Maybe there is an apparent answer.
Remember when this woman ran for office on a platform of being pro-public schools?
For someone who was as accomplished an educator as she was, her move to a party that is forever embracing the dismantling of public education was rather sadistically ironic.
When Tricia Cotham switched parties, she gave the GOP in the NC General Assembly a veto-proof majority.
And just right after she made the switch:
That does not happen unless Cotham changes parties midterm.
But the NC House has not voted on it. And a bunch of mostly white people “rallied” to demand that the NC General Assembly expand the vouchers for all who applied.
In fact, they were rallying to provide a “tax-break” to families that already probably send their students to private schools.
And they rallied after it has been stated by many rural NC superintendents that expanding the vouchers to all people would devastate school systems they oversee.
Maybe the NC House hasn’t voted on it because as Carolina Forward offered,
“While some close observers have suggested the failure of the private school voucher expansion is due to the deteriorated relationship between House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate Leader Phil Berger, there’s another, more straightforward answer: Speaker Tim Moore most likely does not have the votes in his caucus for more voucher giveaways – yet.”
Maybe those rural superintendents have talked to their republican state reps and gave them a very clear view of what would happen in their communities. What the Carolina Forward article argued well was that most of the private schools that exist in the state reside mostly in non-rural areas.
And the News & Observer had an editorial today that echoed those concerns as well as referring to recent reports that show vouchers not increasing academic outcomes for those students who received them.
What is possibly happening in NC is what occurred in Texas when voucher expansion was thwarted by rural representatives who correctly viewed that vouchers would gut smaller rural school systems.
If Timmy is so bent on getting money into schools, maybe he should honor the LENDRO decision first with some of the billions in surplus that were built on the backs of non-wealthy citizens of the state.
