North Carolina students deserve honesty and action on school funding

NC Senator Michael Lee is touting his party’s record on school funding on social media, but it’s a drastic exaggeration. Lee has spent the majority of his time at the NC General Assembly as one of the Senate’s key education budget writers. One would then expect that Lee would be able to provide his followers with an accurate picture of the state of school funding in North Carolina. Unfortunately, he fails to do so. 

 In his post on how public school funding has changed in North Carolina from 2014 to 2024, Lee dramatically overstated the extent of the increase. Lee’s bottom line is that funding increased so much over this ten-year period, that the state is now “investing $1.7 billion more than inflation [would account for] alone.”  

In reality, per-student funding has only increased slightly during this period due to several factors. An experienced budget writer should know better. 

The main issue with Lee’s post is that he fails to recognize that schools face a rate of inflation that differs from traditional measures like the Consumer Price Index.1 The CPI measures the price changes of a “basket of goods” for a typical urban consumer. Of course, a school district’s “basket of goods” looks a lot different than the typical person’s expenditures. North Carolina school districts spend over 90 percent of their funding on salaries and benefits for staff, most of whom are college-educated. 

While there is no published inflation rate for schools, luckily, we can determine how these cost factors have impacted school budgets. For instance, we can calculate how much the cost of average staff salary and benefit costs have increased from 2014-2024. This analysis shows school personnel costs have risen 40.4 percent over this period, outpacing the CPI’s 30.7 percent. 

The net result shows that 2024 spending—when adjusted for real inflation and enrollment changes—exceeded 2014 spending by $355 million, not the $1.7 billion Lee erroneously claimed. 

Diving deeper, looking at the “rate of inflation” in schools is demonstrably insufficient to convey the funding gap. While staff salary and benefit costs have outpaced inflation, they have fallen short of what is necessary to attract and retain teachers across the state. In 2024, North Carolina experienced record high teacher shortages, with more than one in every 16 classrooms lacking a licensed teacher. 

Second, students in 2024 are different from the students in 2014. 2024’s cohort requires comparatively more investment to achieve similar educational outcomes for reasons such as: 

  • The 2024 cohort lived through the COVID pandemic, with many suffering from the trauma and educational disruptions associated with those years. 
  • Indicators of student mental health continue to trend in a negative direction. 
  • The share of students with disabilities rose from 12.1 percent to 14.1 percent from 2014-2024. 
  • The share of English learners rose from 7.0 percent to 11.5 percent over the 10-year period. 

These factors indicate that school funding in 2024 needed to be substantially higher than it was in 2014 simply to provide similar academic results for students. 

Other indicators bear out this theory. 

“School funding effort” measures how much a state is spending on its public schools relative to the size of its economy (GDP). In 2014, North Carolina dedicated 2.6 percent of its GDP to public schools. By 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, the percentage fell to 2.1 percent. Had lawmakers maintained our school funding effort at 2014 levels, school spending in 2023 would have been $3.2 billion (20 percent) higher than it was. 

All of North Carolina’s neighbors dedicate more of their state economy to their public schools. In 2023, North Carolina ranked dead last among all 50 states for its school funding effort. 

Similarly, North Carolina now ranks below all its neighboring states in average teacher pay. It is no wonder that teacher vacancies continue to rise. 

Lee’s claims also fail to account for the state’s lack of investment in school buildings. Between 2015 and 2020 (the last year for which we have data), school facility needs rose almost 60 percent, almost six times the rate of inflation. Historically, the state would issue bonds once every decade to help local governments meet their facility needs. However, the last state school construction bond was issued in 1996, causing facility needs to accumulate and conditions to deteriorate. 

Most importantly, Lee fails to mention that North Carolina’s school funding levels have been determined by the courts to be unconstitutionally inadequate and inequitable. In 2022, as part of the Leandro court case, the NC State Supreme Court ruled that legislators are violating the State Constitution by improperly funding our public schools. 

State leaders like Lee are under an active court order to increase school funding to 40 percent above current levels. By failing to pass a comprehensive budget that better funds our schools, Lee and his colleagues continue to violate this open court order and their oaths to uphold the State Constitution. 

Instead, Lee and his colleagues have focused on diverting education funding to the unaccountable, highly segregated private school sector. Over the past decade, state funding for private schools has grown nearly 5,000 percent. This year, the state has appropriated $731 million to subsidize this private industry, a figure set to grow to $938 million per year by 2033. 

NC Senator Lee was correct when he concluded that “our students deserve both: fully funded schools and flexible resources that meet individual needs” — but he is standing in the way. That dream could be achieved if the legislature stopped funneling money to unaccountable private schools and instead provided public school students with the full educational resources they are constitutionally guaranteed. Until then, students’ needs will continue to be short-changed so long as legislators dishonestly pretend that their responsibility to fully fund schools is complete.