Conservatives for educational mediocrity

by | Mar 28, 2018 | Features, Politics | 1 comment

Before 2011, Republicans claimed great concern over educational failure. Flaccid schools sank in seas of bureaucratic mediocrity. Government, Democrats and the NCAE–especially the NCAE–bore the blame. Only conservative innovators could rescue our kids from the swamp. Progress was urgent.

If only. After a brief but intense onslaught of school-busting, the NCGOP has settled into comfort with mediocrity. Numerous crises go ignored year after year. In place of urgency has come a willfully delusional contentment.

For Republican policies have failed one by one. Charter growth has greased the exit of the affluent from community public schools. Virtual charters thudded into the cellar. Class-size requirements long menaced art and PE, and that crisis is not over yet. The black-white achievement gap has expanded under Republican dominance. Starkly, disturbingly, undeniably, our test scores have begun to stagnate or fall.

Republicans care little. Nowhere is their indifference more obvious than in teacher pay. As usual, Civitas presents the most intense defense of conservative dogma. Chief torch bearer Donald Bryson jovially boasted that the state’s teachers make $2,000 more than the median income. This was a declaration of victory, even though every teacher holds a college degree and only one-third of the state’s workforce says the same. Challenged with this contradiction, Bryson stood his ground.

Simply put, conservatives think it’s okay to be forty-first in teacher salaries. Cost of living, pay comparisons and any number of other arguments are on tap to justify this clear acceptance of failure. Teachers matter a little, just not as much as point scoring and fiscal minimalism.

Expect a concession or two before the midterms. It will be, to use an obscure technical term, half-assed. Republican budget bakers can’t even bear to offer half a loaf.

1 Comment

  1. willard cottrell

    All of us need to remember that republicans worship a “celebration of Ignorance”. They like to call it ‘common sense’. The reality is they’re too lazy to use their brains. They are and always have been looking for easy answers to complex problems. They’ll never change. What have any of our republican critters (at ANY level) done to improve the lot of N Carolinians?

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