By Kris Nordstrom

Senior Policy Analyst, North Carolina Justice Center

RALEIGH (January 16, 2025) – If your goal was to dismantle North Carolina’s public school system, how would you do it?

Would you starve schools of resources? 

Real per-student state funding is down 3.8 percent from 2009. North Carolina’s school funding effort (education spending as a share of our state economy) has fallen from 42nd in 2008 to 49th in 2022. If we made just the average funding effort that year, school funding would have been $6.5 billion higher, 43 percent above actual levels.

Would you make the teaching profession as unpleasant as possible?

North Carolina’s starting teacher pay is the worst in the Southeast. In real terms, it’s 7% lower than it was in 2011. Since the 2011 change in General Assembly leadership, North Carolina’s average teacher pay has gone from being 19% below the national average to 23% today. Legislators have taken away career status, master’s pay, funding for National Board Certification applications, longevity pay, and retiree health benefits. Is it any wonder that teacher vacancies have reached record levels?

Would you create an accountability system that unfairly stigmatizes schools as failing?

Currently, public schools are labeled with an A-F letter grade. These grades are highly correlated with student demographics. Further, they fail to help families identify where great teaching and learning are happening. To date, legislators have not used these grades to direct resources to or otherwise help so-called “failing” schools. Nor have they applied this grading system to the private schools accepting state voucher funding. Rather than helping families or students, the grading system stigmatizes public schools to undermine trust and feed a false narrative about their effectiveness.

Would you participate in bigoted moral panics directed at students of color and LGBTQ students?

North Carolina leaders have railed against the fake threat of teachers “indoctrinating” their students. Lt. Governor Robinson’s FACTS Commission created a website for reporting teachers, but it failed to produce any credible evidence of indoctrination. Failure hasn’t stopped legislators from continuing to rail against the supposed threats from diversity, equity, and inclusion and efforts to treat LGBTQ students with dignity. The national architects of these bigoted moral panics have admitted that their goal is to undermine support for public schools.

It should come as no surprise, then, that privatization is the next step towards dismantling public schools. This means shifting vast sums of money out of the inclusive, traditional public school system and into the exclusionary, discriminatory private school system. HB 10 – which the General Assembly passed this November despite Gov. Cooper’s veto – increases voucher funding from $342 million to a whopping $923 million.

These additional funds will be largely used for subsidizing wealthy families who already have enrolled their children in private schools. The median family with a child in private school has nearly double the household income of the typical North Carolinian household. Gone are the days when vouchers were restricted to families with low incomes.

The increased voucher spending will worsen budget pressures at our already-underfunded public schools. This year’s increase in voucher funding could have otherwise been used to:

• Hire 8,000 classroom teachers;
• Boost teacher pay by 10 percent; or
• Staff nurses, psychologists, counselors, and social workers close to recommended levels.

State Superintendent Mo Green discusses the implications of private-school vouchers for public schools.

The expansion also means increased segregation. The share of white students receiving vouchers is 50% higher than their public school enrollment. This is by design. Modern-day vouchers were created in response to Brown v Board to allow white families to send their children to private segregation academies. Today, at least 39 of these segregation academies are still operating and receiving public subsidies via the state’s voucher programs.

In other statewide voucher programs, voucher students have fared dramatically worse academically than their peers who remained in public schools. In Ohio and Louisiana, for example, math scores of voucher students dropped even lower after transitioning to private school than they did during the pandemic. Arizona’s program has been rife with fraud and has created a massive hole in the state’s budget.

With fewer families attending public schools, it becomes harder to foster the political support necessary to properly resource our schools. Families that receive vouchers are less likely to support public school taxes when they’re now paying out of pocket for uncovered tuition costs, school transportation, lunches, and other miscellaneous fees.

These concerns aren’t hypothetical. Like North Carolina, Chile adopted a universal voucher program that subsidized private school expenses for everyone, even wealthy families who had already pulled their children from public schools. There, middle class families were forced to pay extra to seek one of the limited seats in exclusive private schools. Families with low incomes had no choice but to attend their local public schools, which became incredibly segregated and dramatically underfunded. The country experienced increased discrimination and an erosion of civic cohesion.

While this explains how the General Assembly is using voucher expansion to dismantle public schools, there’s still the question of why. After nearly two decades of observing this legislature and particularly this regressive legislation, one conclusion stands out:

When done correctly, public schools are one of the only public institutions that foster cross-racial and cross-class solidarity. Such solidarity threatens existing hierarchies.

This theory not only explains efforts to dismantle public schools, it also explains why this indefensible voucher bill has been paired with a new law requiring local sheriffs to cooperate with ICE on President-elect Trump’s promised campaign of mass, violent deportations.

Let’s resist these efforts to keep us divided and invest in our public schools to create a stronger, more just North Carolina.

Kris Nordstrom is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Education & Law Project. Prior to his work with the Justice Center, he spent nine years with the North Carolina General Assembly’s nonpartisan Fiscal Research Division, where he provided budget analysis and information to all members of the General Assembly on public education issues.