The Bust Out

what's happening to NC Public Schools

Friday and Saturday marked NC State’s spring graduation—departmental graduations on Friday, with the larger university commencement on Saturday. The weather was gorgeous on both days, and all over campus students in festive red robes snapped photos with their friends and families—in front of favorite buildings, on the steps of the bell tower, outside Talley Student Union.

On my way to Friday’s celebration, I walked past the College of Education’s graduation in Reynolds Coliseum. I could hear joyful cheers from the street. I saw my friend Marsha (check out this awesome write-up of her Ursula Parrott biography in the New Yorker!), and we walked together behind a very dressed up family whose graduation garb we admired.

Inside Talley, most of our colleagues wore their fancy regalia (not required at departmental graduations, but impressive!). I got to see so many of my students, graduate and undergraduate, walk across the stage, including one student, Patricia Ndombe, who graduated from both our undergraduate and graduate programs and will now pursue her PhD in Africology and African-American Studies at Temple. The last undergraduate to walk across the stage, Bella Woods, will join our MFA program in the fall. I met parents of students and graduate students, and later emailed with proud parents who live on another continent and could not be there to see their child recognized, but who celebrated from afar.

With Mayookh Barua, who will study for his PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California next.

And the speeches! They were especially wonderful this year. We heard first from Kacey Cooper, who shared reflections about her grandmother and great-grandmother. Both worked at NC State. Her great-grandmother, she told us, had been a sharecropper in Spring Hope before joining the university’s housekeeping staff, and always saw her work at NC State as “the good job.” She learned to read and write at NC State, and later saw Kacey’s grandmother join the staff too. Kacey described both women as hard-working and determined and proud to be members of the Wolfpack. Their stories inspired her to study English at State, where in our department she had a chance to work with Professor Jason Miller on a project tracing Langston Hughes’s visit to Wilson, North Carolina—a stone’s throw, she said, from the rural community where she grew up.

My colleague Elaine Orr, a novelist and memoirist, then gave a powerful speech about two strong memories she’d been mulling over: one was about swimming in a crystal-clear river in Nigeria, where she grew up, and the red raft, made of wood and metal drums, that was solidly anchored in the river’s strong current. A place where nine-year-old Elaine could swim to and rest with her friends, if making it all the way across was too much. She pondered how that raft had been anchored, how it withstood the current—then told us another story from later in life.

At 44, Elaine was diagnosed with end-stage renal disease; she waited on the kidney transplant list for two years, giving herself home dialysis each day with a solution she warmed in her kitchen microwave. She told us, with unsparing clarity, how tired and sick she’d been, but also how buoyed she felt when the nausea faded each morning and she could make it to campus. She told us that she had to remake herself each morning by conjuring her students—where they were each sitting in the classroom, books open, waiting for class to begin. Elaine told us we needed to be our own anchors as well as our own buoyant rafts in a swift current.

I haven’t done justice to either of their speeches but I hope I can convey how endangered this whole world is—the red robes, the inspiring stories, the belief that stories can change the world. The cheers as future teachers, researchers, journalists, and leaders of all kinds walk across the stage. Not just because of the new Republican bill, House Bill 715, that would eliminate tenure at publicly funded universities like ours, but also and especially Senate Bill 406, “Choose Your School, Choose Your Future,” a bill that would radically expand private school vouchers across the state, spending billions of taxpayer dollars and draining needed money and resources from from public schools.

The voucher bill was announced on April 26 in a press conference featuring remarks from Tricia Cotham, who was elected as a Democrat in solidly blue Mecklenburg County but announced earlier that month that she was switching parties. This one house member has thrown just about every right and institution in North Carolina into peril: abortion rights, the university system, clean water, trans kids’ rights to safety and medicine.

“I did my due diligence as a parent and as a mama and went to our public school — it’s a great public school —and then went to visit the private schools in Charlotte and I was blown away,” Cotham said at the press conference. Her son attends a private school in Charlotte, and no matter how much money she has, she’ll now get to apply an “opportunity scholarship” to her child’s tuition.

