Easley Delivers

Winston-Salem Journal
May 11, 2006

Gov. Mike Easley promised to dedicate all funds from the North Carolina Lottery to education and, on Tuesday, he delivered. Easley’s 2006-07 budget contains education initiatives that more than consume the $425 million that state officials expect to clear from the lottery in the coming budget year. That’s good news.

Tracking the real beneficiary of the lottery won’t be easy, and the governor unnecessarily made that job more difficult by moving existing education programs from the General Fund to the lottery fund. That created suspicion that Easley might then free General Fund revenues for spending in other areas.

Easley would have made it far easier to follow lottery funds had he identified new education programs and dedicated lottery funds to them. Had he done so, North Carolinians could have looked at those programs for years and identified the lottery with them.

For the short term, Easley has made the issue moot, however. His supplemental budget, released Tuesday, includes an abundance of much-needed spending for education.

North Carolinians should not expect Easley to get everything he wants in the budget that eventually emerges from the General Assembly. Legislators have other priorities and are likely to change Easley’s plan. But the leaders of both houses have also said they want to guarantee that lottery funds represent a true increase in education spending. With his budget, the governor is now on record as showing them how they can do that.

The teams recommended fundamental and structural changes to school leadership along with tutoring for teachers and principals.

Teachers should be quite optimistic about their chances of a significant pay raise this year. Both the governor and legislative leaders have proposed plans for raises of at least 7 percent, with Easley’s being higher. The governor’s plan includes a lump-sum increase that favors new and recently hired teachers. This is a wise adjustment that should help with the teacher shortage. But the legislature should also consider a supplemental payment to those who teach math and science.

For years, the state has given money to public schools with one hand and taken it away, in the form of required reversions, with the other. Easley’s budget stops this process. This should be a big help at the local school level.

Among the promising education initiatives are high-school reform, middle-school reading coaches and virtual high-school funding. And the crown on the budget is the full funding, 15 years late, of the state’s Low Wealth School Fund.

A state lottery is not the best way to raise money for education, but it is a mechanism now in place. Easley said he would dedicate its revenues to education, and he kept his word. For that he deserves credit.