North Carolina spent $185 million on private school vouchers last school year, a new annual report sent to the General Assembly shows. This month, the state agency that awards tax-funded scholarships to private school students filed its 10th annual report on the Opportunity Scholarship program.
The report provides less information on the program than in the past, at a time when state funding for vouchers is poised to quadruple over the next decade. Meanwhile, other sources of data on how the money is spent have disappeared.
If state lawmakers override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of House Bill 10, which expands funding for the program, North Carolina could spend more than half a billion dollars on private school vouchers this school year alone — and billions more over the next decade.
Republican state lawmakers have until the end of the calendar year to execute a veto override.
Lack of Accountability
Few standards are placed on private schools that receive vouchers. Teachers don’t have to be licensed. Background checks are required only for the highest administrator at the school, but not for employees who work directly with children. There is no standard curriculum that must be taught, and no publicly elected school board to oversee the school’s budget.
Public data on the program is also slim. This year’s annual report on Opportunity Scholarships is the shortest yet. That’s because last year, lawmakers struck out a line in the 2023 state budget law that previously required the state to track how many voucher recipients moved from a public school to a private school.
“That's one of many data points that we could be gathering and should be gathering if we truly wanted to know if this program is serving students,” said Heather Koons of Public Schools First NC.
Koons is an education researcher employed by the advocacy group. She often sifts through data on vouchers to look for trends, but said the sources are drying up.
In the early years of the Opportunity Scholarship program, supporters said it would give students assigned to failing public schools an exit route to a better education at a private school. There’s very little data that could be used to support that claim, even ten years into the program’s existence.
“That just hamstrings North Carolina's education researchers and evaluators from being able to do valid evaluations,” Koons said. “It also limits the knowledge that North Carolinians have about these programs that we're paying for.”
Prior annual reports from the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority (NCSEAA) showed which school districts new recipients of the vouchers had attended, or would attend, before they received a voucher.
In the beginning, all voucher recipients came directly from a public school. After lawmakers relaxed eligibility rules in 2018, roughly a third of new voucher recipients came directly from a public school.
This year, any student already attending a private school could apply, but public information on how many of them accept a voucher will not be tracked.
Brian Jodice of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, a school choice advocacy group, said it would be helpful to have that data, but said he can understand why it's no longer tracked since voucher recipients no longer need to come from a public school.
"We've always viewed that accountability starts and ends with parents and families who are making those choices to enroll their kids in schools of choice," Jodice said.
Additionally, there’s very little information available on whether the vouchers lead to improved academic outcomes for recipients in North Carolina. State lawmakers initially contracted the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation to conduct a study on this question. After completing the study, researchers told WUNC that they were unable to conduct a valid analysis because students at public schools and private schools are not required to take the same exams, which prevented researchers from accessing a random, representative sample.
North Carolina private schools receiving voucher funds must administer a nationally standardized test of their choice, but do not have to administer the state's standardized tests.
"We're very happy that students are administered a nationally normed test that is reported to their parents," Jodice said. "That might give some people heartburn as it relates to what's publicly facing, but what we care more about is our parents and families getting what they need."
State law requires NCSEAA to file an annual report on learning gains and losses for voucher recipients. For years, the agency filed a one-page report that states “evaluating and reporting learning gains and losses is not currently achievable.”
The North Carolina Department of Administration no longer reports enrollment at private schools, after NC Newsline reported last year that some private schools received more vouchers than the number or students they reported enrolled. The Department changed its annual directory of private schools this year to no longer include enrollment counts of individual schools.
This year, NCSEAA also stopped reporting on its own webpage for Opportunity Scholarships counts of new applicants by private school, ethnicity or county.
That data would be helpful in understanding the demographics of a new wave of applicants. Seventy thousand more families applied for Opportunity Scholarship vouchers for the current school year after a state law lifted income requirements and allowed any student already attending a private school to apply.
If state lawmakers override the veto of House Bill 10, funding for the program will increase four-fold to clear a wait list of applicants.
“It's hundreds of millions of dollars every year going into what's essentially a black hole,” Koons said.
