North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper is on a tear, and it is a righteous one, both for its goals and for his well-justified anger. A product of a North Carolina public education himself both in his hometown of Nashville and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Cooper has no doubt about the value of public education. Now unfettered by an impending 2024 political campaign of his own, Cooper is not mincing words about what has happened to North Carolina’s once-vaunted public education. His office refers to the situation as a “public education crisis.”
And it is.

Cooper, like many other North Carolinians, wants our state to invest in public education, instead of cutting it. Yes, education is expensive, whether it is public or private, but a lack of education is even more costly. Next to my family and my friends, nothing in life has meant more to me than my education. It has helped me understand the world we live in and brought me great joy as I learn, and I know many people feel the same way. Over the last decade, however, North Carolina legislators have concentrated on tax breaks rather than investments, and while the numbers are still big for educational investment at all levels, our growing state—now 9th in the nation—is slipping behind by almost every measure. We spend proportionally less per student and likewise for teacher pay. The Governor supports an 18-percent teacher pay raise over the next two years in an attempt to get North Carolina back to being respected nationally for our public education.

Cooper, like many other North Carolinians, including this one, wants public money to go to public education. Neither he nor millions of others are interested in spending public money to send children to private schools, no matter what their family income. The current policy does just that under the attractive banner of Opportunity Scholarships, but it breaks my heart and makes me angry to know that tax dollars paid in by some of our lowest-income citizens are indeed going to send children of some of our wealthiest residents to private schools. Who on God’s green earth thinks that is morally right or even makes sense to spend $ 4 billion in public money over the next decade on private schools?

Cooper, like many other North Carolinians, wants public schools to teach factual history and ideas that have been recognized and discussed by scholars over time. He is not interested in advancing a political agenda that stresses one point of view and excludes others, nor is he concerned that today’s students’ feelings can be hurt by assessments of historical events and movements in which they played no role.
The bottom line is that most of North Carolina’s children do attend public schools, almost 9 out of 10 of them. If they are not well educated and do not become thriving and productive adults, the rest of us, including those of us educated privately, will struggle in a state that made the wrong funding choices for North Carolina’s overall future.

Governor Cooper put it this way in an interview with WUNC.

“There is no question this is a long-term battle because it is going to be a long-term fix. We need to highlight the positives of public schools, which are numerous, and on top of that understand that they are operating on shoestring budgets and won’t stay good if we don’t provide the proper funding.”

The Governor is correct, and we ignore his advice at our peril.