RALEIGH – Attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the Leandro school-equity case are making headlines with their claim to be deserving of $10.7 million in legal fees financed by the taxpayers of North Carolina. The best term to describe this action is breathtaking gumption.
It requires breathtaking gumption to assert that you “deserve” $10.7 million for “winning” a case when you did not, in fact, win the case. The fact that state politicians, for various reasons, are pretending that the Leandro plaintiffs proved unconstitutional inequities in North Carolina’s funding formula does not change the underlying truth of the matter.
Remember, plaintiffs in the five original counties – Hoke, Cumberland, Halifax, Robeson, and Vance – tried to prove that the state’s use of local property taxes for public education was unfair to poorer counties and in violation of the state constitution’s requirement of “a general and uniform system of free public schools” in which “equal opportunities shall be provided for all students.” The courts, quite properly, said no to this claim.
The vast majority of tax dollars spent on North Carolina public schools were already being collected at the state and federal level. Our reliance on local property taxes has been relatively modest since the 1930s. Unless the courts were being asked to prohibit counties from using property taxes at all to supplement their funding or construct school buildings, it never made much sense to argue that having one-quarter of total educational expenditures funded locally was unconstitutional – but, say, one-fifth or 15 percent funded locally was OK.
As has been repeatedly demonstrated, the notion of wide, persistent, and educational significant gaps in school spending across North Carolina is simply a myth. It is predicated on misstatements of fact and misunderstandings of basic statistics and economics. Moreover, since the Leandro case was filed, total school spending, adjusted for inflation and student enrollment, has grown substantially. The Leandro counties now have more real resources per student than the “wealthy” counties did when the case was filed – not because the state has set up a massive redistribution program, as the plaintiffs apparently wanted, but simply because of overall funding growth.
Responding to the suit, the state supreme court did rule that the constitutional language should be construed to create a civil right to the opportunity for a sound, basic education. What this means in practice remains the subject of political and legal debate. But no court has found North Carolina’s system for funding schools to be unconstitutional.
The entire issue of school-funding equity has devolved into incoherence. Everyone seems to be pretending that it is possible for “the state” to pick up the tab for schools – be they in poor, rural areas with a limited tax base or large, urban areas with intractable poverty and high costs – as if “the state” has money to play with. Once you create a list of dozens of school districts across the state that deserve more money, you start to run out of supposedly undertaxed places to go to get the money.
All North Carolina school districts are funded to a degree sufficient to provide a sound, basic education. They were before the Leandro detour, a journey for which taxpayers should not be charged yet another $10.7 million.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.