Republicans say school vouchers will be good for NC. Here’s where they’re wrong | Opinion

Despite a multibillion-dollar surplus, North Carolina Republicans don’t appear to have any intention of fully funding public schools anytime soon.

Instead, they appear poised to do the opposite — by radically expanding the state’s private school voucher program.

A bill quickly moving through the legislature would expand the Opportunity Scholarship program so that any household could receive a voucher for private school tuition, regardless of income level. Senate leader Phil Berger bragged that it would be the “largest expansion of school choice” since the state began the program a decade ago.

Every Republican in the House and Senate has signed on as a co-sponsor, all but guaranteeing it will have enough support to become law despite the governor’s veto.

When it was first introduced in 2013, Republicans touted the Opportunity Scholarship program as a way to help poorer families afford private school tuition. But over the years, lawmakers have gradually loosened the income eligibility requirements so that more and more families qualify to receive a voucher, even if they don’t necessarily need one.

But it was never really about helping low-income families. It was about weakening public schools, and now, Republicans are taking the next unsurprising step and doing away with income caps altogether. The new bill would tie voucher amounts to income level, so that lower-income families would receive higher scholarship amounts than those with higher incomes. Still, the wealthiest families could receive a subsidy of more than $3,000.

“It’s a pretty exciting day in North Carolina for those who believe in education reform,” Rep. Tricia Cotham, one of the bill’s primary sponsors, said in a House committee Tuesday.

What it is not, however, is an exciting day for public schools. The reform in question is more like a decimation.

Republican lawmakers argue that it actually saves the state money when a student moves from a public school to a private one. But giving the vouchers to families who already intended and can afford to send their children to private schools doesn’t save the state money at all. In fact, it causes the state to fork over money it wasn’t spending in the first place. Current private school students would be eligible for a voucher, even though they’re already paying tuition.

In a tweet last month, Gov. Roy Cooper called the bill “worse than awful,” and it is. The bill would increase the program’s annual funding by an extra $1.3 billion over the next seven years, according to WRAL. By 2032, the state would be spending more than half a billion dollars per year on private school vouchers.

Do the math, and that’s a lot of money that could be going somewhere else — namely, to public schools, which remain woefully underfunded. WUNC reported that half a billion dollars is more than twice what the state spends on public school transportation, and could pay for about a 12% teacher raise. The state is currently facing critical shortages of both teachers and bus drivers.

Republicans say they are supporting “choice” and “students over systems,” but their job is to fund public schools — not private ones. They say that students deserve the opportunity to receive a better education than what’s provided at some public schools, but if they provided schools with adequate funding, perhaps students would not need to look elsewhere to receive a quality education.

Perhaps most importantly, there’s no guarantee that private school vouchers will even be good for students or the state. Even when they receive public dollars, private schools aren’t held to the same curriculum or testing standards as public schools are. They do not undergo the same vetting process, and North Carolina has few guardrails in place to hold voucher schools accountable.

It wouldn’t be hard for lawmakers to offer families a better chance at the kind of high-quality education they say parents are seeking. But instead of being supporters of public education, Republicans seem hellbent on turning people away from it.

This story was originally published May 3, 2023 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Republicans say school vouchers will be good for NC. Here’s where they’re wrong | Opinion."