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Remember the political bazooka that candidate Roy Cooper unloaded on Governor Pat McCrory last fall?
Here it is:
There was a lot wrong with this ad, of course. It was disingenuous. It didn’t tell us the whole story. It cited bogus statistics. And it didn’t bother to mention that the teacher supposedly packing her bags for Virginia would probably make less money when she got there. But none of that matters. You know why? The ad worked. Cooper blew a hole in the incumbent governor’s image ratings and blew that race wide open, and now Roy has the big house on Blount Street.
Today, the liberal teachers’ unions and public school administrators are loading their own bazooka and aiming it at the reformers running the legislature. Only they want those reformers to pull the trigger.
We’ve documented why their self-inflicted class size “crisis” is a massive political trap for conservatives. But now it’s clear the basic math doesn’t even add up. Think about it for a minute: Administrators are asking for $400 Million to address this “crisis” they created. They want $400 Million to cover Art and PE teachers that they supposedly can’t afford, because they squandered the money intended for smaller class sizes on stuff the educrats think is more important than smaller class sizes.
Divide that $400 Million total by $67,000, the average compensation and benefits for a North Carolina teacher, and you get roughly 6,000 new PE and Art teachers in middle and elementary schools across North Carolina.
The problem? According to the educrats’ own documents, there are less than 2,000 total middle AND elementary schools in the entire state. In fact, there are only 1,845 K through 8 (that’s right – eight grade, not third grade or fifth grade) schools. It is probably safe to assume that at most 1,200 of those schools are elementary schools where Kindergarten through Third Grade are taught. It’s probably also safe to assume most elementary and middle schools employ and average of 1 Art and 1 PE teacher, maybe slightly more. So the math doesn’t add up. Why do they need $400 million?
They don’t. They need Republicans to vote to “increase class sizes” so they can hammer them in next year’s campaigns, and re-establish a honey pot for the bureaucrats to dip into when they get the itch to spend.
If you thought that U-Haul driving across the NC border was powerful, imagine the ads they’ll run if Republicans fall for the trap being laid right before their eyes.
Resist, legislators. Or watch all of your hard-earned reforms – and your political careers – disappear.
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