Fact checking Stan White, Paul Tine and the NCAE | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    Stan White should be ashamed of himself. So should the N. C. Association of Educators and a number of other "me too" Democrats like Paul Tine. They have lied. They are still lying.

    White is running slanderous ads against Bill Cook trying to say that Cook voted to "cut education" in the last session of the Legislature. That's a bald faced lie. Here are the facts:

    Total spending for K-12 education in 2012 is up. Recently released numbers from the Department of Public Instruction show that this year $11,958,300,982 will be spent on K-12. That's up from $11,863,273,343 last year and $11,851,181325 the year before (Bill Cook was elected).

    State spending (excluding county and Federal) increased from $7.277 billion to $7.599 billion in the first year of Republican control of the General Assembly.

    What has been cut is the Federal stimulus money the schools got in 2010-11. That has been reduced from $1.9 billion in 2011 to $1.675 billion in 2012.

    So the truth is that even when the Federal stimulus money dried up, total spending increased anyway.

    But the real problem with this picture is that as of yet, school bureaucrats have been unable to show any significant improvements in student learning as a result of the "jobs saved" by the Federal stimulus money.