Yet you are still whining about the state not spending enough. My guess is you are a school teacher. You couldn't stand NJ any more or maybe wanted your kids to grow up in a decent state, so you moved down to Cary to live with the other 23 million northerners who moved there. 15 minutes later, you're all telling us how to run things. And we should listen because it worked so great back home for you.
The point of the post was to demonstrate that the DEMOCRATS were the long term traditional obstructionists of K-12 public education in North Carolina. They had control of the state legislature for over 100 years since 1898 to 2010. The responsibility for underfunding of the North Carolina K-12 public education system over the long term can squarely be placed on them... and it was quite deliberate. The elitist Democrats very much believed that all middle class people and above should go to private Christian schools, not public schools. The population of Cary is 150,000 not 23 million. It is one of the 10 safest cities/towns in America, and is near the top in K-12 educational results despite chronic underfunding. Take away the Charlotte (banking) and Raleigh (Research Triangle Park) metro areas where all the Yankees moved in, and North Carolina's state economy would be ranked last in the nation. And yes, it did work so great "back home" - nearly all the top 100 K-12 schools are in the Northeast. Maybe some Southerners should pay attention and understand what excellence looks like. We are about to enter another year in North Carolina where a K-12 teacher simply has to step over the border into a neighboring state (South Carolina, Virginia, etc.) to earn $10K more in salary - while the clowns in the state legislature scratch their heads and wonder why all the best teachers are leaving. To compound the pain the legislature is proposing laying off an additional 8700 TAs and many teachers despite not needing to do so from a budget perspective. Can we ask what happened to the $700 plus million that the Republicans spent on politically connected consultants for studies on medicare/medicaid reform, IT fixes, HHS updates, unemployment system computers, etc. - all which demonstrated zero results or improvements. The political cronyism under the Republicans is even worse than the Democrats - at least the Democrats has some actual results while hiring their buddies, taking bribes, and stealing anything not nailed down. We now have similar widespread behavior and no results on state initiatives. The state Republicans stated they would stop all the corruption and fix all of this. They now had five years... and we got nothing... it's worse than before.
Somebody wants to be V.P. WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb announced his presidential campaign on Thursday, opening a long-shot bid against Hillary Rodham Clinton and a field of Democratic rivals for the party's nomination.