Honest and dishonest opinions

Opinion columnists try to persuade readers to their point of view. The honest way is to be true to facts and ideas on the other side while explaining a different opinion. The dishonest way is to distort facts and ideas on the other side to make your opinion look like the better one.

Here is an example of the second from John Hood, regarding the latest chapter in North Carolina’s Leandro lawsuit:

Because the funding dispute has now reached the Supreme Court again, with oral arguments scheduled for today, the faulty notion that taxpayer-funded preschool is constitutionally obligatory has again been propagated by the usual suspects. They’d dearly love the Court to order state government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on preschool, along with a commensurate tax increase. That was the original purpose of the Leandro lawsuit — to use judicial means to compel the General Assembly to raise education spending and taxes.

I have followed the Leandro case from the beginning. Its original purpose was not, as Hood writes in the last sentence above, “to use judicial means to compel the General Assembly to raise education spending and taxes.” It was to get the North Carolina legislature to live up to the equal educational opportunity clause of the NC Constitution:

The General Assembly shall provide by taxation and otherwise for a general and uniform system of free public schools, which shall be maintained at least nine months in every year, and wherein equal opportunities shall be provided for all students — Article IX, Sec. 2 (1).

I realize the judges turned pre-school education for poor children into a remedy, but I also realize they did a lot of wriggling to come up with that idea. The equal opportunity clause may not be clear to them, but it seems clear to me — “. . . wherein equal opportunities shall be provided for all students.”

Let’s assume Hood is right.  That means an idea without merit — using “judicial means to compel the General Assembly to raise education spending and taxes” — has had the attention of the NC Supreme Court for more than ten years.

His dishonesty turned it all around. The suit has merit, which is one reason it is still in the courts. The other reason is that the Supreme Court avoided a constitutional remedy in favor of pre-school education for poor children.

The Leandro lawsuit is the most important education funding case in North Carolina, but Hood gives it a purpose without merit and then dismisses it. I will never read another Hood column.