Depend on The Daily Tar Heel to do some first-rate reporting on the "smoke and mirrors" that the Republican leadership in the General Assembly hopes will pacify the state's public school teachers in lieu of serious salary adjustment:
William Brady, a physical education and health teacher at Smith Middle School in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools district, like many other teachers, needs a second job to make ends meet. Kelly Allen, a science teacher at East Chapel Hill High School, said as the price of food and gas has gone up this year, she’s seen her savings decrease.
Both have been teaching for over 20 years, and said their salaries have not kept up with inflation. Last Tuesday, North Carolina legislators negotiating the state budget announced that they had agreed on an 8 percent average pay raise for the state’s teachers next school year – but for veteran educators, like Brady and Allen, the raise will not be significant.
“It's nonsense,” Allen said. “I think my pay, with the current proposal, will go up by about $300 per month — of course that's pre-tax. What a slap in the face! I've given 27 years of my life to educating North Carolina’s children. That will probably give me a few extra tanks of gas each month.” ...
House Speaker Destin Hall (R-Caldwell, Watauga) said the proposed raises would be the largest average teacher pay increase since 2006. However, the North Carolina Association of Educators, a teacher advocacy group, said the proposal was “smoke and mirrors” and criticized the raises as being far below what’s needed to bring the state’s teacher pay in line with the rest of the country.
“Eight percent may sound like a raise — until you pay Duke Energy's skyrocketing electric bill, Aetna's ballooning insurance premium, and more at the gas pump,” Tamika Walker Kelly, president of NCAE, wrote in her statement. “Meanwhile, teachers are still spending more than $1,000 of their own money just to stock their classrooms.”
According to Kelly, the 8 percent raise is an average, meaning every teacher does not get the same amount. Teachers with less than 15 years of experience will see upwards to 17 percent increase in their base pay. Those educators with more than 16 years of experience will see significantly lower raises, at 5 percent or less....
Sure enough (and of course!) two of the (former) members of the NC House Democratic Caucus, Carla Cunningham and Nasif Majeed, joined all the Republicans in overriding Governor Stein's veto of a bill that will commit North Carolina to participating in the federal school voucher program authorized by President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Reps. Cunningham and Majeed had changed their registrations to Unaffiliated after they lost their primaries in March to fellow Democrats who had promised to be more loyal to Democratic Party values. Cunningham and Majeed had participated already with the Republicans in veto overrides prior to today, and had suffered as a result their estrangement from the NC Democratic Party, which cut off data and other resources.
Majeed had originally voted against the measure that he decided today was just fine with him.
A third Democratic House member targeted for his previous footsy with the Republicans, Shelly Willingham, was also defeated in his March primary but did not change his party affiliation. He took the more cowardly route today of simply missing the veto-override session.
Look who came to the teachers protest march on Friday in Raleigh:
Rockingham County Sheriff and NC "Senator Elect" Sam Page seemed only too happy to associate himself with the protesting teachers in Raleigh last Friday. He was there to shake hands, give interviews, and ingratiate himself with a voting bloc not any other Republican General Assembly member would associate with. But Sam Page was there to share the message: Damnit, there's no state budget, and teacher pay has sunk to 46th lowest in the nation. Page was overheard telling Christina Cole, president-elect of the NC Assoc. of Educators (NCAE), and others that "teacher pay needs
to be raised to highest in the Southeast." Cardinal and Pine had video of him saying forthrightly that raising teacher pay was his top priority, that and public safety. Several pics of him posing with individual NCAE members appeared on social media. He created something of a stir.
Of course he was wearing one of his cowboy hats, a sensible straw. The hat's a sigil -- "NOTICE ME" --and the name "Sheriff Sam Page" is already well known to people who follow North Carolina politics, which would include a sizable number of public school teachers. Especially the ones who know he beat Senate President Phil Berger who was no friend to teachers. As far as anyone has testified, Page was the only Republican politician to show his face on Friday. Cool move, partly because it is causing agita among fierce MAGAs, who go rigid when reminded that May Day protests were once a vehicle for the International Communist Party.
I'd like to think that Sam Page showed up -- if even for a little while (I doubt he marched) -- because he's a good guy on the need to pay our public school teachers a living wage. He didn't have to do that for votes. It's quite certain that he will beat the Democrat running against him in November. It's an R+9 district. He doesn't need the teachers' votes but he's embracing a message that will cause the gnashing of teeth for the man who Page beat and who has been the chief block against treating teachers right.
On Wednesday, Dec. 10th, NC House Majority Leader Brenden Jones threw a viral-video tantrum on the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools (CHCCS) superintendent and school board chair, berating, belittling, and bullying them -- he was actually yelling -- about books some third-party special interest told him were used in the schools, accusing the officials of ignoring parts of the new “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” SB49, which seeks to govern discussions of gender identity and which was also meant to show educators just how much contempt people like Rep. Jones have for their profession. After Jones' read titles and short out-of-context selections, in a sneering voice meant to signal to his base just how irredeemable these books really are, he actually tossed them contemptuously on the floor behind him.
