RALEIGH – Here’s a little irony for you: at the same time that some school officials and political activists are demanding that local school districts in North Carolina not be funded equally – that is, that local districts with more difficult challenges should receive higher levels of state funding – officials and activists in the transportation arena are insisting on equal funding for each local area.
Defining equity in the context of state or federal funding for local governmental functions is not as easy as it might sound. The Leandro school finance case has demonstrated, quite to the contrary of the plaintiffs’ original argument, that a constitutional entitlement to an opportunity for a sound, basic education does not require that the state eradicate variations in local education expenditures.
Instead, the state’s appellate courts have found, the language of North Carolina’s constitution requires the state to ensure that every child in the state has a reasonable likelihood of receiving a sound, basic education. Policymakers can’t guarantee that every child will get such an education – the child and his or her the parents have a say in that, among others – but they can ensure that adequate resources are appropriated to the task.
The big-spenders have adjusted their rhetoric and demands to this legal philosophy, finally, and are now making extravagant claims about what this means. For example, they say, Leandro now means that children too young or old to be in the public schools are still entitled to state assistance, or that if children don’t have adequate medical care, which is implicated in the capacity to learn, the state must provide it. This is well beyond the scope of the constitution’s wording or intent, however.
A reasonable argument might be made, however, that the state constitution’s mandate cannot be satisfied merely by doling out a sufficient, equal state appropriation for every child in the state. It might well be more expensive to attract good teachers to schools or classrooms disproportionately populated by children from poor, single-parent, or crime-ridden backgrounds.
I’m willing to bet that many of the state legislators who make or buy this argument, though, offer an entirely different perspective when it comes to state highway funding. It is demonstrable that some counties have far more traffic than others, leading to congestion and pavement deterioration, while also generating a disproportionately high share of total highway-fund revenues for the same reason. But highway funds are not allocated according to a formula that reflects either a priority list of projects, based on passenger-miles improved or accommodated, or an estimate of where highway-fund dollars are generated (which is more or less a proxy for highway usage).
Instead, under a state policy enacted in 1999, each Department of Transportation region is supposed to over time receive an “equitable” amount of state funding for highway projects. In practical terms, this could mean a shift of $300 million in highway funds from the Triangle area, where they are demonstrably needed, to areas of the state where traffic counts are low and likely to remain so.
It is a myth that state highway funding determines the economic development of a county or region. There are many other factors in play, so many in fact that policymakers can and should think of state highway expenditures as reactive of private-sector trends, not a primary determinant of them.
But more generally, the point is this: how many definitions of “equity” is the political class prepared to invent?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.