If you’ve been following this year’s legislative session, you probably haven’t heard anything about the biggest issue in the biggest part of the state budget. The scope of the story is massive, affecting the constitutional rights to educational opportunities for North Carolina’s 1.5 million public school students. And the story is juicy, rife with mystery, lawlessness, and government corruption.
The lack of coverage is strange. Newspaper readers are more likely to have read about efforts to ban cellphones from classrooms or to name “Raise Up” as the state’s official hip-hop song.
If you haven’t guessed yet, the big, strangely unmentionable issue is Leandro. Leandro is the 31-year-old lawsuit about the state’s unwillingness to provide our public school students with the “sound basic” education that they’re guaranteed under our state constitution. Despite students’ multiple victories in state courts, state leaders have yet to provide students with the quality schools and educational opportunities they are owed.
From January 1 to May 1, the word “Leandro” has shown up in just one news story that ran in the state’s two largest newspapers serving Raleigh and Charlotte. The term has failed to appear in any news stories from the major newspapers serving Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Fayetteville, Wilmington, or Asheville.
It’s difficult to imagine an issue in state politics that is having a bigger impact on North Carolinians. There are currently 1.5 million children in our public schools who are having their constitutional rights violated. Millions more have had their rights violated since the case was originally filed in 1994.
Every court that’s weighed in on this question from 1997 to 2022, regardless of ideological makeup, has agreed that students’ constitutional rights are being violated by the state. When the nation’s leading nonpartisan education researchers completed a years’ long study of North Carolina’s education system in 2019, they reached the same conclusion, noting also that the state has been moving backwards.
The General Assembly’s strategy of pairing austerity budgets with unregulated, low-quality privatization schemes has been making things worse. Test scores have fallen, particularly for students of color and students from families with low incomes. Teacher vacancies are at record levels.
The courts have tried to fix things. In 2020, they ordered the state to develop a detailed plan for the state to provide students with the types of schools promised under our state constitution. In November 2021, a Superior Court judge ordered the state to fully implement the Leandro Comprehensive Remedial Plan – a research-based blueprint for achieving constitutional compliance by the 2028 school year.
The Leandro Plan makes several important steps to dramatically improve schools, including:
Expanding NC Pre-K so more students from families with lower incomes can enter kindergarten ready to succeed, Investing in teacher training programs and improving teacher pay, training, and mentorships to address our record-high teacher vacancies, Staffing nurses, psychologists, counselors, and social workers at recommended levels to manage students’ physical and mental health needs, and Dramatically increasing supports for disadvantaged students, students with disabilities, and English language learners.The Supreme Court reaffirmed the state’s responsibility to fully fund the eight-year Plan in November 2022.
That is where the story became particularly interesting.
First, the mystery. Why did a Roy Cooper appointee try to kill Leandro? Per the Supreme Court’s November 2022 court order, State Controller Nels Roseland was supposed to transfer money from state coffers to the schools for the first years of the Plan. He refused, citing “unresolved” legal issues. The Supreme Court cited Roseland’s motion in halting the transfer of funding and for re-hearing the case in February 2024.
There’s a juicy story in there for an enterprising investigative journalist. Until Roseland’s appointment, Governor Cooper had seemingly been a staunch advocate for Leandro. His staff created the Leandro Plan. Each of his budgets recommended full funding of the Plan. Yet his nominee for State Controller fought against the Plan. Roseland’s opposition was known prior to his nomination, having publicly indicated that he opposed Leandro and wouldn’t transfer the funding owed to students. It remains a mystery why Cooper didn’t pull Roseland’s nomination or remove him from office for his actions harming students.
While the Supreme Court halted the transfer of funds for years 1-3 of the Plan in early 2023, its order still requires the state to fund the Leandro Plan going forward. Rather than following the law and implementing the Leandro Plan, legislative leaders have simply ignored the court order. They don’t dispute that students’ rights are being violated. Nor have they put together an alternative plan to improve schools. They’ve simply said, “you can’t make us.” One would think that such wanton lawlessness would be a frequent subject of reporting from the capitol.
If that’s not juicy enough, there’s also blatant corruption. That corruption has taken two forms.
First, in early 2023, Senator Phil Berger and former Speaker of the House Tim Moore appealed to get the case back in front of the Supreme Court. Why did they want to do that? Well, that court now has a 5-2 Republican majority. One of those five justices is Senator Phil Berger’s son, Phil Berger, Jr.
Junior, along with four of his hyper-partisan colleagues agreed to rehear the Leandro case mere months after the November 2022 ruling. In agreeing to rehear the case just months after a decision, the high court ignored foundational legal concepts such as respect for precedent and the rule of law. The facts of the case hadn’t changed. Only the partisan makeup of the court had changed, allowing Junior a second chance to rule on whether Daddy can continue to ignore students’ constitutional rights. This collusive, nepotistic relationship between the judicial and legislative branches has removed a foundational element of our system of checks and balances
The second form of corruption lies in how legislative leaders have spent the money that is supposed to be supporting public school students. They’re spending over $920 million this year for vouchers that mostly subsidize wealthy families who have their kids in private schools. They’ve also passed a series of tax cuts disproportionately benefiting corporations and wealthy North Carolinians. It’s no coincidence that these corporate and wealthy beneficiaries happen to be the same people who fund reelection campaigns. School children, alas, do not.
Given the above, it remains baffling why the press continues to ignore Leandro. The Leandro Plan would have a far greater impact on student achievement than any of the “big” issues being discussed this session such as cell phone bans or school calendar flexibility (which, incidentally, is part of the Leandro Plan, and was supposed to have been passed in 2021). The failure to fund the Plan is undoubtedly suppressing student achievement, particularly for historically underserved populations.
Meanwhile the lawlessness and corruption mirror what we’re seeing at the federal level from the Trump administration. It’s a major deal that General Assembly leadership believes they can simply ignore the parts of the state constitution that they don’t agree with or find inconvenient. That puts all of our basic rights as North Carolinians at risk. It’s also a big deal that the Supreme Court is likely to tarnish its legitimacy and credibility to rubber stamp the legislature’s absurd position. The decision from the re-heard case is expected any day now.
If you’re a journalist, please let me know, why aren’t you covering this issue? Is it not a big deal that 1.5 million children are having their basic rights violated? Is it not a major scandal that the General Assembly has been openly violating a court order for the past 1,283 days? Are we not in the midst of a constitutional crisis when legislators argue that they can simply ignore the parts of the constitution they disagree with?
If the answer to any of those questions is “yes” then I implore you to start centering Leandro in your reporting.
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