A new analysis from the John Locke Foundation says that a report from the Public School Forum is right that North Carolina needs to overhaul the way it pays for public schools but wrong to demand that no school district lose money in the switch.
Locke argues that making that kind of guarantee would lock funding into shrinking, wealthier districts and defeat the reform’s purpose — to move dollars to students who need them the most.
“A ‘no loss’ provision would only ensure that wealthier or lower-need districts — districts that should see funding cuts — maintain their funding levels,” wrote Robert Luebke, director of the Center for Effective Education at Locke, in the Sept. 14 analysis. (Locke is the publisher of Carolina Journal.)
The Forum released its report Aug. 26 after a two-year study. Its modeling found that switching to a weighted student funding formula without new money would cut state funding for 73 of 115 districts and more than half of the state’s charter schools. Sparing every district and charter from those cuts would cost $192.4 million, according to the report.
“The report does get much right and enriches the ongoing discussion on school finance and Weighted Student Funding in North Carolina,” wrote Luebke, who participated in the Forum’s 100-plus-member working group, along with Locke colleague Kaitlyn Shepherd. “It asks many of the right questions and provides a useful starting point in an important discussion.”
The Forum’s report says North Carolina spends too little on its schools, while Locke argues the state doesn’t know where the money goes.
“In our view, the root of current ills is not a lack of resources, but an inefficiency of resources,” Luebke wrote. “Real per-pupil expenditures for North Carolina public schools have nearly tripled since 1970. Academic outcomes have lagged. Do we need more resources, or do we need to learn how to use resources more efficiently?”
One of Luebke’s sharpest objections is to a rule the study group called non-negotiable: No district should lose funding. Enrollment has declined in 85% of districts since 2015 while districts have hired more than 1,200 additional staff since 2020, he wrote. A permanent funding guarantee would lock in both trends, he argued.
Luebke also called the report’s higher-spending scenarios, which would add up to $8.8 billion per year in state spending, “unsustainable.” His alternative: temporary protections to smooth the transition, which, he notes, existing programs already provide in part.
He also faulted the report for what it leaves out. It contains no provisions to strengthen accountability or transparency and pays little attention to consolidating the roughly 50 separate funding streams Locke counts in the current system. Moreover, the report has no strategy to improve student achievement.
“The omissions are conspicuous,” he wrote. Among Locke’s own ideas: converting teacher position allotments to dollar amounts and giving administrators more flexibility in how they pay teachers.
Lawmakers spent the session moving in the same direction. State Sen. Michael Lee, R-New Hanover, filed the Students First Act in the spring, calling for a work group to chart a three-year transition to weighted student funding. The bill cleared the Senate Education Committee unanimously in May, as Carolina Journal reported.
“A weighted student formula is incredibly important,” Lee said at the time. “We need to move forward with it.”
The final state budget, enacted in July, picked up the idea. It set aside $300,000 for a work group at the UNC-affiliated North Carolina Collaboratory, and its assignments overlap with Locke’s policy prescriptions. That includes studying whether to convert teacher pay from position allotments to dollar allotments, and whether to move the job of distributing school funding from the Department of Public Instruction to the state agency that runs the Opportunity Scholarship program.