Perhaps no issue in state policy is as politically consequential or socially vital as public education.
There are few things the public cares about more than its schools. As an issue, education combines the pocketbook political power of tax policy with the emotional weight of social justice. And unlike the tax code, it’s easy to understand and mostly affects children.
Bring up North Carolina politics anywhere and you’re likely to hear two things. First, that public education matters. And second, that North Carolina’s K-12 education needs to be fixed.
But exactly what needs fixing?
Ask a liberal Democrat, and the first reaction will likely be inadequate resources. North Carolina ranks 44th in per-pupil spending, and teacher pay is among the lowest in the country.
On standardized tests, however, North Carolina meets or exceeds national averages.
For some on the right, to the extent that reform really is pressing, more money may appear unnecessary; evidence on how extra funding impacts student achievement is ambiguous enough to substantiate calls for money better spent rather than money more heavily expended.
For others, the problem is unequal opportunity. N.C. public schools continue to struggle with de-facto racial segregation, and property taxes from poorer municipalities mean that some districts can’t keep up with the extra spending taking place in wealthier areas. While North Carolina’s education finance system distributes funding more equitably than most states by most measures, pockets of disadvantage persist.
School choice is regarded as the hallmark solution for others. Vouchers are promoted as an escape hatch for families discontent with public options, and charter schools are touted as nimble, innovative solutions for districts supposedly overrun by low quality tenured teachers.
While the expansion of the school-choice movement in North Carolina has persisted seemingly undeterred by underwhelming evidence on its effectiveness, the growing mound of research on education policy interventions has led well-meaning people to seek all kinds of new solutions.
Fixes to N.C. public education seem to change with the season. Education lotteries. Curriculum reform. Charter schools. Voucher programs. Teacher professional development. Masters’ pay.
This season, it’s class size.
A deeper dive into the most recent legislative bout in Raleigh gives insight into how exactly the political hot-potato of education gets tossed—and why meaningful improvement seems to have escaped these one-dimensional solutions.
In the most recent legislative session, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill mandating reduced classroom size in kindergarten through third grade.
The move was supported with evidence from study conducted by Tennessee on the impact of class size on student achievement. Class size, the study found, can matter. But not in isolation. Systems as complex as public education are loathe to be revolutionized in one fowl-swoop along a single policy dimension. And especially not when reform has unintended consequences.
N.C. school boards have raised concerns in the wake of the state class size mandate. Leaders say that finding the resources to staff smaller classes will either generate cuts in non-essential subjects (art, physical education, and elective courses), increase class size in other grades, or place a financial burden local districts to make up the funding gap.
Even if class size were the silver bullet, consequences resulting from the current legislative design would likely offset student gains. And the result would surely muddy the political water.
In response, the North Carolina House passed legislation to loosen state class-size mandates. But the Senate has yet to follow suit. HB-13 remains stalled in the Senate Rules Committee (rather than the Senate Education Committee) amid suspicion that districts are diverting state funding away from class size reductions and toward less productive improvements.
As districts finalize personnel budgets for the 2017-2018 school year, the General Assembly will be forced to confront these concerns in the coming months. In the case of Wake County, which finalizes its budget on May 15, that deadline is approaching soon.
For those who campaigned on reducing class sizes, reversing course could be politically costly.
Depending on the Senate’s decision, one of two things will happen. Either North Carolina will grant leeway for schools to revert back to the status quo – leaving another reform effort visibly inert – or schools will encounter the unintended consequences of the change -- mitigating to a certain extent the potential benefits of class size reduction.
Either way, this most recent push for education reform is likely to engender the same disappointment of reforms in the recent past—leaving voters ever more skeptical that Raleigh is up to the challenge of improving the welfare of North Carolina’s children.
The lesson is not that reform is futile, but that it is complicated. When the next wave of attack ads take the North Carolinian airwaves, they are more likely motivated by political winds than a fundamentally partisan disagreement about the value of public education. So, as reformers continue to weigh difficult tradeoffs, so too should we be weary of one-dimensional approaches to school improvement.
Tanner Lockhead is a Trinity senior. His column, “not straight talk” runs on alternate Mondays.
Edit 2:15 p.m.: Changed title and made slight modifications for clarity.
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