Switching North Carolina to a weighted student funding formula without new money would cut state funding for 73 of the state’s 115 traditional school districts, plus 111 of its 212 charter schools, according to a new report from the Public School Forum of North Carolina.
Sparing every district and charter school from those cuts would cost $192.4 million, the report estimates. But the Forum recommends going much further. Its spending scenarios would add between $1.4 billion and $8.8 billion per year to the $10.8 billion in state allotments the report modeled.
The left-leaning Forum released the report Aug. 26 after a two-year study by a group of more than 100 education leaders, elected officials, and school finance experts. The national firm Bellwether ran the modeling using 2024-25 state data.
Participants ranged from the John Locke Foundation and the Reason Foundation on the right to the NC Association of Educators and the NC Justice Center on the left, in addition to lawmakers from both parties. (Carolina Journal is published by the John Locke Foundation.) Education groups and agencies — including the NC Association for Public Charter Schools, the Department of Public Instruction, and the State Board of Education — also participated.
State lawmakers are already looking into the question of school funding. This year’s state budget included $300,000 for a work group at the UNC-affiliated North Carolina Collaboratory to chart a path to weighted student funding. Sen. Michael Lee, R-New Hanover, championed the idea this spring in Senate Bill 990, the Students First Act, which cleared the Senate Education Committee unanimously in May, as Carolina Journal reported.
“A weighted student formula is incredibly important. We need to move forward with it,” Lee said when presenting the bill in committee. “We’re one of just a few states with a resource-based allocation method.”
For roughly 90 years, the state has paid for schools by funding resources — teacher positions, programs, textbooks — through more than 40 separate allotments. A weighted formula would instead attach dollars to students, with a base amount for every child, plus more for those in poverty or with disabilities.
The Public School Forum ran the numbers four ways, changing only how much the state kicks in. With no new money, every student starts at $5,133. Some districts would lose up to $7,219 per student. Just five would gain more than $500.
“As the modeling presented in this report clearly demonstrates, implementing a cost-neutral model would result in untenable funding losses for the majority of the state’s school districts and charter schools,” the report states.
Adding more money to the mix improves the picture but doesn’t eliminate the losers. Devoting $1.4 billion still cuts 22 districts and 36 charter schools. Adding $4.1 billion — the Leandro plan’s adequacy target — still cuts three districts and five charters. Only the $8.8 billion version spares everyone, lifting average state funding to $13,017 per student.
Charter schools fare worse than districts under the leaner scenarios. Charters currently receive a per-pupil share of their home district’s allotments, plus state add-ons for students with disabilities and multilingual learners.
Under a weighted formula, they would be funded directly through it — but charters “are usually ineligible for community weights, such as concentrated poverty or rurality weights,” the report notes. At a revenue-neutral base, more than half the sector loses money.
Robert Luebke, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation, said the direction is the right one.
“The directive to develop a funding system based on weighted student funding is a step in the right direction in that it will tie more funding directly to the students,” Luebke said. “Getting the weights right so that weighted student funding works for all public and charter schools is the next step. It won’t be easy, but it will be the right thing for students, educators, policymakers and parents.”
The study group stopped short of endorsing a formula. The weights it tested were “a scenario used for modeling purposes and not a final recommendation,” the report says, and the group’s first non-negotiable is that no district lose funding in a transition.
The next move belongs to the budget’s work group, due back to lawmakers by July 15, 2027.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said avoiding all funding losses under a weighted formula would carry a price tag of up to $8.8 billion per year. The $8.8 billion figure is the cost of the report’s highest-spending scenario, which would raise North Carolina to the national average in education funding effort. The report estimates the cost of offsetting losses under its revenue-neutral scenario at $192.4 million. The story has been corrected.
