Republicans in North Carolina are forever falling all over themselves to claim they didn’t make cuts to public education. Their argument is all semantics. Yes, in raw dollars there may have been more money in the budget, but the funding didn’t keep up with the combination of inflation and growth in the number of students. But none of that really matters. They definitely underfunded it and that’s their fault.
The latest proof is in the Asheville Citizens-Times. The paper notes that high school students in Asheville will be sharing texts book because of a shortage this year. And then the paper lays out the spending problem. In 2009-10, the state spent $111 million on textbooks, about $76 per student. Since they’ve been in power, Republicans have been spending about $23 million or about $15 per student. That’s a huge gap.
But here’s where Republican try to prove their point. In 2010-11, when the Democrats were in control and the bottom dropped out of both the economy and state revenues, the legislature only allocated $2.5 million, or $1.69 per student. The GOP wants to claim that they are more generous because they spent more than that. That’s hogwash.
Democrats made those cuts in desperate times and paid a serious price for their choices. Still, even with essentially defunding textbooks, the Democrats spent more than twice as much as Republicans over a two year average. The GOP claims of spending more on education are just plain false.
What is not false, is that budgets are about choices and priorities. And at the same time the GOP is screwing our public schools, they are handing huge payouts to their wealthy benefactors. The tax cuts they passed in 2013 disproportionately benefited the rich. Revenues are continuing to fall and our schools, universities and community colleges are paying the price.
Republicans scream class warfare and complain about redistribution of wealth every time Democrats talk about raising taxes on the rich to fund programs that help lower income families. The reality is that the war has been waged against the poor, the redistribution has been from the middle class to the wealthy and now the GOP is now going after the institutions that facilitate upward mobility. Even Standard and Poor’s says that income inequality and the education gap are hurting our economy. In North Carolina, the GOP budgets just makes it worse.
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 >
Faculty within the UNC system are not included in the raises given to state employees FYI, so I hear. Once again, NCGOP expresses how it feels about education, something not worthy of value, not worthy of funding, not worthy of supporting.
I find the politics of NC to be very strange – apparently NCGOP was elected on a “reform” platform and then they all defend doing just what the Democrats did (payback time!)
Their absolute loathing of education is a travesty. There ARE voters who believe NCGOP has “increased” funding for education. Anyone with children in the system knows otherwise. I don’t know ANY parent who is not outraged.
NCGOP talks about “markets” as if they know anything about it. They protected the yacht tax break as they got rid of the tax-free holiday for school supplies. And they are absolutely clueless that in the market for teachers, NC scrapes the bottom. We are losing talented teachers – both K-12 and in UNC system. It will be tough to pull back from this free-fall.
Really, if people want NC to have a future at all, these anti-education politicians absolutely must be voted out. They are not “reforming” education – they are destroying it.
The most terrifying thing I read this week – the suggestion that Art Pope is seeking the presidency of the UNC system. I cannot imagine a worse thing to happen to this state – the utter destruction of a once-very fine system of public universities.
You are so right, Thomas. Today, I received campaign literature from incumbent GOP and Tea Party-endorsed State Senator Chad Barefoot, who unfortunately represents me in the NCGA. It touts how he knows the importance of public education and the university system, and how “Chad raised teacher pay, invested more money in our public schools, and passed proven education reforms.”
These are nothing but prevarications of the facts. Barefoot, of course, didn’t raise teacher pay himself as he implies; more accurately, he voted for is a shell game that stole teacher longevity pay, does not have a solid recurring fiscal base of support, and will not stem the exodus of veteran teachers from NC. He voted to cut support to the UNC system, to continue inadequate funding of school supplies and textbooks, to reduce funding for teaching assistants, to limit Wake County voters’ say-so on when a local sales taxes increase for educational purposes might occur, and to further increase public tax dollar subsidies for enrollment in private schools.
But of course his campaign material just tries to mislead voters about his interest in and support of public education. As you say, it’s just plain false and a bunch of hogwash.
Asking honesty from a contard is like squeezing blood from a stone.