Rarely has such fear of the written word and its power to contaminate been exhibited in public by a high-ranking official since at least the Spanish Inquisition.
Rep. Jones was especially het up about a book he waved in the air, Santa’s Husband, which he alleged was recommended to elementary school students in Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools. The superintendent started to respond — “I’m not aware that …” — and Jones angrily interrupted. “You’re the superintendent. You're not aware of what's going on in your school system? You don't know what's printed? It’s trash,” he yelled, tossing the book over his shoulder. After the hearing, a Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools official issued a statement refuting Jones’s allegation: “We have once again searched our school and classroom libraries, and that book is not offered. CHCCS has not recommended this book for children of any age, as that would be a decision for parents to make for their own children.”
I have to admit that the superintendent actually sort of brought this on himself, having been recorded speaking to a teachers meeting in January 2024, saying what he really thought about SB49, opining that in his opinion parts of the law are unacceptably discriminatory. He indicated that he would be reluctant to enforce what was going to inhibit some students from being their authentic selves. Griffin later wrote in a February 2024 email to staff that although the school board had voted to adopt the new law as policy, there were exceptions possible -- far as the superintendent was concerned -- related to classroom discussions and the requirement to notify parents about any change in the way enrolled children were referring to themselves. It’s a fad, right now, adopting preferred pronouns. It's seems silly to old people like me, but it's not going to end Western civilization.
The video of the superintendent's sharing of his opinion on the law and his subsequent email to staff got into the hands of @LibsofTikTok, the username of various anti-LGBTQ and far-right social-media accounts operated by a former real estate agent from Brooklyn, Chaya Raichik, who's big into the whole "groomer" hysteria. So by that route, the horrifying goods on the superintendent got into the hands of Rep. Jones, who knows a great opportunity for grand-standing when he sees one.
I betcha ten dollars Rep. Jones, as a loyal Republican soldier, voted multiple times total for Lt. Gov porn-meister Mark Robinson -- in both primaries and general elections -- and never felt a moral qualm.
College Professors Too Are Being Bullied
Peter Hans, the figurehead who's running the UNC system for the Republicans in the General Assembly, has drafted a policy that declares all course syllabi at the 16 affiliated campuses will now be considered public documents and must be posted on-line for more rabid third-parties to comb through. That news came from The Daily Tar Heel, one of the best investigative orgs in the state.
Alex H. Jones wrote about the new policy: "This is cheap red meat for the MAGA people. I would imagine most of the complaints against course syllabi will come from conservative think tankers paid to made liberals look foolish."
This policy represents an attack on civil liberties derived from centuries of reactionary politics in North Carolina. Civil liberties have always been weak in the South. The Confederacy was essentially a police state, and civil-rights protests were met with state violence. The same has been true with regard to higher education. In the 1850s, politicians drove a UNC professor out of the state for voicing his opposition to slavery. When civil liberties in the South conflict with white supremacy, we know which priority wins out.
And if UNC professors are required to post syllabi online for the perusal of aggrieved right-wing activists, they will be subjected to threats and potentially even violence. Doubt it? Look at the number of acts of political violence MAGA Republicanism has inspired over the last ten years. The intent is to make professors nervous, over the long term to suppress the teaching of left-leaning ideas at UNC. It’s an attack on academic freedom and freedom of speech.
Nobody pays attention to newspaper endorsements any more. People may have once cared what leading state newspapers all across the nation editorialized about, and whom they endorsed for office, but who cares these days? Sure, the endorsed candidate cares, his team, his family, a few close friends, but nobody else. Nobody reads any more. They look at their phones, and newspaper endorsements don't even register.
But some newspaper evaluations of candidates who didn't win endorsement just beg for memorialization. The NandO today:
For a moment, forget all the worst things you know about Michele Morrow. Forget that she advocated for a pro-Trump military coup on Jan. 6, or that she called for the public execution of former president Barack Obama, or her disturbing video post about seeing people who didn’t look or sound like her in a local retail store.
Take away all of that — alongside so many other troubling and bizarre comments — and what are you left with? A Republican nominee to lead the North Carolina’s public school system who has no experience working in public schools, no children who were enrolled in public schools, and no experience in leadership or public office.
Extremism aside, Michele Morrow is wholly unqualified to hold the office she seeks, more so than any major party state superintendent candidate in our state’s history.
