Charter school groups donate $65,000 to Mark Robinson campaign as he attacks traditional public schools 

The majority of the money came from individuals with ties to Charter One, a national charter school management organization that benefited from votes Robinson took as a member of the state Board of Education. 

By Michael McElroy

Donors tied to charter schools have contributed more than $65,000 to the political campaign of Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor who accuses public schools of getting too much money and repeatedly pushes for expanding private school vouchers for wealthy families.

The majority of the money came from individuals with ties to Charter One, a national charter school management organization that runs some underperforming schools in North Carolina, and which benefited from votes Robinson took as a member of the state Board of Education. Robinson’s wife, Yolanda Hill, sits on the board of three of Charter One’s schools

Neither the donations nor Robinson’s votes violate any state or federal campaign finance or ethics rules, but they add to the evidence that Robinson would likely prioritize private and charter schools over the state’s underfunded public school system.

Charter schools are a kind of public school, but are not operated by the public school system. Each school is run by an independent board of directors, like a mini-business, and is given far more flexibility in curriculum and performance standards. Like public schools, charters are free, open to the public, state-funded, and are unable to discriminate based on religion.

But, like with the private school voucher program, the state has increased the money it allocates to charters each year, without significantly raising the total money spent on education, meaning that any increase in the money spent on charters takes away from the total spent on the public school system.

North Carolina ranks 47th in per-student public school spending and dead last in school funding effort, a measure of how much a state spends versus how much it could spend. 

While supporters of charter schools say they’re intended to give parents more choice, that choice is more limited in rural counties. 

More than a third of North Carolina’s 100 counties have no charter schools, and more than 30 counties have only one.

Robinson has made it clear throughout his time in public office that he favors weakening the state’s public schools, which educate more than 80% of the state’s children. 

In his 2022 memoir, he wrote that by increasing funding for private and charter schools, he hoped “we might see a mass exodus from public schools entirely … and traditional public schools might be a thing of the past.”

An investment in Robinson

Individuals tied to Charter One, including the sons of the organization’s founder, have donated $41,700 to Robinson’s campaign overall, according to a review of North Carolina Board of Elections documents. It is hardly surprising that a company or individual would donate to a politician who has backed initiatives the company finds favorable. 

And Robinson’s support for private and charter schools long predates the donations.

But two of Charter One’s five schools in North Carolina received D grades from the state department of public instruction and were on the list of low scoring schools that had not shown any improvement. When the State Board of Education tried to tie the state’s charter renewal process to signs of a school’s improved academic progress, Robinson and other Republicans on the board voted against it. 

Robinson’s embrace of private and charter schools is in step with the rest of the Republican Party in North Carolina. The Republican-controlled General Assembly passed a huge increase in voucher spending last year and also stripped the Board of Education of its power to approve, renew, and discontinue school charters. That power now rests with the Charter Schools Review Board, a group of charter-school advocates, most of whom are appointed by the legislature. 

When the state board of education passed a proposal to reassert some of its oversight before dispersing any funding, Robinson and other Republicans voted against that, too. 

An earlier version of this article misstated the documents that showed the campaign donations to Mark Robinson’s campaign. They were North Carolina State Board of Elections documents, not Federal Election Commission documents.