Republican legislative leaders must be awfully worried about Governor Bev Perdue’s proposal to raise the sales tax 3/4 of a penny to restore some of the devastating budget cuts to public schools that lawmakers made last year.

That’s the only plausible explanation for their puzzling statements and odd behavior in the last few days.

Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger held a news conference Tuesday to challenge Perdue to a public debate about her tax plan. That came just a few days after Berger called the proposal dead on arrival at the General Assembly.

That doesn’t sound much like somebody interested in an actual debate.

It sounds like somebody grasping for a publicity stunt to parrot his tired anti-tax talking points to avoid talking about the damage their budget has caused in classrooms across the state.

Thanks to the cuts that Berger and his Republican colleagues made, thousands of teachers and teacher assistants have been fired, classes are larger, students don’t have textbooks, classrooms are short of supplies, and at-risk four-year-olds are being turned away from vital preschool programs.

Those are the facts, no matter how hard the right-wing think tanks try to deny it.

No wonder Berger wants to frame this as a tax issue. He would rather not talk about education.

Not to be outdone, House Speaker Thom Tillis chimed in and said he wanted to debate Perdue too. Of course he does.

Then there is House Majority Leader Paul Stam, who called Perdue’s proposal a political move because he said she knew it had no chance of passing.

That’s an odd claim, especially from Stam, who spent the last ten years proposing things he knew would not pass.

Here’s another possibility for Stam to consider. Maybe Perdue actually believes that the Republican budget cuts are hurting public schools and she wants to reinstate part of the 2009 sales tax increase to address them.

Missing from much of the coverage about this whole episode is some perspective on what Republican legislative leaders really think about public schools.

Stam for example, wants to privatize them. That’s not speculation. He introduced legislation for a voucher scheme this session and said his dream is that every school is a charter.

The budget the Republicans approved included a provision that allows virtual charter schools and this week the Cabarrus County Board of Education voted to partner with K-12, Inc., a company with a questionable record that operates virtual charter schools across the country.

An audit into the company’s practices in Colorado found the company was receiving money from the state for students who did not live in Colorado or were never even enrolled.

Then there are the layoffs and budget cuts that dropped North Carolina to 49th in the country in per-pupil spending.

The budget also abolished funding for the N.C. Teaching Fellows, a nationally recognized program that provides college scholarships for students who promise to spend at least four years teaching.

Last fall Tillis said lawmakers may have made a mistake by defunding the program, but he has since backed off that statement and there has been no effort to revisit the decision.

That’s their record on education and the public is catching on. Polls already show that voters support increasing the sales tax to increasing funding for public schools.

Republicans ought to be worried.