News & Views

The post North Carolina’s chaotic and destructive school voucher free-for-all appeared first on NC Newsline.

Kris Nordstrom, senior policy analyst

A new report from national experts at the Network for Public Education paints a sobering picture of the policy choices North Carolina state legislators have made for our public schools in recent years. The report is called “The Best and the Worst Statehouses for Supporting Public Schools and their Students,” and sadly, it gives North Carolina an “F” grade – lumping us in with a small group of five under-achievers at the very bottom of the 50 states.

Of course, the tragedy of this is that it doesn’t have to be this way. The state has all the resources it needs to adequately fund and support our public schools and take them to the top of the national rankings. Unfortunately, as Kris Nordstrom, a senior policy analyst with the North Carolina Justice Center’s Education & Law Project explains, such an approach would be at odds with the strategy being pursued by Republican legislative leaders to starve traditional public schools and shift taxpayer funding to unaccountable charter and voucher schools.

Prof. Chris Cooper (Photo: wcu.edu)

The 2024 North Carolina Super Tuesday primary election has finally come and gone and now it’s full speed ahead for the next eight months to the November election. And for better or worse, voters should have very little trouble distinguishing the major party candidates.

According to Western Carolina University political scientist, Prof. Chris Cooper, thanks to victories of the Trump wing of the Republican Party that ousted more traditional conservatives in race after race – Governor, Lt. Governor, congressional seats, and of course the presidency — the contrast in the visions espoused by the candidates who will be on the ballot for this fall’s general election could scarcely be wider.

Professor Michael Bitzer (Photo courtesy Catawba College)

Super Tuesday is upon us and that means it’s primary election week in North Carolina and several other states as voters go to the polls to choose major party nominees for president and a host of other important offices. And while the primary season has been rather subdued here, with few of the top contests looking especially close or competitive, this week’s primary will be enormously impactful – especially in congressional districts where gerrymandering has already assured which party’s candidate will win in November. Earlier we got a chance to discuss where things stand in the presidential race, some of the controversies that have arisen, and some of the issues that will likely be front and center in the months to come with Catawba College Political Science professor Michael Bitzer.

Education Law Attorney Matt Ellinwood

In late February, the North Carolina Supreme Court took the extraordinary (and what many see as the deeply worrisome) step of revisiting the landmark Leandro school funding case – a case that has long guaranteed all of the state’s schoolchildren a constitutional right to a sound basic education.

At issue is whether state lawmakers can be ordered to appropriate the funds necessary to make the constitutional guarantee a reality throughout the state, and as we learned in a conversation with attorney Matt Ellinwood – -the director of the North Carolina Justice Center’s Education and Law Project – the arguments before the high court provided great cause for concern. As Ellinwood also noted, however, regardless of the outcome in the case, education advocates have no intention of giving up on their efforts to secure adequate funding for North Carolina’s public schools.

Lauren Fox, Ph.D.

A top challenge facing public schools in North Carolina right now is a chronic teacher shortage – a shortage attributable to pitifully low salaries and several other shortsighted policies. Fortunately, there are some obvious and doable actions that state leaders can take to address this problem – actions detailed in a recent report from experts at the Public School Forum of North Carolina.

And as we learned in a recent conversation with the Forum’s senior director of policy and research, Dr. Lauren Fox, many of these solutions –as well as solutions to the massive funding problem that afflicts several low wealth counties – can be addressed if state lawmakers simply get serious providing the necessary dollars to get the job done.

Read the Forum’s new report: Rebuilding the Educator Pipeline — Policies and Practices to Make it Happen in NC

Ricky Hurtado, former state representative and current chair of the Governor’s Advisory Council on Hispanic/Latino Affairs (Courtesy photo)

If you’re paying any attention to the national political debate these days, you know that the political right has made immigration and a campaign to demonize immigrants its top talking point for the 2024 election cycle. Republicans in the U.S. House have even sought to condition passage of a critical foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, on a Democratic agreement to, effectively, close the southern border.

Meanwhile, here in North Carolina – a place thousands of miles from the border in which immigrants are an essential and hugely beneficial part of the economy and society generally – we’re hearing similar hateful rhetoric and proposals, and recently NC Newsline caught up with a leader who’s working hard to counter them with facts and common sense, the chair of the Governor’s Advisory Council on Hispanic/Latino Affairs, former State Representative Ricky Hurtado.

Noel Nickle, executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty

This week in Johnston County, the death penalty – a punishment our state has not inflicted in close to two decades – will, effectively, go on trial, when one of more than a hundred pending challenges to the racially discriminatory way North Carolina long sentenced people to death is heard in the case of a defendant named Hasson Bacote. Lawyers for Mr. Bacote say they’ll show that race affected not only jury selection and jury sentencing in his case, but in scores of cases across North Carolina.

The trial comes at a moment in which death penalty opponents have launched a spirited new effort to end the death penalty in North Carolina once and for all and last week NC Newsline sat down with on of the leaders of that movement, the executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Noel Nickle.

Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy Professor David Schanzer (Courtesy photo)

In the eyes of a growing number of observers, the future of democracy itself will be at stake in the 2024 U.S. elections and this sobering fact has enormous implications – not just for Americans but for the populations of dozens of allies around the world.

One expert who’s watching this matter closely and expressing deep concern on a regular basis is Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy Professor David Schanzer. Schanzer who heads the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and holds forth regularly on the substack website, Perilous Times, says the current pro-Russia, pro-authoritarian turn of many U.S. Republicans is an extremely troubling development.

Senior Counsel Douglas Keith (Courtesy photo: Brennan Center)

Throughout most of U.S. history, state courts (and judicial elections) have seldom been the site of pitched political battles. While these courts regularly issued important rulings with significant impacts on public policy debates, the judges and justices who served on these courts were generally able to avoid being drawn into the bareknuckle politics that so often characterize races for other elected offices.

In recent decades, however, things have changed. In the late 20th Century, the political right launched an ambitious national effort to promote and fund the campaigns of conservative judges and in recent years, progressives have been doing their best to respond. These developments have had a big impact on the courts and American politics generally, and recently we had an extended chat with an expert who follows, chronicles, and weighs in on this subject, attorney Douglas Keith of the Brennan Center for Justice. In Part One of our conversation, Keith explained how this arose and just what big deal it’s become.

In Part Two of our chat, we discussed some of the worrisome implications of this transformation, and perhaps most importantly, some of the changes that states can and should consider adopting in order to depoliticize state courts and restore public faith in the idea of an independent and impartial judiciary. Read Keith’s latest report here.