Charter school and voucher bills are an assault on traditional public schools | Opinion

When North Carolinians went to the polls last November, no one told them they were voting on whether to privatize public education.

But apparently they were.

The election’s results – with the help of a post-election party switch by Democratic Rep. Tricia Cotham – gave Republicans a veto-proof majority in the General Assembly. Now they’re using that power to launch an assault on what the GOP’s most vitriolic public schools critics call “government schools.”

The attack started with a bill seeking to remove the State Board of Education’s review of proposals to create new charter schools and another that would require local school districts to share their federal grants and reserves with charter schools. Those changes would accelerate the creation of charter schools and increase the funding diverted from traditional public schools.

But that was just the opening volley. Now come twin bills moving through the state House and Senate – Senate Bill 406 and House Bill 823 – that would offer all parents – even millionaires with children already in private school – a savings on private school tuition at taxpayers’ expense. The subsidy, or school voucher, would be tied to income.

Lower-income families would qualify for this year’s average per-student spending by the state, more than $7,200. Incomes up the ladder would get from 90 percent to 60 percent of the state per-pupil allocation. All families above those income levels would get a voucher equal to 45 percent of the state’s per-pupil allocation.

That means parents sending their child to an exclusive private high school could see their annual tuition bill of $27,000 reduced by about $3,000.

See, Republicans do support education. They just don’t support traditional public schools.

A WRAL-TV analysis found that under the proposed funding levels for vouchers, traditional public schools could lose, under one scenario, as many as 100,000 students, which would deprive public schools of $740 million in state funding.

The Republican-controlled General Assembly has balked at a court order in the Leandro case to provide additional public school funding to comply with the state constitution’s promise that all children are entitled to a sound basic education. But approve a huge boost in voucher funding that would grow from $181 million now to $540 million by the 2032-33 school year? Absolutely.

Helen Ladd, a Duke University professor emeritus whose career has focused on public school funding, told me that conservatives’ fixation on increasing “school choice” by expanding charter schools and vouchers fractures an essential common effort. She called the plan to expand vouchers “a disaster.”

“Implicit in (school choice) is that education is servicing the needs of individuals. It should be serving collective needs,” she said. “Otherwise, why do we have public schools?”

The expansion of vouchers would increase the program’s most striking deficiencies: Using tax dollars to fund private schools without setting standards for what’s taught or providing adequate measurements of how well students are learning. Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood ruled in 2014 that lack of oversight made vouchers an unconstitutional public expenditure. His ruling was reversed by the state Supreme Court in 2015, but in a dissent, then-Justice Robin Hudson said Hobgood got the decision right.

Hudson wrote: “The main constitutional flaw in this program is that it provides no framework at all for evaluating any of the participating schools’ contribution to public purposes; such a huge omission is a constitutional black hole into which the entire program should disappear.”

But instead of disappearing, it’s expanding.

No one campaigned on the platform of imploding the public school system. That it’s being proposed now shows the insidious effects of partisan gerrymandering that the state Supreme Court just said it won’t review to ensure fair elections. Republican lawmakers know they can take extreme measures with little chance of being held to account by the voters they selected.

This story was originally published May 2, 2023 at 6:40 PM with the headline "Charter school and voucher bills are an assault on traditional public schools | Opinion."