JLF Policy Analyst Terry Stoops visited Asheville to discuss trends in North Carolina K-12 education. In short, more money is going to pay more bureaucrats, and kids aren’t getting smarter or staying in school longer. On the bright side, Stoops mentioned that NC students have performed substantially better than the national average in math for several years. Stoops asked why those steering education policy didn’t study the causes of success in math and transfer the findings to reading curricula.
Stoops shared some questions from state proficiency assessments. History tests promulgated unity, togetherness, and the Fourteenth Amendment. One civics question asked how communities decide where new businesses will locate, and science questions were aimed at reinforcing disdain for Amreican industrialists.
One member of the audience asked why the NRA was the only organization getting results. Speaking of big government, he said the NRA had lawyers that “kept suing their a**es and winning.” Stoops explained the NC Institute for Constitutional Law was another organization that “sued their a**es.” It would gladly take on more cases if it could pay for more than three lawyers. Think tanks like the JLF provide activist groups like the NCICL and Americans for Prosperity with the research they need to take action. The JLF is not registered as a lobbyist group.
