North Carolina has one of the most confusing school funding formulas in the nation. Unfortunately, the bizarre complexities of North Carolina’s funding formula fall hardest on students with disabilities. Anyone who has worked in education has seen cases or heard stories of maltreatment and lack of access to a meaningful education involving special [Continue Reading...]
As the recent battles over school re-segregation in various North Carolina school districts make clear, the use of race and poverty in school assignment remains a controversial issue. Some parties, including the former conservative school board majority in Wake County, even argued that it was even somehow forbidden. Fortunately, the U.S. Department of [Continue Reading...]
In June, Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning issued a decision in the long-running Leandro litigation over the state’s public education system. The judge found that the General Assembly’s 20% cuts to pre-kindergarten services for at-risk students violated the state’s constitution. Manning’s directive was quite clear: “The State of North Carolina shall [Continue Reading...]
One of the very real consequences of the General Assembly’s recent budget cuts and North Carolina’s declining commitment to fund its public schools is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit our state’s best and brightest to our ever-shrinking corps of teachers. North Carolina has now fallen even further down the list [Continue Reading...]
As part of an ongoing effort to avoid complying with an important court ruling, leaders of the Republican majority in the General Assembly have asked Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning to “clarify” his recent order mandating that at-risk students be allowed to enroll in the North Carolina Pre-Kindergarten (NCPK) program. For [Continue Reading...]
Early childhood programming is the best and most cost-effective educational investment. This seems like common sense since the best and cheapest way to deal with a problem is almost always to prevent it from happening in the first place. Unfortunately, the North Carolina General Assembly’s recently-passed budget makes inexplicable and disproportionately large cuts [Continue Reading...]
One of the most controversial bills of the early 2011 state legislative session is a proposal advanced by legislative Republicans to dramatically loosen state regulations on charter schools. Unfortunately, rather than just promoting charters, the bill takes a number of steps that pose a real threat to traditional public schools. Though there are [Continue Reading...]
As most people know by now, North Carolina’s elected leaders are facing a huge budget shortfall of nearly $3.7 billion as they work to craft a budget for the coming fiscal year. What many may not know, however, is exactly what this will mean for essential state services – particularly our public schools. Just how bad could things get? [Continue Reading...]
