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The forgotten education perspective

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Staff

By Chris Fitzsimon

The legislative budget process begins in public this week as appropriations subcommittees kick off their daily meetings to look for savings to balance next year’s budget. The conversation begins just days after news that Gov. Beverly Perdue now expects a $3.6 billion shortfall next year, a deficit that experts with the N.C. Budget and Tax Center believe could exceed $4 billion.

Perdue says cuts currently under consideration leave the budget $500 million short next year even after accounting for the money provided by the federal stimulus package. And the cuts are substantial: according to the Associated Press, 10 percent in most state agencies, 7.5 percent in human services and higher education and 4.5 percent in public schools.

Those cuts are bad enough. Many will result in a loss of services for some of the most vulnerable people in the state. Reducing budgets by another $500 million would rip wider holes in the state’s already tattered safety net and could reverse progress that’s been made in many areas, including education.

Public schools in North Carolina are most often brought up in policy circles to lament how they are failing, and there is plenty to complain about. Three out of 10 ninth graders leave high school without a diploma; academic achievement varies widely among schools and school districts, and generally correlates to poverty; and the standardized testing program is confusing at best.

The problems are ready ammunition for the market fundamentalists in their efforts to privatize public education and they are sources of understandable frustration to public school supporters, who often remain on the defensive, reluctant to demand the investments that the schools need and the students deserve.

The conservative mantra is that we shouldn’t keep throwing money at schools that are failing our children and instead need radical reform, including tax credits or vouchers for private schools. Politicians who support public education often agree with the analysis of the problem without also acknowledging the improvements the schools have made, making greater investments far more difficult.

Acknowledging those improvements is especially important this year as legislative leaders decide how much to reduce spending on education, which makes up more than half of the state’s annual operating budget, with public schools accounting for 37 percent of the total. It is worth noting that that percentage is less than the 41 percent of the state budget spent on K-12 education just six years ago.

The school privatizers will tell you the state hasn’t received the return on the education investment that it should have, pointing to the problems that are undeniable. But they also need to be reminded of what the schools have accomplished, using their own sources as measurements, particularly the report released recently by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the national organization of state legislators.

The group’s annual report card on public education ranked North Carolina 30th overall, despite ranking 44th in per-pupil expenditure. That was ahead of all neighboring states except Virginia, which spends 25 percent more per student.
North Carolina leads the country in the percentage of improvement in ACT scores in the last 10 years and is sixth in improvement on the SAT. Fourth-grade students ranked 19th in performance on a national math test and eighth-graders ranked 22nd. The reading test scores were 35th, leaving a lot of room for improvement, though North Carolina students did better than kids in Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and most other Southern states.
The report finds that even the state’s 66.6 percent high school graduation rate, though totally unacceptable, is higher than most of its neighbors. And North Carolina improved its ranking on the ALEC report 10 spots since 2000.

The ultimate measure of schools isn’t a report comparing them with schools in other states, it’s how well they are doing for North Carolina students.

But the ALEC report and others with similar results are important markers of not just how far the state public school system has to go, but how far it has come.
That progress has been made possible by important investments by state lawmakers, who shouldn’t turn back now, budget crisis or not.

Chris Fitzsimon is the director of NC Policy Watch.

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