GOP lawmakers want to pay for students' private education. How we got here, what's new and why they face resistance
Annual spending on private school vouchers would become one of North Carolina’s biggest education expenditures under legislation making its way through both chambers of the North Carolina General Assembly.
Senate Bill 406 and House Bill 823 would provide more than $400 million toward private school vouchers by the 2025-26 school year, an amount that would gradually increase to well above $500 million by 2032.
The bills have been debated along party lines and familiar refrains: Republicans argue investment in private school vouchers provides some students a lifeline out of a public school that isn’t working for them. Democrats argue private schools aren’t accountable to progress and don’t have to accept every student, and that investment in them is money that can be better spent on improving the public school system to better work for everyone. Public schools would lose money for every student who left a public school for a private school, potentially totaling hundreds of millions of dollars lost statewide.
The vouchers — called “Opportunity Scholarships” — have long been focused on lower-income students who don’t have the means for a big tuition check. Now Republican lawmakers want to expand eligibility for the vouchers to everyone, regardless of income and regardless of whether they currently attend a public school. Current private school students could even be eligible.
The universal eligibility proposal foreshadows bigger visions among some Republican lawmakers who want to make fundamental changes to how schools are funded.
Sen. Michael Lee, R-New Hanover, sponsor of the legislation, calls the expanded eligibility “backpack funding.” In other words, the money follows the student. The voucher eligibility — even for wealthy families who can afford private school tuition — in his eyes, is more of a redirection of at least some of the taxpayer’s money. Some of what the wealthier family pays in state taxes would be removed from the public school and sent to the private school their child is actually attending.
Democratic opponents argue that universal eligibility would do more than that, because it would remove more money from the public school than the amount of the voucher. A wealthy family might get a voucher of $3,300, but their child’s former public school would lose more than $7,400.
Lee envisions North Carolina as a pioneer in the “backpack funding” landscape. He has another bill, yet to be heard in committee, that calls for an overall school funding structure that’s designed more for scalability — across districts of varying sizes.
But as far as private school vouchers go, here’s what you need to know:
What are private school vouchers? How do they work?
North Carolina’s private school voucher system is known as the Opportunity Scholarship program. It provides a certain amount of money for a child whose family income is low enough to qualify to attend a private school approved by the state. The voucher is a direct payment to the private school, which then adjusts the student’s tuition bill accordingly. The voucher for the upcoming school year is $6,492, which is lower than the cost of many private schools and higher than some others. Currently, the child must have attended public school to be eligible, unless they are a rising kindergarten, first or second grader or meet a handful of other requirements. The state only sets aside a certain amount of money for the vouchers, however, so not everyone who theoretically qualifies could receive one.
According to a 2020 North Carolina State University study, about two-thirds of voucher recipients attended Christian schools.
What’s on the table?
The bills would expand eligibility for a voucher to any North Carolina students, of any income, and would not need to be a public school student to be eligible, either.
Vouchers would be awarded on an income scale, with the lowest-income being eligible for a voucher that is equivalent to the most recent school year’s average per-student spending by the state. That would top $7,400 for this year. The highest-income families would be eligible for a voucher of up to 45% of the previous year’s average per-student spending by the state, or more than $3,300 for this year.
The bills would also raise the program’s funding, reserving 2.5% of the annual funding for administrative costs.
The first year of big funding increases would come for the 2025-26 school year, when the program costs would top $400 million.
If the average voucher were $4,000, more than 108,000 students could get one, or more than 6% of the state’s public school enrollment. If it were $5,000, more than 86,000 students could get one, or more than 5% of the state’s public school population.
Both possibilities would be substantial increases in the private school population, which was 115,000 students last year.
Public schools would then lose money for each student who left.
If public schools lost 100,000 students, they’d lose more than $740 million in state funding.
It’s possible the loss would be far less than that, however. Some students who apply could come from homeschools or may already be enrolled in a private school; being enrolled in a public school at the time of application would no longer be a requirement, if the bills pass.
Why do some people support private school vouchers? Why do some people oppose them?
Supporters argue the current public school system comes up short and families can’t want for schools to be fixed. They want vouchers now to help them shop around for private schools that they think might better serve their children.
Opponents argue private school vouchers represent money — in this case, hundreds of millions of dollars — that could go toward helping public schools better serve all of their students. They say the vouchers won’t cover the cost of tuition at most private schools, so they aren’t for everyone. They note that private schools can’t serve everyone and selectively enroll, whereas public schools must accept all students and are the most practical option for families.
Lawmakers have also debated how North Carolina runs the Opportunity Scholarships program. The state largely doesn’t follow up on students’ academic progress once they transfer to private schools — something Democrats want the state to do. Republicans argue families are the better judge of whether the transfer is working.
