Quality education has not been a strong point for the NC GOP during the past 15-20 years. Indeed, over the past 16 years the GOP in North Carolina has fostered efforts to reduce public school funding. I think the end game is clearly the total destruction of public education. That’s particularly scary when you consider in the decades prior to GOP control of the NC General Assembly the Democratic Party did so little to foster truly equitable quality public education in NC. The Leandro case was filed in 1994 and ruled on in ‘97 and 2004, well over 16 years ago. While it seems the Democratically controlled General Assembly didn’t seek to totally destroy public education, they did seem pretty committed to keeping it inequitable despite claims to being a “leader” in education. As I have told some local education officials rather recently, I think it is dangerous to make any educational institution, an institution supposed to be designed around what you know about who you know. But that’s what has long been the norm in North Carolina. Have current Republicans gone a bridge too far? Undoubtably. Did they learn how to do it from Democrats in both long ago and fairly recent history? Quite arguably. While the GOP is certainly not behaving much like the party of Lincoln, when it comes to equitably accessible quality education in North Carolina it’s hard to find heroes or role models in the NC Democratic Party prior to the Republican takeover of the General Assembly.
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