NC Republicans are dividing and conquering on public schools. One group can stop them.

The Southern strategy was a divide-and-conquer political approach that the Republican Party implemented after the Civil Rights Movement to successfully recruit white working class voters and elected officials like Jesse Helms from the Democratic Party. To combat the Democrats’ expansion of the white middle class through government programs like the New Deal, GI Bill, and Social Security, Republicans used identity politics and race-baiting to win the white Southern vote.

The GOP’s current Southern strategy in North Carolina effectively transcends race but serves the same purpose — splitting regular folks using public education and the gentle words “school choice.”

It has allowed a select group to dump regular North Carolinians’ tax revenue into their investment portfolios while school funding has languished at pre-recession levels.

I don’t begrudge any marginalized family who has found an environment where their child is thriving, whether traditional public school or a charter school. However, I refuse to engage in an intellectually dishonest argument over who can do more with less.

Doing so is like watching Jerry Springer where two women who’ve been cheated on by the same man, fight each other instead recognizing him as the problem.

All of our schools are shortchanged. The better question is what could we do with more resources and collaboration.

I must give the other side credit, however, for manipulating this issue by always comparing the lowest-performing traditional public schools with the best-performing charter schools in an apples to oranges fashion. It misleads folks into simplistic thinking that charter equals better, meaning the solution to poor education is simply “more choice.”

But when you control for socioeconomics, traditional public and charter schools perform very similarly. That said, there’s a nuanced question that is often ignored in these discussions.

When a child is kicked out of a charter, or when a charter school loses its charter and closes, where do those students go?

They go to our traditional public schools, including to many schools that we simply identify as “failing.” Meanwhile, charters are left with more “massaged” testing cohorts.

Separately, what are the typical demographics of the students who are kicked out of the charter school and/or who attend charters that fold unexpectedly leaving them scrambling to return to traditional public schools further behind than when they started?

Black. Brown. These students are often from families with low incomes. The children and families who’ve been sold “this is your way out” are often the very ones who have lost out in this decade-long experiment of charter school deregulation and lifting of the cap on charter schools, creating an educational Wild West.

Finally, when this occurs how much of the money returns with our academic refugees to the under-resourced traditional public schools? Zero.

Over the past decade, the N.C. General Assembly has passed six corporate tax cuts and cut income taxes for the wealthy, costing the state $12 billion, according to a. Budget & Tax Center estimate.

You know what would help North Carolina reach those third grade reading scores we keep trying to reach by way of philanthropy? That $12 billion and additional teaching assistants would be a solid foundation, so school volunteers could be the supplements they’re best utilized as.

Saying money isn’t the problem is gaslighting, like teaching financial literacy while continuing to pay people a $7.25 minimum wage. If money didn’t matter, you wouldn’t spend $30,000-plus per year to send your kids to private school — the same amount you eventually use to incarcerate our kids.

I invite our corporate community to challenge N.C. legislators to stop defunding our schools, going against the judge’s orders in the Leandro court case, and to produce a real budget that would end the pipeline of teachers leaving our state for South Carolina. If we aren’t willing to do that, then let’s admit that we really don’t care that much.

This story was originally published August 18, 2021 at 11:58 AM.