A Decade of Defunding, Dismantling and Disrespect

While there are certainly many disagreements about education and school policies, nearly everyone I talk with agrees that nothing is more important in education than an excellent teacher. 

No doubt the teacher shortage in North Carolina is serious. Personally, I think we are beyond serious & are at a crisis point to say the least. 

When I checked in January 2022, half way through the school year, I found there were thousands of teaching positions open in North Carolina. Within Franklin County schools there were 26 teacher positions and 15 teaching assistant positions open. To put it bluntly, we were at the halfway mark of the school year and there were classrooms where the students had no teacher. 

Think about that; NO teacher. How would you feel when you show up to your doctor’s appointment only to find out you’ll be seeing a substitute today or you get to court and your lawyer is not there so they have a substitute. We’re not talking about another doctor or lawyer filling in. We’re talking about a warm body. I think we can all agree that is not acceptable. 

It’s the same thing in the classroom. Substitute teachers are very important to a school and go through sub training and background checks, but they can not take the place of teachers. When absent the teacher will leave work for their students to do and the sub facilitates that per the instructions left by the teacher. 

 However, what happens when a sub is placed into a classroom without a teacher? In some cases, the sub has to actually teach, which is a problem in itself because often the sub is not a teacher. The sub might be a former teacher, but it is likely their teaching experiences are not in the content area that they are subbing. Quite often the sub is a parent or a member of the community with no experience in education.

Some schools will combine classes creating overcrowded classrooms that benefit no one. Sometimes schools will combine classes virtually by having a sub in the classroom to manage the students, while they virtually join another teachers class via Zoom. Regardless of how local schools decide to handle their teacher shortage, students suffer and it must be addressed. 

North Carolina is full of qualified teachers so why the shortage? Well, this is a direct result of a decades-long effort to defund, dismantle and deprofessionalize education in North Carolina. 

How did we get here?

For the first time since 1896, Republicans have control of the North Carolina State General Assembly and they have certainly let their presence be known. The GOP-led General Assembly has pushed through legislation that has had a profound negative impact on education in North Carolina. The cuts started soon after the Tea Party (the extreme right wing of the Republican party of the time) swept North Carolina in the 2010 election. In the wake of the 2010 census, the newly elected right-wing legislators quickly redrew and gerrymandered state legislative districts that gave them a supermajority. Shortly thereafter, bills attacking public education were being pushed through.  Here is a list of GOP-led General Assembly actions that have directly caused North Carolina to go from being the most progressive state in the south to one of the most regressive states in the nation.

2010: The Tea Party red wave was voted into office.

2011: The newly elected officials were inaugurated and the attack bills on people’s rights and education started.

2012: The elimination of the Teaching Fellows program. This was one of the state’s most successful pipelines for recruiting and producing excellent teachers. Among public outrage the GOP-led GA reluctantly brought it back, however it is a skeleton of what it once was and it is not as effective. The result? Teacher prep programs in the UNC system dropped 27% between 2010 and 2015. A massive teacher shortage was predicted at this time. 

Also, in 2012 state leaders added measures of standardized test results to teacher evaluations. It is called the Education Value-Added Assessment System or EVASS. It ties teachers evaluations to test scores that they have no control over. Even for teachers that teach non-tested subjects. This opened the door to resurrect merit pay for teachers which we eventually learned that they were doing in secret. Remember the NC Merit Pay Mess called Pathways to Excellence in Teaching? NC Merit Pay Mess

2012 also saw the GOP-led GA attack the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE). North Carolina is a non-union state. Meaning all workers are prohibited by law from unionizing. However, educators do have an advocacy group in the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE). In 2011, the GOP-led GA passed a law targeting how the group collects dues from its members. They eliminated the option for teachers to have their dues deducted directly from their paychecks, which was the most popular option chosen by teachers. Then-Governor Bev Perdue vetoed it. In 2012, the law made it back to her desk and she vetoed it a second time, but the House overrode it during a sneaky, late night vote. The law was later found to be discriminatory, retaliatory and a violation of free speech and thrown out by the state courts. 

2012 also saw teacher salaries fall to near the bottom in the nation and the worst in the South. Other states like Texas and Virginia started recruiting North Carolina teachers and there was a mass exodus from North Carolina classrooms. (In 2001 North Carolina was ranked as high as  20th in the nation; now as of May 2023 North Carolina is ranked a dismal 34th in the nation for the average teacher pay and 46th for beginning teacher pay).

As if the above wasn’t enough, North Carolina schools were dealt another blow. The GOP-led GA re-ordered how schools are evaluated. The new evaluations use an A-F grading system and more than 30%  (700 schools) received a D or F.

