Schools debate short on parents

Editorial  from The Greenville Daily Reflector, December 18, 2013.

The North Carolina Association of Educators has helped sponsor two lawsuits against the state this past week challenging policies enacted by the Republican-controlled General Assembly affecting public schools. Clearly, the NCAE believes public schools and their teachers are under attack by the conservative movement for school choice.

Often lost in the vitriol between educators and conservative politicians, however, are the voices of parents who have children in the public schools. Among taxpayers who support public education, parents of school children have the largest stake in how the schools operate. Their voices should be the loudest in this debate, and yet they are not.

Public schools have plenty of problems, most of which conservatives believe are rooted in generations of government waste and low accountability.

The GOP-controlled General Assembly earlier this year enacted the Opportunity Scholarships Act. The new law is set to begin offering tax-funded scholarships in February to help low-income students attend private schools.

The NCAE lawsuit, filed Dec. 11, promises to at least delay any such scholarships while the courts decide whether the law violates the state Constitution.

The NCAE filed another suit on Tuesday challenging the end of tenure for public school teachers in North Carolina. Tenure has been replaced by contracts of between one and four years — at the end of which the teacher can be dismissed without cause.

Educators fear the new laws are part of a systematic effort to dismantle the public school system by chipping away at its lifeblood of students and dedicated teachers.

Those in favor of school choice and other changes say the reforms will actually improve the public schools by implementing more competition.

The question that largely remains: What do parents think?

Groups such as Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina lobby in favor of school-choice reform issues.

On the other side is Parents for Public Schools, which recently started a Pitt County Chapter. That organization works to preserve the public schools by engaging parents in the education of their children.

Despite the existence of parent groups on each side of the issue, however, most public debate is between educators, politicians and political commentators on either side.

The Daily Reflector invites Pitt County parents to share their thoughts on the issue of school choice and other reforms by utilizing the Public Forum on this page. Tell our readers how you think these reforms will affect the most immediate stakeholders in this public schools debate — your family and your children.