Turning their backs on rural children

The end of Leandro is the latest blow to public schools as Republicans shift funds to private schools.

The Supreme Court threw out the Leandro ruling. The case has been in the courts since the 1990s, when the court ruled that children in poor rural counties were denied a sound, basic education as guaranteed by the constitution. The ruling ordered the legislature to adequately fund schools in those areas and set up mechanisms to determine the amount needed.

The decision is another blow to public education in North Carolina. Republicans came into office in 2011 screaming that our public schools were broken despite plenty of evidence to the contrary and proceeded to break them. Ending this case will hurt children in rural counties.

Since then, they lifted the cap on charter schools, removed the accountability required of public schools, and created a for-profit charter enterprise in North Carolina. They enacted a voucher program with the promise that the goal was to offer poor families the economic means to escape failing public schools and then lifted the income cap on vouchers so that most of them now go to wealthy families. Finally, they’ve cut per pupil spending to among the lowest in the nation.

In essence, they dismantled a functioning and improving public school system to create a new one that rejects the notion of shared responsibility. In rural counties, we run the risk of bringing back the separate-but-unequal schools of the Jim Crow South. Children from more affluent families will travel to wherever the best school is located while children from disadvantaged families will go to where the bus takes them. Expect to see white flight from schools in rural counties — or maybe green flight, the people with money leaving public schools to the people without.

The ruling should offer Democrats an opportunity to build relationships in rural counties. Republicans are taking money from poor public schools and giving it to rich private ones. They are giving tax breaks to wealthy families to keep their children out of public schools. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s a fact.

Leandro may have been an imperfect ruling but it was made because the legislature was not providing the resources necessary to offer children their constitutional right. Without some sort of enforcement mechanism, a ruling to that effect would mean nothing. Now, the words in the state constitution are largely worthless.