Resilience in NC public education and the case for a Jim Hunt renewal

Though it has faded a bit as Republicans consolidated power, education has long been the central political battleground in North Carolina. Schools inspire some of the most ardent feelings in North Carolinians. And test scores, no less than business-climate rankings, count as a defining metric of the success or failure of state government. We received another round of data measuring student outcomes recently—and it seems to have generated a bit of encouragement.

In the latest year, North Carolina students’ test scores rose by a modest 3-4%. Fifty-five percent of children were reading and doing math at grade level, an improvement over the previous year’s 51%. Third-grade reading scores were a notable trouble spot, with only 46% of those children demonstrating adequate reading skills. A success? In the post-pandemic era, many North Carolina policymakers saw these results this way. But these test scores flabbergasted me. I could scarcely believe that 45% of North Carolina children were testing below grade level and that a solid majority of our third-graders were below grade level. Imagine a North Carolina statewide candidate who lost an election by 54%-46%. Their consultants would be shunned. And yet this is an outcome that our state’s educational panjandrums are celebrating as vindication of the state’s recovery from COVID’s educational catastrophe.

Freud famously called this kind of thinking “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” We must do better by our children.

The worst outcome and most damning indictment of the state’s new “school-choice” paradigm was that only 39% of Black children were reading at grade level. This is the latest chapter in a long and ugly story of apartheid in North Carolina public education. In the early 1900s, North Carolina spent less than half the amount of money on segregated Black schools than it did on segregated white schools. The outcomes were predictable. Today, with “choice” as our excuse, we are resegregating education in our state and failing to teach Black children essential skills. The achievement gap evident in this year’s test scores should prove to us that we are failing in the South’s basic moral task: to compensate for 400 years of racism by doing right by Black families who’ve long been trampled under the boot of white supremacy.

But at least test scores ARE rising despite vouchers and low teacher pay. This shows our schools are resilient and that attacks aren't causing an imminent decline in test scores. North Carolinians should take this as reassurance that teachers, administrators, parents, and children have not given up on the basic enterprise of learning and knowledge in our state. I have always been frustrated by the tendency to use hyperbole about “failing schools.” The reality is that our schools have held up and pressed on in the face of a pandemic and years of hostility from the state legislature. We should celebrate the resilience of public schools.

But we still aren’t doing enough. Most importantly, the state continues to underfund public education. Research and experience have shown that per-pupil spending and teacher pay are fundamental to school success. We are barely spending 2/3 of the national average. That's only an incremental improvement over the situation in 1900, when we spent 50% of the national average and had the highest illiteracy rate in the South. Do we really want to remain mired in this? Unfortunately, the income-tax amendment, which a court just upheld, will make it harder to achieve dramatic improvements on education funding. This is one of the many ways in which Republicans may have permanently changed state government.

What we need is a Jim Hunt revival. We need to rekindle the great governor’s evangelical fervor for educational renewal. We need to massively increase per-pupil spending, phase out the voucher program, and pay teachers $100,000 a year. These policies are doable with political will. And as it happens, we have another Hunt in office.