NC lawmakers risk a backlash with school vouchers for all
North Carolina may be about to find out how far is too far on school choice.
That’s the question raised by the willingness of Republican state lawmakers to offer private school tuition vouchers to anyone who wants one, including well-off families with children already attending private schools.
It’s a move that will be expensive for taxpayers and damaging to public schools. Two things voters don’t like.
Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, is apoplectic about a Republican measure this session that provides an additional $463.5 million in private school voucher funding over the next two years. Cooper wants more spending to go to public schools, which have been starved by the Republican-controlled legislature.
The governor’s objections are now as familiar as they’ve been futile. But now even a prominent school choice advocate opposes North Carolina’s approach.
Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank that supports expanding charter schools and vouchers, said providing private school tuition subsidies to recipients at all income levels will hurt the school choice movement.
“I am a fan of school choice, but I am not a fan of school choice going to the wealthy,” Petrilli told me.
School choice should be about providing options for children from poor and middle-income families, he said. When states provide vouchers to families that can already afford the cost of private school, it’s money misspent, he said.
Petrilli, who is also a fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, said, “let’s not overdo it. You’re talking about subsidies for families that clearly don’t need them. Let’s keep it pretty limited.”
Such cautionary advice is unlikely to be heeded by North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders. They see no harm in excess when it comes to promoting options to traditional public schools. After all, if you think public schools are hives of progressive indoctrination, as they do, you want to get as many children out of them as you can.
And, politically, what could be the harm of giving tuition handouts to a well-off demographic that generally favors Republicans?
That recklessness may be tolerated in solidly Republican states, but it could hurt the school choice cause in North Carolina. “In a purple state, I don’t see how this helps make the case,” Petrilli said. “You have to win folks in the center and giving a windfall to wealthy families, I don’t know how that helps.”
The Republican-controlled legislature approved the vouchers known as Opportunity Scholarships in 2013. The justification was that a voucher would allow children from low-income families to escape lowperforming public schools and enroll in a private school. In 2023, it removed the income caps altogether and applications surged, most of them from higher-income families.
The problem for Republicans isn’t just the optics of giving money to households with above-average incomes. Universal vouchers can greatly expand the number of children receiving education funding.
That’s what happened in Arizona when it began a universal voucher program for the 2022-23 school year.
A study by the Learning Policy Institute found that providing money for students being homeschooled or already enrolled in private schools came at a high cost.
Michael Griffith, an author of the Learning Policy Institute’s study, told me, Arizona initially estimated the cost of the universal voucher program at “somewhere near $60 million,” he said. “We did the numbers and it was over $700 million.”
The report said the cost of expanding Arizona’s voucher program for the 2023-24 school year is equivalent to the salaries of 5,198 new public school classroom teachers.
With a veto-proof majority, there’s nothing to stop Republicans from approving a costly subsidy to private schools even as the legislature neglects public schools. But voters may well decide that this costly choice on school choice is the wrong one.
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-40-7583, or nbarnett@ news observer.com