RALEIGH – Remember all the talk about the Leandro case revolutionizing public education in North Carolina?
Well, it obviously hasn’t. There has been no revolution in the state’s education system or in the performance of its students. North Carolina did show dramatic improvement on independent national tests during the early to mid-1990s – but at about the time Leandro was decided and the state legislature enacted a series of notable education bills in the late 1990s, our progress slowed and then nearly halted altogether.
To understand why Leandro has proved to be an expensive detour – and why you should read a new book on the subject – I’ll have to give you a little more background.
The litigation began in 1994. Part of a coordinated national strategy by left-wing attorneys and activists to use courts to order increased school funding, the Leandro plantiffs originally alleged that students in low-wealth school districts were being unconstitutionally deprived of educational opportunity because their districts lacked sufficient funding from state taxpayeres.
The North Carolina Supreme Court issued its first ruling on the case in 1997, sending the case to Wake County Judge Howdy Manning’s court for trial. The Supremes issued a subsequent opinion in 2004. The case remains under Manning’s jurisdiction for the remedy phase.
Contrary to popular belief, neither Manning nor the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs’ original claim that North Carolina’s funding system for education was unconstitutional. As it happens, North Carolina’s funding system is unlike those of states with wide variations in per-pupil spending. Since the 1930s, we’ve paid for public schools mostly with state income and sales tax dollars, not with local property taxes. As a result, North Carolina’s school districts don’t vary all that much in real resources per student.
Moreover, it never made much sense anyway to claim that the state constitution guaranteed a certain level of education funding above that currently afforded school districts by the state. Just during the course of the Leandro litigation, but not because of it, overall education spending grew so much that the “poor” Leandro districts ended up with more dollars, adjusted for inflation and enrollment, than the “wealthy” districts had possessed when the case began.
Rather, the Supreme Court’s decision in the Leandro case was that North Carolina’s constitution established a civil right to the opportunity for a “sound, basic education” (a phrase borrowed from the other, simultaneous cases going on in multiple states). This right was further defined to mean that every student deserved to be given access to a school with qualified teachers, a sound curriculum, and other necessities.
By the time the case reached the high court, it was obvious that North Carolina had already provided districts with adequate resources to provide these necessities. Rather than winning a court order that the state legislature raise education funding by hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, the Leandro plantiffs ended up with the perpetual jurisdiction of a superior court judge, Howdy Manning, over the operation and even in the personnel decisions of troubled school districts.
Needless to say, that’s not what the Leandro lobby within the state’s public school establishment had been expecting. Fortunately for them, Manning’s remedy orders to date haven’t really amounted to much. That’s not his fault, not really. The situation lacks a judicial solution.
So far, this is a story that I and other observers have told many times. What’s new is that a Princeton University Press book by Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth – Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools – puts the Leandro case in perspective by examining the broader trend of school equity and adequacy litigation across dozens of states.
Hanushek is a well-known expert in the economics of education. Lindseth is a well-known expert in school-finance law. Their conclusion is blunt: the litigation has expended lots of resources to little effect. “The impact of court-ordered or induced remedies on achievement has largely mirrored that of previous legislative efforts,” they write – that is, the remedies have made little difference in measurable outcomes.
The book is a treasure trove of data, summarizing testing trends and hundreds of studies examining the potential educational benefits of increased funding, equalized funding, class-size reduction, merit pay, tenure reform, parental choice, and many other variables and policies. I’ll be mining it for future columns.
In the meantime, as a native North Carolinian I found it reassuring to learn that school-finance litigation has been pretty much a dead end everywhere in the country, not just in our state.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation