Few issues have drawn so much attention, spilled so much ink, and generated so many billable hours as the debate over school-funding equity in North Carolina. Unfortunately, few issues have been as poorly communicated to voters, either.
At least since the celebrated Leandro case and related litigation began, for example, North Carolina have been told repeatedly that there are huge disparities in public-school funding across the state. This is demonstrably untrue. North Carolina, unlike many of its peers, has long funded public education primarily with state dollars. Local supplements play a role, of course, and I?m not denying that there are some differences in offerings and facilities as a result, but state dollars fund about two-thirds of the operating cost, on average, with local dollars financing a quarter and the rest being federal.
Obviously, differences in local funding can affect the length of the proverbial tail without wagging the entire dog all that much. In the 2001-02 school year, I found, 97 of the state?s (then) 117 districts had expenditures within a band that was 15 percent above and below the state mean of about $6,700 per student. And of the 20 districts outside the band, most were indeed rural with lower-than-average incomes ? but most had higher-than-average school spending, typically due to an economy-of-scale effect. That is, smaller systems have fewer students over which to spread fixed costs.
These statistics point to the large problem with the debate over Leandro and school equity ? the idea that equal funding necessarily leads to equal educational opportunities or results. This isn?t necessarily true. Nor is it what the Leandro decision concluded, though plenty of folks have read into it what they hoped it would say rather than what it said.
The state constitution contains at least two provisions of interest here. One states that citizens have a ?right to the privilege of education? and that it is the state?s duty to ?guard and maintain that right.? The other stipulates that the state must provide sufficient funds to provide ?a general and uniform system of free public schools.? Previous litigation had resulted in a narrow interpretation of these provisions, but in Leandro the Supreme Court concluded (I think correctly) that the provisions established an enforceable right to the opportunity for a ?sound, basic education? and that the state as a whole, not its local-government creations, was ultimately responsible.
What the Court pointedly did not find, but many continue to pretend it did, was that local systems had a right to equal funding, or that judges can and should oversee every aspect of the budget for public education. The decision laid out criteria for judging whether the state was discharging its duty. But how the state might act to ensure these opportunities was not prescribed.
For starters, the state could help to satisfy the directive by allowing systems to use their current flow of state funding to satisfy their highest-priority needs. Many education analysts agree, for instance, that the hundreds of millions of dollars North Carolina spends each year funding teacher assistants generate few measurable academic benefits. Local schools ought to be free to convert these positions into additional teachers to reduce class sizes in early grades or to attract and retain higher-quality teachers.
I would argue that another way to satisfy the Leandro mandate would be to ensure that students assigned to consistently low-performing schools have alternative schools available if their parents so choose. These are properly policy decisions, not judicial ones.
To argue that education spending is unconstitutionally low is both dangerous (who decides?) and improbable. Remember that spending per student has been a moving target during the course of the litigation. From 1991-92 to 2002-03, inflation-adjusted spending per student rose by 26 percent. A while back, I tracked and compared total expenditures in the 25 richest and 25 poorest districts in the state. After adjusting for inflation and student enrollment, I found that the 25 poorest districts are now better funded in real terms that the wealthiest ones were when this current round of litigation began.
So the only way that current spending levels on the ?poor? districts can be viewed as unconstitutional would be if spending on all school districts in the state was unconstitutional from the creation of public schools in North Carolina during the 19th century all the way through the early 1990s. Politicians looking for cover to justify their costly education initiatives might try to argue this, but it contains no legal or logical weight.