- Advocates say North Carolina public schools are accountable, but public dissatisfaction with schools is growing
- Education scholar Michael McShane offers a three-pronged approach to test public school accountability: financially, democratically, and educationally
- For many reasons — failure to consider capital costs properly, too much focus on per-pupil costs, only district-level data — North Carolina’s public schools lack financial accountability
Public schools are accountable. It’s a claim often repeated by lawmakers, teachers, administrators, and education activists. But are they? What does it mean to be accountable?
Despite an apparatus of accountability, public dissatisfaction with public education is growing
Advocates point to all the structures in government providing oversight and support for public education. The State Board of Education, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, various state boards, and state laws and regulations represent the apparatus of accountability. There is even a North Carolina School Accountability Model that awards letter grades to schools based on a model combining scores on tests (end-of-grade and end-of-course), academic growth, and graduation rates.
But does operating with the language of accountability and repeatedly calling yourself accountable actually make you accountable?
Polls of North Carolinians find that they are increasingly dissatisfied with the state of public education in North Carolina. A January 2025 Carolina Journal Poll found that only 33 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with the quality of the education students receive in local public schools. A majority of respondents — 55 percent — said they were dissatisfied with the quality of education. That’s up 7 percentage points over the previous year.
With respect to grading schools, a November 2025 Elon University Poll found that 50 percent of respondents would give their local public schools a grade of C, D, or F (24 percent were D or F). Only 36 percent of respondents would give those schools a grade of A or B. In comparison, 51 percent of respondents would give private schools an A or B grade, and only 6 percent would give them a D or F. Likewise, 41 percent of respondents graded charter schools an A or B, while only 10 percent graded them D or F.
A three-pronged approach to determining if public schools are fulfilling their mission
In his paper “The Accountability Myth,” Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, offers a helpful, three-pronged framework for determining whether public schools are accountable:
- Financial accountability: Do schools spend money responsibly and effectively?
- Democratic accountability: In how they are organized and in their spending choices, do schools uphold the values and preferences of the larger community supporting them?
- Educational accountability: Do schools produce graduates prepared for careers or college and able to contribute to society?
Applying McShane’s framework to North Carolina public schools shows them lacking much of the accountability that advocates assert they have.
Are North Carolina schools financially accountable to the state’s taxpayers?
In 2024–25, North Carolina spent $11.1 billion on K–12 education. Including state, federal and local funding, that number increases to $17.8 billion.
The State Board of Education (SBE) and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NC DPI) have the job of developing education policy and ensuring the money is spent wisely.
NC DPI is charged with implementing education policy in North Carolina, including the policies of the SBE. NC DPI distributes a considerable amount of data available at the state, federal,and local level to assess revenue and spending devoted to public education. Education revenue and expenditures are frequently listed in annual publications like the North Carolina Public Schools Statistical Profile, Highlights of the North Carolina Public School Budget, and accounting systems such as the Educational Directory and Demographical Information Exchange (EDDIE). While it is certainly helpful for researchers and policymakers to be able to access the data, important context and explanations of the data’s limitations is frequently missing
Each year the North Carolina Public Schools Statistical Profile web site posts financial, personnel, student, and other information for Local Education Agencies (LEAs, or school districts) and charter schools. The Statistical Profile gathers and publishes data from the local, state, and federal levels about how LEAs spend money to educate children.
Merely having information available does not make North Carolina schools financially accountable. North Carolina provides many examples of school spending. Most spending is categorized as current expenses, which are the costs of operating a school. But this category excludes costs that many would think should be included in the costs of educating students. For example, capital costs (the costs of building and maintaining buildings) are not included in the final per-pupil expenditure calculation for North Carolina public school children.
NC DPI does provide an estimate for capital costs (Table 28 in the Statistical Profile). Nevertheless, if the capital costs mentioned in Table 28 were included in the calculation of per-pupil spending, it would be approximately $1,435 higher. Thus, the final per-pupil expenditures for 2024–25 would be $14,503, not $13,068, an additional 11.0 percent more.
Because capital costs add significantly to the costs of operating schools, they should be included in any assessment of the costs of education. To exclude them is to offer an incomplete and inaccurate assessment of the costs of public education.
A second way that current practices obscure financial accountability is the emphasis placed on per-pupil spending. While it provides an average spending level per student, its use has significant limitations.
First, merely looking at per-pupil spending ignores the very large differences in spending caused by geographic differences, different district sizes, and the varying needs of the different types of students served. It also ignores complicated factors that significantly impact education, such as teacher salaries, class size, and the complexity of how education is funded. Equally important, per-pupil spending also fails to account for the needs of students based on their socioeconomic status or academic proficiency.
Finally, the focus on per-pupil spending places heavy weight on inputs — dollars spent — and treats them as an indicator of financial accountability. A serious look at financial accountability, however, would be more balanced and also include a look at educational outcomes. What one obtains for the money spent is just as important as how much money is spent. Considering that the largest expenditure in the state budget is to fund public education, you would expect policymakers to place a major emphasis on outcomes, featuring audits and evaluations of district operations and programs. Those items are noticeably absent from lists of reports and audits.
Other factors also underscore that North Carolina public schools lack financial accountability. For example, NC DPI data focus on the district level. Nevertheless, like districts, schools spend differently based on a range of factors: teacher quality, curriculum, composition of students, and district resources. Those differences are obscured, however, when schools see only district-level financial data.
Even though provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) require recipients of federal aid to report data at the school level, not all schools do, and ESSA lacks substantive enforcement measures to compel them. School level data are important to help accurately assess how much schools are spending, what schools are spending on teacher salaries or health benefits, and why. Lacking such data, it’s difficult to determine which schools are spending money wisely and which are not, much less answer larger questions of financial accountability.
Also harming financial accountability for North Carolia public schools is that very few people understand how education is funded and how dollars are actually distributed to schools and students in North Carolina. The fact that only a few local school board members and state legislators fully understand how schools are funded does not lead to stronger accountability.
At last count there were 50 different allotments for public schools, each with a different formula to determine how much money schools would receive. Over the years various government and private reports have criticized how North Carolina funds public schools. A 2024 report by the John Locke Foundation’s Center for Effective Education, “Funding Our Future,” concluded that the current system of financing public schools in North Carolina is overly complex, inequitable, lacking in transparency, and unable to track to see if the money is having the desired impact.
Sadly, this is not a new problem. A 2016 state report found that the system is so complex that most school districts reported that it takes school business officers two or more years to understand it fully.
In sum, the mere availability of data does not accountability make. A lack of understanding about the true costs of education and a reliance on incomplete data are some reasons why North Carolina public schools lack true financial accountability.
Part 2 of this series will explore whether North Carolina public schools are democratically accountable and educationally accountable.
