Our schools' plunge to mediocrity, or worse

Editorial by Fayetteville Observer, January 23, 2018.

North Carolina continues its descent in the annual national rankings of public education. Education Week’s 22nd annual Quality Counts report card gives this state’s public education a C-minus grade and a score of 70.6 out of a possible 100. The national average was a C-plus.

So, that seems not so bad, given all the struggles we’ve been through since the recession. Except for this: The study also ranks North Carolina public-education system as 40th in the nation. Our descent toward the bottom of the national barrel has been steady. We ranked 34th in 2015 and 37th in 2016. Backing up a few years, we were all the way up to 19th in the nation in 2011. As comparisons with our peers go, that’s an almost suicidal leap.

Now, there is some criticism of the Education Week rankings because they aren’t adjusted for cost of living. The lion’s share of school costs are personnel, and it costs a whole lot more to live in top-ranked Massachusetts than it does to live in North Carolina. Indeed, many of the lower-ranking state school systems are in the South, which happens to enjoy the lowest living costs in the country.

But still, that’s not an apples-and-oranges situation. Just little apples vs. bigger apples. And nobody was complaining about the ranking criteria when this state was in 19th position. We were pretty proud of it. It showed we were making a big commitment to education here, and it was paying off with rising test scores and other good measures of progress. The quality of public education was one key factor in drawing a flood of new residents — and new businesses — to this state.

To some extent, our educators have gotten pretty good at doing more with less. And the study acknowledges this state’s progress in several areas, giving us a C-plus in pre-kindergarten education and in the percentage of adults with post-secondary degrees. Still, it’s hard to see a C-plus as anything but settling for mediocrity.

The big problem is how much less funding our schools are getting. Education Week ranks our spending at 45th in the nation — so close to the bottom of the barrel that we’re bracing for that awful scraping sound. Once again, there’s a mitigating factor that says it may not be as bad as it seems: State lawmakers have boosted school spending in the past two years, and Education Week’s comparisons are based on 2015 federal school spending data. So we may not be exactly 45th, although most other states have boosted spending too, as we move farther from the recession and enjoy a growing economy. The reality is, we could be worse than 45th just as well as we might be a bit better. But two years of relatively small increases in school spending, even as our state’s population continues to be among the fastest-growing, makes it likely that our spending is still down in the bottom 15 to 20 percent, at best. And even when that’s adjusted for cost of living, we’re a long way from being a shining star in education.

The Republican majority took over the General Assembly after the recession with a determination to cut spending and layers of regulation to make the state more attractive to businesses and industries and to lighten this state’s personal and corporate tax burden. They succeeded in doing those things, but in education (and in many other areas of government responsibility), they went too far, cutting away resources our schools need to create generations of well-educated citizens and well-trained workers.

Most recently, lawmakers tried to cut class sizes in kindergarten through Grade 3, and stick local school systems with the cost and consequences. That kind of foolishness needs to stop before we find ourselves with the worst education system in the nation. Try using that as an incentive to bring a company like Amazon to North Carolina — it’s a guaranteed failure. And that’ may be what we’re creating for our children.

http://www.fayobserver.com/opinion/20180123/our-view-our-schools-plunge-to-mediocrity-or-worse