An important veto last Friday (Sept. 20th) by Governor Cooper of NCGOP legislation that allocates several hundred million more dollars to an expanded private school voucher program, money that can absolutely be handed out equally to the rich and privileged, who hardly need taxpayer money to afford school for their offspring. It's an astounding piece of legislation demonstrating the ethereal wishes of a group of people who have been dismantling public support for public education for years and who as a collective actually supports the ambitions of Michele Morrow, who would gut public education for the Lord, as Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Of course, the Republicans in the GA can and will override Cooper's veto, because they have super-majorities in each chamber, but super-majorities of only one vote, so Democrats have their best chance in years to break that super-majority and earn the right to uphold the vetoes of our next Democratic governor. (You don't need to be reminded, of course, that the famous super-majority-making Tricia Cotham, who became turncoat, is currently in a death-match with Democrat Nicole Sidman for her House seat. Cotham''s district was obligingly gerrymandered to alleviate her vast unpopularity with both Democrats and independents, but was the gerrymandering sufficient to save her? Maybe not, in a blue wave.)
Last Friday Cooper also vetoed a strong-armed measure to force sheriffs to cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement officers and turn over any arrestees who might be undocumented to ICE's tender mercies. The Trump mentality of "make 'em feel the whip" quickly invaded some Federal agencies more than others.
This year has felt right for a political change of hue, a blue wave that could wipe out super-majorities, if not whole careers. The atmosphere has grown tremblingly pregnant ever since Joe stepped aside and Kamala took over the crusade, and for that selfless and no doubt incredibly painful self-sacrifice, President Biden deserves and no doubt in my mind will have the lasting kudos of history.
She who would be Superintendent of all NC Schools -- Michele Morrow
Religious schooling is familiar to me. As a graduate of Christ The King (CTK) Catholic High School in Huntersville, North Carolina, religion wasn’t just in my school. It was the central idea of my schooling. The core tenet of CTK’s teaching philosophy was "faith through reason."
Teachers and students alike had difficulty grappling with that ideological framework. In my first year at CTK, we learned about the Big Bang and the theory of evolution in history class. The next class of the day was Theology, where our teacher did not just call those ideas into question but claimed that they were unequivocally false. Between claims about homosexuals infiltrating the Church, he also liked to discuss the difference between Christianity and Catholicism, highlighting with vigor the "heresies" of other Christian doctrines and biblical interpretations, and of course, his belief that god put dinosaurs on earth to "test our faith."
One day in my Junior year, after I had come out and was known to be gay by both my peers and professors, my history teacher decided to spend an entire class session talking about homosexuality. He asked us, “Well, why would gays want to get married? What’s the point other than getting government benefits?” and claimed that gay people knew they weren’t truly married if they weren’t married in the church. He finished this diatribe with a point directed at me and my mother, who was also the biology teacher at the school, saying in front of my classmates, “If you let your son be homosexual, it’s the same as letting him jump off a bridge." One of my classmates brought this to the administration, who decided that my history teacher was speaking within Catholic doctrine and therefore was not in the wrong.
On Thursday, June 27th, the Oklahoma State Superintendent mandated that the Bible be taught in Oklahoma public schools. As a person who went to a Catholic school, these are some of the questions that I believe must be asked when we’re thinking about teaching religious doctrine in schools:
Which doctrines and interpretations of the Bible are we going to teach?
Will we allow or encourage teachers to contradict scientific claims that are universally accepted but are in conflict with the Bible?
Does it mean vilifying queer students and students of other religious and cultural backgrounds who don’t fit into a teacher’s interpretation of the Bible?
If a student disagrees with a teacher’s Biblical interpretation, will their grades be affected?
These are not rhetorical questions. When voters go to vote in North Carolina’s state superintendent election this year, they should be asking these questions because the Republican candidate Michele Morrow is not thinking of them at all. She will likely try to implement the Oklahoma state policy in tandem with other Republican states regardless of the chaos in classrooms that will follow. Voters in this election must consider if they want to live in a state where these questions need to be answered and where their tax dollars are spent, through private school vouchers ("Opportunity Scholarships"), to confuse and punish students without the same religious views as their teachers.
At the Senate Rules Committee hearing Tuesday morning on S 912, Ralph Hise's scheme for changing both the Watauga County Commission and the Watauga County Board of Education -- gerrymandered into geographic districts that Hise came up with in the dead of night -- met with strong and unanimous pushback from current Watauga School Board members. The letter below was read into the record, and for the record, the Republican committee members heard but ignored it, voting immediately and without any discussion to approve the Hise bill and send it on to the Senate floor. The bill is not scheduled to go into effect for the School Board until the elections of 2026, but without successful legal action, the schools we know and love will be upended for the whim of a power-hungry state senator.
Dear Senator Rabon and members of the Rules and Operations Committee of the Senate,
The Watauga County Board of Education met this evening (June 17). During the "Board comments" section of our meeting each of the five members of our Board shared their thoughts about Senate Bill 912.
