The North Carolina Legislative Building (Photo: Clayton Henkel)
Amid the turbulence of a high-stakes election season stands a sadly familiar outpost of stability – the North Carolina General Assembly’s relentless support of private schools at the expense of the public schools that inevitably serve most of the state’s children.
That support advances under the banner of parental choice. Republican legislators who wield their supermajority power with no meaningful checks have decided that when parents’ choice for their kids is private schooling, the state’s taxpayers should help pay the tuition – no matter how well-off those families happen to be.
True, there’s a sliding scale by which less-affluent families qualify for a bigger boost. But whether or not vouchers for “opportunity scholarships” might serve a worthy purpose under some circumstances – by providing more educational options for children from disadvantaged backgrounds – offering private-school tuition help to all comers while public schools are kept on short rations adds insult to long-standing injury.
Funding for an expanded opportunity scholarship program has been a Republican goal through the legislature’s 2024 session, which temporarily petered out in early summer when the House and Senate couldn’t agree on an updated budget.
But then lawmakers were summoned to Raleigh to tie up various loose ends in advance of the November election. While also overriding a string of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes, the Republican majority moved to pump a cool $493 million in new funding into the scholarships – benefiting families who became eligible last year once income limits were dropped. A bill that includes the expenditure cleared the Senate on Sept. 9 and the House on Sept. 11, in each case along party lines.
The bill, H.B. 10, presumably would have passed earlier if the two chambers had agreed on whether also to give further raises to teachers and other school personnel. The House favored the raises but the Senate didn’t.
In the end the Senate prevailed. So H.B. 10 – one of those unwieldy contraptions born of legislative horse-trading and political expediency – will lighten the tuition load for as many as 55,000 students who applied for the scholarships when money to pay for them wasn’t yet available. That’s assuming Cooper’s anticipated veto is shot down per usual.
Opportunity for whom?
Without the new funding, voucher money already approved would flow through the schools to some 15,800 students. The families of most of them are in the lowest of four annual income tiers – less than $57,720 — and are eligible for tuition subsidies of $7,468 per student. The new set-up with no income limits will allow subsidies of $3,360 for top-tier families making more than $259,740. Yes, you read that right.
What’s more, the new rules allow applications from students already enrolled in private schools. So families who already can afford to send their kids to a well-equipped day school or “classical academy” now will have a little extra cash to spend on more of the finer things of life, courtesy of those ever-so-thoughtful legislators. Maybe it’s not attempted vote-buying, but it’s hard to tell the difference.
If this generosity didn’t affect the flow of money to public schools, perhaps it would be less objectionable (bearing in mind the axiom that there’s no free lunch when it comes to paying for public services of all sorts). But public education indeed would take a hit, calculated by the Office of State Budget and Management to be nearly $100 million a year. That’s even though H.B. 10 includes additional funds to cover some costs due to enrollment growth.
Meanwhile, teachers’ salaries in North Carolina will continue lagging near the bottom of the national heap. That contributes to an ongoing shortage of qualified personnel, especially in hard-pressed rural counties that can ill afford the pay supplements common in urban counties such as Mecklenburg and Wake.
During the House debate, Democrats may have been outnumbered but that didn’t stop them from rising to rip the bill as betraying the state’s duty to uphold its public schools.
They pointed out that private schools are sparse or non-existent in rural counties, so residents there will have trouble taking advantage of the scholarships. At the same time, those counties will be squeezed as the pot of money supporting schools statewide is tapped for the tuition giveaways. Their less-than-robust tax bases mean they’ll struggle to make up the difference.
Bridges too far
It only makes matters worse that many of the schools benefitting from subsidized student enrollments are religiously oriented, with little to stop them from advancing narrow, faith-based viewpoints.
In a society that should want to make sure its schoolchildren who benefit from taxpayer funding are taught to think rather than to accept indoctrination, a bias in favor of any religion should be troubling. Freedom of religion of course is a guaranteed right, one that the N.C. Council of Churches defends vigorously. But a system in which schools whose purpose has a religious component get significant financing from public coffers should make First Amendment supporters’ skin crawl.
Nor must private schools where opportunity scholarship recipients often enroll abide by the same rules as public schools when it comes to teacher hiring standards and accountability as rendered via standardized tests. So how are taxpayers providing the scholarships supposed to feel confident they’re getting their money’s worth?
As reported by Raleigh’s News & Observer, Democratic state Sen. Jay Chaudhuri of Raleigh organized a Sept. 9 roundtable at which several public-school educators took aim at the pumped-up voucher plan. The money would be better spent, they said, addressing such problems as balky heating and cooling systems, crowded classrooms, and the shortage of bus drivers.
Keegan Storrs, teacher at the public N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, had this to say, as quoted by The N&O: “If we had a fully funded public education system, we could consider providing extra for families who are able to make the choice to send their children to private schools. But until our public schools are fully funded, we have no business talking about vouchers.”
That pretty much nails it. And in that context, it’s disappointing to recall the legislature’s stubborn resistance to the funding plan worked out during the long-running Leandro lawsuit, in which the courts said the state must provide all public-school students with the chance to get a sound basic – in other words useful – education. Of course, the state Supreme Court under its current Republican leadership has undercut that obligation, but that’s another story.
A dubious bundle
H.B. 10 originally was framed as the latest attempt to force the state’s sheriffs to coordinate with federal immigration authorities by temporarily holding undocumented immigrants for possible deportation if they were arrested for some reason.
That requirement is opposed by many immigration advocates as likely to mean some people will be deported even after low-level encounters with the justice system that don’t involve alleged violence or a plausible threat to public safety. They argue that it will erode cooperation between local law enforcement and the immigrant community – a view accepted by several urban-county sheriffs who have declined to cooperate with federal “detainers” when someone in custody normally would be released pending trial.
As the dispute played out, the bill had stalled. But it remained a Republican leadership priority, and in recent months a version emerged with enough support to pass both chambers. It was onto that version that the tuition voucher expansion was grafted – meaning that legislators who might have had qualms about the vouchers couldn’t oppose them without also opposing the immigration measure, or vice versa. In other words, it became an offer many of them couldn’t refuse when it was unveiled by a conference committee of top Republicans on Sept. 9.
The House’s final vote on the bill, sending it to Cooper, was 67-43, with three conservative Democrats joining unanimous Republicans in favor. The governor now has ample reason to issue another veto. So long as the legislature is under the spell of a gerrymandered supermajority, such doomed vetoes have served mainly to highlight how the Republican agenda tramples on many principles of good government and equity. But that makes them worth the effort.
This commentary was first published by the North Carolina Council of Churches.