Gordon B. Hinckley, an American religious leader, once said, “You can't build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you're going to have a strong superstructure.” The exact same stays true for education; it’s basically impossible to pass college if one never went to school when they were younger, such as in elementary or middle school. However, in North Carolina, the precise opposite seems to be occurring: although the state has many grand colleges, such as Duke University and the University of North Carolina, the public grade schools have been taking an absolute beating from the NC government for nearly half a decade now. It bring up the question: why did the NC state government all of a sudden start pummeling public education? …show more content…
In fiscal year 2011-2012, North Carolina ended up with a deficit of 3.7 billion dollars, which, proportionate to the state’s budget of $21 billion, was one of the worst offenders in the country; in fact, it was bad enough that voters elected a veto-proof GOP (Republican) supermajority in a landslide election to the state legislature, because the GOP advocated budgets cuts to decrease the deficit. As to why the GOP targeted public education, they actually had a good reason: public education took up nearly 30% of the budget at the time, and besides, apart from Health and Human Services, which occupied about 37.5% of the budget at the time, all of the other expenditures were negligible in size, with the next largest being sub-10% of the total budget at the time. So, it was logical to slash public education first - it, as well as HHS, were the two largest available targets for budget cuts, so the new Republican supermajority struck - and they struck hard. The state legislature attacked public education on many fronts, including slashing funding for public education,