Earlier this month, Wake County Superior Court judge Abe Jones lost his reelection bid to Wake County public defender Bryan Collins.  The election results give the News & Observer an opportunity to paint Jones as a victim of conniving judges, racist attorneys, and an unsympathetic bar association.

In July, I commented on one of Jones’ rulings.  I wrote,

Judge Jones argues that the announcement of the chairman of the State Board of Education, Bill Harrison, constituted an SBE decision on an entire class of charter applications — in this case, virtual schools.  He maintains that the SBE had no obligation to act on the application [from the non-profit board N.C. Learns] because “it concluded that no response was required given its previous October 2011 announcement that no virtual charter school application would be considered for 2012-2013.”

In other words, Judge Jones contends that Harrison’s proclamation was representative of the SBE as a whole, even though members did not vote on the application.  Indeed, the N.C. Learns application was never brought before the board as a formal action item.

Did Judge Jones consider the implications of granting the chairman of the SBE this kind of unilateral authority?  If the chair of the SBE determined that the state had too many charter schools in Durham County, to use a relevant example, he could announce that the SBE would not consider any applications for schools in that county.  And that would be the end of the story.  What Harrison says, goes.  It is Harrison’s way or the highway.  Harrison is large and in charge.  You get the idea.

What is to stop the chairman of the State Board of Education from disqualifying charter applications based on other attributes of the application?  What if Chairman Harrison did not approve of the educational program or student demographics of certain charter applicants? Judge Jones would argue that the chair could simply announce that the SBE would not consider such schools in the upcoming application period — no vote of the board and no rationale required.

To his credit, Judge Jones points out that the charter review process is well established.  He writes, “Over the last 15 years, the SBE has instituted various procedures designed to ensure that all applications are reviewed thoroughly and consistently, e.g., SBE Policy TCS-U-012.”  In the case of the N.C. Virtual Academy, however, the SBE largely ignored policies related to the charter application process as outlined in the N.C. General Statutes and SBE Policy TCS-U-012.  Obviously, there is nothing in statute or policy that allows the chair of the SBE to exercise unilateral authority over the charter review process.

The N&O wants us to know that Jones is smart because he is a Harvard-educated lawyer.  I do not doubt that he is intelligent.  I hear that Harvard is a decent school. I question his jurisprudence.  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one.