4 thoughts on “When They Claim NC Public Schools Are Underfunded…”

  1. There is something deeply wrong with our public education system.

    Many things, actually, but one thing we can do right now that would make fixing the schools infinitely easier is to abolish the teachers’ unions. Doing so wouldn’t only make reforming public education easier, but it would also begin the process of separating education from indoctrination, making schools safer and more responsive to parental concerns; it would also remove one of the main pillars of support for the worst elements of the left and the Democratic Party.

    The two big teachers’ unions are run by truly awful people whose only goal is the promotion of left-wing ideology. They provide the ground troops for the Democrats, and are legally allowed to use state and local resources for political purposes. I worked for a candidate once who was a public school teacher, and he was bombarded by emails explaining why he should be defeated–using the public school email system.

    It is impossible to overstate the overlap between the increasing power of the teachers’ unions and the devolution of our schools into indoctrination centers that don’t teach children to read, write, and do math but instead focus on alphabet ideology, critical race theory, and ruin the mental health of our children.

    Who worked with the Centers for Disease Control to ensure that children were kept out of school during COVID? The teachers’ unions.

    Who said “kids are resilient” and wouldn’t be harmed by being kept out of school? The teachers’ unions.

    The teachers’ unions have been proponents of pushing “Social and Emotional Learning” into the schools, which is another term for teaching kids to be as antiresilient as possible. As the popularity of SEL has exploded in the schools, youth mental health has plummeted. Suicides, suicidal ideation, diagnoses of severe mental illness, depression, and anxiety have all skyrocketed.

    The teachers’ unions did that.

    Teachers unions lobby for every cause other than improving the education of our children. Sure, they want more money to flow to the schools, but every time we increase the funding–the US spends more on public education than any country in the world other than one–child performance and mental health take another step back.

    The unions protect every bad teacher, and work assiduously to ensure that pay for performance is inhibited as much as possible. Bad teachers are protected–good luck firing a teacher, even if they harm students or go to school drunk.

    The premise behind the unions is especially bizarre–the necessity for them apparently stems from the belief that the teachers need to have an adversarial relationship with…the citizens, who pay their salary and hire them to teach children. You may have noticed that most of the lobbying and political activism of the unions has nothing to do with improving education–they don’t care. The “No Kings” rally Randi Weingarten is funding has nothing to do with education at all–it is political action directed at Donald Trump and Republicans.

    Is there another organization that can compete with the NEA or the American Federation of Teachers for the title of most destructive in the country?

    I can’t think of one.

    Obviously, the expansion of school choice is an important response to the decline in our public education system, but it is only one tool. Until we destroy the unions that basically run our education system in this country, reforming the public schools will be impossible.

    So lets ban the unions.

    1. Rep. Mark Harris from NC is precisely trying to do that. He just introduced a bill to revoke the NEA’s congressional charter. That is a step in the right direction. I don’t know if it will need 60 votes in the Senate.

  2. You could look at the previous 3 decades and find the same disproportionate increase in spending on govt schools in real $s/pupil as well. More money and worse results. A lot more educrats though! And given that the autonomy (opposite of bureaucracy) of a school is proven to be just about its most important virtue (correlating with learning in studies), that fits with the results.

    1. The autonomy vs. bureaucracy point you make applies directly to the Guilford County Schools system, J. Sobran. We have seen an explosion in central office/ bureaucratic function over the last 15 years or so. Obviously, that was by design.

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