NC’s expanded vouchers have a hidden cost. Public schools will feel it | Opinion

Republican state lawmakers refuse to tell the truth about school vouchers.

They claim that providing hundreds of millions of tax dollars to help families pay for private school tuition will not affect public school funding. But that’s not what the experience in other states shows.

A study supported by the Education Law Center in 2023 looked at seven states where voucher programs are well established – Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Wisconsin. It found that the portion of state gross domestic product allocated to funding public schools decreased.

Yet Republican lawmakers say that won’t happen in North Carolina, despite a massive expansion of the state’s voucher program known as Opportunity Scholarship. The program now offers vouchers of varying amounts to all families of all incomes, even those with children already attending private school. Last year the legislature approved spending $463 million more on vouchers. By the 2032-33 fiscal year, the program is expected to cost $825 million annually.

House Speaker Destin Hall says people concerned about funding of the state’s public schools need not worry about the flood of cash going to private schools. In his March 12 response to Gov. Josh Stein’s State of the State speech, Hall said, “Expanding opportunity and supporting our teachers are not competing goals. They’re two sides of the same coin. Empowering families and investing in our teachers builds a stronger, brighter future for all of North Carolina’s children.”

Hall and fellow Republican leaders want to have it both ways, or rather they want North Carolinians to think they can have it both ways – spend lots of taxpayer dollars on private school vouchers and still have plenty to support good public schools.

This fits with another distortion that Republicans keep repeating – that the legislature has been generous in increasing teacher pay. Or, as Hall put it in his response, “the Republican-led General Assembly has consistently invested and will continue to invest even more in meaningful teacher raises.”

Let’s unpack these claims, starting with the second, based on figures provided by the Public School Forum.

In 2011, the year Republicans gained control of the legislature and have since held it, the average North Carolina public school teacher pay was $46,514. The average teacher pay in 2022-23 (the latest available hard figure) was $56,559. That’s an increase, yes, but teachers still have lost ground to inflation. If average teacher pay had kept up with inflation since 2011, it would be $67,063 today. So much for “meaningful teacher raises.”

Remarkably, raising teacher pay, as inadequate as it has been, is the good news for schools under Republican rule. By the broader measure of school funding, North Carolina ranks 48th among states in per-pupil funding and 49th in funding effort.

When it comes to vouchers, Republicans turn up the gaslighting. Remember that the Opportunity Scholarship program was introduced as a way to help low-income families move on from low-performing schools. Now it has morphed into a universal voucher system.

Will that affect the funding for public schools? Republicans say no because the voucher money is not drawn from public school funds. That’s true, but the surge in private school funding certainly dampens the appetite for public school funding increases, especially when Republicans want to keep cutting taxes.

Days after Hall delivered his we-can-do-both message about vouchers and public school funding, Rep. Julie von Haefen, D-Wake, proposed a school funding bill that shows how dire the situation already is. Her bill, which she has proposed previously, calls for the legislature to provide full funding for public schools under the Leandro plan that Republican leaders have ignored.

How far is the state behind in meeting the Leandro plan? As of now, von Haefen said, the state would need to spend $4.3 billion this year just to get back on track with the Leandro schedule. Meanwhile, Stein’s budget asks the legislature to approve a $4 billion bond to make improvements to repair and replace deteriorating school buildings across the state.

None of that spending will be approved by Republican lawmakers, of course. But somehow Republicans are asserting that spending hundreds of millions on school vouchers will not come at the expense of public schools.

Von Haefen said the cost of vouchers will have an even more pronounced effect if the economy slows as projected.

“The huge expansion of these vouchers is going to affect our public schools because our revenues are down and they are going to be dropping every single year as the voucher spending is going up,” she said. “So something has to break and to me that’s just going to be that our public schools system is going to continue to suffer.”

Vouchers will expand school choice, but they’ll also expand the shameful gap between what public schools need and what the legislature provides.