While the U.S. Supreme Court grabs national attention on education issues, state supreme courts have quietly issued a wave of major rulings over the past year that are reshaping school funding, charter schools, and voucher programs across the country. In an op-ed published June 10, 2026 in Education Week, Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute interviewed constitutional law expert Derek Black about the often-overlooked state court decisions that carry big implications for policy. The conversation reveals a legal landscape in flux, with recent rulings on everything from judicial power over school budgets to whether charter schools can tap public funding.
The past 12 months have delivered several landmark decisions. Last summer, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled that the state's base level of school funding was constitutionally inadequate, continuing a half-century pattern of state courts treating education as protected by state constitutional guarantees. But the most dramatic shift came this spring in North Carolina, where the state supreme court reversed its own 2022 decision that had upheld a trial court's unprecedented order for the state treasurer to transfer nearly $2 billion in surplus funds into public education accounts. The court's reversal signals that the lower court overreached in imposing a statewide funding remedy on the legislature. On school choice, Kentucky's Supreme Court this spring struck down the state's charter school law, finding it unconstitutionally diverted money from the "common school fund" reserved for traditional public schools. Meanwhile, Idaho's Supreme Court went the other way, upholding a private school tax-credit program on the grounds that tax credits don't directly tap public school funding. Lower courts in Utah, Wyoming, and Ohio have also issued adverse rulings on vouchers that are now before their state supreme courts.
According to Black, the North Carolina reversal reflects deeper changes in judicial politics rather than a simple legal shift. "North Carolina went from issuing some of the country's most consequential school funding decisions to becoming far more reluctant to press the legislature on educational adequacy," he explained, noting that the state switched from nonpartisan to partisan judicial elections in 2016. The Kentucky charter ruling builds on a 2015 Washington state decision that read "common school" as a constitutional term of art with specific historical meaning, though Black suggests the California Supreme Court in the 1990s "just didn't want to get in the way of reform and experimentation, so it papered over the common school distinction." Black also pointed to an emerging issue in West Virginia over whether legislatures can override the authority of constitutionally separate education officials, calling it especially important "in a moment when branches of government increasingly push against one another's limits."
The legal uncertainty extends to the new federal scholarship tax credit program. Black notes that while state constitutional prohibitions on vouchers don't automatically apply to federal tax credits, a South Carolina case offers a cautionary tale—the state supreme court struck down the governor's use of federal COVID relief money for vouchers because those federal education funds still counted as "public funds" requiring legislative authorization. The fact that governors must opt in to the federal program could trigger similar state constitutional limits. Black's bottom line: "Our state and federal founders believed that public education was essential to a republican form of government, so they constitutionalized public education and set up a number of guardrails to protect public schools." Those 200-year-old structures may look like historical oddities when they constrain modern political impulses, but there's wisdom in the protections they provide.