Leandro ruling could open up education finance debate

The North Carolina Supreme Court could rule this week in the 30-year-old education funding legal dispute commonly known as Leandro.

The decision could encourage a much-needed discussion about the future of education finances in the Tar Heel State.

In recent years, the Leandro case has cast a shadow over the state education funding debate. Republican legislative leaders and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper have taken opposite sides on the case’s progress.

For many of Cooper’s allies, any education question prompts the quip, “Fully fund Leandro.”

For some left-of-center partisans, the conversation ends there. They know their slogan means spending more money from state coffers, but that’s it. They couldn’t say how new Leandro funding would change the status quo.

Others realize that fully funding Leandro means endorsing a program called the comprehensive remedial plan. It’s an eight-year, multibillion-dollar, trial judge-approved blueprint based on the work of a San Francisco consultant.

It’s also five years old. By virtue of its 2019 release date, the plan took no account of the COVID pandemic. It says nothing about pros and cons of remote learning. It fails to address learning loss that resulted from months of classroom shutdowns.

A judge ordered the state in 2021 to spend an additional $1.75 billion linked to the plan. The money would cover items not already funded in the state budget. Once lawmakers finalized a budget — just days after the court order — they addressed roughly $1 billion of the judge’s demands. Now that lawmakers have approved multiple budgets since the 2021 order, the legal dispute has been whittled to $677 million.

Beyond the money, Republican legislative leaders question whether a trial judge had authority to order new statewide education spending. Leandro’s three-decade history includes just one trial. That trial focused on education in a single North Carolina county: Hoke.

GOP lawmakers argue that courts cannot extrapolate from that single trial to justify hundreds of millions — potentially billions — of dollars in new spending across the state.

The state Supreme Court disagreed in November 2022, when Democrats held a 4-3 court majority. In a party-line vote, Democratic justices endorsed a trial judge’s order for more education spending. They sent the case back to the trial court simply  to recalculate the numbers.

Days later, voters flipped the state’s high court to a 5-2 Republican majority. Then justices agreed to revisit Leandro. They will decide as early as Friday whether a trial judge had “subject matter jurisdiction” to mandate statewide education changes.

It’s unclear how justices will rule. But one line of questioning during oral arguments in February suggested concerns about locking North Carolina into the existing Leandro plan.

“Suppose that we affirm the trial court order in this case, and the comprehensive remedial plan begins to take effect, money’s being distributed, we’re one or two years in, and in some school district in our state … there’s a group of students who’ve never heard of Leandro, have no idea this case exists or know anything about it, but they’re not getting a sound, basic education in their school,” Justice Richard Dietz said. “They get together with their parents. They get a lawyer. They get experts to explain what needs to be done to fix their school. … They go to court and file a lawsuit. What’s going to happen to that lawsuit?”

“Will those parents be told by a trial judge, ‘Sorry, your rights have already been decided,’ or can there continue to be many, many more Leandro suits?” Dietz asked.

“I’m just concerned that there are students that are out there who may say, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not fair that the government is the one that’s deciding this for me. I never got to come to court and say here’s how you fix my school,’” Dietz added.

Dietz and his colleagues will disappoint Leandro plaintiffs if the high court shuts the door on this case of judge-ordered education spending. The “fully fund Leandro” slogan could vanish.

But the story doesn’t end there.

North Carolina still needs to fix a confusing education finance system based on dozens of different funding formulas. It’s a system so complicated that a new school finance officer typically needs two years or more to understand how it works.

It’s a system my colleagues at the John Locke Foundation’s Center for Effective Educationwant to address. Later this month, they plan to release a report focusing on prospects for positive education finance reform.

Perhaps the state Supreme Court’s Leandro ruling will open up the reform conversation. That would mean good news for North Carolina’s future.    

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