GOP's school voucher plan stokes debate over private school accountability

Proposed legislation has divided state lawmakers over their vastly differing education priorities. Democratic lawmakers want more help for struggling public schools, while Republican lawmakers are prioritizing funding access to private schools.

Posted 9:30 a.m. Jun 18 — Updated 3:16 p.m. Jun 21

Emily Walkenhorst

, WRAL education reporter

RALEIGH, N.C. — As North Carolina lawmakers eye a drastic expansion in private school vouchers, a debate is re-emerging over the quality and accountability of the schools that could benefit from the effort.

The GOP-backed proposal would make public funds available to more families who send their children to private schools. The effort has divided state lawmakers over their vastly differing education priorities. Democratic lawmakers want more help for struggling public schools, citing the success of some pandemic-era efforts. Republican lawmakers prioritize funding access to private schools, citing some students’ more immediate needs.

Most states require private schools that receive public money to meet certain conditions that North Carolina doesn’t require, experts say. That represents a flaw in the effort, critics say.

The school voucher program exists, Republicans say, to give students an alternative when their public school isn’t meeting all of their needs.

But if private schools have less accountability, critics argue, how can they be trusted to provide a better education than public schools?

“Legislative Republicans propose pouring billions of dollars in taxpayer money into private schools that have no meaningful accountability for student outcomes and can decide which students they want to admit,” Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper said in a statement earlier this month.

Republicans contend private schools — by virtue of being optional for families — are accountable by free-market economics; if a family doesn’t like the school, they can send their child somewhere else.

North Carolina is unusual in not requiring private schools to be accredited to receive public scholarship money, said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas. States usually require it to ensure students will receive an adequate education from a school that has been reviewed and approved by a reputable source.

“When it’s also the state’s money, then the state has an interest in making sure the private school is operating responsibly,” said Wolf, who is an advocate for vouchers.

'The importance of accrediting'

North Carolina lawmakers’ plan would expand eligibility for private school vouchers — the state calls them Opportunity Scholarships — to families of all incomes, including those whose children already attend private school. It would boost spending for the program by nearly $300 million in just two years and eventually to well more than half a billion dollars annually, making it one of the biggest education-related line items in North Carolina’s state budget.

It could also cost public schools hundreds of millions of dollars annually if enough public school students opt for private schools instead. North Carolina, Congress and some counties fund education on a per-student basis.

Vouchers are checks written by the state to a private school on behalf of a qualifying family that needs financial help to send their child to a private school. Currently, only lower-income families qualify and most of the students have to have attended a public school first. The child does not need to be failing to qualify, and the public school they are seeking to leave does not need to be failing.

North Carolina allows any nonpublic school, aside from homeschools, to participate. Because private schools don’t need to be accredited to operate in North Carolina, they don’t need to be accredited to participate in the Opportunity Scholarship program. So long as they comply with the rules of the program, including an employee criminal background check, they can continue to participate.

Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and a voucher opponent, said he’s not as concerned that North Carolina doesn’t require private schools to be accredited to participate.

“There’s a little more potential for some funny business,” he said. But even accredited private schools can produce bad results, he said.

“I don’t want to overstate the importance of accrediting,” Cowen said.

NC school voucher proposal part of nationwide Republican push

Cowen and other voucher opponents note the significantly worse outcomes found in Louisiana, somewhat worse outcomes found in Indiana and insignificant outcomes found elsewhere. Voucher supporters often note success outside of test scores: That children whose families sent them to private schools using vouchers graduated high school and sometimes went to college at higher rates than the peers they left behind at their public schools. Parents also felt more positively about their children’s safety.

As many as three-quarters of private schools choose to be accredited already, especially the larger ones, according to Cowen.

“You have to be really far out there as a private school to not want to,” Cowen said. Those tend to be very small schools and unaffiliated with major organizations or religious groups, he said.

There are 846 private schools in North Carolina. Because accreditation is not required, the state doesn’t track how many of them are accredited.

Cowen said states should evaluate the test scores of private schools, instead, to ensure the publicly funded students are getting a good education.

'Free-market intervention'

North Carolina requires private schools to report their test scores to the state — which are barred from public release — but it doesn’t take action based on those test scores. High test scores don’t prioritize a private school for receiving voucher money, and low test scores don’t prevent a private school from receiving voucher money.

North Carolina doesn’t have a trigger to stop funding schools performing poorly. That’s normal, Wolf said, though some states do have a trigger based either on performance metrics or finances. North Carolina has neither.

The reason for that goes back to the ideology underpinning school choice to begin with, Wolf said, that a private school would close if it weren’t providing satisfactory results.

“It’s consistent with the basic idea of school choice as a free-market intervention where you let customer choice, customer decision drive and be the main accountability mechanism,” Wolf said.

Private schools in North Carolina also choose nationally standardized tests and don’t take state standardized tests. That makes comparing how well the private and public schools are doing difficult but not impossible, Cowen said.

He’s optimistic that a new data-sharing agreement between the state and North Carolina State University to study the voucher program will shed light on academic outcomes. Having that information would provide greater transparency for the program than other states have chosen to do, he said.

Private school vouchers in NC: Who uses them and which schools get the most?

Wolf said requiring private schools to administer state exams, in addition to the exams they already choose to administer, is a non-starter for a lot of private schools. Tests often drive curriculum choices, and private schools would rather maintain their own way of educating students, Wolf said.

That’s pushed many lower-quality schools — desperate for more funds and more students — to dominate voucher programs in states that require that.

In Louisiana, state test results were dismal for voucher students. Researchers found that the more private schools were asked to be regulated like public schools, the less they wanted to be involved in the state’s voucher program. In other words, they believed their schools would be more successful if they weren’t subject to the rules that limit public schools.

But Cowen said national standardized tests should still be helpful for determining whether the private schools are providing a quality education, even if they don’t administer state standardized tests.

The tests may technically be different, but not by much.

“You’re not going to get a kid who aces the SAT but flunks the ACT,” Cowen said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

'Have to have accountability'

The bottom line for Cowen is that states need to find some way to hold private schools accountable for providing a quality education when they use public dollars.

“Public dollars have to have accountability behind them in the education space,” Cowen said.

At least 50% of funds go to children whose families qualify for free or reduced-price school meals. The lowest-income families would receive more than $7,000 in a year, while the wealthiest would receive more than $3,000 in a year, starting in the 2024-25 school year. For the first time, students already attending a private school would also be eligible for the vouchers.

Research is mixed on the impact of private school vouchers on student achievement, with some studies showing performance declines in some states among students who transferred to private schools while studies in other areas showed higher graduation rates among voucher recipients.

The most successful voucher programs — where students who received them had higher high school graduation rates and college-going rates — have high levels of community support programming for them, Wolf said. People can’t choose a school for their child without significant help. He suspects some of Florida’s success has been related to a nonprofit that works directly with families on eligibility and applying to schools.

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