Democratic leaders and education advocates blasted the North Carolina Supreme Court Thursday after it voided years of rulings in the long-running Leandro education case, but conservatives and Republicans applauded the reversal in the long-running case.
The 4-3 decision didn’t void the initial Leandro ruling that the North Carolina Constitution grants all students the right to a sound basic education. But it did rule that control of school funding lies not with the courts, but with the Republican-led legislature, which Gov. Josh Stein said is responsible for the state’s 49th rank in per-pupil spending.
“The Supreme Court simply ignored its own established precedent, enabling the General Assembly to continue to deprive another generation of North Carolina students of the education promised by our Constitution,” Stein said in a statement.
House Democratic Leader Robert Reives (D-Chatham) also condemned the ruling as partisan.“For three decades, Republican and Democratic judges recognized and attempted to enforce the right to a sound basic education. Today, four Republican justices nullified that constitutional right. The children of our state deserve better,” he said.
The North Carolina Association of Educators called the ruling a “moral failure.” President Tamika Walker Kelly said thousands of students continue to attend overcrowded classrooms in deteriorating buildings, and announced a May 1 protest in Raleigh.
Conservative groups welcomed the ruling as a restoration of legislative authority over budgets. Donald Bryson, CEO of the John Locke Foundation, said judges should not dictate the state budget.
“Budgets must be written by elected representatives who are accountable to the people — not by litigants who lost at the ballot box and went fishing for a judicial bailout,”he said. Judges and justices in North Carolina are also elected.
Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) praised the decision, saying it reaffirms the legislature’s authority.“For decades, liberal education special interests have improperly tried to hijack North Carolina’s constitutional funding process in order to impose their policy preferences via judicial fiat,” he said. “Today’s decision confirms that the proper pathway for policymaking is the legislative process.”
North Carolina Supreme Court vacates nine years of Leandro school funding orders
The Leandro case dates back to 1994, when five low-wealth, rural counties sued the state over inadequate school funding. In 1997, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the state was violating students’ constitutional right to a sound, basic education, a decision that has been upheld multiple times since.
In subsequent years, lower courts and state officials wrestled with how to meet that standard. A 2002 trial judge ordered the state to provide enough funding for well-prepared principals and teachers, adequate school resources, and pre-kindergarten for at-risk students. The Supreme Court affirmed much of that ruling in 2004, though it said pre-kindergarten could not be mandated because state law does not require school until age 7.
State legislators have for decades resisted the spending increases court decisions have called for. Democrats controlled the legislature until 2011, but did not provide the funding needed to solve the problem. In 2018, the state and plaintiffs agreed to hire outside consultants WestEd and the Learning Policy Institute to evaluate how North Carolina could improve education. Their findings formed the basis of the Leandro Plan, a multi-year roadmap for investment in teachers, early childhood education, and other resources.
The plan, estimated to cost $5.6 billion, was never fully adopted by the legislature, even after it was scaled back by a subsequent judge to $678 million. In 2022, the court ordered state officials to release the funds anyway, prompting legal challenges from Republican legislative leaders who argued that the court has no constitutional authority to control the state budget.
Keith Poston, president of WakeEd Partnership, called the ruling “disappointing but not surprising.” He said the court focused on procedure, rather than addressing whether the state is meeting its education obligations. “What hasn’t changed is what students and teachers need,” he said.
That urgency was echoed by Sen. Jay Chaudhuri (D-Wake), who called the ruling a “betrayal” and said it could cost Wake County more than $290 million in funding, hundreds of staff, and millions more for students with disabilities.
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