What do experts say? Do students do better when they transfer to a private school?
North Carolina does not have a policy to take action based on the voucher-recipients’ test scores at private schools.
Students who use the vouchers to attend a private school must be tested, and their results must be reported, though it may not need to be publicly reported. However, those tests don’t need to be the same ones the students would have taken at a public school. They can be different tests, making the results difficult to compare to prior academic performance.
But for a report released in 2020, North Carolina State University researchers sampled 700 students to take the same test and analyzed the results of those tests, while factoring in the comparability of the student samples. They found first-year voucher recipients scored better in math and language but not reading. Renewal students scored better in language, but not reading or math.
In 2017, NC State researchers tested students in the most common regions of voucher use and found much of the positive difference could be drawn back to a handful of schools, suggesting that improved academic performance may be the case for students who attend those schools but not students who attend others.
Researchers listed two main challenges to evaluating the effectiveness of the voucher program: The inconsistency in testing and the lack of incentive for private schools to participate in the state’s voluntary evaluation process.
How does a half-billion dollars compare to other education spending?
The bill would turn North Carolina’s private school voucher program into one of the biggest education-related spending items in the state within a decade.
The state currently sets aside $133.8 million for private school vouchers.
The bill affects the eight years after that and calls for a set aside of $550.5 million by the 2032-33 school year.
Public school funding will top $11 billion this year and is likely to go up again next year as lawmakers mull employee pay increases that Gov. Roy Cooper also supports.
North Carolina funds public schools using an allotment system, in which the state hands down an amount of money for dozens of different purposes and generally restricts their use to those purposes.
North Carolina spends well more than this year’s voucher budget ($133.8 million), on several funding items, including classroom teachers, instructional and non-instructional support personnel, administration and specials teachers, such as music, art or physical education teachers. administration.
But just four allotments top the $550.5 million voucher budget called for in 2032: The classroom teacher allotment ($4.1 billion), charter schools (about $1 billion), special education (nearly $1 billion) and Restart Schools (about $557.2 million).
Half a billion dollars is more than what the state spends, for example, on extra funding for low-wealth schools ($274.1 million), gifted programming ($75.7 million), teacher assistants ($382.5 million), at-risk students ($320.1 million), students with limited English proficiency ($111.9 million), and disadvantaged students ($79.1 million).
What happens next?
The bills appear likely to pass and become law. Republicans entered the current legislative session one seat short of a veto-proof majority in the House. But then Rep. Tricia Cotham switched parties, joining the GOP. Cotham, who supported school choice before the switch, is now the lead sponsor of the House version of bill. Republicans largely support the proposed measures and are emboldened with their newfound supermajority to potentially override a veto by Gov. Roy Cooper. Plus, they’ve overcome what can be a hurdle for some bills: Support in one chamber but not in the other. In this case, identical bills have been filed in both the state Senate and the state House of Representatives.
How could this affect families? How could this affect public schools?
Families that already qualify for a private school voucher can apply for one during the application window each spring. Families above the current income cap, have to wait until the window opens for the 2024-25 school year to apply for a voucher, if the bill passes.
Students must be accepted into the private school to use the voucher, and private schools selectively enroll.
For families not interested in a private school voucher, their school may shrink. School funding is distributed based on enrollment, so smaller enrollment would mean their school system would have to make cuts.
What about the Leandro case? Doesn’t it call for billions in funding for public schools?
Private school vouchers don’t count toward compliance with the mandates of Hoke County Board of Education, et. al. v. State of North Carolina, et. al., commonly referred to as Leandro.
The long-running lawsuit over whether North Carolina is providing an adequate education has resulted in a court-mandated remedial plan to adopt new policies and systems and to spend more money on various efforts in early childhood, pre-kindergarten and K-12 classrooms.
That plan calls for nearly $1 billion more in funding next year and even more in subsequent years, eventually raising education spending by more than $4.5 billion from where it is today.
Republican lawmakers have opposed the plan and fought it in court, arguing the state can’t afford it. A judge ruled earlier this month the state has already come up short by $677.8 million toward the plan for last year and this year, including more than $300 million for this year.
They’ve also argued private school vouchers should count toward the goal of providing students with an adequate education.
The state and plaintiffs — families and school boards in five lower-income counties — agreed to the court-mandated plan back in 2021, arguing it gave public schools themselves a better chance of providing an education families could consider adequate.
The nearly $1 billion more called for next year includes substantial increases in funding for special education ($98.4 million more), disadvantaged and at-risk students ($218.6 million more), school support professionals such as counselors ($132.6 million more), expanded NC Pre-K ($75.1 million more), Smart Start ($102.4 million). It includes many more, and smaller, funding increases.
