Humdinger of a Republican Primary!

 

Republicans must decide on March 5th between Catherine Truitt, the incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction (and a total weak-kneed RINO to some of the MAGA crowd), and Michele Morrow, failed school board candidate and Scourge For God who intends to return Christian and Nationalist "morality" to the school system. The winner of this primary will face the winner of the Democratic primary (about which, more later) this November.

Catherine Truitt

The crowd over at DailyHaymaker.com hate her guts because she's never sufficiently denounced diversity, equity, and inclusion in education -- don't ask me for specifics; my eyes glaze over at the first mention of DEI, CRT, IDGAF, with never any collaborating detail -- just disproportional anger about vague happenings at school because little blond-headed Johnny came home supposedly hating his own skin for the sins of history his teacher implied he needed to repent.

Truitt seems a lot less liberal than Brant Clifton alleges. I'd say she's standard-issue Republican, the weakest tea on the whole philosophical proposition that a country must educate all its children. She takes money from the people she's supposed to regulate, namely out-of-state, for-profit charter schools, and has refused to challenge the credentials or record of such companies as American Leadership Academy Monroe, recently approved for a new charter (after two previous failures over issues like "conflicts of interest in the school’s governance, rapid expansion of [the home company] into North Carolina without sufficient evidence of academic success, and drawbacks of giving public tax dollars to an out-of-state corporation").

Truitt is being challenged for the nomination by the candidate who will bookend perfectly with Mark Robinson.

Michele Morrow

She made quite a spectacle running for seat #9 on the Wake County School Board in 2022 (getting just under 36% of the vote against the winner's almost 56%). Though the Wake School Board technically runs without party labels, everybody usually knows, and Morrow was endorsed by the Wake Republican Party. She was also endorsed by Moms for Liberty.

Morrow, 53, a former nurse, has home-schooled all five of her children, and has been an effective spokesman for her side because she can be non-kooky and makes perfect sense on some issues, like the need for more trained school nurses, yet the extreme views she's learned to dampen in public came out in the open after she established herself as a flashpoint presence on social media, famously labeling public schools “socialism centers” and “indoctrination centers” and urging people not to send their children to them. During a candidate forum in September 2022, she said, “I think the whole plan of the education system from day one has actually been to kind of control the thinking of our young people.” (There's always a conspiracy, no?) She also pushed conspiracy theories on 2020 election fraud and COVID-19 vaccines and posted about “taking out” the enemies of her people. She hates "social activism" in school. Social activism apparently belongs entirely over the barrier at Capitol Hill: Morrow took her oldest children to the January 6th Capitol riot, said on a live Facebook feed that she was there to teach her children "a lesson about citizens’ role in a democracy," but also claimed later that she had tried to dissuade rioters from pounding on and breaking windows.

Watching her current video introduction for Superintendent of Public Instruction, we see a very nicely turned out candidate -- lovely, really -- saying some pretty standard stuff at first about guaranteeing a good education for every child. Then things change, perhaps when she wields the word conservative, and here they come, the dreaded spew of ominous initials -- DEI, CRT -- as she drills down into the horrors of children coming to hate their own white skin because of confronting unpleasant facts in history. Morrow's game is barely contained fright. And make no mistake: Morrow is the Iron Woman who is gonna put a stop to all of it, reinstating "the true history of our great nation." She's intense under a surface of apparent calm, rigid in posture, animated in face, remembering to smile on key words. You can almost hear her gritting teeth.

Here's Morrow in action in front of the Wake County School Board on June 6, 2023:

Un-Trumping North Carolina: Democrat Jen Mangrum, Running for State Superintendent of Schools

Jen Mangrum is running for an open seat which will put her on the Council of State. The previous Superintendent of Public Instruction, Republican Mark Johnson, had bigger ambitions. He opted not to run for reelection in 2020 and ran instead in a crowded Republican primary field for Lieutenant Governor, an office much favored by rising politicians in North Carolina (and by some empty suits). Mark Johnson finished 3rd in the primary (out of 9 candidates) with 12 percent of the vote.

His tenure since 2016 as Superintendent was fraught. The scandal over Johnson's attempt to force a contract for Istation, instead of a competitor reading program called Amplify (as I don't know the ins and outs of this hardware, I won't attempt to characterize the machinery), stirred up a hornet's nest of teacher pushback against Johnson's dictatorial and unqualified decision-making. Well known educator and NC education blogger Justin Parmenter wrote:

So yeah, there were definitely bad actors involved in the Istation contract controversy. Superintendent Mark Johnson himself was chief among them.

The Istation scandal was not the only scandal Johnson produced in his sad term as superintendent (think iPads), but it was the one that stunk the most. 

It also perfectly encapsulated his failed leadership of our public schools in that it boiled down to an appalling disregard for the insight of experienced educators in making important decisions that impact our students. 

Johnson simply didn’t care what teachers thought.

I think I can speak for the majority of North Carolina’s public school educators when I say: Superintendent Mark Johnson will not be missed.

 

Jen Mangrum won her Democratic primary against four competitors with 33 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a run-off. I've been a fan of hers since she ran against Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger in the 2018 mid-terms. She brought the heat and showed a commitment to public service that I can only admire in an age of self-serving politicians. Mangrum had to fight to get on the ballot, and she never stopped fighting the Phil Berger machine. In fact, her race for Superintendent of Public Instruction can be thought of as a continuation of her crusade to dismantle Berger's terrible influence over education:

"Public education is the core of our democracy," Mangrum says, and Phil Berger has presided over the systematic dismantling of that core in North Carolina. Mangrum has spent her entire life in classrooms, 15 of those years as a public school teacher. She's now teaching at a higher level at UNC-Greensboro, helping to train young people for the classroom. She recently earned the endorsement of the Network for Public Education, which called Phil Berger "the worst enemy of public education in the North Carolina General Assembly .... Berger has used his position as leader of the Senate to promote the privatization of North Carolina’s public schools. His policies have been harmful to the dedicated teachers of the state."

Mangrum's Republican opponent, Catherine Truitt, gets a "moderate" rating from the Heritage Alliance, the conservative org that produces the iVoterGuide. Truitt says she "agrees" with "school choice, including voucher programs, tax credits, charter schools, private schools, and home schools," and she checks the expected conservative box on right to life (anti-abortion). But she also said she disagreed with this statement: "Governments should define marriage as between one man and one woman; no other definition of marriage should be legalized or supported with taxpayer or public funds."

Truitt -- on paper at least -- is far more qualified for the job than Mark Johnson ever was.