Republicans like Cotham have been using the odious euphemism “backpack funds” to praise this bill, a way of saying that what the state spends per pupil (significantly less than our neighbors in Virginia or South Carolina—we rank 45th in the country) is theirs to take with them—to whatever private school a family chooses. The phrase “backpack funds” is reminiscent of the racist anti-busing organizing around “neighborhood schools”—another way of saying, “this is mine alone, not yours. I’d prefer to be apart from yours, in fact.” (Most voucher recipients, according to Public Schools First NC, have never had their kids in public schools.)

Vouchers will no longer go to low and middle-income families, but to any family who chooses a private school. Families who qualify for free and reduced lunch will get 100% of the maximum award ($7,213); households making up to 200% of that amount ($111,000 a year for four people) will get 90% of the voucher maximum; and so on until you get to families making above $249,750—even millionaires will get 45% of the voucher. Families already paying tuition at private schools will get vouchers, and if this bill passes we’ll eventually spend $500 million a year on largely unregulated private schools, most of them religious.

As many have pointed out, this spending could be so much better applied elsewhere—fully funding our schools as ordered in the Leandro decision. Paying teachers needed raises—they could get 12% more with this money! Funding more college scholarships (annually, the bill is more than we spend on scholarships to college). Fixing our bus driver shortage with higher pay and better benefits (we’ll spend more than twice as much on opportunity scholarships than we spend on school transportation).

Professors in my department have been reassured by higher-ups that our chancellor—all the UNC system chancellors—would be working hard to defeat the anti-tenure bill, and that it would be such a brutal hit to our state’s economy and stance as a hub for research and technology that it will never succeed. I think that this is probably right. But at graduation I found myself wondering if or how much our chancellors have spoken out against the voucher bill, which will be equally devastating to our university. Because the majority of our students come to us from public schools in North Carolina. Many of them needed the things that public schools must provide and that private schools don’t have to bother with—free lunch programs, for example. Bus service. Acceptance and welcome of LGBTQ+ kids and families of all religions. Acceptance and welcome of neurodiverse kids and disabled kids and kids with learning differences.

These public school students come to us prepared, smart, and ready to learn. They welcome difference and diversity; they’re great at working together. They’re tough and kind and funny and generous. They’re skilled, creative writers and researchers I’d hire in a minute!

But I have a hard time imagining what NC State would be like in 10 or 15 years, when the public school system is fully busted out. To bust out, in fraud terms, is to take all of a business’s assets and lines of credit and exploit them until the business is kaput. It was the subject and title of a Sopranos episode in which Tony recoups an associate’s gambling debt by taking over his sporting goods store. They use his credit to order things they can sell on the street, from plane tickets to beer coolers. They don’t care that Davey winds up sleeping in a tent in his empty store, or that the business fails. The business—its building and resources and whatever it means to the people it sustains—is just a means to an end.

I think that’s what’s happening here with our public schools: a bust out. Take our investment in our children and chop it up, leaving public schools with fewer students, fewer families of means, fewer books and resources and teachers and staff members. Take your big boat, like Tony on the Stugats, and swamp the littler boats in your wake.

But maybe we can be buoyant, like Elaine’s metaphor, which allows for swift and ceaseless currents.

We can attend a webinar on school vouchers like this one, sponsored by Public Schools First NC.

We can call and write to our lawmakers opposing Senate bill 406 (919-733-4111 or Ncleg.gov/findyourlegislators)

We can canvass for Democrats with Neighbors on Call, Down Home, or County to County.

We can keep an eye on extremist groups like Moms for Liberty and work to keep their candidates off of our school boards.

And we can stick together, keep our kids in public schools, and keep talking up the public schools to people we know. Maybe I’ll write to Chancellor Woodson—who, by the way, is a product of public schools.

How are you spending the weekend, Frog Troublers? Bea is at a sleepover, and we’re planning to do some bike riding with Harriet today.

Congratulations to all the graduates in your life!