Inside Roy Cooper’s “State of Emergency” on Public Education

“State of Emergency.” It’s an official proclamation triggering emergency powers that we’re all too familiar with after COVID.
 
But this week, Gov. Roy Cooper added a new definition to “state of emergency” – one that’s not an official proclamation but a means of communicating urgency over what he perceives as poor policymaking.
 
It began Monday morning with an ominous red banner running across the official homepage of the governor’s website: “Gov. Cooper has declared that public education in North Carolina is facing a state of emergency and he urges North Carolinians to contact legislators.”
 
In advance of 3:00PM remarks Cooper would give that day, speculation mounted among media and political observers that Cooper would sign an actual state of emergency declaration to grant himself emergency powers.
 
Would he use those powers to transfer money without legislative approval? Is it a gambit to withdraw funds from the treasury to fund the Leandro plan?
 
But that didn’t come to pass. Instead, Cooper delivered a five-minute speech lambasting legislative Republicans.
 
He used unusually charged language, which some called reckless, claiming lawmakers “dropped an atomic bomb” on public education and sought to “choke the life” out of public schools.
 
Cooper did not have an actual state of emergency like a hurricane to mobilize against. Instead, he wanted to express his displeasure with the General Assembly’s proposed legislative changes.
 
He ran through a list of arguments (which also appear on a specially-created landing page on his website) that are familiar to those who follow politics.
 
He believes the legislature should spend more on education and eliminate proposed tax cuts. He’s upset that the proposed budget offers Opportunity Scholarships to all children in the state (he opposed the program when it was means-tested, too). And he objects to a proposed change in how the Board of Education is selected – right now, he appoints all members.
 
At the end, Cooper urged North Carolinians to call their representatives to complain.
 
Senate Leader Phil Berger’s spokesman called the episode a “meaningless publicity stunt [that does] nothing to improve educational outcomes in our state.”
 
Even some reporters expressed rare skepticism. WRAL’s Travis Fain tweeted, “You don’t have to declare a state of emergency to ask people to call state legislators.”
 
At bottom, the flashpoint is just another escalation of a long-simmering conflict.
 
***
 
Cooper believes legislators should spend more money on public education and end scholarships for private schools.
 
Legislators say they have spent more money, and that taxpayer education funding should follow a child to whichever school he or she wishes to attend, be it public, private, or charter.
 
Cooper is right that in every year of his tenure, he’s asked the legislature to spend more on education than they’ve ultimately decided to allocate.
 
But the legislature is right that, even if it hasn’t met Cooper’s spending requests, it has increased K-12 spending on both a gross and per-pupil basis.
 
A claim from Sen. Rachel Hunt on this issue is instructive. She said this week that her father, former Gov. Jim Hunt, “fully funded” schools, unlike the Republican supermajority now.
 
But that’s just not true.
 
Per-pupil funding reached the highest level under Gov. Hunt in 2000, his last year in office. That year, the K-12 authorized budget was about $6,800 per student (adjusted for inflation using 2022 dollars).
 
Last year, the authorized K-12 budget was more than $7,500 per student.
 
This is why claims that the General Assembly underfunds education usually fall on deaf ears at the Legislative Building. People can argue in good faith that the legislature hasn’t increased education funding enough, but it’s indisputable that education funding is higher right now than any other time in state history.
 
But bickering over funding levels isn’t really the legislature’s priority anyway. What they propose, and what Cooper vehemently opposes, is a shift towards funding students themselves instead of schools.
 
In this model, the state provides a certain amount of funding to each student to use for whichever school option their families choose – public, private, or public charter.
 
Legislators argue that multiple education options are better than one. Cooper argues that all those funds should go to schools and school districts, and that the best way to improve education outcomes is to give those schools and school districts more resources.
 
***
 
What does any of this have to do with a state of emergency? Very little.
 
Of course, the last statewide state of emergency came because of a global pandemic. At that time, Cooper’s emergency declaration granted his administration more power, and he maintained the state of emergency for nearly three years.
 
Since then, legislators have reformed the state of emergency statutes so that no governor can grant him or herself such sweeping authority for more than 30 days without legislative approval.
 
But none of that really matters here because Cooper didn’t sign an actual emergency declaration – he just said that it’s his opinion that public education faces an emergency because of legislative policy choices.
 
Whether that message is accurate or hyperbolic is for you to decide.