North Carolina's Education Crisis: Why Private School Vouchers Aren't the Answer
The Leandro court case determined that North Carolina had failed to “provide a sound basic education” and served as a much-needed spotlight on the reality of the state’s education system. However, 27 years have passed, and the state’s educational outlook remains bleak. North Carolina’s public school system lies in the bottom half of most public school rankings. Lists that calculate public school funding, chance for success, and K-12 achievement all place North Carolina near the bottom. The state’s governor has even declared North Carolina’s public education system faces a “state of emergency.” Yet the only evident change that the state’s legislature has decided on is to expand its private school voucher program, ironically titled the “Opportunity Scholarship.” Providing more “private school vouchers” exacerbates the educational issues highlighted in the Leandro ruling by siphoning funds away from public schools that are already underfunded. Instead of increasing the number of wealthy families that can receive private school vouchers, state lawmakers should focus on improving the performance of the state’s public schools by investing more in our teachers.
When lawmakers first introduced the Opportunity Scholarship, they stated that its goal was to provide students enrolled in low-performing public schools with the chance to attend high-quality private schools. However, the program’s design failed to address the important question of why these public schools were underperforming in the first place. The growing demand for these vouchers is tied mainly to the belief that private schools possess significant advantages over public schools. These advantages will translate to academic gains among students who use vouchers to switch schools. The reality is that this notion is purely fiction. The perceived benefits of private schools are nothing more than an illusion brought about by the lack of any legal requirement forcing private schools to report on student performance or teach a curriculum based on state academic standards. As a result, private schools suffer from a glaring lack of transparency, making it extremely difficult for parents to identify deficiencies and impossible for the public to ensure that our tax dollars are being spent effectively.
At the end of 2023, North Carolina state legislators significantly expanded the Opportunity Scholarship program by making three fundamental changes: the program’s income eligibility and past public school attendance requirements were eliminated, and its funding from the state budget for the next ten years was increased by an enormous amount of $1.9 billion. Expanding North Carolina’s school voucher program is unnecessary and harmful to the state’s public education resources. Students of any economic background are now eligible to receive an opportunity scholarship, even if their family is already wealthy enough to afford private school tuition or have never stepped foot in a public school. These eligibility changes reveal the true intent behind the Opportunity Scholarship program: to funnel tax dollars away from public schools to make private school attendance cheaper for those who can already afford it.
Lawmakers recently considered another significant increase to private school voucher funding before the expansion they passed in October 2023 had even gone into effect. Although House Bill 823’s name, “Eliminate School Choice Program Waitlists,” suggests it addresses a longstanding issue, it is intended to ensure the wealthiest families in North Carolina receive a taxpayer-funded discount on private school tuition. The bill would blow a hole in the state’s budget as lawmakers would be obligated to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in tuition for students from wealthy families. The Opportunity Scholarship program not only threatens public school budgets by luring students away from local public schools, which reduces the per-pupil funding, but it also commits state education funds to unaccountable private schools, which reduces the amount available for public schools.
With less than a year passing, the legislature has incorporated an additional $248 million voucher expansion into an existing bill—a practice known as logrolling. Rather than proposing it as a separate legislation for individual debate and vote, legislators will propose a bill with multiple proposals to suede favor. House Bill 10, originally titled "Require Sheriffs to Cooperate with ICE," has been renamed "Require ICE Cooperation & Budget Adjustments." This revised bill now contains provisions for an additional million dollars allocated to private school vouchers for the 2024-25 academic year.
Given that the current school year is already in progress, most parents have made educational choices for their children. The bulk of this $248 million allocation will likely benefit students currently enrolled in private schools. Families who can afford private education may receive a taxpayer-funded reimbursement for their tuition expenses. The bill proceeded to Governor Cooper's desk for consideration on September 18, 2024 and vetoed two days later on September 20th. Governor Roy Cooper was joined by education and business leaders from both political parties to highlight the disastrous impact this would have on public schools, particularly those in rural areas. Despite the apparent lack of connection between HB 10’s original focus on sheriff cooperation with ICE and the allocation of additional funds for private school vouchers, there is concern about the potential implications if the bill is approved aside. Most of its provisions would take effect July 1, 2024, with some exceptions. The combination of these issues in one bill has raised questions about potential future connections between immigration enforcement and education policy or funding.
In addition to diverting money away from public schools, private schools discriminate against students for a variety of reasons, including religion, LGBTQ identity, and disability. Last academic year, North Carolina House representative Ashton Wheeler Clemmons discussed the case of an autistic student who unsuccessfully attempted to use the Opportunity Scholarship program to attend a private school. The student was denied admission from all three private schools that he visited, a result that does not provide a clear example of discrimination but instead raises questions about how exactly private school admissions offices select applicants, along with the level of oversight that the offices are subject to. This lack of oversight is especially concerning when one considers the dominance of religious schools in private schooling. During the 2021-2022 school year, 77% of K-12 private school students (4.2 million) attended a religiously affiliated school. The popularity of religious private schools is troubling because of their ability to often skirt around critical civil rights. These institutions are usually exempt from regulations and legislation such as Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, along with protections of students’ sexual orientation, religion, and treatment while possessing a disability.
Despite the continuous expansion, private school vouchers are not the key to North Carolina’s education system. One potential alternative is to raise the state’s public school teacher salaries. North Carolina ranks at or around 38th in nearly every ranking of average state public school teacher salaries. While studies have shown that increasing teacher pay leads to a gain in student performance, the connection between both variables is much more nuanced than a simple correlation. Efforts to morph teaching into a more lucrative profession have resulted in many significant improvements, such as higher teacher retention rates, a larger share of high-achieving college students taking courses in education, and a raised chance of hiring teachers who earned top scores on their educator certification exams. Raising the salaries of North Carolina’s teachers would give students access to more experienced and higher-quality teaching.
Much change is needed to provide North Carolina’s students with the “sound basic education” the state constitution promises them. While there are likely thousands of ways the state legislature can work towards this, it is clear that siphoning money off from public schools to expand the Opportunity Scholarship program is not one of them.
Isaiah Anderson is from Groton, Connecticut, where he attended multiple schools within the Groton Public School System. He is a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pursuing a major in political science and a minor in urban studies. He gained experience with education policy as an undergraduate research assistant with the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC) and as a summer intern with the Center for Racial Equity in Education (CREED).
