Court filings: Too many NC children aren't receiving adequate education

BY JANE STANCILL

The state has abandoned its constitutional commitment to provide all North Carolina children with a sound, basic education, say lawyers for low-income school districts, who cite years of budget reductions, jettisoned programs and tens of thousands of low-scoring students.

In a new filing, attorneys in a landmark school quality lawsuit call for a hearing in August and a detailed plan from the state, with timetables, for complying with the basic education mandate from two previous Supreme Court rulings. They say North Carolina has discarded many of the planned remedies to the problem, leaving 800,000 poor students – 56 percent of all school children – at risk of academic failure.

“While the State has advanced some meritorious initiatives, many of those initiatives, since 2008, have been eliminated or substantially curtailed,” said the April 29 filing by the attorneys for five low-income counties in the lawsuit, known as Leandro for the original student plaintiff.

Meanwhile, the judge overseeing the case issued a stinging, 38-page report this week on “the reading problem” in North Carolina, calling educators to task for “way too many thousands of school children” who have not received an adequate education.

Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard E. Manning Jr., who has monitored schools’ progress for more than a decade, said he is awaiting the results of this year’s end-of-grade and end-of-course tests, along with the latest ACT scores of state students. He also issued a warning.


Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/05/08/3846698/too-many-nc-children-arent-receiving.html?sp=/99/102/105/