Each member of our Board, for various reasons, expressed opposition to the bill. Even though each of us on the Watauga County Board of Education was elected through a nonpartisan process, we thought it would be helpful to the committee to know that of our 5 members the political affiliations are equally distributed with 2 republicans, 2 democrats, and 1 independent We hope this demonstrates to the committee that our reactions and comments are not politically motivated. They are motivated by the belief that this bill has the potential to weaken one of the consistently top rated school systems in the state.
We feel it is important for you to know that none of us were told this bill was being considered nor were we asked if it was needed (or if it would be helpful in any way). Furthermore, during our discussion of this matter, each of us shared that we had not had anyone in our county speak to any of us indicating they felt there was a need to change anything about the way School Board members have been elected in Watauga.
One of our Board members reached out to the director of our county's Elections and also to the Chair of the Board of Elections and asked the following questions;
Have voters registered any complaints with your office about the election process for the Board of Education? Both the director and the Chair replied, no.
Has Sen. Hise voiced any complaints with your office about the election process for the Board of Education? Both the director and the Chair replied, no. One of our major concerns is that we believe this bill has been submitted with very little input from the citizens of our county. Embedded in this concern is our belief that very few citizens of our county even know this bill has been proposed.
Another concern we have is around the issue of moving to district elections and eliminating at-large elections. Each of us have varying concerns about this. Each member expressed the concern that this would create the potential to limit the number of people who would run for Board of Education that are passionate about public education and motivated to act in the best interest of all our county's schools. Conversely, we feel it would increase the number of people who are coerced into running just because a district needs a school board candidate.
We also are concerned that by electing school board members from districts instead of at large it creates the potential for divisiveness and self-interest instead of cohesiveness and "best for the whole school system" thinking. For the committee's consideration it may be helpful to know that our Board of Education has historically enjoyed having representation from a variety of areas of our county. (This information can be provided to the committee should it like to know the breakdown of representation from the various areas of our county.) We can also provide information (if requested) that shows how moving to district representation could generate potential Board of Education members that would not be acceptable to the majority of the citizens or fairly represent the current distribution of schools in Watauga County.
It is appropriate to add that the Board would like to express gratitude to Senator Hise for including the provision that our Board of Education elections remain non-partisan.
To conclude, in summarizing the many thoughts of the current Watauga County Board of Education members, we have consensus in our belief this bill should not be approved because of the aforementioned concerns and the following additional statements.
The way our citizens elect the members of the Board of Education is not broken and doesn't need fixing.
We are consistently one of the top performing school systems in North Carolina and we are very concerned this bill has the potential to weaken our school system.
Mr Chairman, should you or any of the committee wish to have further information, or dialogue, you may reach out to me or any of our other members. Their names and email can be found on our school system's website at https://www.wataugaschools.org/.
Thank you in advance for your attention to this message and to our concerns as the officials elected by the citizens of Watauga County to represent our excellent school system.
Justin Parmenter, a 7th grade language arts teacher in Charlotte whose Twitter feed is a daily must-read for me, published an editorial today in the News and Observer that takes a bite out of the youngest punk Republican in the General Assembly, Jake Johnson, for the bill he wrote that would force every public school teacher in the state to post online their lesson plans -- just the public school teachers, mind you, not the private school teachers whose private enterprises are getting lots more money in the form of vouchers and a free ride on accountability.
The purpose of Johnson's "punching down" on public school teachers appears to be nothing more than an attempt to "out" any "socialist indoctrination" going on in these here parts and thereby intimidate teachers and let them know that the state of North Carolina really has total contempt for what they do. No wonder, as Parmenter points out, the state is losing teachers at an alarming rate ("1 in 9 resigned last school year").
I wrote about Jake Johnson extensively when he was appointed to his seat in the NC House in 2019 to replace that other disgraced young punk Cody Henson, and I think the facts still stand:
Jake Johnson claimed that he went to college to get a degree in business administration but that Barack Obama in the White House was the straw that broke his business back. He switched to political science out of revenge for Obama and became an avowed partisan warrior against what America was becoming under a president who might have been -- probably was -- born in Kenya. I found on-line where he was scheduled to speak to the Asheville Tea Party back last January on the "steps we are going to have to take to get younger people into conservative politics." (I wish I'd heard that rap!)
Here's the passage in Johnson's biography that's almost forgotten: He says he served as "field director" for the successful congressional campaign of Mark Harris. That would be the Reverend Mark Harris, whose winning campaign against Democrat Dan McCready in November of 2018 was called back to be redone because of massive ballot fraud committed -- wait for it -- in the field operation.
This is the guy who now has a plan to drive even more public school teachers out of the profession.
On March 6th, the day after the primary that saw Republican incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt get kicked out by Republican voters (after one term) and replaced by an ideological wrecking ball named Michele Morrow, a home-schooler and very determined enemy of public education as it has evolved in the 21st Century. Morrow will be on your ballot come November to run the Department of Education, up against Democrat Mo Green.
