Potential path forward on public education in North Carolina

Today we’re publishing the conclusion to our three-part education series.

In Part I we untangled the history of North Carolina’s confusing education bureaucracy, in which both the State Board of Education and the Department of Public Instruction have jurisdiction over the school system. Many incentives drive the two to war, not work, with one another. North Carolina’s schoolchildren suffer because of it. Reform has been discussed publicly for 75 years but still eludes policymakers.

In Part II we explored the four main models other states employ to govern their public schools. We also discussed two examples of success – Mississippi and Massachusetts, which have shown the way on early childhood literacy.

In this final installment, we bring it all together. This is a big issue, and any change to the status quo involves thousands of decision-makers. We propose concepts, some of which are new to the public discourse, as a means to push forward the critical discussion about how best to organize our schools so that North Carolina’s children have the best opportunity to reach their full potential.

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In a recent education debate on the podcast Honestly, a guest rattled off a litany of responsibilities one constituency or another expects from public schools today. At the end, she asked:

So are you a school, or are you a social services organization? Is your role to teach academic subjects, or is your role to become the health care for that family?. . .Let’s just stop calling them schools if we’re going to lay on so many responsibilities.

She’s right. Enter a school and ask people with different titles what they believe the school offers its students, and you’ll get many answers that touch on family, social health, behavior, emotions, and, yes, learning. Before we can begin to ask how to improve the public schools system, we have to know why the public school system exists in the first place.

It’s often tempting to pile onto a school’s remit by connecting “education” to every part of growing up. The kids can’t learn if they’re not getting enough sleep because mom and dad are fighting. The kids can’t learn if they might get evicted at the end of the month.

These are compelling and deeply sympathetic problems. But schools cannot be a one-stop shop to support every aspect of a child’s social and emotional well-being. If they try, they will fail.

We’ve suggested for years in these very pages that businesses should stick to their core competencies – that operating outside of them invites misadventure. The principle holds true for government agencies, too, including public schools.

We are not elected or appointed policymakers, and only they can settle on whether the public school system serves a narrow or overly broad purpose. But we propose this as a starting point:

The purpose of public schools is to promote and advance our democratic republic through an educated citizenry that transfers generational values so that all have the opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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Equipped with a guiding purpose, education leaders can set out to better achieve their mission. But under what governance structure?

Part I of this series described the utter dysfunction that can define North Carolina’s public education bureaucracy. We identified models that other states have adopted, and we even put forward for discussion one model unique to North Carolina that would still honor the constitutional mandate for both a Superintendent of Public Instruction and a State Board of Education.

But a more efficient system will not happen unless the state’s Big Three leaders – the Senate President Pro Tempore, the Speaker of the House, and the Governor – resolve to address it.

Two of those three leaders will be new in January 2025. What a signal it would send if all three agreed to seriously pursue a remedy in the long session next year.

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 After purpose and governance, the last major piece is organizational structure. There are 115 public school districts in North Carolina right now. Enrollment ranges from fewer than 500 students to more than 150,000. The 10 largest school districts serve nearly half of all students, with the remaining 105 districts serving the other half.

Might an opportunity exist for a more efficient regional model in which finance, HR, and other shared services are spread across only, say, 12 regions of identical size? Such a model would not strip local districts of autonomy – rather, it would professionalize shared services and improve technical expertise for smaller districts.

For example, some rural school districts have less than 2,000 students, and are staffed with a chief finance officer, a human resources director, a public information officer, and other staff managing a single district that serves less than 1% of the student population as Wake County Schools. Successful big businesses do not have hundreds of staff occupying identical positions to serve markets with vast size variations. Rather, successful businesses apportion staff to maximize efficiency and reduce complexity.

This model has proven successful in the UNC System, which consolidated 16 different reporting requirements and budget systems into one manageable whole while preserving autonomy for each university. 

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The preceding discussion is not a set-in-stone blueprint for the best path forward. It comes from many conversations over the past year among business leaders who care deeply about our education system. Other, better ideas may well exist.

But most can agree that the status quo – from bureaucratic in-fighting to school mission creep to organizational structure – is not optimal. The only way to make something better is to talk about it and act. Are you willing to enter the fray in pursuit of a better future?