Reading, Writing, and Political Arithmetic

Patricia Saylor made her pitch in a Facebook group for North Carolina public school teachers, where they usually swap notes about curriculum, compensation, and working conditions, such as mold in the classroom. 

“Let’s run for office,” she wrote in mid-July to the 47,000-member North Carolina Teachers United. 

Saylor, retired from a career in Durham and Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools, envisioned organizing beloved public school teachers to challenge what she called “anti-education” lawmakers across North Carolina in next year’s state legislative elections.

In particular, she hoped educator candidates would run as Republicans in reliably red areas. Since there are very few swing districts as the political maps are currently drawn, Saylor thought it made little sense to recruit teachers to run unaffiliated or as Democrats—they would have no real shot at winning. The path to influencing education policy, as she saw it, ran through the GOP: “It’s the strategy of playing the ball where it lies and going where the conversations are happening.” 

Saylor imagined that these candidates would run for state House and Senate seats on the issue of boosting public school funding. Their already strong community connections would give them a leg up. And a unified message might just help change attitudes inside the Republican Party, which has used its legislative majorities since 2011 to peel away incentives for long-serving, highly educated public school teachers while advancing alternatives to traditional public schools through expanded charter school options and private school vouchers.

The election of a slate of candidates committed to listening to constituents, understanding the impact of policy decisions, and voting in the best interests of public schools and students would be “an incredible vibe shift in the General Assembly,” Saylor said. Maybe, she thought, there could even be a bipartisan Education Caucus.

Within two months of floating the slogan “Make the NC Republican Party the Education Party,” she had lined up a half-dozen other volunteer organizers and 14 candidates. 

Tired of Complaining

Chris Wilson, the band director at Polk County Middle School, signed on immediately. 

In his two decades as an educator, he has watched North Carolina’s teacher salaries slide down the national rankings. Other metrics fell, too. Now, “Mississippi is even beating us in some areas,” Wilson said. “Mississippi! Seriously, that’s embarrassing.”

“I got really tired of teachers complaining about how bad things are when there’s something we can actually do about it,” he said. 

Wilson, 46, had previously talked with Saylor about the possibility of running for office. So when he saw Saylor’s new message, he didn’t hesitate. He changed his party affiliation from unaffiliated to Republican in August and announced his run for the state House. 

Wilson, who earned a doctorate in educational leadership and administration from North Greenville University in South Carolina last year, said he plans to focus his campaign on three things: boosting teacher salaries, bringing back bonuses for long-serving educators, and reducing high-stakes standardized testing. 

“All I’m here for is to make education better in North Carolina,” he said. “I don’t care what party I’m associated with.”

That approach has detractors. Wilson said he has received threats both in person and online. “I’ve been told to drop out, I’ve been called a hypocrite, I’ve been called a fake Republican,” he said. “But my response is, ‘I wouldn’t have to do any of this if you guys would have done your jobs originally.’” 

His criticisms of the status quo can be harsh. Testing is “a joke,” he said, and private school vouchers—the centerpiece of recent Republican education policy—are “a crock of shit.”

Conservatives tend to favor vouchers because they align with a belief in free-market solutions and allow for religious instruction. Liberals tend to argue that private schools are not accountable for the taxpayer money they receive, and vouchers help drain the public school system of necessary funding. But both parties have begun to sour on the utility of high-stakes testing.

The incumbent in Wilson’s district is Rep. Jennifer Balkcom, a mortgage broker who previously served on the board of the Henderson County Education Foundation, which is focused on supporting local public schools.

Balkcom campaigned for her second term last year in part on “parental rights”—a basket of policies that generally includes support for alternatives to traditional public schools and opposition to teaching about race or gender identity. 

This year, she sponsored a bill that would empower people to sue public school districts whose library materials are found not to be “wholesome.” Opponents staged a “banned book read-in” on the lawn outside the General Assembly. The bill passed the House and now sits in the Senate Rules Committee.

Balkcom did not respond to an interview request from The Assembly. She won her last two elections handily, with 58 percent of the vote.

Incumbents’ Advantage

The candidates aligned with Saylor’s NC Educators on the Ballot initiative are challenging some of the state’s most established Republicans. 

Phil Shepard, of Onslow County, is in his eighth term in the House. Larry Potts, of Davidson County, is in his fifth. 

Others hold House leadership positions: Mitchell Setzer is speaker pro tempore; Steve Tyson is deputy majority leader; and Howard Penny Jr. is deputy majority whip.

A few, including Balkcom, sit on the House K-12 Education Committee, which is co-chaired by Republican Tricia Cotham, a former teacher and assistant principal.

“It will take a lot to bring change,” said Chris Cooper, politics professor and director of the Haire Institute for Public Policy at Western Carolina University. “But given the cold, hard math that Democrats aren’t going to win the vast majority of these districts, it’s as smart a political play as I can think of.”

The candidates are a mix of retirees and educators still on the job. Some are longtime Republicans, others were unaffiliated until recently, and one switched parties from Democrat to Republican last month. Many were previously apolitical, said Saylor, who is registered as a Democrat.

