By L.A. Williams
Christian Action League
March 15, 2024
North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarships — funding vouchers that are allowing a growing number of parents to choose their children’s school — came under fire from Gov. Roy Cooper earlier this month. He called them a “reckless waste” of taxpayer money and asked that the program be halted until public schools are fully funded.
The governor made his disparaging remarks about private schools during an address to the state Board of Education on March 7, claiming that the schools “don’t have to tell taxpayers what they teach, how their students perform, which students they will reject or whether students even show up at all.”
Governed separately from public schools, private schools in the Tar Heel State are required to operate at least nine months a year, keep attendance records and immunization records, administer standardized achievement tests to students in grades three, six, nine and 11 and meet various other health and safety standards.
“What the governor doesn’t seem to understand or want to acknowledge is that parents are taxpayers, and so private schools are held accountable by their customers, who can vote with their feet, so to speak, and choose a different school if they aren’t satisfied,” said the Rev. Mark Creech, executive director of the Christian Action League. “Without the Opportunity Scholarships, many families, especially those with very limited income, would have no choice at all but to leave their children in their assigned public school, whether it’s failing them or not.”
Cooper’s criticisms came just after a record number of applications (nearly 72,000) were turned in to meet the March 1 deadline for Opportunity Scholarships.
“These numbers confirm what we’ve known for a long time: parents want to be able to choose the best educational option for their children and the Opportunity Scholarship Program is a popular vehicle for parents to do so,” Dr. Robert Luebke, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation, told the media.
As a result of Republican-led legislation passed last year, the program is now open to all North Carolina parents, regardless of income. It had been only for lower-income families.
In the new set-up, families of the 32,000-plus students already receiving Opportunity Scholarships get first dibs on renewals. Next in line are those with the lowest incomes, then middle incomes up to higher ones with scholarship amounts determined via a sliding scale. Families in each tier are chosen by random lottery.
According to The Carolina Journal, an estimated 70 percent of renewal and new applications for the vouchers are from poor, working class, or middle-class families.
The state awarded $133 million in Opportunity Scholarships for 2022-2023, averaging $5,266 per student. The funds are allowing more than 25,000 students to attend 544 private schools. Some $293.5 million of the state budget is earmarked for the scholarships for this coming school year, with the line item expected to increase significantly over time.
Cooper told the board that public schools could lose $200 million in state funding next year alone as a result of the expanded voucher program. But Brent Woodcox, senior policy counsel at the General Assembly, and other supporters of Opportunity Scholarships pushed back.
“The money is not coming at the expense of public schools. The money is remaining with the child and following the child to the school chosen by parents,” Woodcox wrote on X. “Almost like Roy Cooper thinks the purpose of sending money to public schools is not primarily to pay to educate kids.”
This is not the first time the Opportunity Scholarship has come under fire. Created in 2013 by the Republican-led legislature, the program won a lawsuit filed against it by the North Carolina Association of Educators in 2015. The N.C. Supreme Court ruled that the scholarships were constitutional. A similar suit, filed by the NCAE and the National Education Association in 2020 ended in April of last year, when it was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiffs.
