North Carolina is now a lot closer to adopting a strong school-choice program. State representative Tricia Cotham, a former assistant principal of a public school and chair of the K–12 Education Committee, has switched parties and given Republicans a 60 percent supermajority in both houses of the legislature.
That means Republicans can now override Democratic governor Roy Cooper’s vetoes. He has exercised that power 75 times in the last five years, and, so far, only been overridden once.
Cotham has a lifelong history of supporting public schools. She has a master’s degree in school administration, she was honored as Charlotte’s Teacher of the Year in 2001, and she’s served as an assistant principal for a public high school.
But she said in a news conference yesterday that, “We have to evolve. . . . The state is changing especially after what [parents] saw firsthand and experienced in their home with Covid and learning. One size fits all in education is wrong for children. . . . The Democrat Party didn’t really want to talk about children. They had talking points from adults and adult organizations.”
She said her changing views on school choice caused her to be “shunned and called a traitor.” Liberal groups contacted her children in an attempt to bully her.
Cotham described herself as a “single Mom, basketball coach and woman of strong faith” and lamented that, “Some people can’t accept a bold strong woman who is an independent thinker who works across the aisle.”
Democratic fury at her party switch may stem in part from the fact that Cotham comes from Democratic royalty. Her father, John, chaired Charlotte’s Democratic Party, and her mother, Pat, is a current Democratic county commissioner there.
The fact that Cotham has felt it necessary to leave her ancestral party is a sign of just how intolerant of moderates it has become. As she put it at her news conference: “The party has become unrecognizable to me and so many others.”