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The sort-of-charter schools bill won final approval by a vote of 21-19 in the state Senate yesterday, with Democratic leaders calling two recesses while they worked to scare up a majority, The N&O reports.

This bill gives local school systems some new options for reforming failing schools, including turning them into "charter schools" that really aren't like other charter schools because they'll still be run by the school board and school system administration.

The purpose was to put this down on the state's second Race to the Top application, due Tuesday, in an effort to make it look like North Carolina is progressing farther down the road to school reform than it really is. Sort of like high school seniors add lots of clubs and activities to their college applications, even if they don't really participate.

Still, maybe school systems will make good use of their new tools. We can hope.

What bothered me much more was the fact that only 40 senators voted on this important bill, only 80 percent of the chamber. This is only the second week of the legislative session, so a 20 percent attrition rate is deplorable.

Any school would get marked down if 20 percent of its students missed a key test. Voters should expect more of their senators.

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Posted by Doug Clark on Friday, May 28, 2010 at 8:41 am

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Paul Daniels

May 31, 2010 - 1:11 pm EDT

Doug:

I think that the BIG reason that N.C. did not do better in the first round of the Race to the Top lottery was its cap on charter schools. The President and his administration made it clear that they were big supporters of charters schools as a way of innovation. In response I think, states such as Illinois doubled its cap on charter schools from 50 to 100. (Funny what politicians will do for money, isn't it?)

I firmly believe that if what we are truly concerned about is ensuring that kids get the best education possible, it really should not matter within very broad parameters how the education is delivered: public, charter, private, parochial, etc. Although late, and apparently coming with strings attached, I applaud the Senate for this change of heart.

Best regards,

Paul Daniels

Mark Binker

May 28, 2010 - 11:41 am EDT

Doug: The numbers are a little better.

There were three "pair" votes. Under the pairing rules, one senator who is in the chamber offsets their vote against a senator who was out of the chamber. So Sens. Davis, Goss and Snow were there as well, and Sens. Albertson, Soles and Queen followed the procedure to register their thought.

So even though they weren't recorded as voting, six additional senators - in addition to the 40 - took official action on the bill. That would get you to 46 of 50...for whatever that's worth.

Doug

May 28, 2010 - 12:14 pm EDT

Thanks, Mark, but I'm not sure I understand the accounting. There were still only 40 recorded votes. What's the point of the pairing if those votes aren't counted?

Mark Binker

May 28, 2010 - 12:32 pm EDT

It has to do with some old and odd notions of civility and decorum that seem to attach to Senates of all stripes.

The original intent of the procedure was to allow people who weren't able to be around for a vote (Their daughter was marrying the tobacco farmer up the road and it was a three day horseback ride up to the mountains) still register their opinion. Of course, you can't let someone who's not actually around vote, so they came up with this pairing procedure.

The idea is that a senator on the opposite side of an issue says, "Hey, we'd just cancel each other out anyway," so I'll pair with you and the outcome won't be affected much. Again, it's a courtesy thing -- sometime even senators have somewhere else to be and we might disagree but hey, we're still colleagues.

So that's what with 43 senators in the building, only 40 were recorded as voting.

Now - the way the procedure was used in this case was kind of upside down. The count on the floor Thursday was 25 Ds and to 18 Rs. The Ds were in the position of losing 4 or 5 votes on the issue. If a straight-up vote had occurred, that would have made the vote 21-22 for the bill at best, which would still have been a loss. So the D leadership had to round up pairs from folks who weren't in the building to neutralize some of the would-be "no" D votes in order to get the thing to pass.

Artful, a little complicated, but still sausage making.