NC charters dodge a bullet

No news is good news

The September 'mini-session' of the General Assembly has come and gone, and the Honorables have taken no action on the two issues of interest to the charter community.  For that remarkable show of restraint, they are to be congratulated.  It's not often that an elected body at any level comes face to face with a golden opportunity to do something stupid, and doesn't do it.

The first opportunity involved approval of governor Perdue's long-overdue appointees to the State Board of Education.  Recall that at present there are three seats on the SBE that are being filled by 'holdovers,' members whose terms of office expired back in March but are allowed to stay on until their successors are approved. 

After months of delay, the governor finally submitted the names of three individuals (two incumbents, chairman Dr. Bill Harrison and NCAE shill Jean Wooland, and one newbie, a Mr. William Woltz) to fill the seats.  Had the legislature approved the appointments, those three persons would have had seats on the board until March of 2019.  But some clever person figured out that if the General Assembly simply declined to approve the appointments, a new (and potentially pro-charter) governor taking office in January of 2013 would then be able to nominate his own appointees, giving him a running start towards overhauling the current anti-charter board. 

The second opportunity had to do with the proposed constitutional amendment on governance of public education.  While there are a lot of good ideas in the proposal (like shortening the terms of office for SBE members from the current eight years to a more reasonable six), it would also strip from the legislature the power to approve or disapprove of the governor's appointees to the SBE.  The trade off there is that the leaders of the two legislative chambers would get to make a few appointments on their own, but the governor's eight appointees would still constitute a majority of the fifteen member board.  That provision needs some work.  We've seen what kind of damage an anti-charter governor can do, working through a compliant SBE, and we don't like it.