The state Supreme Court ended a marathon court battle over public school funding with a ruling Thursday that said state courts can’t order the legislature to spend money on education.
Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote the 4-3 majority opinion that brings a close to the long-running Leandro case. Republican Justice Richard Dietz and Democratic Justices Allison Riggs and Anita Earls dissented.
The lawsuit, which took on many iterations over the past three decades, became a test of the division of power between the three branches of state government in recent years.
“As this litigation comes to a close a few weeks shy of its thirty-second anniversary, we are reminded of these principles from our prior cases: In our constitution, the people established a tripartite system of government,” Newby wrote. “In doing so, the people did not vest the judicial branch with the power to resolve policy disputes between the other branches of government or to set education policy. We would be especially ill-equipped to resolve such questions in any event.”
Leandro v. North Carolina began in 1994, when five low-wealth counties sued the state over what they contended was inadequate funding. The case has been in and out of court ever since, as the state grappled with how to ensure a fair education for students in both wealthier and poorer districts.
The central question in the most recent round of court battles has been: Can the courts order the legislature to spend $5.6 billion on an eight-year plan that lawmakers did not develop or sign off on to improve educational opportunities for the more than 1.4 million children in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade?
The state’s highest court, Newby wrote, decided that “the judicial branch is not the venue in which to seek education policy reform.”
Their ruling came 770 days after a controversial rehearing of the landmark case. Education advocates have gathered at rallies, pushed for legislative meetings, and held press briefings to highlight the costs of waiting for what they had hoped would be the funding the court had ordered.
Public school districts, meanwhile, faced difficult decisions about closing schools due to declining enrollment, which resulted in drops in state funding. A growing chunk of state money in recent years went toward vouchers subsidizing private school tuition.
Democratic Gov. Josh Stein was quick to respond to Thursday’s ruling, saying it does not change “the state’s fundamental responsibility to its students.”
“Education opens doors of opportunity for children, but today the Court slammed them in the face of students who deserve the right to a sound basic public education,” Stein said in a statement. “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 the General Assembly’s investment in public school education in recent years puts North Carolina close to the bottom in the country in terms of per-pupil spending. “Four Supreme Court justices believe that is okay, but they are wrong,” Stein said. “Their decision is contrary to the plain language of our Constitution and the court’s past rulings.”
Earls wrote in her dissent, which Riggs signed onto, that the majority betrayed the state constitution’s guarantee that every child will receive a “sound, basic education.”
“The majority concludes that it will not order the State to correct the way it has harmed public school students, even in very low-wealth school districts like Hoke County, and even as two previous Courts concluded that the State is failing to adequately educate students and must act to fix the public education system,” Earls wrote.
Tamika Walker Kelly, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators, called the court’s decision “a moral failure.” “No state does less for its public schools than North Carolina,” she wrote in a statement. “That fact was cemented today by our highest court.” The Cumberland County Board of Education also said that it was disappointed with the outcome and would continue to advocate for more funding for low-wealth school districts.
State Senate leader Phil Berger said in a statement that “liberal education special interests” had tried to “impose their policy preferences via judicial fiat.”
“Today’s decision confirms that the proper pathway for policymaking is the legislative process,” he said in the statement. Berger’s son Phil Berger Jr. was one of the justices who voted to overturn the 2022 ruling.
Back to Basics
Robb Leandro, whose name has become synonymous with the decades-long fight over public education funding, was an eighth grader in Hoke County when the lawsuit started.
He’s now a lawyer in Raleigh with Parker Poe, the firm that has represented his old district and four others in Cumberland, Halifax, Robeson, and Vance counties.
In 1997, the state Supreme Court found that all North Carolina students are entitled to a “sound basic education,” and that ruling allowed the lawsuit arguing that the state wasn’t providing that in poorer areas to proceed to trial.
Five years later, Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning ruled that the state had fallen down on its “sound basic education” obligation and ordered that every school have a well-trained principal and a certified teacher in every classroom. Manning’s ruling focused on Hoke County, and the state Supreme Court later ordered the lower court to gather more evidence from all the districts.
Manning oversaw the case for years, primarily focusing on classroom instruction and not on funding issues. Manning’s successor, Judge W. David Lee, was assigned to the case in 2016 and later approved a settlement agreement that called for the state to spend billions over eight years.
But the Republican-led legislature objected, setting the stage for the judicial debate that dragged on until Thursday.
In 2022, when there were four Democratic justices on the state Supreme Court and three Republicans, the majority issued a ruling that said the courts could order lawmakers to fund the plan.
That ruling came just before the 2022 judicial elections that flipped the partisan makeup of the state’s highest court to a Republican majority.
Shortly after the new justices took office, the court agreed to revisit three high-profile political cases—one about gerrymandering, another about voter ID, and Leandro. Decisions to rehear a case are typically very rare; the court had granted only two petitions for rehearing since 1993, ProPublica reported.
One of the attorneys in the Leandro case called the decision to grant a new hearing “one of the most astounding egregious acts that I have ever witnessed,” WUNC reported at the time. The justices heard arguments on February 24, 2024.
In the decision issued Thursday, the majority voted to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning the same plaintiffs couldn’t bring it again. But that would not stop other litigants from bringing new lawsuits with similar complaints of inadequate school funding.
Dietz wrote in his dissent Thursday that, unlike the majority, he saw a path forward “that cures the State’s shameful failure to meet its constitutional obligations,” while also returning public education policy to the other branches of government. The Republican justice disagreed with permanently dismissing the case, as the majority ordered.
Dietz said he would have sent the case back to the trial court, brought lawmakers into the negotiations, and included more school voices.
“I can only speculate about why this Court felt so compelled to rush Leandro to the finish line by the end of 2022,” said Dietz, who was elected that year. “Whatever the reason, no Leandro decision will stand the test of time unless it is obtained through a process of inclusion, not exclusion.”
At least one other justice expects more litigation. “Before the ink is dry on this decision, countless lawsuits over education policy and funding will be filed across North Carolina,” Berger wrote in an opinion concurring with the majority.
He wanted the opinion written by the chief justice to explicitly disavow the majority’s reasoning in the 2022 Supreme Court opinion, known by the shorthand Hoke III.
“Half measures will only ensure that we will be back here again with profiteering lawyers and constitutional evolutionists who fetishize a government of the judges, by the judges, and for the judges who can legitimately argue that the reasoning of Hoke III remains,” Berger wrote. “For separation of powers stalwarts, this is a demoralizing head scratcher.”
