technical defect is any indication, a remaking of the Elections Board by the GOP would deal another heavy blow to democracy in the state. The GOP there has demonstrated time and again that it will act in bad faith in the pursuit of raw power, and now the ultimate question—one of democracy itself—has reached the cynical and feckless majority of the state Supreme Court.

It sadly may prove true that the only message the GOP in North Carolina will ever understand is one of resounding electoral defeat. That worked in Wisconsin, when in 2023 a progressive Supreme Court candidate destroyed the MAGA one by double digits in a special election where voters had grown tired of extremists’ dirty political tricks. That state’s grotesque gerrymanders are now a thing of the past, and party representation at the state level (and soon national level) far better reflects realities on the ground in that state.

A similar wake-up and shake-up in North Carolina is long overdue.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fraud, Injustice, North Carolina

Education Law Center: How Fair Is Funding in Your State? The Case of North Carolina.

By dianeravitch
December 26, 2024 //
5

Education Law Center published a handy guide to compare state spending on education.

Public Schools First North Carolina used that guide to demonstrate how poorly the state funds its schools.

Education Law Center’s 2024 report Making the Grade: How Fair is Funding in Your State shows once again that North Carolina is doing much less that it can to support public schools.

This comes no surprise to those following public education funding in the state, but it is disappointing that North Carolina, a state that touts its business-friendly environment, continues to neglect an essential foundation of business success—an educated workforce. More than 80% of the state’s students attend public schools (traditional & charter), so continued neglect jeopardizes our state’s future at every level.

FUNDING LEVEL GRADE: F – Funding level is the per-pupil funding provided to school districts from state and local sources. The measure is cost-adjusted to account for cost-of-living differences across states. North Carolina is #48 out of 51 (states + DC). All other Southeastern states rank higher; only Arizona, Utah, and Idaho rank lower. 

North Carolina’s per pupil funding is $4,868 lower than the national average! 

The “good” news is that in this year’s report, North Carolina lags behind Mississippi by only $475 per student. Last year our state spent $669 less per student than Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation. 

FUNDING DISTRIBUTION GRADE: B – Funding distribution measures the extent to which districts with high levels of poverty receive additional funds. North Carolina is #12 out of 48 states in this category, a very respectable rank with room to grow. This measure tells us that although overall public education funding is terrible, the funding available to high and low poverty districts is fairly even (i.e. equally bad).

FUNDING EFFORT GRADE: F – Funding effort measures the funding allocated to support PK-12 education as a percentage of the state’s wealth (GDP). North Carolina is #49 out of 50 states. This means that although North Carolina has enough money, it chooses not to spend it on education. North Carolina spends just 2.08% of its wealth on education. Only Arizona spends less. They spend 2.05%.

The state with the highest funding effort is Vermont. They spend 5.50% on education. Vermont’s GDP per capita is $53,483 and the state spends $25,627 per pupil (cost adjusted) each year.

In contrast, North Carolina’s GDP per capita is $56,943, which is higher than Vermont’s. But we spend just $11,777 per pupil. In other words, although Vermont isn’t as rich as North Carolina, Vermont spends $13,850 more per student (cost adjusted) each year. That’s more than double North Carolina’s financial commitment to our students!

North Carolina is better that this. Let’s hold our legislators accountable!

Categories Funding, North Carolina

North Carolina: Republican Supermajority Strips Newly Elected Democrats of Power

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2024 //
27

The Republican supermajority in the state’s General Assembly is shameless. They used their numbers to pass a bill that strips the newly elected Democratic Governor, State Attorney General, and State Superintendent of Schools of many of their powers.

Outgoing Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, but Republicans overturned his veto.

The Republican power grab was embedded in a bill that shortchanged the victims of Hurricane Helene.

When will voters in North Carolina wise up and start voting for Democratic legislators? The ones they have now are not working on behalf of their constituents.

They are using their power to protect their power and perks. The public be damned! Vote them out!

Categories Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, North Carolina, Republicans

North Carolina: Vouchers Are Funding Indoctrination in Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2024 //
6

Justin Parmentier, an NBCT-certified high school teacher in North Carolina, has been scrutinizing the nonpublic schools that receive voucher money from the state. he found that nearly 90% are religious schools where discrimination and indoctrination are commonplace.

Parmenter remembers when now-disgraced Lt. Governor Mark Robinson opened a search for public schools that indoctrinate and came up with nothing.

Public funds in NC support religious schools that openly and egregiously indoctrinate students. Not a peep from the culture warriors. It wasn’t indoctrination they objected to; it was public schools.

Parmenter wrote the following in March 2024, before Robinson was disgraced by the CNN report on his history of posting on pornography websites. To call Robinson a hypocrite would be an understatement:

With billions of dollars now on tap for North Carolina’s private schools, and 88.2% of those dollars going to religious schools, scrutiny is rising over exactly what our taxes are supporting.

Private schools are legally able to discriminate against children, and many of North Carolina’s Christian schools deny admissions to students based on religious beliefs, sexual orientation, or learning disabilities.

For example, Fayetteville Christian School, which pocketed nearly $2 million in voucher dollars this school year, expressly bans students who practice specific religions like Islam and Buddhism, and they also bar LGBTQ+ students–whom they brand “perverted”–from attending.