Parents were aghast at how many schools were “failing”. However, the metrics did not measure the quality of the school, it instead measured the socio-economic status of the students. Nearly every one of these “failing” schools were considered high-poverty. 

The state of Virginia also used the A-F rating, but got rid of it because it proved to be ineffective and not accurate. Instead of following Virginia and getting rid of it, the GOP-led GA embraced it and used it as a cudgel to bludgeon North Carolina schools.

It gave them the manufactured evidence that North Carolina public schools were failing and parents should have the freedom of choice (as they worded it) to send their children to private schools at taxpayers expense. 

The private school voucher or “opportunity scholarship” program was implemented. The program diverted public tax dollars from public schools and redirected the money to private and religious schools. Republicans marketed it as if schools were a failing business. If the business in your town is failing, shop somewhere else. The problem is schools are not businesses & tax dollars have accountability attached to them. Schools are not businesses

Public money is being taken away from schools that are already underfunded & struggling and placing them in a private school that does not have the same accountability that public schools do. This is like making KFC pay for your chicken at Chick Fil A  because KFC got a low rating and you really wanted to eat at Chick Fil A anyway and bonus…have KFC pay for it. 

To make matters even worse, the GOP-led GA lifted the cap on charter schools which resulted in an explosion of charter schools across North Carolina. Franklin County currently has three charter schools, two too many in my opinion. They also introduced legislation that weakened the oversight of public charters by removing the Department of Public Instruction’s role as management of charters. 

This opened the field for out-of-state for-profit companies to flood into North Carolina and open for-profit charters that are taxpayer funded. You read that right. More funding taken away from public schools and put in the hands of for-profit companies that open and manage charter schools with little to no oversight or accountability to taxpayers. Wake Preparatory Academy is a prime example of this right here in Franklin County.  Wake Prep originally tried to open in Wake Forest but was denied and they then crossed the county line into Franklin to open in the former Sprint building. The Franklin County Board of Education opposed this and wrote a 300 page document in opposition. They lost and Wake Preparatory Academy was allowed to move into Franklin County with little to no trouble. The owner is Glenn Way out of Arizona and he has profited into the millions by managing Charter schools across this nation. Arizona Charter profiteer

Many of these for-profit companies have a terrible track record when it comes to effectiveness in educating children, but yet they are now fast tracked in North Carolina. The same government that demands oversight and accountability from public schools suddenly sings a very different tune when those very same tax dollars are sent to private, religious schools and for-profit charter management companies. 

Whew! 2012 was a tough year for North Carolina public schools and teachers. It’s no wonder why our state saw a mass exodus of teachers. 

Could it get worse? Why yes it can and it did…..

2013: Tenure was eliminated. This robbed teachers of their right to due process and allowed districts to fire teachers at will. As a result,  teachers that are advocating for policies that would benefit education can now be fired for doing just that. It should be noted that the GOP-led GA made an offer to pay teachers a 25% bonus in exchange for voluntarily giving up tenure. Teachers were outraged and this bribe was eventually removed from the table, but only after courts intervened. Another overreach by the GOP-led GA that the courts had to step in and correct.  

The GOP-led GA decided to devalue advanced degrees and eliminated the 10% raise in salary that teachers received when they earned their masters degree. Now in North Carolina a master’s degree means nothing.

A push for merit pay and bonus pay resurfaced. There is so much wrong with this. Every pilot program on any type of merit or performance based pay that has ever been done has failed. (In 2022 it resurfaced as The Pathways for Excellence in Teaching. Educators are currently fighting it. NC Merit Pay Mess

2014: the GOP-GA cut $500 million from the education budget. 

Teachers were laid off and teacher assistants were forced to take on additional jobs like driving a bus. Building maintenance went from replacing and repairing to patching it together. Education Week called the NCGA “The Most Backward Legislature In America”. 

The GOP-led GA took away longevity pay for educators only. Longevity pay is available to all state employees and rewards employees for reaching longevity milestones. It must be noted that the GOP-NCGA eliminated longevity pay for teachers only, leaving it in place for all other state employees who are not working in education. 

What is longevity pay?  

Beginning in year 11, North Carolina teachers would be eligible for longevity pay ranging from 1.5% to 4.5% depending on the longevity milestone they reached. Eliminating this for teachers, coupled with lowering and capping the salaries of experienced teachers, legislators sent a clear message that North Carolina no longer valued experienced teachers or education. This is the year school districts saw an even bigger mass exodus of teachers. A 2015 Washington Post headline read; North Carolina teacher exodus rises- despite efforts to halt attrition. 

