The state ranks first for business and last in school funding. On Tuesday night, Mecklenburg's board said both things out loud.
By Jack Beckett | The Charlotte Mercury
North Carolina is the top-ranked state for business in America. It is also dead last — 51st out of 51 jurisdictions including the District of Columbia — in how much it invests in public education as a share of its own economy. Commissioner Susan Rodriguez-McDowell attended a ribbon cutting for City Bank earlier in the week where the first fact was celebrated. She brought the second one to the dais on Tuesday night.
"We're number one in business," she told colleagues near the end of a three-and-a-half-hour meeting. "But we're number 50 in education funding." She added that the state's workers rank similarly low in wage measures. All three facts, she said, belong in the same sentence. In most public settings, they do not appear there together.
The occasion was the Mecklenburg County Board of County Commissioners regular meeting on March 17. Rodriguez-McDowell was not the only commissioner who found her way back to the subject. By the end of the night, four of them had spoken to it from the dais — unprompted, hours after it first came up, on their own time.
It started with Ray LeGroen.
LeGroen is a public school teacher, a parent of CMS students, and a member of both NCAE and CMS. He came during public comment with a specific ask: he wanted the board to pass a resolution supporting the NCAE's "Kids Over Corporations" campaign, a statewide push calling on the North Carolina General Assembly to fund public schools over corporate tax cuts. He had three minutes.
The Education Law Center's "Making the Grade 2025" report, released in December, ranked North Carolina dead last for education funding effort — the measure of how much a state invests in public schools as a percentage of its GDP. The state also ranked second-to-last nationally for per-pupil spending, putting roughly $5,600 less per student into classrooms than the national average. The state's corporate income tax, currently at 2.25 percent — the lowest among states that still impose one — is on a legally scheduled path to zero by 2030. Statewide spending on private school vouchers through the Opportunity Scholarship program has jumped from $185.5 million in 2023-24 to $533.5 million in the current school year.
No commissioner responded to his resolution request from the dais. None indicated whether the ask would be taken up at a future meeting. The Mercury contacted the county clerk's office to ask whether any resolution was pending; no response was received before publication. That silence is part of the story.
Commissioner Laura Meier put it simply: "We used to be the education state. We're not there anymore." She and several colleagues had recently attended a League of Women Voters panel on public school support and a separate meeting with an education advocacy group. Both events, she said, reinforced the same point: this is structural, not partisan.
Rodriguez-McDowell's contrast — first in business, last in schools — was the sharpest observation of the night and the one that connected most directly to what LeGroen had said three hours earlier. If the state can sustain a national reputation as the best place to do business while investing less in public education than any other state in the country, she suggested, something in that equation eventually gives.
None of this is the county's problem to solve through its budget. As LeGroen noted, more than half of the CMS budget flows from the state. Mecklenburg can supplement what Raleigh sets. It cannot substitute for it. A board resolution is not a funding mechanism. Floor statements are not legislation.
But the board is a public body with a platform, and its members appear willing to use it on this particular question. Whether willingness becomes action — a resolution, a formal letter to legislative leadership, a public commitment from the full board — remains to be seen. Four commissioners spoke Tuesday. Five did not.
A teacher came with a specific ask. The room heard him. Whether it acts is another question entirely.
This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0). You may share it freely with attribution. You may not remix, transform, or build upon it.
About Jack Beckett Jack Beckett is a senior writer for The Charlotte Mercury, where he covers local government, civic policy, and the decisions that shape a city most people never see coming. He attends a lot of three-hour public meetings so you do not have to. He does this on cold coffee. He has stopped complaining about it. Mostly.
About The Charlotte Mercury The Charlotte Mercury is a civic journalism publication covering local government and community affairs in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. It practices slow journalism: reporting that digs into how decisions get made, who benefits, and what the footnotes say. It runs no third-party trackers, sells no reader data, and carries no auto-play video. It is funded by readers and privacy-respecting local advertisers who do not retarget you across the internet afterward. It is independently owned and operated. It is not the fastest newsroom in Charlotte. That is intentional.
Related: CMS Makes May 1 a Teacher Workday as Unfilled Absences Hit 1,934 Ahead of Raleigh March (April 24, 2026) — The board invoked this same argument, citing the state's 43rd-in-the-nation teacher pay ranking and the 2030 corporate income tax phase-out, when it voted 9-0 to convert May 1 into a teacher workday.
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