Education Law Attorney Matt Ellinwood

In late February, the North Carolina Supreme Court took the extraordinary (and what many see as the deeply worrisome) step of revisiting the landmark Leandro school funding case – a case that has long guaranteed all of the state’s schoolchildren a constitutional right to a sound basic education.

At issue is whether state lawmakers can be ordered to appropriate the funds necessary to make the constitutional guarantee a reality throughout the state, and as we learned in a conversation with attorney Matt Ellinwood – -the director of the North Carolina Justice Center’s Education and Law Project – the arguments before the high court provided great cause for concern. As Ellinwood also noted, however, regardless of the outcome in the case, education advocates have no intention of giving up on their efforts to secure adequate funding for North Carolina’s public schools.

Lauren Fox, Ph.D.

A top challenge facing public schools in North Carolina right now is a chronic teacher shortage – a shortage attributable to pitifully low salaries and several other shortsighted policies. Fortunately, there are some obvious and doable actions that state leaders can take to address this problem – actions detailed in a recent report from experts at the Public School Forum of North Carolina.

And as we learned in a recent conversation with the Forum’s senior director of policy and research, Dr. Lauren Fox, many of these solutions –as well as solutions to the massive funding problem that afflicts several low wealth counties – can be addressed if state lawmakers simply get serious providing the necessary dollars to get the job done.

Read the Forum’s new report: Rebuilding the Educator Pipeline — Policies and Practices to Make it Happen in NC

Ricky Hurtado, former state representative and current chair of the Governor’s Advisory Council on Hispanic/Latino Affairs (Courtesy photo)

If you’re paying any attention to the national political debate these days, you know that the political right has made immigration and a campaign to demonize immigrants its top talking point for the 2024 election cycle. Republicans in the U.S. House have even sought to condition passage of a critical foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, on a Democratic agreement to, effectively, close the southern border.

Meanwhile, here in North Carolina – a place thousands of miles from the border in which immigrants are an essential and hugely beneficial part of the economy and society generally – we’re hearing similar hateful rhetoric and proposals, and recently NC Newsline caught up with a leader who’s working hard to counter them with facts and common sense, the chair of the Governor’s Advisory Council on Hispanic/Latino Affairs, former State Representative Ricky Hurtado.

Noel Nickle, executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty

This week in Johnston County, the death penalty – a punishment our state has not inflicted in close to two decades – will, effectively, go on trial, when one of more than a hundred pending challenges to the racially discriminatory way North Carolina long sentenced people to death is heard in the case of a defendant named Hasson Bacote. Lawyers for Mr. Bacote say they’ll show that race affected not only jury selection and jury sentencing in his case, but in scores of cases across North Carolina.

The trial comes at a moment in which death penalty opponents have launched a spirited new effort to end the death penalty in North Carolina once and for all and last week NC Newsline sat down with on of the leaders of that movement, the executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Noel Nickle.

Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy Professor David Schanzer (Courtesy photo)

In the eyes of a growing number of observers, the future of democracy itself will be at stake in the 2024 U.S. elections and this sobering fact has enormous implications – not just for Americans but for the populations of dozens of allies around the world.

One expert who’s watching this matter closely and expressing deep concern on a regular basis is Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy Professor David Schanzer. Schanzer who heads the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and holds forth regularly on the substack website, Perilous Times, says the current pro-Russia, pro-authoritarian turn of many U.S. Republicans is an extremely troubling development.

Senior Counsel Douglas Keith (Courtesy photo: Brennan Center)

Throughout most of U.S. history, state courts (and judicial elections) have seldom been the site of pitched political battles. While these courts regularly issued important rulings with significant impacts on public policy debates, the judges and justices who served on these courts were generally able to avoid being drawn into the bareknuckle politics that so often characterize races for other elected offices.

In recent decades, however, things have changed. In the late 20th Century, the political right launched an ambitious national effort to promote and fund the campaigns of conservative judges and in recent years, progressives have been doing their best to respond. These developments have had a big impact on the courts and American politics generally, and recently we had an extended chat with an expert who follows, chronicles, and weighs in on this subject, attorney Douglas Keith of the Brennan Center for Justice. In Part One of our conversation, Keith explained how this arose and just what big deal it’s become.

In Part Two of our chat, we discussed some of the worrisome implications of this transformation, and perhaps most importantly, some of the changes that states can and should consider adopting in order to depoliticize state courts and restore public faith in the idea of an independent and impartial judiciary. Read Keith’s latest report here.

Rev. Suzanne Parker Miller (Courtesy photo)

North Carolina’s long running Leandro school funding case is headed back before the state Supreme Court this week and Newsline discusses why this has supporters of our public schools deeply concerned with the head of the group Pastors for North Carolina Children, the Rev. Suzanne Parker Miller.

Common Cause NC Sailor Jones (Backdrop Photo: Getty Images)

The state’s March 5th primary election is right around the corner. Early in-person voting starts this Thursday and it’s already possible to obtain a ballot to vote by mail. Unfortunately, as we’ve discussed previously on News & Views, this year’s election will be accompanied by a raft of new laws that state legislators have recently enacted to make voting a bit more tricky if you haven’t been paying attention to the news.

All that said, the election is on and voters have to make the best of the new rules and fortunately some smart advocates are doing their best to educate and motivate voters. And recently NC Newsline caught up with one of our state’s best, Common Cause of North Carolina associate director, Sailor Jones.

Meredith College political scientist and pollster David McLennan (File photo)

Meredith College pollster Professor David McLennan on what voters are thinking (and in many cases not thinking) about the March 5th primary, as well as some other important issues that confront our state and nation. Read the full results from the latest Meredith College poll here.

Public Ed Works executive director David Rice

No other function of state government in North Carolina consumes a larger share of the state budget or more attention from state leaders than K-12 and higher education. Unfortunately, in recent years, those appropriations have steadily withered even as the attention lawmakers devote to our schools and universities has related more and more to the micromanagement of hiring and curriculum decisions and enforcing an ideological agenda than giving educators the funding and support they need.

One expert who keeps tabs on these trends and frequently critiques the performance of state legislators when it comes to public and higher education is the executive director of the nonprofit research and advocacy group Public Ed Works, David Rice. And recently Rice was kind enough to join Newsline to review some of the top education issues currently facing the state.