EduGram

EduGram Thoughts of the Week:

So, after watching the North Carolina General Assembly this week, I decided to dive into the state Constitution. With all this talk about needing to change it, I figured I’d go back to our founding document to see what else might need a refresh. What I actually found was a tangled mess of three different Constitutions and hundreds of amendments throughout our history.

To be clear: NC is currently operating on Constitution #3. Yup. We passed the first one back in 1776, followed by a Declaration of Rights the very next day. That Declaration was a massive deal to our early leaders... so important, in fact, that North Carolina flat-out refused to ratify the US Constitution until the federal Bill of Rights was added. The wildest part of that standoff? Because we held out, North Carolina was ineligible to participate in our nation’s very first presidential election.

That leads us to the second iteration of our state's Constitution. This was one passed in 1868 after the conclusion of the Civil War. Like many southern states, North Carolina was required to modify our Constitution to be readmitted to the Union. However, North Carolina spent the next hundred years doing everything they could to amend this version of our Constitution. In fact, between 1869 and 1968, a whopping 97 different amendment proposals were put in front of North Carolina voters, and of those 97, voters passed 69 and rejected 28. But because of that massive flood of amendments, the whole document became a total mess. It was packed with antiquated, obsolete, and completely ambiguous laws. By the end of it, our constitution had simply become incredibly difficult for anyone to read or interpret.

So, how did we fix that hot mess? Enter our third and current North Carolina Constitution, which was put to the voters and passed in 1971. Instead of just adding more band-aids to a broken document, they completely overhauled the whole thing... reorganizing it, cutting out the obsolete junk, and making the language actually readable for the first time in decades. But they didn't just clean house; they also threw in some major upgrades, like explicitly banning racial discrimination and locking in a cap on the state income tax. It was basically a massive formatting edit and a modern upgrade all rolled into one, giving us the foundational blueprint we’re still arguing over in the General Assembly today.

Okay, so now that we know which Constitution we're actually operating under and how we got here, the question turns to just how many times this 1971 version has been amended. Any guesses? I'll give you a second to think about it...

Give up?

The answer is 37 times. That's right... since 1971 North Carolinians have modified our Constitution 37 times. To give you some highlights, those changes included lowering the legal voting age from 21 to 18 (1972), allowing the Governor and Lieutenant Governor to run for a second consecutive term (1977), standardizing how property taxes are valued (1973), and mandating that civil fines go directly into county public school funds (2004).

All of this brings us right back to this week in the NCGA, where the House and Senate have suddenly transformed into the Oprah Winfrey of Constitutional Amendments. You get an amendment! You get an amendment! Everyone gets an amendment! During this biennium alone, there have been 33 different bills filed to alter the state Constitution. Now, having a couple dozen amendment bills filed in a legislative term isn't completely unusual. What makes this year different is how many of them are on the fast track to actually pass the NCGA and land straight on our ballots this November. Heck, at this rate, some voters in the Old North State are going to have more constitutional amendments to vote on than actual candidates running for office.

Now, as longtime readers of the EduGram know, Dr. EduGram doesn't offer opinions on the current slate of amendments making their way onto our ballots this fall. Whether they are good, bad, neutral, or just a play to boost voter turnout is for others to decide. But what I will say is this: if we’re going to take the time to modify our Constitution, can we finally get rid of some of the truly egregious junk that’s still sitting in there? Like, for instance, finally repealing the Literacy Test in Section 4 of Article VI. This universally agreed-upon, horrific provision is still technically in our Constitution, even if it's no longer enforceable.

I actually tried twice during my time in the NCGA to get this provision repealed, with zero luck. I guess I just didn't have the foresight back then to realize that getting an amendment on the ballot is a whole lot easier if you promise to also cap how much a municipality can value someone's property to keep their taxes down. Don't worry though... I'm pretty sure that while you might pay less in property taxes today, you totally won't be stuck selling that property for less down the road. We all know that property evaluations used by the real estate industry for resale purposes almost never factor in the accessed value for tax purposes, which would be artificially deflated just to get tax bills down. But hey, no chance that unintended consequence comes back to bite us in the future. None at all.

Seriously, though... make sure to give yourself plenty of extra time when you head to the ballot box this fall. Between the actual candidates and this sudden avalanche of constitutional questions, your ballot is going to closely resemble a mile-long receipt from CVS. Grab a cup of coffee, do your homework before you walk through the precinct doors, and get ready for a marathon session in the voting booth.

Happy reading, and see you at the polls!

EduGram Thoughts of the Week:

Guess who's back
Back again
EduGram's back
Tell a friend
Guess who's back... Guess who's back... Guess who's back... Guess who's back...

In December 1997, Julia "Butterfly" Hill scaled a California redwood to protest logging, vowing not to descend until a buffer zone was secured. Taking a leaf out of her book, though with significantly less media coverage, the EduGram team has spent the last 18 months perched in a sturdy oak on Wade Avenue, waiting for the North Carolina General Assembly to pass a budget. As it turns out, if a protest happens in the woods and nobody posts it to Instagram, does it even make a sound? Apparently not, as my silent vigil went entirely unnoticed, making the whole "tree-sitter" phase a bit of a failure as we didn’t get a budget and I got to meet way more animals in that tree than I was comfortable with. But much like Marshall Mathers, the EduGram is back... making our grand return just as our friends on Jones Street reconvene to get back to the people’s business.

With North Carolina’s two most influential political entities returning to action in the same week, the burning question is: what can we actually hope for in the 2026 Short Session? The short answer, pun absolutely intended, is the exact same thing that drove us up that tree eighteen months ago. We need a new state budget.

It’s been years since the NCGA passed a truly comprehensive budget. Instead, we’ve been limping along on the skeletal remains of the 2024-2025 fiscal year, held together by minor tweaks and legislative duct tape. The result? No meaningful raises for teachers, retirees, or state employees. These critical funding items might as well have been sitting in that oak tree with me, completely ignored by passers-by while the rest of the world moved on. As inflation climbed, our state’s most valuable assets watched their real-world purchasing power dwindle.

Now, I know we could spend all day lobbing grenades across the fountain separating the two chambers in the legislative building trying to pin down exactly who’s to blame for this mess. But frankly, I no longer care "who shot J.R." (For the Gen Z and Millennial crowd: figuring out who shot J.R. Ewing was the 1980s equivalent of the Avengers: Endgame premiere, only with shoulder pads and hairspray). Like so many others across North Carolina, I’ve moved past the finger-pointing phase… I just want this resolved.

The simple fact of the matter is that it’s time for the "business of the people" to actually include the people who keep this state running. It should embarrass all of us that we find ourselves in this predicament, living in the state we love, while paying our employees so much less than their counterparts in Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina. While the folks in the Old North State have been stuck in a budgetary stalemate, South Carolina has been aggressively moving the goalposts. For the 2025-2026 school year, the gap in starting pay hasn't just widened; it’s gone from a crack to a canyon.

Look, as many of you know, Dr. EduGram hails from South Carolina. It’s hard for me to admit this, but in my book, the only things South Carolina should be better at than North Carolina are college football, barbeque, and beaches. Having "Teacher Pay" added to that list should make us all want to go climb a tree and stay there until someone fixes the math.