On March 6th, the day after that thunderbolt of Truitt's defeat -- unexpected -- unimaginable, really, that a moderate professional like Catherine Truitt would get bumped off the ticket by someone considered a nut -- the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce put out an astounding official statement warning that the primary win of Michele Morrow was a threat to the state's "business climate" (and if you immediately flash on Dan Bishop and those people passing the Bathroom Bill in 2016 and costing the state billions in moola and years of bad press and worse memories, you would be right). Gov. Pat McCrory signed the Show Us Your Gender Act in March of 2016 and the stars fell on North Carolina in a media catastrophe that lasted until they repealed the law a quick year later in 2017.
The Chamber evidently thinks that Michele Morrow is another bathroom bill waiting to metastasize.
"When both parties move to the opposite ends of the political spectrum," wrote the Chamber's political director, "it erodes the quiet, bipartisan work necessary to move our state forward. Moderating voices in each caucus will be replaced with partisan ideologues that cause division and create controversy."
Division and controversy -- very bad for business.
Here's a video of Morrow interviewed by Bill O'Neil for WXII. She complicates the political equation by sounding reasonable (there has been indeed an explosion of gender fluidity, but whether you can blame the schools for that and not pop culture seems debatable). She scapegoats the teaching of history for daring to admit the historic evidence that white people have made some bad choices for owning Black people and squeezing Indians into the corner. And Morrow can get fairly giddy about sending more tax dollars to private academies and thus starving public education. And incidentally, she took some of her kids to the January 6th siege of the Capitol, though she says she never went into the building.
She says that in addition to banning books that lean too far into any kind of sexual awareness, she wants books about "traumatic experiences" also banned from school libraries. "But couldn't a book bring some comfort to you to know you're not alone?" asked O'Neil. "No," sez Morrow, decisively, as though the word "comfort" had triggered an odd antipathy.
Her persuasiveness coupled with her calm demeanor make her seem a kind of coherent culture analyst. She has noticed some blatant blunders by education bureaucrats that areactually blatant blunders. But it's how far backward you're willing to go to balance the scales that gives one plenty of pause about Morrow. There is on-line an extended video of her laying out her platform (and incidentally her personality) in a Zoom presentation to the Pasquotank PAC. (The Pasquotank PAC, named for the county, "promotes Republican and Unaffiliated Conservatives in Northeastern North Carolina." Lord help me but I find her persuasive, and I can see her appeal. She talks well and without visible notes and makes sense of things for the MAGA crowd who want everything razed to the ground.
In other words, she has to be stopped.
Maurice "Mo" Green, Democrat
Mo trails behind him a distinguished career in education: Executive Director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation from 2016-2023. More than seven years as superintendent of Guilford County Schools. Before that, general counsel of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, then chief operating officer and then deputy superintendent. He began his career as a lawyer in private practice after doing two United States judicial clerkships. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics and a law degree, both from Duke University. (Indebted to PamsPicks for the details.)
He's about as establishment as you can get. And Morrow is a disestablishmentarian. The clash alone ought to give you the willies when it comes to deciding if our public education will teach inclusiveness as part of the fabric of our Republic.
Very right race for the top five finishers. A total of six candidates will go
through to the November ballot:
Marshall Ashcraft 4,765
Adam Hege 4,347
Chad Cole 4,208
Charlotte Mizelle Lloyd 4,204
Alison Carroll Idol 4,128
Tom Ross 2,039
Ashcraft, Hege, and Lloyd are Democrats. Cole, Idol, and Ross are Republicans. Anything can happen, come November. All these candidates were researched and written up by PamsPicks. Appears that the two most radical candidates were eliminated.
The high-level duo of Tom Ross and Margaret Spellings, co-chairs last year of the Governor’s Commission on the Governance of Public Universities in North Carolina, issued some eight months ago a 153-page set of recommendations for reforming the way the university system is governed. Both Tom Ross and Margaret Spellings are past presidents of the UNC system, hounded out of office, incidentally, by increasingly conservative boards of governors put in place by the Republican bosses in the General Assembly. Turns out, of course, that their recommendations for reform to remove partisanship and increase diversity were akin to pissing into the wind. To suggest that the politicians should stay the hell away from boards of trustees and governors, when they had only just recently won enough control to punish the liberals in the classrooms -- that idea was dead abirthing. Increase diversity? Ross and Spellings actually used that word, which to Christian conservatives is evidence of a plot to turn every kid gay. So the Commission report disappeared from off the earth.
So it's nice to hear that Ross and Spellings brought the whole topic up again. They talked about the dangers of vindictive partisanship in our colleges and universities during an online discussion organized by the nonprofit Coalition for Carolina. Then Joe Killian, writing about the on-line conversation for the NC Newsline, brought it to my attention.