They live all across the state: Lisa Koperski in Catawba County, Blake Sauls in Nash, Michele Joyner-Dinwiddie in Wake, Melissa Simmons in Iredell, Amy Dragotta in Harnett, Nicole James in Craven, Reagan Sydes in Onslow, Pamela Zanni in Davidson, and Jasmyne Hill Brooks in Pasquotank. Saylor expects candidates in Johnston, Vance, and New Hanover counties to announce soon and perhaps others to follow.

Sauls, a middle school health and physical education teacher running against Rep. Allen Chesser, said he recognizes that the advantages of incumbency could be hard to overcome.

“I think we’re going to certainly try our best and see where this movement backs us and supports us,” he said. He’s buoyed by his faith and the sense that he is part of a movement gaining momentum.

Jeffrey Elmore, a former Republican legislator and public school teacher, said that educators have a built-in advantage in campaigning: They have a whole lot of experience with public speaking, and they tend to be good at it.

In politics, “you’re standing in front of groups of people talking about your ideas,” he said. “Well, you do that every day as a teacher.”

Elmore ascended to hold the powerful role of House Appropriations chairman over his 12 years in the General Assembly. He resigned last year following a run for lieutenant governor. Now he works as a senior policy adviser to House Speaker Destin Hall. 

Elmore said he wasn’t exactly lonely as a teacher in the Republican caucus—many of his legislative colleagues had some type of education background. Several taught in community college or served on local school boards.

One such Republican is Todd Carver, a freshman House member from Iredell County who expects to face a primary challenger associated with Saylor’s organizing.

He taught law enforcement classes for more than a decade at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, later worked as public safety director at Mitchell Community College, and also served four years on the Iredell-Statesville school board, the last as chair. “I identify as an educator,” he said.

Several of the bills Carver sponsored this year relate to public education, and he said he supports higher teacher salaries and reinstating supplementary pay for teachers with advanced degrees—both of which are included in the House’s budget proposal. 

Another policy goal he holds dear: expanding the private school voucher program to include pre-kindergarten as a way to address the shortage in affordable child care.

“I think just to say that Republicans have been anti-education and Democrats have been pro-education, that’s just an over-generalization,” Carver said. “I would say, hey, look at what I’m doing.”

‘Nothing Stealth About It’

Saylor refined her recruitment pitch to teachers as the summer wore on.

If a few of us get on the ballot, we change the narrative.

If a dozen win, we become a voting bloc.

If 40 win, we become a formidable force and a model for the nation.

In Facebook posts and Zoom meetings, she promised that organizers would help candidates with messaging and campaign finance. If they were elected, organizers would arm them with information about how to write policy and serve on powerful committees. 

Saylor encouraged the candidates to confront accusations that they were running a stealth campaign with honesty. “As long as you are forthright, upfront, and honest about your strategy and your reasons,” she told them, “then there’s nothing to expose.”

“Nothing stealth about it,” she wrote in response to a Facebook comment. “This is a single-issue effort: Fully fund and support public education in North Carolina. That’s it.”

The organizing effort has been entirely grassroots, Saylor said. Her group has neither spent nor accepted any money, and no one has been paid to run.

She discussed other obstacles in her recruitment pitches, too, most notably that a state lawmaker’s salary is only about $14,000 a year despite sometimes long and unpredictable work hours.

That has been a harder problem to solve, she said. Some potential candidates decided not to run because they didn’t see a way to make the schedule and the pay work for their families. Others decided they were close enough to retirement to give it a shot. At least one started looking into virtual teaching positions, she said.

Elmore kept his teaching position while he served as an elected representative. He said he was able to teach almost the full academic year during short sessions, missing only the testing window. During long sessions, he would start the academic year, then take leave around Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The school district treated his leave as they would for a member of the National Guard, he said. 

Koperski was a few months into retirement when she saw Saylor’s posts. The 58-year-old had worked in education for 32 years, most recently as a career development coordinator for Lincoln County schools, but she couldn’t stop thinking about how else to help North Carolina’s children.

With Saylor’s nudge, Koperski changed her registration from unaffiliated to Republican and announced she would be challenging Setzer, who is in his 14th term.

“Because right now,” she said, “we’re looking at the true definition of insanity, of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

She thinks someone familiar with the education system, and its specific weaknesses, could help lead the state to different outcomes.

And she’s not afraid of the low pay. “That doesn’t matter to me,” Koperski said. “I made more in 2008 than I did when I retired. I’m a single mom of two kids, and I’ve got nothing.”

Saylor wishes she had started earlier to have a real shot at recruiting challengers for every Republican incumbent in the General Assembly. “But I think we’re going to have an impact,” she said, “whether we have 13 or 50.” 

While Saylor’s recruiting has slowed down, other teachers who have heard about her idea seem to be taking up the challenge. She said she has been hearing recently from more and more people she didn’t already know who are also interested in running. 

They don’t have to make a final decision until the filing deadline, which is in December.