Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget proposal would seize millions from school choices programs and divert it to public schools. Cooper’s plan could eventually cripple the programs while at the same time propping up failing public schools and punishing low-income families, lawmakers and education policy experts say. …
Agonizing. These lockdowns, mandates, and suppressions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Logically inconsistent, clumsy in their application, and impossible to enforce. We’ve become prisoners of this virus, without imminent hope of reprieve. Potential treatments are enmeshed in politics, thrust into a media culture…
Ketch Secor of the energetic American roots band Old Crow Medicine Show and a few of his talented friends streamed a concert from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry this past weekend. In eloquent music parlance, they killed it. One song, “Wagon…
In addition to being immoral, discrimination is foolishly self-destructive. It keeps companies from hiring the best people and serving the most customers. It throttles innovation. It makes us poorer.
A save-the-system-not-the-student mentality is at the center of the “left-leaning” N.C. Association of Educators’ lawsuit to thrust a dagger into the heart of our state’s school choice options. “Vouchers for private schools are an affront to a state that has a long and…
In February 2019, after months of negotiation, Western North Carolina’s Mission Hospital was sold to HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital company. HCA Healthcare owns 184 hospitals across the U.S. and United Kingdom. Mission is its first hospital in North Carolina. After the sale, complaints…
Republicans are blasting Gov. Roy Cooper for a lack of transparency and demanding that he hold in-person press briefings. The N.C. Republican Party announced a public records request Friday, July 31, asking for Cooper’s schedule and travel plans. They criticized him for holding virtual press briefings…
I’m tired. Tired of the lecturing from Gov. Roy Cooper and his cohorts. Tired of waiting for his edicts. Tired of his pedantic lecturing. I’ve written about that. All of it. I’ve written about it probably way too much, as a colleague mentioned…
This summer’s racial protests and violence have propelled the issue of slavery reparations under the national spotlight. It is a central feature of the list of demands forwarded by the Movement for Black Lives — a coalition of “Black Lives Matter” and other related groups. For the first time…
COVID-19 is a deadly virus. That’s indisputable. But information from state health experts and the governor are fraught with mixed messages and questions, which leaves people mostly confused and often afraid, one researcher says. A big problem is that, speaking for North Carolina, that…
