By Amy Cockerham
Public Ed Works

RALEIGH (September 4, 2025) – Lack of funding is the root of many issues facing North Carolina public schools today, as legislators have failed to allocate enough funds to keep up with surrounding states, setting our state behind.

GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, is the value of goods and services produced in a state. In 2024, North Carolina dedicated just 2.4 percent of its GDP to spending on public schools, putting our funding effort below every state except for Arizona.

We ranked 49th.

This is a problem, said Sara Howell, the Public School Forum of North Carolina’s Associate Director of Policy & Research.

“It’s a long history of it,” Howell said. “We’re hoping to turn the tides. But … recent years have not been helpful.”

The Leandro case, a lawsuit filed in 1994, argues low-wealth and some urban counties don’t have enough money to provide an equal education for their children. Twice, the NC Supreme Court ruled that the state should ensure all students a sound, basic education.

However, the case is still being debated 31 years later.

“You go back to 2010-ish and before and … we’re doing pretty well,” Howell said. “We’re meeting national average… In the Southeast, we’re kind of standing apart as an example of how to do it right in terms of education funding and teacher pay and all that good stuff.”

“After that you start to see the North Carolina percent spending on education and teacher salaries freeze and … we just never recovered from the 2008 recession, right? We never started spending adequate funding on education after that point.”

In the latest data from the nonprofit Education Law Center, North Carolina spent $11,777 per student in pre-K through 12th grade, compared with a national average of $16,131.

We ranked 48th.

Don Martin is the former Superintendent of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, so he knows how important fully funded schools are.

(Insert video of Martin)

“If we don’t invest in K-12 education now, we’re going to end up with kids that can’t do very well or are not doing very well 10 to 15 years from now,” Martin said. “And then I don’t think we’ll be first in business anymore.”

“We’re not competing in salaries, our per-pupil spending is low, and our percent of GDP spent for education is not competitive. You look at those three pieces of the data and say, ‘Woah, we’re not doing very well.’”

Howell said the pool of money the state draws from for education is dwindling rapidly.

“Due to some scheduled corporate and personal income tax cuts in North Carolina, we are now looking down the barrel of a budget shortfall in the coming years,” Howell said.

North Carolina legislators have yet to establish a budget for 2025-27. We challenge them to increase school spending to give our next generation of students a fair shot.

“There’s plenty of research that shows that adequate, equitable school funding leads to improved academic outcomes, especially in districts that have greater need,” Howell said.

“You see improved test scores, more years of completed schooling, higher adult earnings, like you name it. The research is there. It’s just a question of us rising to meet the occasion.”

This is the latest installment of our “Lessons Learned” series aiming to address how legislative actions – and inaction – in North Carolina over the past few decades have contributed to harm in our public schools. For a chronicle of our previous work, click here.