The divided foundation of North Carolina’s public school system

“Experience during the past several years has shown the necessity for having in a state one coordinated authority. . .When the reorganized State Board of Education has been established, it should be authorized to appoint the State Superintendent of Public Education.”

So reads a recommendation for reorganizing North Carolina’s education bureaucracy – from 1948. The debate still simmers today, some seven decades later.

Two entities have legal authority over North Carolina public schools: the State Board of Education, which is appointed by the governor, and the Superintendent of Public Instruction, who is elected every four years.

That’s a challenging governance structure, like a corporate board of directors with no control over the CEO. Many incentives drive the two to war, not work, with one another. North Carolina’s schoolchildren suffer because of it.

Today’s piece is the first in a three-part series we will share in the coming weeks. We describe below how this state of affairs came to be, because understanding the history is foundational to changing the status quo.

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The North Carolina Constitution has provided for both a State Board of Education and an elected Superintendent of Public Instruction since 1868.

The 1868 Constitution quite clearly gave the State Board of Education primary authority over public schools. It empowered the Board – which consisted mainly of Council of State members – to “legislate and make all needful rules and regulations” governing public schools.

The document made little mention of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, saying only the position would serve as secretary of the Board of Education and carry out other duties that “shall be prescribed by law.”

Six decades later, during the Great Depression, the General Assembly established the school funding scheme that endures today. The legislature provided sufficient state dollars to keep the public school system operating as local economies (and therefore local governments) faltered in the 1930s. The state has provided the bulk of public education funding ever since, in effect setting a high floor for school spending that local governments can supplement if they choose.

The expanded education funding begun in the Great Depression prompted an effort to reorganize the growing state education bureaucracy. In 1942, voters ratified a constitutional amendment to expand the State Board of Education’s scope – and to make the Board answerable primarily to the governor, via eight gubernatorial appointees.

The amendment authorized the Board of Education to manage public school finances, divide the state into school districts, and “make all needful rules and regulations” for the public school system. But it also introduced overlapping authority with the Superintendent.

The amendment empowered both the Board and the Superintendent with “supervision of the public schools,” though it reserved funding authority for the Board only. One might trace the friction between the Superintendent and the Board to that amendment.

For the next 47 years, just three men held the Superintendent post. That continuity might explain why no major conflicts arose during that period, though tension between the two bodies was something of a running joke in the Capitol.*

“During the 1960s and 1970s, when Dallas Herring was chairman of the State Board of Education and Craig Phillips was superintendent, the feuding was a Raleigh fixture – like Thad Eure’s bow ties and straw boaters,” Jack Betts quipped in a 1990 North Carolina Insight article.

But the friction finally set the tinder on fire in the late 1980s and 1990s. Superintendent Phillips retired in 1988, and Bob Etheridge made known his desire to seek the post. After Phillips’s 20-year tenure, though, the Board thought it an appropriate time to finally press the legislature to turn the Superintendent into an appointed position.

The State Senate easily passed a bill to put a constitutional amendment to the voters, but it failed to advance through the House. Betts, the North Carolina Insight author, attributed its failure to the powerful House Appropriations Chairman: Bob Etheridge. 

Etheridge won his election, and thus began a bruising years-long battle between Etheridge and the Board of Education. The two even went to court with another, suing over staffing decisions. The feud reached a crescendo in 1995.

That year the legislature passed House Bill 7, which rendered the Superintendent entirely subservient to the State Board on all matters, from staffing to policy decisions. The opening sentences of the bill begin with, “Subject to the direction, control, and approval of the State Board of Education, the Superintendent shall carry out the duties. . .” The bill empowered the Superintendent with only those authorities “that the State Board delegates.”

The Board achieved absolute victory.

That arrangement persisted for more than 20 years, until 2016. That year Roy Cooper defeated Pat McCrory, which meant a Democrat would hold appointment power for the Board of Education. Mark Johnson also won, making him the first Republican to be Superintendent since 1901.

The General Assembly, controlled by Republican supermajorities, had only weeks between the November election and Cooper’s ascension to reconfigure the separation of powers. On December 16, 2016, the legislature passed House Bill 17, which returned to the Superintendent many of the authorities it stripped in 1995.

The measure effectively brought the education bureaucracy back to the pre-1995 status quo. But that status quo is still beset by confusion and a lack of accountability.

What former Gov. Bob Scott said in 1990 is still true today: “Given the sorry state of affairs our public education now is [in], with its babble of voices, the answer to ‘Who’s on first?’ is ‘No one!’”

Take for example this theoretical dictum: It is the policy of the state that public high school graduation rates should reach 95% in ten years.

Who is in charge of executing that: the State Board of Education? The Superintendent of Public Instruction? The Governor? The General Assembly? The answer is all of them and none of them.

Indeed, the current structure incentivizes the Board and the Superintendent to sandbag one another. The Board, say, would adopt general policies it claims will achieve 95% graduation rates, then press the Superintendent to get it done. When problems inevitably arise, the Board would say the Superintendent failed to execute its policies, and the Superintendent would say the Board adopted bad policies.

If the Governor and the Superintendent are from different parties, then the Board and the Superintendent have even more reason to undermine one another and blame the other party’s lackeys.

Add in the General Assembly as the state’s supreme policymaking body, and the matter gets even more muddled. We don’t need a theoretical example: In 2019, Senate Leader Phil Berger, the State Board of Education, and Superintendent Mark Johnson all agreed that early childhood reading curriculum needed adjustments. Sen. Berger spent months writing a bill to make those adjustments, and he did so together with members of Gov. Cooper’s own State Board of Education. The bill passed the legislature (unanimously in the Senate), only for Gov. Cooper to veto it because of an unrelated budget squabble.

Put all of this together, and one reaches the same conclusion policymakers have held for decades: It can’t go on like this.

But there is hope. Other states facing similar challenges have seen leaders come together to reach agreement for the common good. Yes, North Carolina is home to legendary political fights – but it’s also home to an enduring legacy of problem-solving.

We’ll explore visions for improving the status quo in the near future. Stay tuned.

Foot Note:
*The Constitution was revised again in 1971. It currently describes the authorities granted to the State Board of Education and Superintendent of Public Instruction this way:

• “The Superintendent of Public Instruction shall be the secretary and chief administrative officer of the State Board of Education.”
• “The State Board of Education shall supervise and administer the free public school system and the educational funds provided for its support, except the funds mentioned in Section 7 of this Article, and shall make all needed rules and regulations in relation thereto, subject to laws enacted by the General Assembly.”