The grim future for K-12 education in a post-Leandro North Carolina

By all indications, North Carolina’s public education system will soon be dealt a massive, devastating and world-altering blow.

The windup for the expected haymaker commences this week when the state Supreme Court again hears arguments in the 30-year-old Leandro school funding case. The actual delivery of the punch will likely take place sometime in the weeks to come when, barring a remarkable and unexpected turnaround in the attitudes and philosophies of its conservative Republican justices, the court will reverse its previous holding and rule that it has no constitutional authority to order the legislature to adequately fund the state’s K-12 schools.

When and if this ruling comes down, it will mark a seminal moment in state history – both for the state’s constitution and its most important public institution.

As was explained in this column last October, the negative implications for the constitution and the rights of North Carolinians will be significant. If the court holds that it lacks the authority to order the General Assembly to appropriate funds to provide for a constitutionally adequate education system, it invites the violation of all kinds of rights that are dependent upon public spending – be it the rights of public employees, those who receive public benefits, or even criminal defendants and incarcerated people.

After all, if the court can’t require the legislature to fund the state’s struggling schools, how can it ever mandate funding for, say, child protective services or adequate jail space in a financially strapped county? Many on the political right might not like it, but there are a variety of important rights in our society that are dependent upon public appropriations. And if courts lack the basic authority to assure that such appropriations are adequate and fairly distributed, then that society quickly takes on a very different and much darker look.

But the most immediate and obvious impact of the expected gutting of Leandro will occur in the state’s K-12 schools. For three decades now, school districts in the state’s low wealth counties – school districts that lack an array of basic attributes, like highly trained teachers and administrators, adequate facilities and decent textbooks and other classroom materials, and the local resources to fund them – have held out hope that the Leandro case would finally bear the fruit its architects had dreamed of: a first-rate and fully desegregated public education system in all of the state’s 100 counties.

Now, however, if 30 years’ of litigation prove to have been for naught and those hopes are dashed, not only will struggling school districts and their schoolchildren be out of luck, but conservative lawmakers also will be further emboldened to pursue an even more ambitious overhaul of the state’s education system.

And sadly, it doesn’t take much in the way of imagination to envision what that will look like.

As has been made readily evident by the General Assembly’s actions and inactions in recent years, the post-Leandro education world in North Carolina will be a two-tiered system, not unlike what one encounters in many developing countries around the world.

On Tier One will be the elite, mostly private or quasi-private schools that cater to the children of the well-off, along with a small handful of lucky or connected high achievers from the rest of society. These schools will be overwhelmingly white, mostly Christian in orientation, and though heavily subsidized via taxpayer-funded vouchers, prohibitively expensive for most families.

A small appendage to Tier One – convenient for providing a deceptive cloak of respectability and diversity — will feature smattering of lower-wealth voucher and charter schools that will be more affordable and overwhelmingly populated with students of color. A few will do well. Most will struggle.

And Tier Two? That will be the place reserved for everyone else – the schools that the state funds with its lowest-in-the-nation financial commitment. Like now, a few relatively well-off counties will manage okay – at least in the short run. But over time, the situation will continue to degrade and deteriorate, as destructive trends that arose with such ferocity during the pandemic continue to wreak havoc: the chronic shortage of highly qualified teachers, principals, administrators, nurses, counselors, custodians, social workers, cafeteria works and bus drivers.

Now add the damage that will result from a persistent drumbeat of manufactured conservative social war attacks and the discord and personnel losses this will sow on school boards, among parental volunteers and in school faculties, and the picture grows even more bleak. Systemic underinvestment in school facilities and university schools of education along with the end of a general societal commitment to integration will combine to turn the clock back still further.

The end result: a system of education, and ultimately a society, like one might encounter in Central and South America – a North Carolina in which 10-20% of the population lives better than ever before, but in which almost everyone else is subsumed in a growing underclass that lives behind an ever-taller wall.

And in light of all this, it’s little wonder that the American right continues to strengthen its embrace of authoritarianism as a means of governing in such a badly divided and stratified society.