RALEIGH – Pubilius Syrus, a former slave whose Latin writings won the praise of Julius Caesar himself, exhibited a keen understanding of human affairs, including politics. “He who has a mind to do mischief,” Pubilius wrote, “will always find a pretense.” Anyone who watches the North Carolina General Assembly with any degree of critical distance quickly becomes familiar with the politics of pretense.
If a lawmaker has a bill drafted to benefit a friend, political supporter, or special interest, he finds a way to cloak it in thick layers of “creating jobs” or “helping children.” Also, many lawmakers file legislation they have no expectation or even intention of passing – sometimes to fulfill a promise, sometimes to garner favorable attention during campaign season, and sometimes just to get the attention of the bill’s opponents so they will make a side deal or pony up campaign contributions.
Few legislative dramas have been so full of pretense as the House of Representatives’ lickety-split passage of a bill authorizing local districts to convert failing public schools into “charter-like schools.” During the floor debate over the measure, some supporters insisted that it had nothing to do with North Carolina’s application for federal Race to the Top education funds.
Although the deadline was just days away, and North Carolina had suffered during the previous round of competition for maintaining a statewide cap on charter schools, these legislators denied that the two issues were linked, arguing merely that school districts needed more authority to reform low-performing schools.
Inconveniently, Gov. Beverly Perdue has publicly supported the bill precisely because she thought it would improve the state’s Race to the Top application. And everyone in Raleigh knew that the House and Senate were fast-tracking the bill to beat Washington’s June 1 deadline – why else would such a bill be on the floor of the General Assembly so early in the 2010 session?
That wasn’t the only pretense that became evident during the debate. For one thing, much of what the bill supposedly authorized district officials to do with low-performing schools was already within their purview. After all, the main reason charter schools enjoy the freedom to innovate is that they are out from under the control of school districts. If they wanted to, districts could allow similar autonomy.
Another pretense was that such legislation was about improving educational opportunities for low-performing students. No, it was about protecting the education establishment from competition and accountability. How could one know this? Here was a hint: the lobbies representing teachers, superintendents, and school boards supported the bill, while the groups representing families wanting more educational opportunities questioned it.
Supporters apparently assume that the Obama administration will either be fooled by the bill or doesn’t really care about charter schools. Both assumptions seem to me to be fraught with unnecessary peril.
Darrell Allison, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, had the same thought. “North Carolina is once again positioning itself to forfeit hundreds of millions of dollars due to its inaction in moving strong on public charter school policy this legislative short session,” Allison said at the Legislative Building shortly before the initial House vote.
At the same time legislative leaders were rushing to authorize “charter-like schools,” they were continuing to block legislation to authorize additional schools that were, uh, actually charter schools. Even if they believed that North Carolina should maintain an artificial cap on the number of charter schools, and that some charters were performing so poorly that they should be shut down, you’d think they would at least agree that the state’s highest-performing charter operators ought to have the chance to replicate their success in counties with few or no educational options.
Perhaps they would agree – if their true goals were to satisfy parental preferences, increase student achievement, and boost the state’s woeful graduation rate. Because their goal was really to protect the powers and jobs of the education establishment, however, then adopting the pretense rather than the reality of reform was required.
As Cicero – another great stylist of Latin prose, and an experienced politician himself – had figured out two millennia ago, “the false is but an imitation of the true.”
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.