John Hood weighs in on the latest installment in the long-running Leandro education lawsuit in our state. The case is back in court today. A key point: there is no constitutional right to pre-school.
The North Carolina Supreme Court has never ruled that the state constitution requires the delivery of early childhood services to all preschoolers, or even to all low-income preschoolers.
I know that may not be what you’ve read in news stories covering funding disputes about North Carolina Pre-K and Smart Start. But my statement is correct. You can check behind me by reading the relevant Leandro decisions at the website of theAdministrative Office of the Courts, including last year’s unanimous Court of Appeals ruling on the funding dispute. You can also ask the Supreme Court justices who wrote the original decisions in the long-running Leandro school-funding lawsuit what they meant.
I’ve done both. There is no constitutional right to preschool. No such provision was written into the current state constitution or added by constitutional referendum.
Because the funding dispute has now reached the Supreme Court again, with oral arguments scheduled for today, the faulty notion that taxpayer-funded preschool is constitutionally obligatory has again been propagated by the usual suspects. They’d dearly love the Court to order state government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on preschool, along with a commensurate tax increase. That was the original purpose of the Leandro lawsuit — to use judicial means to compel the General Assembly to raise education spending and taxes.
