A headline you'd never see if Republicans ruled the roost in North Carolina

CMS will lay out plans for rehiring teachers

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials are expected to disclose plans today for how many laid-off teachers they will rehire for the upcoming school year. Superintendent Peter Gorman also is likely to give some indications of how the system will decide which teachers will return.

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Gorman said last week that the decision by state lawmakers to increase the sales tax by 1 cent is expected to give CMS enough money to rehire "a substantial number" of the 665 teachers he laid off earlier this summer.

"We will bring back teachers -- absolutely," Gorman said late last week. "And I am thrilled about it."

Speaker Hackney today said

"In the context of a severe recession, I feel like we have saved public education and its core mission," he said during a news conference after gaveling the House to a close after seven months. "We did it without pay cuts, without furloughs and, I think, fairly."

There's a lot the General Assembly didn't do, and much of what they did do was done behind too many closed doors. But mostly the honorables steered clear of Republican efforts to gut public education ... at least for now. Rob Schofield has a good take on some of the bright spots. He's more upbeat than I am about how things turned out, but perhaps that enthusiasm comes from a better understand of how many bullets we really dodged.