I’m old enough to remember when Republicans pummeled Democrats for unfunded mandates. Unfunded mandates are regulations or requirements passed by legislatures or Congress without the money to pay for them. That’s exactly what Republicans are doing to our public school system.
The North Carolina legislature passed a law lowering class sizes for kindergartners through third grade. That’s a good idea except that the Republicans in the General Assembly didn’t include money for the classroom space needed to meet the new requirement. In response, school districts across the state say they might need to cut arts and physical education programs. That’s bad for schools and bad for our children. It’s also the epitome of an unfunded mandate.
At the same time, Republicans are crowing about a potential budget surplus. The state is apparently $322 million ahead of schedule in tax collections. Last year, the state had a surplus of $1 billion. Really, though, the state isn’t running a surplus. Republicans aren’t paying their bills and sticking local governments with the tab. That’s not a surplus. That’s bait and switch.
In North Carolina, state government is responsible for funding public education. Local governments are responsible for school construction. However, when state laws, not growth, require more classrooms, the legislature should fund those classrooms, especially in poorer counties.
Instead of helping schools, though, the Republicans in the legislature will probably make more tax cuts. For them, passing money on to their wealthy benefactors is more politically palatable than helping schools systems build classrooms. We’ll hear plenty from them about how many taxes they’ve cut and very little about how many governments and people they’ve shortchanged.
Personally, I’m not opposed to some GOP ideas about reforming public schools. I believe we need smaller class sizes, even smaller than they’ve proposed. I’m also not against charter schools if they’re used to provide alternatives to traditional classrooms and have proper oversight and accountability. But I’m vehemently against shifting the financial burden for public education from the state to the counties and I believe that we need to fully fund public education.
Reforming public education should mean improving the educational experience of our children, not spending less money or passing the buck from state government to local school districts.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
It’s beyond “unfunded mandate,” and even beyond “bait and switch.” More accurately, it’s the NCGOP “starving the beast” so that they can claim “it’s broken.”
It’s like they did in McCrory’s first campaign and in the first months of his term, when Republicans labeled Medicaid, DHHS, DENR, the tax system–in fact, everything–“broken.” This was done so as to justify their platform that government can’t ever do anything right, that the private sector needs to be contracted and unleashed to do the government’s work, that all tax collections are always wasted, and that public expenditures are most often unnecessary and always a bad thing.
With their new smaller class room size mandate, the NCGOP is once again setting up our local public schools for failure. They did it with woefully inadequate teacher salaries and per-pupil spending levels (both are still big problems), Now they’ll do it some more by forcing kids into inadequate (broken) learning spaces. And then they’ll spout how public schools aren’t doing the job (they’re broken), and how private schools and charters need to be funded more with tax dollars (to “fix” our schools).
Good points. Watch the ACA repeal for same approach. Local hospitals, doctors and community clinics will be overwhelmed. Strange that this strategy works over and over again. Hard to feel hopeful at this point.