The N.C. House of Representatives revealed the education portion of its budget bill this week, and it’s a sobering document that continues the current legislative session’s unprecedented attack on public education in North Carolina. Remember, though, that the N.C. House actually leans a smidgen less to the far-right than the N.C. Senate – in other words, these ideas could get even worse by the time they make it through both houses. Here are some lowlights of what the House GOP wants:
– Set up a voucher program that would take $100 million from public education and give it to private schools, despite the fact that over 60 percent of North Carolinians oppose the measure, according to Public Policy Polling.
– Increase class sizes, especially in early grades. Overall teaching-load limits for teachers in grades 7-12 would be removed. Public-education advocates, led by former N.C. Schools Superintendent Bob Etheridge, delivered 15,000 signatures to Gov. Pat McCrory opposing increases in class size.
– Students with disabilities and students with limited English proficiency would not be eligible for pre-kindergarten. As Progressive Pulse noted, these are the children who benefit most from pre-k programs, so, um, WTF?
– New teachers with masters degrees would not get a salary supplement anymore (currently, they receive a $3,000 supplement). Our state’s teachers are already among the most underpaid in the nation (46th out of 50), by the way.
– School buses less than 15 years old could not be replaced until they reach 300,000 miles rather than the current requirement to replace them every 200,000 miles.
The education cuts and policy changes making their way through the General Assembly – the Senate’s budget, for instance, calls for cutting 6,000 teachers’ aides – are some of the most destructive, and frankly puzzling, measures we’ve seen from state lawmakers in years. Another way of putting it is that the state is self-destructing; after all, it’s we the voters that elected the smug half-wits who seem determined to wreck public education in North Carolina. Of course, a poorly educated citizenry will be perfect for the kind of low-paying companies the good ol’ boys in Raleigh want to bring here. Needless to say, keeping citizens ignorant won’t hurt GOP reps’ chances of re-election, either.
No wonder the Moral Monday protests are getting bigger by the week.
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This article appears in Jun 12-18, 2013.
No one should be surprised. They said they were going to do this when they were campaigning. If you voted for them then it must be what you wanted. Either that or you are one of those people who think that calling someone a Liberal is an insult.
I actually listened to the campaign promises of the candidates instead of looking to see to which party they had sold their soul.
I didn’t vote for these guys.
How do you wreck something that is already a wreck?
The schools of the “Good ‘ol Days”: Reading, writing and math. No computers, no sex ed, no touchy feely. These poor barely educated kids grew up to build cities, railroads (and the trains that ran on them), sky scrappers like the Empire State Building in less than 500 days, they built the atomic subs and put men on the moon…all with what the above writer would consider a substandard education. The problem is, we are graduating kids who can’t read, write or balance a checkbook and we are spending record amounts of money in the process. Our education system needs a massive reboot. Just throwing money at it has not worked.
I see the Liberals continue to go through life with with fingers up their noses and their heads up their butts.