Election results and the future of our schools | Eastern North Carolina Now

By:  Steven Rader

Recent election results at the federal, state, and local level have a major potential to impact school policy in Beaufort County.  From a policy perspective, prevailing viewpoints moved in different directions at different levels, so impacts will be mixed.  In general terms, the federal election moved things to the right on education, the state election to the left, and at the county level to the right. 

A poll by the John Locke Foundation last year found that 71% of North Carolina parents are concerned about political indoctrination of their children in the public schools.  This stems from the promotion of “woke” ideology in the schools such as Critical Race Theory, radical gender ideology, DEI, and ESG. Parents across the country have been pushing back against the woke agenda for the last two election cycles by electing many new conservative school board members.

There are entrenched forces in education which have worked to pull policy to the left.  The Teachers’ unions are one of them, with both of the national unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association very far to the left.  In North Carolina, the NC Association of Educators (NCAE), always liberal and supportive of Democrats, has moved even farther left, even adopting the second most recognized symbol of communism, the raised clinched fist, as their own symbol.  That speaks volumes.

For the most part, school superintendents have been missing in action on standing up against imposing wokeness in our schools.  In some cases, that is because the superintendents are liberals themselves, but even if they are not, the career ladder for superintendents makes most gun shy of getting involved.  To move up the career ladder means moving to a bigger and better paying school district and the larger the district often mean a more liberal school board, although that has been changing recently.  Still superintendents are reluctant to have anything that smacks of standing against the education establishment on their records so as not to alienate liberal board members of larger school districts.  Superintendents are constantly building their resume for their next gig.

The N C School Boards Association is another nest of liberals, with a very liberal entrenched staff.  When Biden attempted through executive action to rewrite Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to change it from protecting girls and women to protecting gender identify and sexual preference, which would require schools to let biological boys onto girls’ athletic teams and into girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, the NC School Boards Association was the dog that didn't bark.  They did nothing to try to push our state Attorney General to go to court and get an injunction to protect our girls as every other state AG in the southeast successfully did.  They also did nothing to inform local school boards about how they could use one of those court injunctions obtained by other states to protect girls in our North Carolina schools. The NC School Boards Association seems perfectly happy with the woke agenda and totally uninterested in fighting it.

Where the rubber meets the road on insisting on a commonsense curriculum and policies and a rejection of wokeness in our schools is with the elected members of our county school boards.  Fortunately, North Carolina law is centered around local control of local schools and for the most part the power lies with the local school boards if they have the backbone to use it.

Election results at the federal level were a blessing for parents looking for a traditional education for their children, free of the woke agenda.  President Trump has rejected the Biden attempt to rewrite Title IX on the campaign trail, and that threat will soon go away.  He has also named a new Secretary of Education, a native of Craven County, NC, who is a solid conservative and is certain to move quickly to shut down the federal DOE programs that promote wokeness.  Federal meddling in education to push a leftwing agenda will soon be a thing of the past.GOP control of Congress and the presidency also opens the door to any legislation that will be needed on that front.

The situation at the state level, however, is dire.  While the career staff at the NC Department of Public Instruction has always been liberal, they have been kept somewhat in check for the last eight years by a succession of two moderate Republican Superintendents of Public Instruction who headed the department. That safety valve ended this election when radical far left activist Mo Green won that office on the Democrat ticket.  For quite a few years, Green was director of the major funding organization for the left and far left in North Carolina, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which has been like the NC version of Soros' foundations.  Among groups funded by Green dealing with education were one that demands that school resource officers be removed from schools and another that promotes inappropriate sexual materials in kindergarten and early grade school.

That is not the only place things went downhill at the state level for common sense education.  Most of the NC Board of Education is appointed by the Governor, and Roy Cooper has stacked those appointments with woke leftists.  There has at least been a voice for common sense as the Lieutenant Governor and State Treasurer are both voting members, and both have been conservatives who used their positions to push back on the woke agenda.  However, both ran unsuccessfully for Governor and those voices have been silenced.  Their replacements are very different, one a very liberal Democrat and the other a nominal “Republican” who in the last election was an Unaffiliated who voted in the Democrat primary and who has worked until his election for gun control kingpin Michael Bloomberg.  

The Republican loss of their veto proof majority in the NC House also means they can no longer override vetoes from very liberal Governor-elect Josh Stein on needed education legislation. Wokeness will not be able to be legislated away in North Carolina for the next two years.

At the local level, there have been two key changes on the Beaufort County Board of Education.  Liberal Democrat Mac Hodges was soundly defeated by conservative Republican Stacey Davis, who has pledged to be a voice for parents on the school board.  In a second race, conservative Republican Daniel Hudson won unopposed after soundly defeating an ineffective nominal Republican incumbent in the primary. In his campaign, Hudson voiced opposition to the woke agenda and supported more parent input in local education.  These changes, plus the other three conservative members elected in the previous election should give our board a much stronger backbone to stand up against the woke agenda in Beaufort County Schools.  They will not have to contend with pushy leftists at the federal level but will have a much bigger problem with that from the state level than in the past.  Thus, the question becomes:   Will the conservative majority on the local School Board stand against the Woke Agenda?