Killian republished the Ross/Spellings report’s top-line recommendations (which get better toward the bottom):
Expand the UNC Board of Governors from 24 to 36 members – with 32 of them appointed and four standing members
Expand each campus board of trustees to 15 members
Allow the minority party of the General Assembly to appoint eight seats on the UNC Board of Governors
Reserve four seats on the board of governors and campus boards of trustees for the chairs of the faculty and staff assemblies
Mandate 16 of the board of governors’ members be appointed from eight designated parts of the state to promote geographic diversity on the board; the other 16 would be appointed at-large
Institute a one year “cooling off” period between serving in the General Assembly or being an active lobbyist and serving on the board of governors or a board of trustees
Create a new “Center for Higher Education” which would monitor the UNC Board of Governors and maintain a database of well-qualified candidates for appointment to the boards
The ruthlessness of the conservatives toward higher education -- when it's coupled in any way with progressive advocacy -- came to full flower in 2015 with the punishment of Gene Nichol, a distinguished faculty member in the Chapel Hill School of Law and past President of William and Mary College and a consistent critic of the Republican super-majority in the General Assembly. It's almost Putinesque how they targeted Nichol with specific poison pain, took away his Center for Poverty, Work, and Opportunity -- just shut it down because some politicos complained that Nichol was actively helping the poor with some kind of legal aide.
The conservatives are on a jihad to stamp out liberalism in higher education. They don't need no recommendations from over-educated bureaucrats.
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 TruittThe 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:
I'm indebted to Rob Schofield's NCNewsline podcast of October 9th for new information on just how awful the hidden provisions in the state budget are turning out to be. They're not just naked and crushing power-grabs but also so badly written that some of them can't be enforced. Two examples:
Schofield: "The State Board of Education learned from its attorney that while it can hear appeals from parents regarding local school board actions under the new Parents Bill of Rights, it has no authority to take any action."
Under the controversial law, educators must alert parents if their child changes their name or pronoun at school. It also restricts instruction about gender identity and sexuality in K-4 classrooms and makes provisions for parents to review schoolbooks.
Parents can take concerns to the state board if a concern has not been resolved by a local school district within 30 days. Parents must submit concerns to the state board in writing.
Bad Law-Writing Example Number 2:
"The UNC-Chapel Hill official directed to establish a new conservative school on the campus [the School of Civic Life and Leadership] by year’s end, says some of the directives he faces are so illogical that they defy the laws of physics."
In addition to a $2 million allocation in each of the next two fiscal years, the budget sets an aggressive hiring deadline of December 31 for the school’s dean. Typically, such a hiring process can take a year or more. The budget also requires the university to hire between 10 and 20 tenured or tenure track faculty for the new school from outside the university....
Prominent faculty members [said that] mandating details down to the number and type of faculty to be hired and from where they must come is a clear message from the legislature that a faculty-led process cannot be trusted to create the school the legislature’s Republican majority wants in the way it wants it.
Coined by scholar Jarvis Givens, “fugitive pedagogy” refers to the subversive strategies Black educators used to teach students the skills to think and to survive despite a system of education that was designed to only prepare them for manual labor.
--Lisa Delpit, MacArthur "genius" honoree, author of Multiplication Is For White People (quoted here)
"Jarvis Givens is a [young!] professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a faculty affiliate in the department of African & African American Studies at Harvard University" (Harvard bio). His first book in 2021 was titled Fugitive Pedagogy because it traced the history of Black educators -- either informal teachers or licensed instructors -- who managed to pass along to their Black students knowledge and information that they weren't meant to have. That's the fugitive part. The pedagogy consisted of "This is who you are, this is who we are, this is how we got here, this is how we've managed to survive here."
Some Black educators are warning that new days have dawned where the teaching of racial reality can get you canned. Fugitive pedagogy becomes a thing again, but it shouldn't be the tool of Black teachers only. White teachers who know a hawk from a handsaw should also participate in undermining the conservative push to make everything seem as rosy as possible and the status quo as guilt-free as a Sunday picnic.
It all started with the election of Michelle Antoine to the Johnston County Board of Education in November 2022. Antoine is the mother of eight children, a once fit outdoor enthusiast, a Southern Baptist, and a crusading social warrior. She confesses her activities against Critical Race Theory with this "influencer brag" on her website: "[I] wrote historical, current, and informational speeches and delivered presentations across the state of North Carolina. Included topics: Critical Race Theory; Gender Theory; Law, History, and Racism in School Segregation in North Carolina...." (I bet that last one contained some scorching information.)
Antoine ran with the backing of a conservative group calling itself Citizen Advocates For Accountable Government (CAAG -- rhymes with "gag"). CAAG had been aggressively accusing the existing Johnston school board with financial irregularities in the summer of 2022 leading up to Antoine's election, propagandizing for N.C. State Auditor Beth Wood "to come and take a close look at the finances of the Johnston County schools."
