The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction unveiled a five-year strategic plan in 2025 aimed at making the state’s schools “the best in the nation.” Along with seeking to improve test scores, Advanced Placement performance and the high school graduation rate by 2030, the department also hopes to up the percentage of school-aged children enrolled in public schools to 89%.
One year in, there’s yet to be a documented increase.
Private school enrollment has risen steadily since the 2014-15 academic year, when the state first implemented the Opportunity Scholarship Program, also known as private-school vouchers. The state legislature expanded the scholarship in 2023 by removing the income cap, allocating additional funding and no longer requiring new recipients to have previously attended public school.
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Perception of traditional public schools in the state has taken a hit in the years since as North Carolina continually comes in at the bottom of lists ranking school funding and teacher pay across the country — though student performance and achievement metrics at the state’s public schools are improving.
State lawmakers have been criticized by public school advocates for prioritizing private school vouchers over public school funding, which critics say is causing North Carolina public schools to struggle to keep up. The primary barrier to improving public schools, and making them more enticing for families, is funding, NCDPI said.
So in a state that is growing its spending of public dollars on private schools yearly, what other way is there to increase the percentage of families choosing public schools for their children?
Turning the tide on enrollment
NCDPI’s Senior Director of Government Affairs and Strategy Geoff Coltrane said the department is grateful for the raise in teacher pay as part of the state budget this year. But that mostly went toward early-career teachers, not veterans.
“We know that the No. 1 factor impacting student learning is our teachers, and so we want the best and the brightest, and the best prepared, the best supported in our classrooms,” Coltrane told Carolina Public Press.
“A lot of that starts with their pay. We’ve seen around funding that North Carolina still lags a lot behind our peer states. We’re currently ranked 49th out of the 50 states in terms of per pupil spending, and so we have a lot of work to do there. … That continues to be a challenge. However, given those challenges, we still are seeing these amazing results.”
North Carolina public high schools had their highest graduation rate in state history at 89% this past school year, higher than its 2026 target in the five-year plan.
There was also progress toward goals like increasing the percentage of 10th, 11th and 12th grade students who pass an Advanced Placement exam with a score of three, four or five, which typically allows the student to obtain college credit at a four-year university. The goal is 75% by 2030, and the current percentage rose from 65.4% in 2023–24 to 72.1% in 2024–25.
Though not part of the five-year plan, scores in the state’s end-of-grade exam scores from 2025–26 were also the highest they’ve been in the past three years.
But public school enrollment did not improve between 2023–24 and 2024–25, and although NCDPI’s dashboard is not updated for the 2025–26 year, raw data shows the percentage is nearly the same as it has been the past two years.
The data NCDPI uses for its calculations shows the total number of students attending local education agencies, meaning traditional public schools, decreased by about 36,000 students in 2025–26. But almost 5,000 more students attended charter and regional schools, which are also public but operate independently from county and city school districts, in the same timeframe.
According to data from the Department of Administration, which oversees nonpublic education, private school enrollment increased by a little over 7,000 in 2025–26. Homeschooled children, however, decreased by more than 12,000.
The enrollment decline in public schools could be chalked up to the current emphasis on school choice in the state, Coltrane said, but the student population is also getting smaller overall. That’s reflected in the total enrollment of students, regardless of which type of school. The birth rate in the United States has been on a steady decline since peaking in 2007, so enrollment will likely continue to drop across the board.
NCDPI is adapting to the changing landscape by leaning into school choice, too. Its Find Your Fit initiative uplifts public but nontraditional options like early colleges, magnet and charter schools for families looking for alternatives.
It also launched task forces on school accountability reform, which Coltrane said is analyzing how to reflect school performance outside of test scores, and educator licensure, intended to make the process more transparent and streamlined. The Attend NC program is also looking at how to decrease the amount of students that are chronically absent.
Part of NCDPI’s plan to turn the tide on current enrollment trends is to change the narrative around public schools. Two of the eight pillars of the five-year plan are to celebrate the excellence in public schools and galvanize champions to invest in and support public education. Coltrane said there is a sense that, if NCDPI can deliver on the other goals in the five-year plan, then the enrollment percentage will naturally rise, too.
“Part of what we’ve been doing is obviously celebrating those successes, but also making sure people understand,” Coltrane said.
