NC Republicans say vouchers are about ‘school choice.’ Some don’t have choices | Opinion

Republican lawmakers say that their expansion of North Carolina’s private school voucher program is about equality and freedom of choice.

But depending on where you live, that freedom of choice may really just be an illusion. Despite the fact that anyone in North Carolina can now receive voucher funding, the landscape of opportunity and choice remains unequal, especially for those living in rural or underserved counties.

Sixteen of North Carolina’s 100 counties do not have a school that accepts direct payment for the 2024-25 school year, according to the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority. Forty-seven counties have less than five schools to choose from, and 14 counties have just one.

GOP lawmakers radically expanded the Opportunity Scholarship program last year, and have hinted they’ll add more funding this year after wealthier families who applied for vouchers were turned down due to insufficient funding. The principle behind expanding school choice, lawmakers say, is to prevent zip code or income from determining the quality of education a child receives.

But no matter how much North Carolina pours into school vouchers, they’re unlikely to solve that problem. While Republicans tout voucher expansion as evidence of their commitment to funding education, it’s not a suitable alternative to fully investing in North Carolina’s public schools — most of all because the counties that “benefit” least from voucher expansion are the ones perhaps most in need of funding.

North Carolina’s 10 poorest counties — which are largely home to the state’s most disadvantaged school districts — don’t have many options as far as private schooling goes. Most of them have three or fewer voucher schools, and some have none at all.

Among North Carolina’s eight majority Black counties, it’s a similar story. All eight counties have less than five voucher schools each. There’s just one voucher school in all of Northampton County, which covers an area of 551 square miles. Compare that to bigger counties like Wake and Mecklenburg, which each have more than 60 voucher schools.

What happens when the only private school in your county is almost an hour away, and you can’t afford to make that commute every day? What if the only option is a religious school, and you’re not religious? What if the only school in your area turns you down, because private schools are able to discriminate? Under those circumstances, “school choice” remains a luxury that not everyone can afford.

Of course, some families in rural counties will be able to afford it. And we already know that those counties will be hit hardest when families do leave the public school system to attend private school with a voucher. Some rural school systems only have a few thousand students, so any loss of funding has a greater impact, especially when some operating costs don’t decrease with enrollment. While larger counties may be able to offset some of the funding losses with local appropriations, smaller counties can’t afford to do that without significantly increasing taxes.

The inevitable consequence is that the quality of public education will become worse for those who can’t afford to leave, because already underfunded schools will lose even more resources. Some of the state’s poorest counties are projected to lose as much as 8% of state public school funding as a result of expansion despite the fact that they have few private schools to choose from.

All the while, rural taxpayers will continue paying into a program they cannot access, for a choice they do not have. While “school choice” sounds like something that’s liberating parents, as a practical matter, it’s a two-tiered system in which parents in wealthier counties have more choice than those who live elsewhere. Education in North Carolina will remain vastly unequal, because the ability to choose something “better” won’t be available to everyone.