““To make up for the projected billion-dollar-a-year shortfall created by the many new tax cuts he helped to deliver, something had to give. So for savings, the legislators turned to the one institution that had distinguished North Carolina from many other southern states—its celebrated public education system. The assault was systematic. They authorized vouchers for private schools while putting the public school budget in a vise and squeezing. They eliminated teachers’ assistants and reduced teacher pay from the twenty-first highest in the country to the forty-sixth. They abolished incentives for teachers to earn higher degrees and reduced funding for a successful program for at-risk preschoolers. Voters had overwhelmingly preferred to avoid these cuts by extending a temporary one-penny sales tax to sustain educational funding, but the legislators, many of whom had signed a no-tax pledge promoted by Americans for Prosperity, made the cuts anyway.””