Choosing his facts

by Thomas Mills, Politics NC, January 8, 2016.

It looks like Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest wants to pick and choose his data. Forest rejected a report showing that charter schools in the state are disproportionally white and wealthy. That’s not what the light guv wanted to hear. He rejected the report as too negative and convinced the State Board of Education to refrain from sending the information to the legislature despite a January 15 deadline.

Forest is concerned about criticism charters might get from the press. His fears are well founded. The schools are far more segregated and the kids come from wealthier families than traditional public schools. That was a concern of critics when Republicans lifted the cap on charters in 2011. Now that their fears have come to pass, Forest wants to suppress the information or see if he can get a better spin on it.

The history of this fight stretches back to Brown v. The Board of Education. North Carolina put off integrating their schools for as long as possible. Most counties didn’t integrate until more than a dozen years after the ruling. When they did, segregation academies popped up all over the state. A few, mostly in cities, survived and adapted, allowing a few minorities and catering to predominately wealthy families while offering a handful of economically based scholarships. Most, though, faded out as lower middle class families had trouble shouldering the burden of paying for private education.

Republicans have been trying to subsidize private, largely segregated schools ever since. They pushed for vouchers for years, always making the argument that children shouldn’t be forced to attend failing schools. In reality, they were pandering to their base. The charter movement offered an opportunity, allowing parents to send their kids to publicly-funded schools that have fewer regulations than traditional public schools.

The original intent of charters was to allow for experimentation to identify successes that could then be adapted to traditional public schools. There’s certainly a place for charters in the public school system. However, the concept has been perverted to subsidize religious education and add to the re-segregation of traditional public schools.

That’s the data the Dan Forest doesn’t want us to see. He’s going to “run cover” to allow his cronies to tweak the information to get the results he wants. That’s not what research and reports are supposed to do. We should be entitled the facts, not the GOP spin on them.