Debates about public school funding often ignore one of the most crucial points: the so-called “bang for the buck.” Terry Stoops, the John Locke Foundation’s director of research and education studies, says most discussions about public school budgets focus on pumping more dollars into schools. He says policymakers ought to pay more attention to how effectively schools spend the dollars they have. Expect to hear quite a bit during the next few months about the North Carolina economy. Especially in the race for governor, partisans on the left and right will argue about how well the state’s economy has performed compared to neighboring states and compared to its own past record. John Locke Foundation Chairman John Hood warns that some data will prove more valuable than others when weighing the competing claims. North Carolina has a new state law governing access to video from police body cameras. Much of the debate about that law involved competing principles of privacy and government transparency. You’ll hear highlights from the legislature’s debate about those conflicting goals. The unexpected death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia will have a major long-term impact on the U.S. Supreme Court. But Ilya Shapiro, editor-in-chief of the Cato Institute’s Cato Supreme Court Review, says Scalia’s death had a minimal impact in the short term on court decisions during its most recent terms. Shapiro recapped the 2015-16 court’s most important rulings during a presentation in Raleigh for the Federalist Society. He shares details of that presentation with Carolina Journal Radio. North Carolina’s criminal code is much larger than those in neighboring states. That doesn’t necessarily mean the state is doing a better job fighting crime. Many of the state’s crimes target small business owners and entrepreneurs who fail to fill out proper paperwork or jump through bureaucratic hoops. Becki Gray, the John Locke Foundation’s vice president for outreach, discusses efforts to fight overcriminalization in North Carolina.