RALEIGH (February 19, 2025) – Asked what North Carolina needs to know about public education, State Superintendent Mo Green has a twofold response.

While there is absolutely need for improvement, Green says in the accompanying video, the state also has the best high-school graduation rate it’s ever had. It has more students taking and passing Advanced Placement courses. And it was at the forefront of Middle Colleges, which allow high school students to earn college course credits for free.

“These are just a couple of examples of where North Carolina is doing some really good things,” Green says. But messages in the media are too often negative.

“There’s all this gloom and doom around it, as opposed to, ‘There are multiple bright lights,’” he says. “We ought to amplify those things and then get to work on those things that need to be worked on.”

BUT GREEN ALSO says North Carolinians need to understand their public schools are severely underfunded.

“We have found ourselves in a situation where we have woefully underfunded public education in North Carolina,” he says. “It’s gotten to a place where it’s desperate.”

He notes that the state ranks 48th in the country in per-pupil funding – North Carolina spends about $5,000 less per student than the national average, and $3,000-4,000 less per student than even its neighbors in Virginia and South Carolina.

The state also ranks 49th in “funding effort,” the percentage of its economy it devotes to K-12 public schools.¹

“This is a place where North Carolinians need to recognize we can do much better, and we need to,” Green says, “so that we can have even more of those bright lights show up in our public education system.”

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1 https://www.wunc.org/education/2024-12-13/nc-ranks-49-school-funding-effort-education-law-center-making-the-grade; https://edlawcenter.org/research/making-the-grade-2024/.