As the new school year commences, backward education priorities reveal a backward agenda
by Kris Nordstrom, NC Newsline
August 28, 2023
North Carolina’s public school students could use some help.
From thirty years of the still-ongoing Leandro court case, we know that our school funding is inadequate. Our state’s school funding effort – the amount we spend relative to the size of our economy – ranks dead last in the country.
We also know that funding is inequitable. We shouldn’t be able to predict student performance based on the student’s district, race, or family income. Yet North Carolina’s inequitably distributed funding systemically denies certain students the opportunities for academic success offered to some of their peers.
Teacher shortages have tripled in recent years, with disastrous results for students. Schools may respond to vacancies by hiring untrained substitutes, increasing class sizes, or forcing kids into virtual classrooms. Shortages affect experienced teachers, too, who often must accept larger class sizes or sacrifice planning periods to fill in when substitutes are nowhere to be found.
Schools similarly lack the resources to hire enough bus drivers. In Wake County, for example, drivers will bring one group of students to school, then turn around and pick up a second group. Every day, thousands of students will arrive after school starts.
These are all serious – but solvable – issues. They demand a serious response from the state legislators responsible for our public schools.
Unfortunately, North Carolinians are burdened with a legislature that’s uninterested in addressing the very real problems that inhibit student flourishing. Instead, they’re hastening the privatization of public schools and fanning the flames of bigoted moral panics that target vulnerable students.
As districts wait on the passage of an overdue state budget (the fiscal year began July 1), legislators spent much of July and August taking an unearned vacation. Upon their return last week, they couldn’t be bothered to pass a budget or otherwise address important education issues. They instead voted to enact divisive laws that had been vetoed by Governor Cooper.
Two of those bills, H219 and H618, will hasten the creation and expansion of low-quality charter schools that on average have consistently underperformed compared to traditional inclusive public schools since 2016.
H219 allows most charters to dramatically expand enrollment without State Board approval. It further permits county governments to appropriate limited local funding for charter school capital projects. This will mean less money for our crumbling traditional public schools that already face a $13.1 billion backlog of outstanding capital projects.
H618 strips away much of the State Board of Education’s authority to approve or deny charter applications, renewals, and revocations by creating a new Charter Schools Review Board. Board members must demonstrate a “commitment to charter schools” and will be dominated by appointees from the General Assembly. The move is quite possibly unconstitutional and will undoubtedly lead to another wasteful legal battle before it is finally settled.
More troubling are the bills the General Assembly passed last week that target trans youth.
H808 prohibits the initiation of gender-affirming care for people under 18. H574 bars transgender youth from participating in school sports. The first bill takes away decision-making from trained medical professionals, potentially denying much-needed care for certain children. The second makes it harder for tans students to fully be fully involved in public school activities.
S49, the so-called “Parents Bill of Rights” unfairly targets vulnerable LGBTQ children and contains several provisions that would hamstring school operations and harm broad swaths of students. The bill’s prohibition of instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in the K-4 curriculum is redundant—sexual orientation and gender identity are not part of the K-4 curriculum. To the extent new “rights” are provided, they open new avenues for bad actors to tie up school district operations and resources by filing frivolous requests for information and objections to instructional materials. They would also have a chilling effect on open and honest conversations between students and educators, particularly for LGBTQ youth and the growing number of students dealing with mental health issues.
The passage of bigoted laws targeting LGBTQ youth will exacerbate the challenges our schools already face, particularly regarding teacher vacancies. Teacher surveys show that these divisive issues have “infringed on teachers’ autonomy,” and have “negatively affected their working conditions.”
As Jennie Bryan, a 2021 North Carolina Teacher of the Year finalist from Brunswick County explained “the targeting of teachers’ professional and academic integrity, the creation of controversies out of our curriculum in our highly politicized times has really almost absolutely broken the spirit of many of my colleagues.”
Sadly, that’s the point. Legislative leaders continue to ignore the real challenges that make it harder for students to thrive and instead pass laws that make our schools less welcoming for students and teachers alike. At a certain point, we must admit that these folks know what they’re doing.
NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.
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