With her election, Antoine joined another notorious so-'n'-so already on the school board, Ronald Johnson, who had been indicted for extortion and other crimes in April 2023. He was also censured by the full school board (Antoine dissenting) and fired from his job with the Smithfield police department (for cause). With Johnson still sitting on the board under indictment and with his case pending, he sued the rest of the school board -- excepting Antoine -- in a Federal suit in June alleging civil rights violations. "Johnson says he’s a sexual assault victim. He claims he’s a victim of a conspiracy to remove him from political office and deprive him of a livelihood" (T. Keung Hui).
Another character enters the fray. Also elected to the school board in the elections of 2022, a man named Terry Tippett, who was actually the top vote-getter. He has no love apparently for either Michelle Antoine or Ronald Johnson, which all came to a head on Monday -- two days ago.
It gets complicated. Antoine had sued the school board back on September 12 and talked a judge into sealing the complaint because it contained information that could irreparably hurt Antoine. Antoine actually got a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the school board's getting a report from its attorneys about a grievance that had been filed against Antoine, which she alleged was defamatory. But meanwhile, the school board successfully got the case moved to Federal court, and the TRO ran out last Sunday, so on Monday the rest of the school board scheduled a special meeting to hear the official report on a grievance against Antoine which had been investigated by the attorneys. Antoine dropped her lawsuit before the Monday meeting, perhaps hopeful that the facts could stay hidden. They didn't.
All hell broke loose at the Monday special meeting. Ronald Johnson and Terry Tippett almost came to blows. There was actual physical movement toward one another (you can see the video evidence about Tippett's standing up here). Michelle Antoine had her mike cut off. She decried the "kangaroo court" that she believed she was the holy victim of. Terry Tippett called Antoine “the most uninformed person, the most disrespectful person, the most unprofessional person I’ve ever seen sit on the board of education or any board.”
It's the trumpist brand, isn't it? that Antoine brought with her election. There are Michelle Antoines in many counties, hell-bent on disruption and destruction.
So this is happening in Wilmington. Friday morning the New Hanover School Board convened for a hearing on whether Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, written by Jason Reynolds, adapted from the work of Ibram X. Kendi, should be permanently banned from any school reading list.
Since January, a parent, Katie Gates, has been pushing to ban the book and now, after her request was denied in two different appeals, the school board is deciding its fate. When Gates first complained, her daughter had been assigned Stamped as part of an Advanced Placement course. Since then, her daughter accepted an alternative assignment and has since completed the course, but Gates has continued to pursue getting the book removed....
...the board will determine whether the challenge to the book has “merit” and whether that book should be “retained, removed from the New Hanover County Schools entirely, whether it should be removed to another school level, or whether its availability should be restricted.”
I haven't read Stamped. I rely on an honest broker like Wiley Cash to school me:
The book is a “remix” of Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning created for readers ages 12 and up.
While the book reveals the genesis of racist ideology in America and suggests ways to combat it, Gates characterized it as “embracing dangerous ideologies.” In her complaint, Gates challenged the book through a number of inaccurate “facts,” contending that Thomas Jefferson freed his enslaved people and that the Bible was not used to justify slavery.
In the piece that Cash wrote for The Assembly, he concludes that "the fix" may already be in since two of the board members, including the chair, colluded with Katie Gates: "Much of the board’s public wrestling with this decision appears to be theatrical. Gates and two conservative members of the school board seemingly laid the groundwork for the decision—to be made sometime this fall—months ago. Emails WHQR obtained reveal close coordination between Gates and school board member Josie Barnhart and Chair Pat Bradford."
Cash's interest comes from a personal place:
"I’m a parent of two young children who attend New Hanover County schools, and I’m deeply invested in ensuring that they learn the true complexity of American history. As a North Carolina native who was educated in the state’s public schools, I did not."
For example, Cash writes, he didn't know about the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, a brutal white supremacist coup, until he was in graduate school taking a class on North Carolina literature at UNC-Greensboro. (Many of the rest of us didn't learn about Wilmington until 2020, when Wilmington's Lie came out and won the Pulitzer.) It would be well worth paying the measly subscription price to get Wiley Cash's full essay, for his discussion of Charles W. Chestnutt is well worth the effort.
UPDATE
The board voted Friday 4-3 to temporarily ban the book from the high school curriculum but retain it in high school libraries until the board can update its policy to allow a “balanced” book to be added to the AP course.
Gene Nichol is the liberal UNC law professor who gives the Republican General Assembly the dickens regularly on the op-ed pages of the News and Observer. Nichol is a hard puncher with a gift for clarity:
[The NCGOP's] most consistent goal is to slant the playing field in its favor, democracy be damned. You know the list — redistricting, voter suppression, ballot manipulation, legislative process tampering, impermissible power grabs and more. (Aug. 6)
More? Nichol lays out the full complaint against the Republican super-majority in Raleigh. Number One: "Our nearly all-white Republican legislative caucuses repeatedly burden and disadvantage Black Tar Heels. The case reports of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals prove it to be so. Lawmakers don’t like it mentioned, but it is what it is."
