Raleigh, North Carolina – The North Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a long-running lawsuit over state education funding, a decision that will likely keep the power to decide how much money to spend and where to spend it with the Legislature, not judges.
The 4-3 ruling, which was led by the court’s Republican justices, was overturned Historic ruling in 2022 when the court, which had a Democratic majority, ruled that a lower court judge had the authority to order that taxpayer money be directed to state agencies to address long-standing education inequities.
The following year, another court judge calculated that the state owed $678 million to meet two years of a comprehensive eight-year, multibillion-dollar remediation plan, in part to improve teacher recruitment and salaries, expand pre-K and help students with disabilities.
In Thursday’s ruling, Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote that what began as a modest lawsuit over one district’s education spending “became a widespread, facial assault on the entire educational system enacted by the General Assembly.” Since then, Newby said, the judicial process has gone too far.
When the case expanded, “the trial court’s authority to hear the case also ceased,” Newby wrote during his order dismissing the school finance lawsuit.
The decision came more than two years after the court heard oral arguments. Republicans who control the General Assembly would not be required to comply with the remedial plan while preparing state budgets, including this year’s budget that is now several months late.
Democratic Gov. Josh Stein will have to rely more on convincing lawmakers and his veto power to spend more on teacher pay, pre-kindergarten programs and other initiatives. Stein was North Carolina’s attorney general when the 2022 ruling was handed down.
“The Supreme Court simply ignored its established precedent, enabling the General Assembly to continue to deprive another generation of North Carolina students of the education promised by our Constitution,” Stein said in a statement Thursday.
Two Democratic judges and a Republican judge objected to Thursday’s ruling.
Associate Justice Anita Earls, a Democrat, said the decision appears to be more about dealing with how the 2022 decision is reached than what happens to students.
“Allowing a state to escape judicial scrutiny for violations of constitutional rights through its conduct during litigation quickly reduces constitutional rights to words on paper — morally compelling but functionally useless,” she wrote.
Attention will now turn to formulating the next government education spending proposal. The General Assembly meets this month. Nearly 40% of the state’s more than $30 billion annual budget goes to K-12 funding alone.
“Liberal education special interests inappropriately attempted to hijack North Carolina’s constitutional funding process in order to impose their policy preferences via judicial fiat,” Republican Senate Leader Phil Berger said in a press release. “Today’s decision confirms that the correct path to policy making is the legislative process.”
Critics of GOP education spending have pointed in part to taxpayer-funded scholarships for K-12 students to attend private schools as evidence that more could be done for public school children.
The lawsuit began in 1994, when several school districts in low-income areas and families with children sued and accused the state of violating the North Carolina Constitution by not providing adequate funding for education.
The case is often referred to as “Leandro” — after the last name of one of the students who sued.
Supreme Court decisions in the case from 1997 and 2004 found that the state constitution requires that all children must have “the opportunity to receive a sound basic education,” and that the state remains ill-equipped to comply with that dictate. Many say it is a problem that remains unresolved.
“The people paying the price for the failure of our leaders are not just abstract ideas. They are the generations of children in rural communities, past and present, who waited 30 years for a promise that was never fulfilled,” Tamika Walker Kelly, president of the North Carolina State Teachers Association, said in a press release.
The court’s Democratic majority in 2022 had decided that the Supreme Court’s decisions combined with the Constitution’s “right to the privilege of education” and years of inaction by elected officials created an “extraordinary” situation that gave the late Justice David Lee power. To order the spending of money Without a specific law enacted by the General Assembly.