While lawmakers expand costly private-school vouchers that lack oversight and accountability and exclude many students and families, North Carolina continues to rank near the bottom in public school funding, leaving critical questions about the state’s budget priorities as a new school year begins.
New Report on Private School Vouchers
The Public School Forum of North Carolina recently released a report on the state’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, analyzing data on the 200 private schools that received the most taxpayer funding in 2024–25. The findings are troubling: many of these schools exclude students and families from admission, some raised tuition after receiving public dollars, and schools provide families and the public little information about curriculum and school quality. The Forum proposed several recommendations for strengthening accountability and accessibility for private schools receiving taxpayer dollars. Read the full report here, and find a summary here.
Meanwhile, North Carolina ranks 48th in the nation in per-pupil spending, nearly $5,000 below the national average. The state has a constitutional duty to provide every child with a sound, basic education; yet, instead of fully funding public schools that serve all students, lawmakers are diverting resources to private schools inaccessible to many.This universal voucher expansion is expensive and unsustainable. In the first year since expansion, legislators added $248 million on top of the hundreds of millions already appropriated to “clear the waitlist”, which consisted mostly of students from higher-income families who were already attending and able to afford private schools. That means entirely new costs for the state–costs that come at the expense of local public schools that serve the vast majority of students in the state. Districts are already facing teacher layoffs, larger class sizes, and program cuts, even as public schools show steady gains in test scores and graduation rates. Continued progress depends on lawmakers investing in, not defunding, the schools that serve all North Carolina children.
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