The GOP-led GA also touted a 7% raise for teachers. This simply was not true. The way it was marketing the general public was under the impression that all North Carolina teachers were getting a 7% raise and that is not what happened. Teachers with less than 10 years of experience saw the biggest increase while veteran teachers received the smallest. 

My husband and I, at the time, were in our tenth year of teaching & received a 2.5% raise each. Our combined raise did not even equal the touted 7% the NCGOP was claiming.  Some veteran teachers received less than 1%. Some teachers with 25+ years in the classroom actually saw their salary decrease as a result of losing longevity pay. 

In spite of the facts, Legislators such as Rep. Tim Moffitt (R-Buncombe) tweeted and boasted that this was the “largest teacher pay raise in state history”. It was not! 

They basically took longevity pay away from veteran teachers and rolled it into the pay scale and called it a raise. I call that a sleight of hand. 

2016: A bill was passed that weakened the powers of the North Carolina State Board of Education and gave the state superintendent more power over public schools. This removed a lot of the checks and balances that the state board of education provided. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction was reorganized, which resulted in layoffs. 

So much damage has been done to public education, but their bloodletting did not stop here. There was more to come.

2017: Included in the budget was a provision that all new hires, beginning in 2021, would no longer receive retiree healthcare benefits. Something that educators counted on when committing to a teaching career. 

Also, in 2017 the GOP-led GA handed down to the local school districts an unfunded mandate to cap the size of K-3 classes. In order to meet the requirements of this mandate, the GOP-led GA required the elimination of Art, Music and Health/PE classes on the K-3 level. That did not sit well with educators in these fields, nor did it sit well with the public. Art, Music & PE teachers from across the state, including me, descended upon the NCGA like a plague of locusts. The bill did not pass, however in its wake the GOP-led GA handed down to the local LEAs an unfunded mandate to reduce class sizes on the K-3 level forcing local school districts to make painful cuts. 

2018: 

By 2018 the devastating cuts are apparent.  Compared to the 2008-09 school year, funding for

textbooks and instructional materials is down 45%

supplies & materials down 55%

technology down 59%

per pupil funding down 7% (adjusted for inflation and compared nationally per pupil funding in North Carolina is down 25%)

Teachers are FED UP! The Red4Ed movement was created and teachers started wearing Red4Ed or red shirts on Wednesdays. Teachers statewide unified and started reaching out directly to state legislators, only to be ignored and mocked. The NCAE and teachers organized and planned an education rally and march in downtown Raleigh on Wednesday May 16, 2018. 

Teachers started taking that day off and it became apparent that teachers were willing to sacrifice their PTO for this rally. Standing in solidarity, school systems across the state decided to close for the day. Over 20,000 teachers from across the state descended upon Raleigh and the State Legislative Building on Jones Street. 

The elected Republicans in the GA refused to meet with teachers that day and most were absent, but found time to post and tweet about how irresponsible teachers were to shut down schools. House Representative Mark Brody called teachers thugs. This is the beginning of calling teachers ugly and vile names. 

A second Red4Ed rally occurred in May of 2019. Again, most elected Republicans were conveniently absent from Raleigh that day and many tweeted calling teachers “Union Thugs”, “Far left marxists”, “Bullies”. 

In response the Republicans tried to change the law about how teachers could use their personal time off. They wanted to make sure that teachers could not use personal time to take off a day when schools were not closed. They also wanted to make it difficult for teachers to take a day off to rally, It failed. 

Perhaps if Republicans wanted to end teacher rallies they should engage with teachers,  listen to them and support public education. But that has never happened & they continue their war on teachers and public education.

2020-2021: the pandemic years. 

As a historic global pandemic ravaged the world, forcing schools across the world to close, teachers did the unthinkable. They flipped in-person classrooms to virtual, often within days, with no “handy how-to” handbook. Teachers were literally “building the plane while in the air”.  Regardless of all the hiccups along the way, teachers rocked it and converted in-person learning to virtual, so North Carolina children could still get an education, all while dealing with a historic pandemic. The end of the 2020 school year and the beginning of the 2020-21 school year was virtual. Teachers were being cheered on and hailed as heroes.

No doubt it was a stressful time for everyone; parents, teachers, admins, students. We were all stressed and rightfully so. We did not know for sure what we were dealing with and it was changing daily.  School systems were having meetings on how to reopen schools all while keeping everyone safe. Everyone includes ALL students, ALL teachers, ALL admins, & ALL support staff. After many meetings, in the fall of 2020, most schools were able to reopen, but with a mask mandate and a hybrid schedule in place. It wasn’t perfect, but it was doable and students were back in the classroom, even if it was part-time.  

