Rowan County’s legislative delegation, Senator Carl Ford (District 33) and Representative Harry Warren (District 77), have bought into that trend lock, stock and barrel by deemphasizing public school funding and placing millions of our tax dollars into supporting unaccountable private schools.

NC ranks dead last in the country for school funding effort.

North Carolina’s children are being short-changed by the N.C. Republican General Assembly. Rowan County’s legislative delegation, Senator Carl Ford (District 33) and Representative Harry Warren (District 77), have bought into that trend lock, stock and barrel by deemphasizing public school funding and placing millions of our tax dollars into supporting unaccountable private schools.

Sen. Ford and Rep. Warren often justify their funding decisions by claiming that North Carolina’s public school End of Grade test scores “don’t make the grade.” What they don’t tell us is that the private schools receiving tax dollars aren’t required to give their students the same annual tests as public schools. Thus, while those schools aren’t being held to the same standard, they still receive state funding.

Are the private schools that receive state funding performing on grade level? Who knows?

According to the recently released Education Law Center report, N.C. ranks dead last in the country for school funding effort. The center’s Making the Grade report reflects an annual overview of the condition of school finance in each state. The report, which provides a comparative analysis of the degree to which states are fairly funding schools so that all students have the chance for success, gave North Carolina an unflattering shout-out with the statement that “The highest-effort state (Vermont) makes more than double the effort to fund schools as the lowest-effort state (North Carolina).” The Education Law Center notes that for students to have a “meaningful opportunity to achieve a state’s academic standards, three core principles must be followed:

• 1. students need a sufficient level of funding so that schools have adequate staff, programs and services
• 2. low-income school districts need even greater funding to address the additional costs associated with student poverty
• 3. state lawmakers need to raise sufficient revenue, either through state or local sources, to ensure that all schools have adequate funding.”

The report can be found at https://edlawcenter.org/research/making-the-grade-2025/. — Karen Puckett