North Carolina Supreme Court throws out longtime suit over education funding

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The North Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday threw out longtime litigation over education funding in the state, a decision that’s likely to keep intact the power to decide how much money to spend and where with the legislature, not judges.

The 4-3 ruling, led by Republican justices on the court, set aside a landmark ruling in 2022 when the court, then with a Democratic majority, ruled that a lower court judge had the authority to order that taxpayer money be directed to state agencies to address longstanding education inequities.

The following year, another trial judge calculated that the state owed $678 million to fulfill two years of an eight-year, multibillion-dollar comprehensive remedial plan in part to improve teacher recruitment and salaries, expand prekindergarten and help students with disabilities.

In Thursday’s ruling, Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote that what started as a modest lawsuit over education spending in one county “became a full-scale, facial assault on the entire educational system enacted by the General Assembly.” Since then, Newby said, judicial actions had gone too far.

When the case expanded “the trial court’s authority to hear the case likewise ceased,” Newby wrote while ordering the school funding litigation be dismissed.

The decision came more than two years after the court heard oral arguments. Republicans who control the General Assembly won’t be obligated to comply with the remedial plan as it writes state budgets, including one for this year that’s now several months late.

Democratic Gov. Josh Stein will have to rely more on persuading lawmakers and his veto stamp 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 own 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 justices and one Republican dissented in Thursday’s ruling.

Associate Justice Anita Earls, a Democrat, said the decision seemed more about dealing with how the 2022 decision was reached than what happens to students.

“Allowing the state to escape judicial scrutiny for constitutional rights violations through its behavior during litigation quickly turns constitutional rights into words on paper — morally compelling but functionally useless,” she wrote.

Attention will now turn toward crafting the next state education spending proposal. The General Assembly reconvenes this month. Close to 40% of the state’s more than $30 billion annual budget goes to K-12 funding alone.

Republican Senate leader Phil Berger said in a news release that “liberal education special interests have improperly tried to hijack North Carolina’s constitutional funding process in order to impose their policy preferences via judicial fiat. Today’s decision confirms that the proper pathway for policymaking 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 more could be done for public school children.

The litigation began in 1994, when several school districts in low-income areas and families of children sued and accused the state of violating North Carolina’s constitution by not providing adequate education funding.

The case is often referred to as “Leandro” — for the last name of one of the students who sued.

Supreme Court decisions in the case from 1997 and 2004 found the state constitution directs all children must receive the “opportunity to receive a sound basic education,” and that the state remained poorly equipped to comply with that dictate. Many say it’s a problem still unresolved.

“The people paying the price for our leaders’ failure are not abstractions. They are the generations of children in rural communities, past and present, who waited for 30 years for a promise never fulfilled,” Tamika Walker Kelly, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators, said in a news release.

The court’s Democratic majority in 2022 had determined that those Supreme Court decisions along 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 Judge David Lee power to order funds be spent without a specific law enacted by the General Assembly.