Women (especially the ones of childbearing age) and LGBTQ have been treated as second- and third-class citizens -- with abortion restrictions, gay marriage bans, licenses to discriminate, House Bill 2, and "the brutal targeting of transgender teens."
They target poor people -- abolishing the earned income tax credit, slashing the state’s unemployment compensation program, cutting SNAP benefits for poor kids, and dramatically reducing legal aid support. "Stepping on their necks is, apparently, the moral high ground."
The decimating of public schools. Vouchers, charters, the incursion of corporate entities into education-for-profit -- tearing down public education. "They don’t admit it. They just do it. Day in, day out." For higher education, their loathing of liberal professors like Gene Nichol has spilled over on the state's flagship universities. A stacked Board of Governors with yes-men for Berger/Moore make life sometimes miserable for university chancellors who want to be independent.
That's the path the General Assembly has taken under a Republican majority. Gene Nichol lays it out, and it's a depressing fact, but voters can storm the helm and turn the ship. It's the only thing.
A "monster" schools bill was introduced on July 12, S90, "Children's Laws Omnibus." Text of the bill is linked here, which also contains the official report from the Legislative Analysis Division about what the bill will allow/cause -- which will be plenty to make any flat-earther, pissed-off Moms for Liberty happy and further fuel their hobby of raising holy hell over silly stuff.
I mean, can you imagine? The bill was obviously written to tickle an itch against an entire public education system that has taught far too many youngsters to be tolerant of difference. This is a bill written for people who are angry about tolerance. S90 will unleash real chaos on an already shaken and squeezed school system.
The bill is framed by something dreamily called "the fundamental right to parent," defined in the bill as “the liberty of a parent to direct the upbringing, education, health care, and mental health of the parent’s child.” "That’s dangerously vague," wrote the NandO Editorial Board, "and the ambiguity makes it far too easy for the bill to be weaponized by angry parents seeking to oust educators with whom they disagree."
A sampling of other features in S90 that the Legislative Analysis Division identified:
Section 5 would severely limit sex education, because it's always preferable to keep pubescence ignorant of its own condition.
Section 6 would put partisan parents in a position to censor library holdings and would require detailed -- and we do mean detailed -- syllabi, filed fresh at the beginning of every semester, of what any teacher would be saying about sex and safety in any class.
Section 8 would give parents explicit rights to ban their children from the library and the right to examine their records of borrowing books.
Sections 10 and 11 would give parents the right to sue schools and to get a superintendent fired.
They should have called S90 "Weaponizing Ignorance."
The NC Republican Vision for Schools, contained in a new law the governor vetoed yesterday. House Bill 618: First, empower all sorts of maybe sketchy people to invent charter schools that are draining revenue from public education, and then make sure those sketchy people are never questioned about what they're doing and how they're doing it.
"The legislation creates a new Charter School Review Board with the power to grant, amend, terminate and renew school charters." The governor will have no say whatsoever in appointing the 11 voting members, but (springing this on you now) Phil Berger and Tim Moore each get four appointments apiece, and "two members appointed by the State Board of Education who are not current members of the State Board of Education" and who are charter school advocates in North Carolina, plus the lieutenant governor. It actually singles out "charter school advocates," which should tell you everything you need to know about legislative "intent."
So can you say "naked power-grab"?
The governor left the "naked" part out and substituted a word almost as problematic: “This bill is a legislative power grab that turns responsibility over to a commission of political friends and extremists appointed by Republican legislators, making it more likely that faulty or failing charter schools will be allowed to operate and shortchange their students,” Gov. Cooper said in a statement. “Oversight of charter schools should be conducted by education experts, not partisan politicians.”
Of course Cooper's veto will be overridden, of course. Especially what with Tricia Cotham being the primary sponsor of HB618.
With every move they make, with every breath they take, with every bond they break ... they be grinding down public schools.
J.W. Williamson was the founding editor in 1972 of the Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, which he edited until July of 2000. He has taught college classes in Appalachian history, cultural politics, and literature, and he has lectured widely on the pop-culture history of "Appalachia" in the American consciousness. His books include Interviewing Appalachia, Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films, and Hillbillyland: What the Mountains Did to the Movies and What the Movies Did to the Mountains. He has won the Thomas Wolfe Award given by the Western North Carolina Historical Society, the Laurel Leaves Award given by the Appalachian Consortium, a special Weatherford Award given by Berea College, and the Cratis Williams-James Brown Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association.
The views expressed on WataugaWatch are solely those of J.W. Williamson or individual contributors and are not necessarily shared nor endorsed by the Watauga County Democratic Party nor by any other adults of sound mind in this or any other universe.
