Republicans find a new way to punch down on NC teachers | Opinion
The 2024 short session of the North Carolina General Assembly has barely begun, and already GOP legislators who see punching down on public schools as a reelection campaign tactic are taking aim at our state’s long-suffering teachers.
Only weeks after the N.C. Department of Public Instruction released data showing North Carolina teachers are quitting in record numbers (1 in 9 resigned last school year), and just in time for Teacher Appreciation Week, N.C. House Republicans have filed a bill titled “Academic Transparency” which would force all teachers to post their lesson plans online with their names attached “no later than 10 days after the lesson was given.”
The bill’s author, Rep. Jake Johnson, who represents Henderson, McDowell, Polk and Rutherford counties, has a history of fanning fake culture war flames and encouraging the public to distrust public schools because he believes it may help his chances at being reelected and holding on to power.
For example, in May 2022 Johnson shared this Facebook video crowing about stamping out Critical Race Theory in North Carolina’s schools but neglected to tell voters that Gov. Roy Cooper had vetoed the bill he was flexing about in September 2021.
North Carolina teachers are so used to serving as the punching bag for state Republicans that this new legislation doesn’t really qualify as front page news. But there are some real problems with the bill, apart from the fact that it’s driven by cynical politics rather than an actual need.
One is that it’s labor intensive. Teachers are currently so overworked due to having to cover for the extraordinary number of job vacancies that this onerous requirement could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. With record numbers of teachers leaving, we need state legislators to focus on how to make the job more attractive rather than making it worse.
Secondly, many teachers spend hours developing their own supplementary materials due to the subpar curriculum they’re often saddled with. Those materials are their intellectual property, and they deserve to have some control over who has access to it.
Another point to consider is that this burdensome requirement applies only to public schools but not to the private schools that Republicans are keen to pour billions of taxpayer voucher dollars into. Why should public schools be required to make their materials freely accessible to private schools that are already siphoning away our desperately-needed funding? Why not require private schools to do the same?
Finally, dropping a bill with “transparency” in the title at this moment is terrible timing — and I’m not talking about Teacher Appreciation Week.
Buried in last year’s budget bill was a provisions that exempted state legislators from N.C. public records law. The law gives legislators — like those who sponsored the Academic Transparency bill — the power to determine if any documents produced through their work on behalf of the people qualify as a public record and whether to retain or destroy those. This law shields them from having to share their “lesson plans” even after they’ve left office.
So this bill stings a little more than the usual anti-public school legislation coming out of the General Assembly because it’s just so damn hypocritical.
I’d bet my bottom dollar that the House members who sponsored this bill don’t actually believe there is socialist indoctrination going on in North Carolina’s schools. This is nothing more than a lazy boogeyman campaign tactic by individuals who should be out there talking about the actual improvements they’re bringing to their districts in the way of things like more jobs, better health care, etc.
But for anyone who really does want to see what’s happening in North Carolina’s public schools, I suggest you come to any one of them and offer to volunteer. We could really use the help.
Justin Parmenter is a seventh-grade language arts teacher at South Academy of International Languages in Charlotte.
