Among the world’s most powerful impulses is a parent’s desire that their child receive a great education, which can help lead to a fulfilling, positive life.
A driving force in my life was to help our son attend terrific schools. I’ve never met a parent who didn’t want the best for their child. So making the case against efforts that support a parent in that quest is an interesting challenge.
But in his final months as governor, Roy Cooper is pushing back against a movement that has enormous momentum. His reasoning is that liberalizing school choice by subsidizing private schools with public funds is creating an emergency for traditional public schools. He terms the actions of school-choice proponents a “scheme” that is driven by Raleigh lobbyists connected to for-profit private school operators.
About 16% of the state’s K-12 students are now outside of traditional public schools, the governor says. The state’s main school choice nonprofit, Parents for Educational Freedom, says it’s closer to 24%, including 160,000 home-schooled children, 130,000 in public charters and 120,000 in private schools. Lengthy waiting lists suggest those numbers will grow.
This year, state lawmakers turbocharged the debate by approving $625 million to help subsidize parents who prefer to send their children to private K-12 schools. Cooper calls them vouchers; proponents label them scholarships. As many as 55,000 students stand to benefit, unless enough lawmakers favor Cooper’s promised veto. The issue was unsettled at press time.
The $625 million could provide public school funding for 8.5% teacher raises, $1,500 retention bonuses, additional counselors and teachers’ assistants, with money left over, the governor said in an interview. “Vouchers are the biggest financial hit to schools in decades,” he said.
North Carolina is now a national leader in the school choice movement, including requiring the least accountability of private schools of any state. Cooper notes that the publics require licensed teachers and considerable accountability on many measures, and open their doors to all comers, while the private operators are getting their coin with little, if any scrutiny.
Voucher/scholarship backers counter that surging interest in school choice is less about money than about increasing parental influence and dissatisfaction with how public schools operated during and after the pandemic. Trust parents to do the right thing, they say.
It’s quite a shift from the mid-1990s, when school choice launched in North Carolina as a way to spur innovation and maybe a little competition with the public schools. The initial law in 1996 had bipartisan support and limited the public charters to 100 schools.
The cap is off and the state has 211 public charter schools, along with about 830 private schools. Since 2014, the Republican-dominated legislature has promoted private-school vouchers, initially aimed at low-income families. Now the state’s richest families can take advantage of the program. (Some elite schools don’t take part, however.)
Cooper emphasized his respect for those who prefer private schools. Like many of the state’s wealthiest and most influential leaders, he and his wife made such a choice for their family. But in a world of scarce resources, incentivizing parents to opt for a private school inevitably harms the public schools, he says.
Sadly, he believes, it continues N.C. lawmakers’ long tradition of ignoring a constitutional mandate to provide a sound, basic education to every child.
