On Glensford Drive here in Fayetteville one could be forgiven for not even noticing Montclair Elementary School, lost as it is in the enormous shadow of Berean Baptist Church. Across the street is Berean Baptist Academy, which benefits from taxpayer funding in the form of vouchers. Montclair looks impossibly lost with its squat, humble architecture that likely dates to the 1980s, if not before.
This is disparity by design. The expansion of vouchers will continue to drain money away from our public schools, especially as conservatives resist releasing Leandro funds. Disingenuous arguments about school choice and parents’ rights run smokescreen for the long-running project to hobble public education: a project which began around the time of integration. That private schools, segregation academies, and homeschooling all began their ascendance at roughly the same time is no coincidence.
Driven by motivations of profit, prejudice, and class antagonism, myriad actors have taken advantage of the labor conditions under which public educators struggle. The goal is to create a situation which will someday be untenable. Once public schools are broken on the wheel of this sabotage, conservatives can then claim that public schools never worked in the first place. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.
With the public funding that comes in the form of vouchers, there is no added accountability. Private schools are free to employ corporal punishment, require religious belief as a condition of employment, and use their curriculum as a means of evangelizing students. These schools need not be accredited and the state does not require that teachers in private schools be certified in any way. Were public funds not being used to support these schools, I would be less alarmed. That taxpayers are funding these institutions is outrageous.
Of course, in North Carolina, public educators have little recourse, bound as they are by state statutes which explicitly forbid collective bargaining or striking under threat of misdemeanor. These statutes are some of the most restrictive in the United States, rivaled only by Virginia. Products of the Red Scare of the 1950s, these statutes effectively leave all public employees with little option but to keep their heads down and hope that the General Assembly is acting in good faith.
This is not to say that private schools or homeschooling ought to be maligned in any way. My son has autism and is intellectually impaired and, during two years of the pandemic he attended a private school dedicated to serving children with autism. Why? Because the county public schools were not providing him with what he needed at that time. This is not because public schools are inherently insufficient but because they have been gutted by over ten years of Republican rule in the North Carolina General Assembly.
I’m enormously proud to work for the State of North Carolina. It is my home and has been home to my family for at least eight generations. I’d not have tattooed myself with the state motto and dogwood flowers were I not proud of my home. I am not proud, however, that our politicians seem determined to undermine one of the greatest experiments in the history of our democracy. Our public schools ought to be examples for the rest of the world to copy.
As it is, the current situation is unsustainable. Unfortunately, that’s precisely the point.
An Unhappy Consciousness 