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The North Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday threw out long-running education funding litigation, a decision that Republicans said returns decisions about school spending to the legislature and judges said had gone too far in steering remedies. The court’s 4-3 ruling set aside a 2022 decision that had given a lower court authority to order taxpayer money to address longstanding education inequities.
In the latest dispute—often referred to as “Leandro,” named for one of the students who sued—the case began in 1994 when school districts in low-income areas and families of students sued the state, alleging it violated North Carolina’s constitution by failing to provide adequate education funding. The Supreme Court issued decisions in 1997 and 2004 that found the state constitution required all children be given the “opportunity to receive a sound basic education” and that the state was not equipped to comply.
The 2022 ruling had taken a key step forward in the remedial phase. At that time, with a Democratic majority on the court, the justices ruled that a lower court judge could direct taxpayer money toward state agencies to address inequities, using judicial orders to respond to what the court described as constitutional failures over time.
After that decision, a trial judge calculated the state owed $678 million to meet parts of an eight-year, multibillion-dollar comprehensive remedial plan. According to the AP report, the plan was aimed in part at improving teacher recruitment and salaries, expanding prekindergarten, and helping students with disabilities.
Thursday’s majority opinion was authored by Chief Justice Paul Newby, who argued that the litigation’s shift in scope meant the lower court’s authority should have ended. Newby wrote that what started as a modest lawsuit over education spending in one county “became a full-scale, facial assault on the entire educational system enacted by the General Assembly,” and that since then, “judicial actions had gone too far.”
The ruling said that when the case expanded, “the trial court’s authority to hear the case likewise ceased,” leading the Supreme Court to dismiss the education funding litigation. By doing so, the justices left the legislature in charge of determining how much money to spend and where, including through the budget process rather than court-ordered remedies.
Republicans who control the General Assembly argued the court’s 2022 approach improperly constrained the legislative budgeting process. The decision came more than two years after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments, and the AP report said the General Assembly’s leaders are not obligated to comply with the remedial plan as it writes state budgets, including the current year budget that is now several months late.
Democratic Gov. Josh Stein, who was North Carolina’s attorney general when the 2022 ruling was issued, said in a statement Thursday that 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’s response framed the impact as returning responsibility to persuading lawmakers and using veto power to secure more education spending.
The dissents came from three justices, including two Democrats. Associate Justice Anita Earls said in her dissent that the decision appeared to be more about handling how the 2022 ruling was reached than about what happens to students, writing that “Allowing the state to escape judicial scrutiny for constitutional rights violations through its behavior during litigation quickly turns constitutional rights into words on paper — morally compelling but functionally useless.”
As attention shifts to the next education spending proposal, Democrats and school advocates have argued that persistent funding gaps have taken decades to resolve. Tamika Walker Kelly, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators, said in a news release that “The people paying the price for our leaders’ failure are not abstractions,” but rather the “generations of children in rural communities, past and present,” who she said waited for a promise that was never fulfilled.
Republican Senate leader Phil Berger, in a news release, said the litigation had “improperly tried to hijack North Carolina’s constitutional funding process” to impose policy preferences through “judicial fiat,” adding that Thursday’s decision confirms “the proper pathway for policymaking is the legislative process.”