RALEIGH – So that is what all the fuss was about.
The gubernatorial-debate fuss, I mean. For weeks, Gov. Mike Easley and Patrick Ballantine tussled over whether, when, how, and where to debate. As far as I can tell, it was the Easley campaign that sought to set conditions that would make debates either less likely or on his own terms. Ballantine’s campaign, as is traditional for challengers, sought the maximum opportunity to challenge the incumbent and gain some momentum. Finally, the two agreed to an Oct. 4 debate on education and an Oct. 15 debate with an unrestricted agenda.
Enjoying a comfortable lead in the polls, Easley should have come into Monday’s education debate, held at SAS Institute in Cary, with little to prove and little interest in making news. But that’s not what happened. The governor came loaded for bear, too loaded in fact, and delivered a performance that seemed to me to be nervous, unresponsive, and out of character.
He set the tone with an opening statement that generated the best, make that the worst, sound bite of the day. “If Patrick Ballantine is a champion of education, then Saddam Hussein is a champion of civil rights,” Easley joked, though it wasn’t funny. It was an odd and frankly tasteless way to start out. It was at or near the top of most early news coverage of the debate. But there were more oddities to come.
After Ballantine stated that, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council, North Carolina’s average SAT scores ranked 46th in the nation, Easley berated him for being ignorant about the state’s educational performance. “You’re not even close,” he said, then going on to say that on the latest National Assessment of Education Progress tests North Carolina had ranked 1st in math, 7th in reading, and 4th in writing. “You need to do your homework if you are going to talk about education,” he told Ballantine.
I can only assume the governor was over-prepared, so crammed full of statistics that he got them mixed up or failed to explain what he was talking about. While North Carolina has posted impressive gains on NAEP scores since the early 1990s, I can find no evidence of our schools ranking 1st in math, 7th in reading, or 4th in writing, measured either in average scale scores or proficiency levels. Perhaps he meant in the rate of increase, but that is a very different thing.
Moreover, Ballantine was accurately citing ALEC’s study (which was based on 2003 scores; the 2004 scores show a modest rise to 42nd, which Easley apparently thinks is “not even close” to 46th). There is no question that North Carolina’s SAT scores remain unimpressive, though I think it best to compare our performance to those of other states with high percentages of test-takers (even among them, we’re still closer to the bottom than the top). The most devastating statistic is North Carolina’s graduation rate of only around 60 percent, which Easley did not attempt to deny.
Later, Ballantine argued for saving $25 million in administrative positions within local school districts. Easley cited the number of positions at DPI in Raleigh and alleged that Ballantine’s numbers were “made up.” No, the governor mixed up two different categories of positions. Such exchanges happened throughout the debate, making Easley look less informed that I know he is – and leading him to change the subject frequently and sometimes gracelessly to the issue of a state lottery.
Ballantine was at his weakest when insisting several times that the state’s teacher pay had fallen further behind the national average during Easley’s tenure. As I have previously explained, North Carolina teacher compensation already exceeds the national average by a significant margin. I also think Ballantine’s criticism of Easley’s work as attorney general in the 1990s representing the state against the Leandro plaintiffs didn’t take into account the fact that it was Easley’s job to defend his clients, state officials who decided to assert the constitutionality of the current funding system for public schools. One might say he was a lawyer who had no choice in his clientele.
All in all, though, not a good showing by a governor who usually performs well in televised debates. Perhaps, as Gary Robertson of the Associated Press put it, Easley was “frustrated by the format.” Ballantine has a lot of ground to make up in the last month of this campaign. Monday’s performance may help some.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.
Update: Boy, that was fast. As of about 7:30 am I had already received many responses to what I wrote above. Thanks for reading! Some agreed with me, others were critical. In particular, an Easley supporter pointed me to one of the tables reported by NAEP that factors in statistical significance in making cross-state comparisons (remember that NAEP exams are given only to a sample of students in each state). Look under each of the NAEP links I provided above for tables such as this one for math, which does show that while several states have higher 4th-grade math scores, the difference is not large enough to meet a significance test.
Unfortunately for Easley, this form of comparison still doesn’t justify his claims. The 8th-grade math table, for example, clearly shows several states above NC even when statistical significance is factored in. The same is especially true for the 8th-grade reading table, which by my count shows 24 states ranking higher than NC, not quite the six Easley said (he meant the 4th-grade scores alone). Moreover, the way Easley asserted these numbers does not do justice to a form of analysis in which many states are bunched together with NC, statistically indistinguishable. It doesn’t justify saying we are “so near the top that we can’t see the bottom” (can’t swear that’s a verbatim quote, but it’s close), particularly because the governor referred to 4th and 8th grade scores. As I suggested, he had a lot of stats ready to go, and apparently just failed to cite them precisely and effectively. By the way, I should note that if Easley’s overstated North Carolina’s educational performance, Ballantine understated it by relying on SAT averages.
Another emailer said I was wrong about Easley looking “nervous” and “unresponsive.” Well, these are obviously subjective judgments to a large degree, but I stand by mine. Where was the governor’s smile? Another factor is that folks in the room watching Easley and Ballantine may have gotten a different impression than those watching at home. I watched a videotape of the broadcast, the framing of which did not make Easley’s peripatetic wandering in front of the podium look good. The camera angle showed him somewhat sideways, where his hand gestures were distracting and he didn’t seem to be talking to the viewing audience. Ballantine smiled more, looked more comfortable on screen. Again, just my perception.