Howard Lee, former Chapel Hill mayor, former state legislator, and former chairman of the N.C. State Board of Education, hasn’t much of a history of supporting charter schools. In fact, during his legislative career he was at best lukewarm to the concept, never going out of his way to promote school choice.
Terry Stoops, the John Locke Foundation’s director of education studies sees a bit of irony in the fact that Lee is now having to go hat in hand seeking approval of a charter school proposal of his own:
Lee always maintained the veneer of a charter school proponent, but he remained passive, thus complicit, during an era when members of the State Board of Education and staff at the Department of Public Instruction bullied and bureaucratized North Carolina’s public charter schools. Indeed, charter school applicants are lucky not to be applying for a charter during Lee’s tenure on the State Board of Education.
• Charter school applicants will not encounter the frustration of limited slots due to a 100-school cap on charters, which Lee’s Democratic allies maintained a decade after demand for charter seats outpaced supply.
• Unlike the dismissive SBE’s Leadership For Innovation (LFI) committee, appointees to the NC Public Charter Schools Advisory Council will use their considerable expertise to determine which charter applications are good enough to be presented to the State Board of Education for approval. Lee created the LFI committee to handle charter school matters after he eliminated the Charter School Advisory Board in 2007.
• The NC Public Charter Schools Advisory Council will allow charter applicants to comment during meetings. The LFI committee rarely permitted public comment from charter school representatives.
Simply put, Lee will enjoy the kind of hospitable charter application process that applicants sought for years.
Another irony is that the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP is opposing Lee, the first black mayor of Chapel Hill, saying his plan would be bad for black kids.
