Various professional education protest groups (Aim Higher NC and their parent organization, Progress NC) have been up in arms for years about teacher pay and retention.

These protest groups have gone quiet on that issue as the legislature has been steadily increasing both entry-level pay and veteran teacher pay. The legislature has had to do this in order to bridge the gap that was created by the previous administration under Democrat Bev Perdue, who froze teacher pay.

Now, these outfits are harping on per-pupil funding and supplies teachers buy out of their own pockets.

Progress NC and its various proliferations have, of course, ignored that it is the local districts and not the legislature that set district budgets, supplemental salaries and yes, dollars spent on supplies. Never let a manufactured crisis go to waste there, guys.

The Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest has already set out to respond to the per-pupil funding question in a new video.

WATCH:

Description:
For decades both the Federal government and state legislatures throughout our country have thrown money at public education at an exponential rate in hopes of increasing the outcomes of our students. Unfortunately, for many of our students and our schools, these positive outcomes have never come. How much we spend per child has proven to not increase outcomes. For some of our public schools in North Carolina, failure has been an acceptable result for decades. This is shameful. Instead of continuing to throw money at a never-ending bureaucracy, it is the time to start taking calculated risks and implement new innovative approaches that target communities which have been plagued by failure for far too long.