Saving North Carolina’s Public Education System
How to Stop Those Who Would Betray the State’s Children and Future
As part of its work on public education in America, Civic Way is taking a closer look at one state—North Carolina. This is the seventh essay in Civic Way’s series on North Carolina’s primary and secondary education system (see the last essay). The author, Bob Melville, is the founder of Civic Way, a nonprofit dedicated to good government, and a management consultant with over 45 years of experience improving public agencies.
Given greater freedom about where to send their children, parents of a kind would flock together and so prevent a healthy intermingling of children from decidedly different backgrounds. ― Milton Friedman
The Threats to North Carolina’s Public Education System
North Carolina’s public education crisis has many causes and symptoms. We will complete our presentation of these ills, and how they threaten the future of the public education system in the next few essays. This essay deals with the issue of school choice and North Carolina’s private school voucher program.
1. The Hyping and Hijacking of School Choice.
When the school choice issue is hijacked for calculated political purposes—as in North Carolina—the likely outcome is not quality education for all but the dismantling of public education for many.
NCGA leaders and their partisan acolytes invoke the school choice mantra with numbing frequency. For ten years, they have blindly led the expansion of public charter and private voucher schools into perilous waters. In our view, their ham-handed, overzealous approach will ultimately reduce educational options for North Carolinians.
On the eve of the uber-expansion of the state’s OS private voucher program—one that few other states have even contemplated—we should step back and take stock of where we are. If we going to expand school options, we owe it to North Carolina’s children to do it the right way. Unfortunately, it is clear that the ideologues and dilettantes championing OS expansion are misguided, and that is bad news for anyone who cares about public education.
School decisions can be tough for families and the pandemic, by disrupting schools, only made these decisions tougher. School choice is popular because every family wants an opportunity to find the right educational fit for their child. Most parents believe that access to a quality education is paramount to a child’s future prospects.
Today, North Carolina has a wide array of educational choices for children. We have 206 public charter schools with some operating latitude but with open enrollment, state standards and public accountability. We have ten lab schools at public universities. We have 222 magnet programs with a multitude of academic offerings, such as STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math), college/career preparatory and language immersion programs.
Most families put their children in public schools. About 84 percent of North Carolina’s school-aged children attend public schools, including charters. While the academic results of some public programs have been mixed, public charter schools and magnet programs remain popular. Many have waitlists and enrollment will likely continue to increase. The challenge for LEAs is to develop cost-effective, appealing academic options [i] and bring them to the attention of parents.
The point is not that we have enough academic options for our children. Rather, it is that we should invest in replicating proven public school success stories[ii] and improving current public-school options before we subsidize every private school option without regard to merit. And that we should strike a balance between meeting each child’s needs and serving our democracy.
2. The Naive, Reckless Expansion of Private School Vouchers.
Ironically, the greatest single threat to school choice lurks within the GA’s universal voucher proposal—the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. This proposal’s risks are summarized below.
First, a universal voucher program, coupled with so-called backpack funding[iii], will upend the very definition of education as a shared public good—a benefit for children, their families and their communities. Publicly funding private schools without public oversight won’t magically make private schools a public good, it will merely accelerate the demise of the public interest.
Second, expanding the OS voucher program will likely weaken educational quality. Many private schools chasing public tax dollars do so because they need the money (elite private schools have thus far resisted such programs). Homeschools could become a cash cow for some parents. Voucher zealots have tried to overcome these hurdles by waiving minimal quality standards[iv] and rigorous oversight but lax regulations will only encourage poor quality.
The likely results? Instability. Discrimination. The neglect of special needs children. Religious indoctrination[v]. The proliferation of unregulated, low-quality homeschools. Plummeting student achievement. However, since the OS program requires few if any reports from participating private schools, we may be blissfully ignorant of such outcomes.
Third, by investing $520 million per year in private schools[vi]—and diverting much of that funding from public schools—the GA will damage all public schools. Total state funding for public schools will be reduced by an estimated $204 million[vii] and small counties will likely incur the biggest budgetary hits. The diversion of public funds will not only benefit private interests, but force many LEAs to cut instructional costs, enlarge classrooms and close schools.
Finally, expanding the OS program could have the perverse effect of cutting viable academic options. The NCGA failed to fund investments in building private school market capacity or developing practical tools for helping parents navigate that market. In many areas, such as rural counties, private school choices are limited. In other areas, private school options have limited slots. Such limitations could pressure private school champions to fund substandard schools in areas with limited market capacity.
The end game? Bolstering substandard private schools at the expense of viable public schools will leave the state not with a wide array of academic options but rather two distinct systems—one for affluent families and a larger one for struggling Title I schools. The weakened public system will be the system of last resort for children from low-income families and those with special needs.
Together, the two systems will fail to meet the state’s constitutional standard.
In our next essay, we will comment on one of the greatest threats to North Carolina’s public education system—weak accountability. After that, we will focus on strategies for overcoming the threats.