School Vouchers

An insightful critique of North Carolina’s voucher expansion, highlighting how vouchers reduce public-school funding, worsen rural challenges, and fail to improve outcomes while benefiting private interests at the expense of equitable education.

Draining Public Education One Voucher at a Time

By Wanda K. Mohr

The ostensible rationale underlying the “school choice” movement 1s that providing vouchers will expand high-quality education options for parents and students. Choice has become a popular catchword in Republican “education-reform” groups whose goal is to increase funding for private schools through voucher systems.

Conservative orthodoxy holds that parents must be given an exit ramp from a failing public education system that force-feeds children progressive fads.

The voucher movement exists largely in red states, with Donald Trump having won most of the pro-voucher states in the 2020 election.

In 2013, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the Opportunity Scholarship Program enabling low-income North Carolina families to choose a private school education for their children. In 2023, the General Assembly expanded the program, removing the income cap for families to receive the scholarship and making all NC K-12 families eligible for the program.

However, the voucher programs are not living up to Republican hype. The reality is that the beneficiaries of the voucher system are mostly families whose children were already enrolled in private schools, not families using the vouchers to escape struggling public schools.

Moreover, unlike public schools which are required to be openly responsible to scrutiny and audit, voucher recipients are not held to the same level of accountability despite being funded by taxpayer dollars. Voucher funded education is also not held to the same academic standards, such as attendance, curriculum standards, testing and graduation rates as public schools. Voucher states have some of the worst results in the history of education research—on par or worse than what COVID-19 did to test scores. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large

by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years.

Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center ↗ has called the voucher system an “outsourcing of discrimination,” opining that the use of public taxpayer funds finances the types of discrimination that the state itself could never enact. The pattern of discrimination is clear. Unlike public schools, private schools can (and some do) limit their admission based on race, gender, sexual orientation, learning ability, and any other number of factors.

Vouchers do benefit churches and church schools. Most schools receiving traditional vouchers as payment are religious schools and this brings up thorny questions about the separation of state and church that are ignored by proponents of the voucher systems.

But the real issue is that state funding of vouchers comes at the cost of funding traditional public schools. As voucher systems expand, they cannibalize states’ ability to pay for their public education commitments.

For example, Arizona, which passed universal vouchers in 2022, is today nearing a genuine budget crisis as a result of voucher over-spending. Six of the last seven states to allow vouchers have had to slow their spending on public schools relative to investments made by non-voucher states.

There are many other downsides to the voucher programs (See: https://governor.nc.gov/private-school-vouchers-fact-sheet/open ↗). But one very important factor that NC lawmakers have ignored is how vouchers and voucher expansion affect rural communities. Vouchers do not provide school “choice” for most rural students due to the unavailability of private schools.

While the negative financial consequences of voucher programs are statewide, rural communities are hit especially hard. Rural school districts already face unique strains because they have fewer students and resources and cannot take advantage of the same economies of scale as larger school districts. These factors make it difficult to support fixed costs that do not meaningfully change with reduced student enrollment, such as facilities maintenance and transportation.

This revenue loss also brings the threat of school closures, which pose hardships to students, such as long bus rides to schools outside their communities. This is in addition to negative short-term impacts on academic performance, and to residents who rely heavily on public schools for employment and healthcare and nutrition, and as a gathering place for civic and social engagement.

These realities were undoubtedly an important reason for the NC legislature’s failure to pass the school voucher expansion before adjourning for the summer.

The central question for a public-education system in a democratic society is not whether school options should exist, but whether high-quality schools and education are available to all children. This cannot happen through bleeding public schools of their money or by way of other Republican gimmicks such as gerrymandering to maintain Republican supermajorities that would assure such unwanted interference in public education. Democrats have long valued education as the key to life success and support a quality education for all children. Republicans are essentially in favor of providing educational opportunities of unknown quality to the

few at the expense of quality education for all.

Voucher programs not only siphon public dollars and direct them toward private interests, but also take public problem-solving and replace it with private, self-serving decisions. This approach negates the key elements of a democracy that include social cohesion, the common good, shared aims, and the empowerment of all citizens. Supporting the Democrats platform on education and winning the general election will restore those elements to

the American people.

Wanda K. Mohr is a retired Rutgers University professor. She is an active volunteer in CCDP.

School Vouchers

Draining Public Education One Voucher at a Time

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