North Raleigh Christian Academy won’t accept children with IQs below 90 and will not serve students who require IEPs (a document which outlines how a school will provide support to children with disabilities).

If this public funding of widespread discriminatory school practices rubs you the wrong way, I have bad news for you.

It gets worse.

That harmful indoctrination Mark Robinson was howling about a couple years ago in his disingenuous attempt to generate political momentum?  Turns out it’s real.  It just isn’t happening in the traditional public schools Robinson was targeting.

The Daniel Christian Academy is a private school in Concord, NC.  This school has received public dollars through school vouchers every year since Republicans launched the controversial Opportunity Scholarship voucher program in 2014-15 for a grand total of $585,776.

Daniel Academy’s mission is to “raise the next generation of leaders who will transform the heart of our nation” by equipping students “to enter the Seven Mountains of Influence.”

The Seven Mountains of Influence (also referred to as the Seven Mountains of Dominion or the Seven Mountains Mandate) refers to seven areas of society:  religion, family, education, government, media, arts & entertainment, and business.  Dominionists who follow this doctrine believe that they are mandated by God to control all seven of society’s “mountains,” and that doing so will trigger the end times.

The Seven Mountains philosophy has been around since the 70s, but it came to prominence about ten years ago with the publication of Lance Wallnau’s book Invading Babylon:  The Seven Mountains Mandate.  Wallnau touts himself as a consultant who “inspires visions of tomorrow with the clarity of today—connecting ideas to action,” and his book teaches that dominionists must “understand [their] role in society” and “release God’s will in [their] sphere of influence.”

Wallnau does caution his followers that messaging about taking control over all seven areas of society on behalf of God might freak out non dominionists, saying in 2011 that “If you’re talking to a secular audience, you don’t talk about having dominion over them. This … language of takeover, it doesn’t actually help…”

So why should North Carolinians care that their tax dollars are subsidizing this sort of indoctrination of children through private school vouchers?

I posed that question to Frederick Clarkson, a research analyst who has studied the confluence of politics and religion for more than three decades and lately has been focusing on the violent underbelly of Christian nationalists who want to achieve Christian dominion of the United States at all costs.  Here’s what Clarkson said:

North Carolina taxpayers should be concerned that they are helping to underwrite an academy for training children to become  warriors against not only the rights of others, but against democracy and its institutions.  The idea of the Seven Mountain Mandate is for Christians of the right sort to take dominion — which is to say power and influence — over the most important sectors of society. It is theocratic in orientation and its vision is forever. 

This is not something that is about liberals and conservatives . Most Christians including most evangelicals, Catholics, and mainline Protestants are deemed not just insufficiently Christian, but may be viewed as infested with demons, and standing in the way of the advancement of the Kingdom of God on Earth. And they will need to be dealt with.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, North Carolina, Religion, Separation of church and state

North Carolina: “Armed Militia” Threatens Federal Emergency Workers

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2024 //
12

The Washington Post reported that federal emergency workers had to stop work due to concerns about an “armed militia.”

It can’t happen here. We are the United States.

But we have a candidate for President who constantly encourages violence against enemies and disparages the federal government that he wants to lead.

And we have a political party that wants no restrictions on guns. And here we are.

LAKE LURE, N.C. — Federal emergency response personnel on Saturday had employees operating in hard-hit Rutherford County, N.C., stop working and move to a different area because of concerns over “armed militia” threatening government workers in the region, according to an email sent to federal agencies helping with response in the state.

Around 1 p.m. Saturday, an official with the U.S. Forest Service, which is supporting recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sent an urgent message to numerous federal agencies warning that “FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, NC, to stand down and evacuate the county immediately. The message stated that National Guard troops ‘had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there were out hunting FEMA.’”

“The IMTs [incident management teams] have been notified and are coordinating the evacuation of all assigned personnel in that county,” the email added.

Two federal officials confirmed the authenticity of the email, though it was unclear whether the quoted threat was seen as credible. The National Guard referred questions to FEMA when asked about the incident. One Forest Service official coordinating the Helene recovery said responders moved to a “safe area” and at least some work in that area — which included clearing trees off dozens of damaged and blocked roads to help search-and-rescue crews, as well as groups delivering supplies — was paused.

By Sunday afternoon, personnel were back in place, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The setback is one of the latest examples of growing concerns about safety and security in western North Carolina, where many towns were almost wiped off the map after the historic hurricane made landfall two weeks ago. In the weeks since, misinformation and rumors have made the recovery more difficult, targeting multiple federal agencies operating as part of the recovery. Federal officials such as the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA’s director of public affairs have been the target of antisemitic attacks.

Chimney Rock, in Rutherford County, has become one of the centers of tension and conflict after a rumor spread on social media that government officials planned to seize the decimated village and bulldoze bodies under the rubble. Authorities and news outlets debunked the assertion, but people still took to social media imploring militias to go after FEMA.

A person familiar with FEMA operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the agency was working out of an abundance of caution and its teams were operating at fixed locations and secure areas instead of the usual practice of going door to door.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Guns, North Carolina, Republicans, Trump
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