RALEIGH – The 2009 session of the General Assembly isn’t going to result in a big increase in taxpayer funding for the public schools – or for anything else, for that matter – but that doesn’t mean lawmakers can’t make advance education reform in North Carolina.
There are plenty of good ideas for boosting student achievement that would require little or no additional public expenditures. While North Carolina’s public schools aren’t expensive by national standards, they have seen a real increase of 53 percent in expenditures per pupil over the past 20 years, much of it occurring during Jim Hunt’s third and fourth terms in the 1990s.
As I’ve observed before, big increases in state school funding were not associated with commensurate gains in school outcomes. Just as the most expensive programs started hitting the state budget in the mid-1990s, North Carolina’s rate of improvement on credible national achievement tests began to slow.
The state of North Carolina will spend nearly $8 billion on elementary and secondary education this year. Counties will spend billions more on operations and school construction. The investment, in other words, is already huge.
Here are some ways that state policymakers could increase the return on this investment in 2009, while saving taxpayer money in the process:
• Eliminate the statewide cap of 100 charter schools. Because charters don’t receive state or local capital funds, they’re less expensive than district-run public schools and have saved taxpayers many millions of dollars a year since their inception a decade ago. As JLF’s Terry Stoops has observed, the fairest reading of the available data is that charter schools at least match comparable district schools in student performance, and the best charters significantly outperform the average public school. Those are precisely the charter operators we should be allowing to expand into additional neighborhoods and counties.
• Adopt a state tax credit for private educational investment by families and businesses. Fostering more choice and competition in North Carolina education would not only give at-risk students a way out of poorly performing schools, but would also save taxpayers a great deal of money as students transfer from expensive district-run public schools to less-expensive alternatives.
• Junk the state’s own end-of-grade tests in favor of purchasing independent national tests. They would be easier and less expensive to administer, while giving North Carolina policymakers and parents achievement scores that they can actually use.
• Make it easier for talented professionals to enter North Carolina’s classrooms. Knowledgeable North Carolinians who want to pursue a fulfilling second career shouldn’t have to jump through ineffective credentialing hoops in order to teach high-demand subjects such as math and science. Again, the best-available data suggest that North Carolina’s restrictive teacher-licensing policies do not produce better instruction in the classroom.
The state’s yawning budget gap is no excuse for a lack of progress on education reform. Given the stakes, in fact, we shouldn’t accept any more excuses.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation