RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The North Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday tossed out a long-running case over education funding in the state, a decision that could leave the power to decide how much money is spent and where intact with the legislature, not judges.
The 4-3 decision, led by Republican justices on the court, set aside a landmark decision in 2022 when the court, then with a Democratic majority, gave lower court judges the authority to direct taxpayer money to state agencies to address longstanding education disparities.
The following year, another trial judge calculated that the state owed $678 million to complete an eight-year, two-year, multibillion-dollar comprehensive remedial plan to improve teacher hiring and pay, expand pre-kindergarten and help students with disabilities.
In Thursday’s decision, Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote that what began as a minor issue over education spending in one county “became a full-scale, in-your-face attack on the entire education system enacted by the General Assembly.” Since then, Newby said, judicial actions have gone too far.
When the case expanded “the trial court’s jurisdiction to hear the case also ceased,” Newby wrote in ordering the dismissal of the school funding case.
The decision comes more than two years after the court heard oral arguments. Republicans who control the General Assembly won’t be forced to follow the remedial plan as it writes the state budget, including one that is now several months late for this year.
Democratic Gov. Josh Stein will have to rely more on using his veto stamp to persuade lawmakers and spend more on his favorite education programs and initiatives. Stein was North Carolina’s attorney general at the time of the 2022 ruling.
“The Supreme Court simply ignored its own established precedent, enabling the General Assembly to continue to deprive the next 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 looked more at how the 2022 decision was reached than what would happen to students.
“Allowing the state to avoid judicial scrutiny for violating constitutional rights during litigation turns constitutional rights into words on paper — morally binding but functionally worthless,” she wrote.
Attention now turns to crafting the next state education spending proposal. The General Assembly is sitting again this month. Only about 40% of the state’s more than $30 billion in government spending goes to K-12 funding.
Republican Senate Leader Phil Berger said in a news release that “liberal education special interests have unfairly attempted to hijack North Carolina’s constitutional funding process to enforce their policy preferences through judicial fiat. Today’s decision confirms that the proper route for policymaking is the legislative process.”
Critics of GOP education spending have pointed to taxpayer-funded scholarships for K-12 students to attend private schools as evidence that more can be afforded to public school children.
The litigation began in 1994, when several school districts and families of children in low-income areas filed suit, accusing the state of violating the North Carolina 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 filed the lawsuit.
Supreme Court decisions in the 1997 and 2004 cases found that state constitutions mandated that all children receive an “opportunity to receive a fair basic education” and that the state remained poorly equipped to comply with that mandate. Many say this problem is still not solved.
“The people who are paying the price for our leaders’ failures are not intangibles. They are the children of rural communities, past and present, who waited 30 years for a promise that was never fulfilled,” Tamika Walker Kelly, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators, said in a news release.
In 2022, the court’s Democratic majority determined that the Constitution’s “privileged right to education” and those Supreme Court decisions, combined with years of inaction by elected officials, created an “extraordinary” situation that gave the late Justice David Lee the power to order spending without special legislation enacted by the General Assembly.
