Project 2025 is a radical playbook that was made by the Heritage Foundation and many former Trump administration officials. It shows how to take the government away from the people and give it to the next Republican president. A national ban on abortion is one of the unpopular ideas in the playbook.
But getting rid of the Department of Public Education, which serves 80% of American children, is one of the most radical ideas. Project 2025 is so far-fetched that Donald Trump has tried in public, but failed, to separate himself from it.
Even though I’m glad my kids go to public schools in North Carolina, I need to sound the alarm. No matter what happens in the rest of the country, the parents of almost 80% of North Carolina’s kids are at risk of Project 2025 because the wrong people were chosen here.
In the race for governor, Mark Robinson supports private school vouchers while Josh Stein supports public schools.
In the less talked about race for superintendent of public instruction, Mo Green, a former award-winning Guilford County superintendent, is running against Michelle Morrow, who hates public schools. Both races have very serious effects on public schools.
North Carolina was a standard for public schools for many years, not just in the south but across the country in many ways. The legislative part of government was run by Democrats, and Jim Hunt, a Democrat who served four terms as governor, was the best governor for education.
But we also had two terms of Republican Gov. Jim Martin, who was a reasonable leader who worked with people from both parties to give North Carolina’s public schools more money. These two leaders built up the state and its economy by putting more money into schools.
For more than 30 years, my mother taught in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, and I went to public K–12, college, and graduate schools in North Carolina. I saw all that this state had to offer in terms of public education. If you are a parent now, you have seen our state government and its Republican supermajority override Gov.
Roy Cooper to hoard a budget surplus, freeze the salaries of teachers in the prime of their careers without a reason, cause a talent drain, and sabotage our schools to the point where we lose teachers to South Carolina, which I could never have imagined when I was a kid.
It’s scary that both Mark Robinson and Michelle Morrow, our leaders, show a clear lack of respect for public schools. Morrow has cleaned up her social media to hide her ties to January 6 and has called for former President Obama to be put to death in public.
She is running for education secretary only to destroy it. Robinson has also called teachers in public schools “wicked.” He just wants to keep taking money from public schools (the opposite of what Martin did) and giving it to private schools that don’t have to serve all kids and don’t have to be supervised.
You can homeschool like Morrow or send your kids to the private schools Robinson wants to pay for. That’s your choice. Using taxpayer money to help the rich while supporting the North Carolina GOP’s plan to destroy public schools is something I don’t agree with.
Instead, I think we should do a lot better than ranking 49th out of 50 when it comes to education spending. We should raise graduation rates, test scores, close achievement gaps, and make public-private partnerships work well.
NC can’t handle another wave of extremism like HB2. People, companies, and parents, your project 2024 is to keep NC from having a Project 2025.