Then comes the “anti-maskers”. This is a group of people that are anti-anything government.  They do not want any mandates in place. They want schools and businesses to reopen, as business as usual. They are unwilling to acknowledge the ramifications of Covid and are not willing to sacrifice wearing a mask in the short term or willing to follow any Covid protocols. They are relentless and they start yelling and screaming at teachers and administrators. The name calling evolves into threats. 

These parents started attending school board meetings, yelling and screaming and in some cases threatening school board members. It got ugly. 

Coupled with this, along with the madness of the 2020 election more teachers became fed up and threw in the towel. Another mass exodus of teachers and many did not return to the post covid classroom 

In 2021  Moms For Liberty (M4L) formed. They are based out of Florida and evolved out of this anti-covid, anti-masker group.  The dark money flowed in to help fund this group. They tout themselves as a group of moms that joined forces to save children from the indoctrination of “government controlled schools”. They also claim to be a champion of parental rights. Their slogan is “We don’t co-parent with the government”. They have spread the idea that public schools or as they like to say “government controlled schools” are indoctrinating children at school to be gay, change their genders to become trans, turning them against their parents and convincing white children to hate themselves. They have even made claims that teachers are giving children hormone blockers and showing gay sex videos to 7 year olds and claim that all of this is being done without parents’ knowledge. In other words, as Betsy DeVos said the school is becoming the home and the teachers are taking the place of the parents. 

None, and I do mean NONE of this is true. While they love to make these claims with ferocity, they often offer no evidence or details to substantiate these claims. 

Teachers went from being heroes to being called child abusers and child groomers. When teachers speak out to defend themselves from these lies, M4L will dox them. Doxxing is when you search for and publish private and personal information about someone, usually on the internet and social media, all done typically with malicious intent. M4L deliberately does this to teachers in an effort to destroy them both personally and professionally. They have placed a target on the back of teachers and it is a matter of time before something really bad happens to a teacher. 

The assault on teachers doesn’t stop with Moms For Liberty.

Post 2020 election, Christopher Rufo introduced CRT which stands for Critical Race Theory, claiming “woke” teachers are teaching students to hate America and the white race. Racial tensions were stoked and state leaders started fanning the flames of bigotry. 

In North Carolina, newly elected Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, repeatedly has claimed that teachers are indoctrinating students and refers to the school leaders as “twisted individuals’ ‘. He even said “all the ills we see across this nation can be traced back to public schools” and that “satan and his minions have had their way with our children via public education”. Without any evidence, he has publicly accused Michelle Obama of being a man. He has attacked Jews and made many anti-semitic comments. He is an open racist, homophobe and xenophobe. I, personally, find him to be morally corrosive.  He is no friend to public education and he embraces an ideology that is sickening. 

He is now running for Governor of North Carolina in 2024. 

2023: Thanks to the defection of Trisha Cotham, the Republicans now have veto power and are ready to wield it as we saw on the passage of the Abortion Ban Bill that went into effect when they overrode Governor’s Coopers veto in May. 

House Bill 823 passed and is now in the Senate and is most likely to pass. The passage of this bill will be a devastating blow to public education. It will divert millions of dollars from an already starved public education system to private, religious schools with ZERO accountability. 

 Don’t be hoodooed by private school vouchers

In the midst of this assault on public education is the 30 year long court battle about funding or the lack of, for North Carolina public schools known as the Leandro case. Multiple rulings have been handed down in favor of Leandro.  In 2021 Judge Lee ordered the state of North Carolina to release the funds to the schools and the GOP-led GA refused to do so, marking an unprecedented moment in history when a State Legislature openly defies a court order.  In 2022, the North Carolina State Supreme Court heard this case for the third time and for the third time ruled that the state has failed its public school system and ordered the money to be released. Once again the NCGA does nothing. However, in the wake of the 2022 election the Republicans took control of the North Carolina State Supreme Court and in an unprecedented move reversed three previous court rulings. Not because there was something wrong with the rulings, but because they did not like the rulings. One of the reversed court rulings was Leandro. Once again disrespecting North Carolina public education and its teachers, students and families. 

 Leandro: What is it and why it matters 

 New elected NC Supreme Court reverses Leandro ruling

The future of the public school system  in North Carolina is in peril. More than 70 education bills are cycling or have cycled through our state legislature so far this year. Most of them will not make education or any classroom better for North Carolina students or teachers. The only way to stop this outright war on public education is through voting. Vote for the person, not the party. I urge you to vote for those that support public education. Without it our communities will suffer.

North Carolina students deserve better.

North Carolina citizens deserve better. 

North Carolina deserves better.