Leandro’s end could open door to NC education reform

It’s not clear whether North Carolina’s top policymakers can reach bipartisan agreement on meaningful education reform.

But the state Supreme Court recently removed a key obstacle. By a 4-3 vote, the high court ended the 32-year-old Leandro lawsuit.

Critics blame the court for shirking its duty to help guarantee North Carolinians access to a sound, basic education. Yet over the past decade, developments in the long-running Leandro case muted meaningful dialogue about reform.

Justice Richard Dietz was the only Republican who disagreed with the high court’s April 2 decision to shut the case down. But Dietz’s dissent opened with a good explanation of why Leandro’s end should produce more good than harm.

“The heart of Leandro is the notion of a sound basic education,” Dietz wrote. “But the Enlightenment principles that form the building blocks of that education — rationality, objectivity, tolerance, skepticism — have been abandoned by all sides in this long-running lawsuit. Instead, this case and the discourse around it have become a study in the opposite — partisanship, bias, generalization, straw-manning, and appeals to ignorance. Simply put, Leandro has lost its way.”

It wasn’t always so.

When the case started in 1994, a group of parents, students, and school boards in five “low-wealth” counties sued the state for more money. They argued that North Carolina failed to provide schools enough funding to meet the state’s constitutional obligations. Later, school systems in larger counties joined the case. They argued that state education funding shortchanged them as well.

The state Supreme Court issued its first Leandro ruling in 1997. Justices agreed that provisions in the North Carolina Constitution guaranteed students the opportunity to access a “sound, basic education.” Yet the high court rejected plaintiffs’ plea to order more funding.

For the next 20 years, the case took numerous twists and turns. The plaintiffs, state government, and the court all haggled over what a sound, basic education looked like in practice. At no point did a court ever issue a blanket order for more spending.

Nor did the case prompt clear partisan divisions.

The situation changed in 2017. Democrat Roy Cooper’s newly installed gubernational administration, the State Board of Education, and the money-seeking plaintiffs all began working together. All endorsed hiring a San Francisco-based consultant to create a plan that would resolve the Leandro dispute.

The process included no input from leaders of state government’s policymaking branch, the Republican-led General Assembly.

In 2021, the judge overseeing Leandro ordered the state to spend an additional $1.75 billion on items listed in the plan. The order called for executive branch officials to move money without any legislative input, prompting serious constitutional questions.

Top lawmakers and the state controller objected.

By this time, Leandro had taken on a distinct partisan tone. Democrats rallied around the mantra of “fully funding Leandro.” Republicans objected to some Leandro plan details. They devoted more attention to opposing the judicial branch overstepping its authority in North Carolina’s constitutional structure.

In November 2022, four days before voters flipped two state Supreme Court seats from Democrats to Republicans, the outgoing Democrat-majority high court issued an order upholding the Leandro judge’s decisions.

That 2022 ruling “judicially amended our constitution and fundamentally changed the judiciary’s role in our constitutional system,” Republican Justice Phil Berger Jr. lamented in a concurring opinion on April 2. Berger chided GOP colleagues for refusing to “expressly disavow” the Democratic justices’ earlier legal reasoning.

Stopping short of Berger’s request, the Republican majority nonetheless vacated every order and decision in the Leandro case since 2017.

“[T]he people did not vest the judicial branch with the power to resolve policy disputes between the other branches of government or to set education policy,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote in the lead opinion. “We would be especially ill-equipped to resolve such questions in any event. … Judges are not experts on education policy.”

“[W]e encourage all to direct their desire to enhance education policy to the branches that the people constitutionally charged with addressing such policy questions,” Newby added.

The chief justice referenced a March 10 executive order creating a new blue ribbon education commission for North Carolina. Democratic Gov. Josh Stein and Republican legislative leaders supported the group.

“Like all North Carolinians, we hope this commission is successful in reaching some effective solutions to enhance our education system,” Newby wrote.

The new commission will move forward without the partisan baggage of the Leandro case lurking in the background. North Carolina’s students, parents, and taxpayers are much more likely to see benefits from a fresh start.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.