“In a lot of cases, we share these stories with people, and they’re like, ‘I had no idea.’ So I think there’s a both/and there. I think both continuing to make progress on those measures to show that ‘Hey, look at our graduation rate. Look at our student performance rates. Look at Advanced Placement and CTE.’ All these other things that will help to to tell the story that public schools are a great option will have more students come to public schools.
“... Just getting that information out there will help to change people’s thinking on public schools. So getting to those rates may make a difference. It may not, but … just telling people about those successes will also help people to say, ‘Well, maybe I need to check out my public school.’”
Schools of thought
There’s vastly differing perspectives among education thought leaders on how public schools can stay competitive.
Director of the Carolinas Academic Leadership Network, part of the libertarian John Locke Foundation, Bryce Fiedler said he’s not sure he agrees with the enrollment goal as a concept, but the other goals in the plan are ones to aspire to. How public schools do in those areas should inherently reflect in the enrollment data, he said.
His bottom line is that states like North Carolina are responsible for making public schools a more compelling choice, particularly in the wake of an abundance of other options.
“(Schools) have to make sure that they are safe and secure,” he said. “They have to make sure that student discipline is a priority, and that academic quality is the number one focus. It’s the reason that our schools exist in the first place — are students getting a quality education?”
CALN provides training and professional development for school board members in the Carolinas to help them enact policies that advance student achievement, good governance and parental authority, Fiedler said. When he speaks with school board members, superintendents and administrators, he said he sees that leadership in the top-performing districts often embraces the competition, even if they aren’t keen on private school options.
“They’re not necessarily out there celebrating these things, but they recognize them and understand that our public schools have to be better,” he said.
“They have to make an attractive appeal to parents so that they want to remain in the district — so the ones that embrace a competition mindset, the ones that recognize that the status quo, maybe the way that we’ve been doing things the last decade, has not been working, the ones that take the initiative.”
Fiedler isn’t sure the goal of 89% is realistic “unless there are drastic improvements in academic quality and public perception and a significant shift in parents wanting to start sending their kids to public school,” though NCDPI including charter schools in its count could make it easier given that charter school enrollment is growing, he said.
Parents want to know class materials and library books are age-appropriate, Fiedler said. Families will have the most say on those issues in private schools, he said, though he applauds North Carolina’s emphasis on parental rights through recent legislation. He’s also found parents are also looking for schools that utilize technology in smaller doses, which some districts have been working toward.
The public schools that parents will choose
In another approach, the North Carolina Community Schools Coalition’s rationale is that families will choose public schools that prioritize engagement between the school and the broader community.
The coalition partners with traditional public schools in the state to transform them into not just education centers, but neighborhood hubs with resources for all. It works with NCDPI to identify which districts could be a good fit — traditionally rural districts, those that are in need of additional support and those that are willing and able to implement a new school structure.
Partner schools are paired with a coordinator who serves as a bridge between both the school and families and the school and the community. The coordinator ensures the schools integrate services and programming that would best serve that area. The schools also have a family resource center that offers food, clothes, hygiene products and serves as a place families can enroll in benefits.
Each school analyzes qualitative and quantitative data to understand the strengths and needs of its community, and build supports to match that. All of this is done under the guidance of an advisory board made up of students, family, staff and community members of the particular school.
This support and governing structure can increase the engagement from families and the broader community which, in turn, leads more families to want to enroll their children in the school, said Dan Kimberg, co-director of the North Carolina Community Schools Coalition.
“We fundamentally believe in the power of traditional public schools,” he said.
“We think that neighborhood schools, traditional public schools, are best situated to celebrate the strengths of a community and meet the needs of that community. We believe that these traditional public schools can be the hubs of pride and partnerships, and the more that people understand the power of those public schools, the more people are going to choose to go to those public schools.”
Lack of funding is certainly a barrier for increasing public school enrollment, Kimberg said, however there’s also what he calls a scarcity mindset around what schools are able to offer. But just because one school has great resources doesn’t mean that another school can’t, too.
“We are living in this time where there’s such a sense of scarcity that exists, like this scarcity mindset around what is available — ‘What resources are available? What strengths are there?’ — this deficit mindset around our schools, which I don’t really think is true,” Kimberg said.
“Our schools are filled with such abundance. There’s so many resources if you are able to really catalyze a community, really capitalize on the assets of families of community members.
"That may be the biggest obstacle, is people doubting what’s possible in a traditional public school, especially people that have never walked through the halls of a traditional public school. The greatest resource is just the brilliance that exists in our school communities, the real power that exists within them.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.