North Carolina voters must stop our own Project 2025 | Opinion
Project 2025, a radical playbook created by the Heritage Foundation and many former members of the Trump administration, lays out a blueprint on how to strip government from the hands of the people and put it into the hands of the next elected Republican president. The playbook contains many unpopular items, including a national abortion ban, but one of the most extreme is abolishing the Department of Public Education that serves 80% of American children. Project 2025 is so extreme that Donald Trump has tried, unsuccessfully, to publicly distance himself from it.
As a parent who's happy to have my kids in North Carolina public schools, I must ring the alarm. Regardless of what occurs nationally, with the wrong elected candidates here, parents of nearly 80% of North Carolina children kids are at risk of our own Project 2025.
Between the governor's race with private school voucher advocate Mark Robinson versus public school supporting Josh Stein and the less-discussed Superintendent for Public Instruction race between former award-winning Guilford County Superintendent Mo Green and public school loathing Michelle Morrow, drastic consequences for public schools are at stake.
For years, North Carolina was known as a beacon for public education, a model not only in the south but in many ways nationally. The legislative branch of government was Democratic-led and we had the ultimate education governor in Democrat Jim Hunt for four terms. But we also had two terms of Republican Gov. Jim Martin who governed as a moderate and worked across the aisle to increase funding in public schools throughout North Carolina. Both governors grew this state and its economy on the backs of education.
As someone who attended NC public K-12, undergraduate, and graduate schools and have a mother who taught for more than 30 years in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, I saw all the best that this state had to offer in the space of public education. As a current parent, I have watched our state government and its Republican supermajority override Gov. Roy Cooper to hoard a budget surplus, unnecessarily freeze the salaries of teachers in the prime of their career, create a talent drain and sabotage our schools to the point that we lose teachers to South Carolina, something unimaginable when I grew up.
What's concerning is that we have two candidates in Mark Robinson and Michelle Morrow who display outright disdain for public education. Morrow, who has scrubbed her social media to hide her ties to January 6 and called for a public execution of former President Obama, is running to lead the education department solely to destroy it. Robinson, who also has called public school teachers "wicked," simply seeks to continue stealing money from public schools (the opposite of what Martin did) and direct it towards private schools that lack oversight and do not have to serve all children.
I respect people's right to home school like Morrow and send their kids to the private schools that Robinson wants to fund. What I don't respect is using the people's money to subsidize the wealthy while actively continuing the North Carolina GOP's quest to destroy public schools. Instead, I am supporting drastically improving our 49th out of 50 education funding ranking and increasing graduation rates, test scores, closing achievement gaps, and forming successful public/private partnerships.
NC can't afford the next wave of HB2-esque extremism. Citizens, businesses, and parents, your project 2024 is to prevent NC from experiencing a Project 2025.
Justin Perry is a contributing columnist.
