POLL: North Carolina REALLY Wants School Choice

RALEIGH – While the North Carolina Democratic Party typically resists any type of school choice that undermines Big Government’s top-down education structure by which Leftist dogma can be inculcated in our children, popular opinion across the Old North State indicates they are in a very small minority.

Indeed, recent polling of North Carolinians conducted by SurveyUSA shows that an overwhelming majority of them support school choice.

Education study @SurveyUSA finds 92% of North Carolinians think parents should choose where their child attends school, 88% believe parents best suited to decide where a child attends school, and 84% support Opportunity Scholarships. https://t.co/O8K6JmS4PX #ncpol #ncga #nced pic.twitter.com/XyarLaoSr6

— Joseph Kyzer (@JosephKyzer) January 23, 2019

92 percent! You probably couldn’t get that strong of a consensus on water being wet, much less a ‘controversial’ policy like school choice.

Still, the Left resists such policies tooth and nail. For instance, in the summer of 2018 a bill was introduced in the state legislature to allow for the formation of town charter schools to serve suburban communities outside of Charlotte. The bill, which eventually became law, allows towns in Mecklenburg County to create their own charter schools, giving preference to town residents for seats, giving parents and students an alternative to the bureaucratic behemoth that is the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools district.

The Left immediately cried foul. The problem? The four towns were majority white, and because the town charter schools would give preference to town residents, the schools would be majority white, too. That, said a leader of the chairman of the local Black Political Caucus, was ‘morally reprehensible,’ and tantamount to Jim Crow segregation. Seriously.

Opponents even pointed to the lawmakers supporting the bill being white as evidence that it was a racist measure. As if the color of their skin in itself denoted bigotry, which is quite ironic considering the charge.

It isn’t just local activists smearing the legislation as a return to Jim Crow segregation, either. Gov. Roy Cooper went on record just last month to declare that any move toward town charter schools is a step back toward segregation.

Mind you, under this law no one is forced to change schools. To the contrary, the town charter schools would merely be another option for local families to choose from, an alternative to larger, more distant schools of the CMS district.

This makes total sense, and the recent polling results confirm that the vast majority of parents in the Old North State agree. The charge that school choice movements are motivated by racist intentions to re-institute racial segregation is beyond ridiculous.

The North Carolina people understand this, so when is the political Left in this state, leaders like Gov. Roy Cooper, going to recognize and acknowledge the truth? If they really cared about education as much as they say they do, then school choice should be one of the policies they champion. The fact they don’t should tell you something about their true motivations when it comes to education.

You can read the rest of the polling results here.