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There’s plenty to dread about this year’s campaign season. But the race for North Carolina’s superintendent of public instruction is shaping up to offer voters a choice in November between well-qualified candidates who behave like adults and offer different perspectives on what’s best for our kids.
Incumbent Catherine Truitt, a Republican, is seeking a second term. In her first, she’s shown herself to be knowledgeable about issues and focused on academic results. She aligns with GOP lawmakers on some things but has challenged them on others, joining bipartisan coalitions to lobby for improving the state’s school letter grades and granting calendar flexibility to school districts. She has pushed to revamp the way students are taught to read and the way North Carolina recruits and pays teachers — efforts that will delight some voters and dismay others.
She’ll face Michele Morrow in the Republican primary, and that promises to be acrimonious. Morrow is a Wake County resident who home-schools her kids. Her campaign material has said that “our students' minds are being poisoned with politically biased, racially divisive, sexually explicit and academically weak content” and that Truitt “has no plan to improve scholastics or classroom conduct and has grossly mismanaged our educational budget.” She ran for a district seat on the Wake County school board in 2022, finishing second of three. There’s an anonymous anti-Morrow website calling her a right-wing extremist and featuring a TikTok of Morrow streaming herself from the march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Democratic primary features C.R. “Katie” Eddings, Maurice “Mo” Green and Kenon Crumble. Eddings is a Lee County teacher and Air Force veteran who’s running to be a voice for teachers. Crumble is a Wake County assistant principal and a doctoral candidate at Long Island University. Green has the highest statewide profile, having served as superintendent of Guilford County Schools, executive director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and deputy superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
The primary is March 5. Absentee ballots are already in the mail, and in-person early voting begins Feb. 15.
Unless something dramatic changes before the primary, we’ll likely be looking at a Truitt-Green contest in the general election. Each of them has far outstripped their primary competitors in raising money and lining up the kind of support that can win a statewide race. Truitt had raised more than $200,000 as of her July campaign finance report (read details and donors here), while Morrow reported just under $3,500 as of December. Green had raised almost $115,000 as of October, the month he announced his candidacy (details and donors here). Crumble filed a first campaign report on Dec. 28, listing less than $2,000 raised, and Eddings’ most recent filing says the campaign has $375 on hand.
I’ve dealt with Green and Truitt enough to respect them both. As one of North Carolina’s 2.7 million unaffiliated voters, I look forward to taking a good look at their positions and casting a vote on Nov. 5 that doesn’t require holding my nose.
