Conservatives for educational mediocrity

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.

Read more: https://www.politicsnc.com/conservatives-for-educational-mediocrity/