OPINION: Mo Green, Michele Morrow to debate in NC superintendent’s race tonight. Here are 5 takeaways from the race so far.

This race to lead North Carolina’s public schools is a microcosm for national politics because the candidates represent two starkly different philosophies.

Mo Green and Michele Morrow, the two people running to lead North Carolina’s public schools, will debate Monday night, but it’s possible you didn’t notice the first couple times. 

After all, there are a lot of really big elections on the ballot. But the state Superintendent of Public Instruction is, in a sense, the top educator in the state. It’s usually a teacher or other education leader who, in addition to administering and overseeing NC’s local public school systems, tells the politicians in the legislature what schools need and what policies work. 

READ MORE: Early voting begins Thursday in North Carolina. Here’s how to do it. 

That second part’s needed more than you think. Most of the lawmakers in North Carolina have no background in education, and they’re typically too old to have had children in public schools anytime recently. 

Ask Catherine Truitt, the outgoing Republican superintendent, who had to sound the alarm multiple times on bad ideas from the legislature. 

In other words, this job is important. 

It’s meaningful then that the Republican who beat Truitt in the GOP primary this year, Michele Morrow, has no experience in education and no children in public schools. Truitt has refused to endorse Morrow and, during an interview with Education Week this summer, said she was “shocked by (Morrow’s) complete lack of understanding of how public schools function and what the job of state superintendent is.”

Yikes.

Experience, or lack thereof, has been a central component of the debates so far between Morrow and her Democratic opponent, former school administrator Mo Green. 

The candidates aren’t just different from each other. They seem to live in different universes. Morrow’s brash and confrontational, a harsh critic of public schools and public school teachers. She’s supportive of school choice options, including private school vouchers, and has argued that public school educators are indoctrinating children with liberal ideology. 

Morrow’s candidacy, however, has been overshadowed at times by a history of controversial statements online about state and national politics, including calling for the execution of Democrats like Gov. Roy Cooper and former President Barack Obama, as well as supporting a military coup after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Morrow also attended the January 6th insurrection in D.C. with her children.  

Think of Green as the opposite in many ways. Green was a school administrator in Charlotte and Greensboro. In Greensboro, where he was superintendent for more than seven years, the local schools were recognized for academic growth and performance. In the last decade, he’s led the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, a philanthropic group that gives out grants to various causes, including public education. 

Green’s more low-key, a public education believer with a librarian’s voice and an interest in nuts-and-bolts education policy.

The first debate between Green and Morrow was hosted by the education advocacy org Best NC in mid-September. The second, hosted by Spectrum News in late September, was overshadowed by Helene’s damage out west. 

Tonight’s debate is hosted by the nonpartisan Public School Forum of NC. It starts at 7pm at Pinecrest High School in Southern Pines. Tickets are available at the door, or you can watch it on a future episode of “Education Matters,” which airs on YouTube and WRAL.

Since the debates, and this race, are flying too low under the radar, here are my thoughts on the race. I was a longtime education reporter, so I’m not just making it up. 

Let’s get to it.

There hasn’t been near enough talk about school funding

There’s an elephant in the room, and the debates so far, especially the second one on Spectrum, strayed too often into reactionary, “Moms for Liberty”-style subplots: “Kids are on cell phones too much! Why are kids so disrespectful these days? What happened to tough teachers?! What are my kids reading? Is it dirty??”

I don’t doubt these are chief concerns for some North Carolinians, but not all of them. When you talk to most parents and educators in North Carolina’s local public schools, they want to know why our schools can’t afford basic supplies, why they have to close because of failing air conditioning systems and mold, and why teachers are paid so poorly.  

Public school funding in North Carolina ranks near the bottom of the nation. So does teacher pay. North Carolina also ranked 49th in the nation, out of 50 states, on “school funding effort” in one nonpartisan K-12 report that took into account a state’s ability to fund education based on economic activity. 

And yet, if you ask most people, educating the next generation is the most important thing our government does. 

“This is a moment when champions of public education need to meet the moment,” Green said during the Spectrum debate in September. 

Morrow, like Republican leadership in the state legislature, blamed the schools’ struggles on the schools. 

 

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Morrow is trying to be “the change candidate”

Here’s why that’s odd. 

Morrow is a Republican. But Republicans in North Carolina have held the state superintendent’s office since 2016, and controlled the state legislature since 2010. 

“My vision is to make students the priority, not the system,” Morrow said during the debates. “We have a broken system, from the top down.”

But the top down is Republican, so what gives? If you’re a Republican who wants to blame that system on Democrats, it’ll be an uphill battle. 

Morrow had to look like a leader, not an extremist

This was tough. Morrow’s inflammatory social media posts, which endorsed violence and baseless conspiracy theories, are hard to stomach even if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. 

But she mostly succeeded during the debates of not dwelling on it, talking instead about her conservative K-12 philosophy. During the Spectrum debate, Morrow didn’t apologize for her most offensive comments, but she did say they were “in jest” or “taken out of context.”

Green, however, kept bringing it back up. “I would love to have the interchange about only education issues, belief in our public schools,” he said. “But that isn’t where we find ourselves in large part because of my opponent.”

Green needed to show some fire

There aren’t many people, other than people working for Morrow’s campaign, who are questioning Green’s background in education.

But it would be fair to wonder if he had the fire in his belly to go up against a state legislature that’s been virtually unchecked on education in the last decade. In truth, the legislature will hold all the cards, no matter what. They write the laws and write the budget. 

So it follows that public schools need a strong advocate in the superintendent’s office, because Republican lawmakers in the legislature are diverting more dollars to private school vouchers while underfunding public schools. Their end game is clear. They don’t believe in public education as an institution. 

During the debates, Green seemed to break out of his usually-calm demeanor on multiple occasions. At one point, he bristled when Morrow talked about how legislators should spend the state’s budget surplus, and when she applauded spending on private school vouchers, Green called it a “taxpayer voucher scheme.”

“You can create a surplus when you woefully underfund our public schools,” Green said. “Sure you can create a surplus.”

Some statements from Morrow are impossible to verify. At one point, she said private schools are doing a “much better job” than public schools, but under North Carolina law, private schools aren’t required to report back to the state on academic performance and growth in the same way public schools are. 

“Who knows? Who knows what’s going on in our private schools?” Green said.

Also, in America, the lion’s share of publicly-funded private school vouchers go to families who were already sending their children to private schools, Josh Cowen, a K-12 researcher, wrote in his 2024 book “The Privateers.” 

The hypocrisy is tough

Depending on how well you know Morrow’s background, some of her comments during the debates, including quoting Martin Luther King Jr., were either inspirational or hypocritical. 

She complained in the Spectrum debate about online anger and divisiveness. “People say things on a screen they wouldn’t say face to face,” she said, adding that online social media networks tend to take “empathy” away.

I couldn’t agree more, but this is the person who talked about executing Barack Obama in front of a pay-per-view audience, and once wrote that the plus sign in LGBTQ+ includes pedophiles. 

“I do not want to waste a dime on supporting his life,” Morrow wrote of Obama. “We could make some money back from televising his death.”

It’s going to be really hard for people to accept MLK truisms from this person. 

There’s another chance to hear this important debate.

If you don’t attend the debate tonight, make sure you watch it on a future episode of “Education Matters,” which airs on YouTube and WRAL.

Early voting begins Thursday in this and every other North Carolina election. Here’s how to vote early. Check out the rest of Cardinal & Pine’s voting hub here.