One could be forgiven for thinking that the debate over “school choice”—the option for parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private, often religiously-affiliated schools—has somehow gone away. Nobody seems to be talking about school choice in this election cycle; for culture warriors of the left and the right, issues like abortion and trans rights have taken center stage.
But school choice has not gone away, nor have the fights around it. Thirty-one states, as well as Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, offer some combination of educational savings accounts, tax credits, or voucher programs for parents who elect to send their children to private schools. And in a 2023 poll by RealClear Opinion Research, 71.3 percent of respondents said they supported school choice (which the poll defined as a parent’s right to spend tax dollars to send their child to either the public or private school that they felt best met their child’s needs). If the debate around school choice seems to have quieted down, maybe that’s because—as with legalized gambling, once rare but now legal in all but two states—it now wins so often that people aren’t paying much attention.
Still, when proposals to expand voucher programs and other school choice measures arise, there is spirited opposition. The issues raised by these programs cut to the heart of American identity, and how we think about race, unions, church/state separation, and our identity as a country that offers free education for all.
A school choice debate is unfolding in North Carolina, where voucher advocates are trying to make a program originally meant for poor families available to all families; the law is poised to withstand a veto from Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper and go into effect. The months-long debate over the expansion of the state’s school voucher program has crystallized the broader nationwide arguments for and against school vouchers. North Carolina has already embraced non-public schooling. In North Carolina, as many as 1 in 5 students are not enrolled in traditional public schools. What’s more, private school enrollment has risen by nearly a quarter since 2019, with around two-thirds of private-school enrollment taking place in religious schools. In other words, North Carolina is a microcosm of an ongoing national reckoning over school choice that has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Opponents of this proposed expansion contend that the school choice movement is now taking off the sheep’s clothing to reveal the wolf that was underneath all along: school choice, they say, was never just about helping the poor, but rather about breaking public schools. Proponents of the expansion disagree: they say the changes will force public schools to improve—and if they funnel huge amounts of public dollars into private schools, too, why should that be a problem, so long as children get educated? In North Carolina, both sides insist they have good intentions. But as in the rest of the country, there are unanswered questions about the long term consequences of school choice.
On Sept. 11, 2024, both houses of the state General Assembly voted to fund the voucher expansion to the around 55,000 students who were waitlisted earlier this year due to insufficient program funds. According to North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority (NCSEAA) data, the number of recipients of the Opportunity Scholarship, which was implemented in 2014, have risen year over year. In 2019-2020, the state awarded about $48 million in disbursements. For the 2020-2021 school year, the amount leapt to $61.5 million; that year, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, many North Carolina public schools remained closed, but private schools generally opened for on-site instruction. By the 2022-2023 school year, Opportunity Scholarship disbursements had more than doubled, to nearly $134.5 million statewide. Meanwhile, according to a 2023 analysis by the Associated Press, out of the thirty-four states that reported private school data, North Carolina ranked fifth in enrollment growth.
In September 2023, North Carolina’s General Assembly voted to expand access to the Opportunity Scholarship, which had been limited to low and moderate-income students who had not previously attended private school. Applications surged. Over half of the roughly 72,000 applicants for the 2024-2025 school year were in the higher income brackets. When many of those families did not receive vouchers, legislators proposed a new bill to fund an expansion that would award money to those students passed over this school year. This bill inflamed the familiar debates over who benefits from school vouchers, and who loses.
“This GOP plan doesn’t increase opportunity,” North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, posted on X (formerly Twitter) last year. “They just want billions of $ going to private schools at the expense of public education so a millionaire gets thousands of $ to keep a kid already in a private academy while veteran teachers get a $250 raise. Shameful.”
The Senate approved an additional $463.5 million dollars for the next two school years, to be awarded to 54,800 students awaiting scholarships. But the House attached the bill to its budget bill, over which the two chambers could not come to an agreement before the legislative session ended in June. Even had the House voted to approve the Senate version of the bill, the governor was expected to veto it, returning the bill to the Republican-controlled legislature, which would likely override his veto. But when the legislature reconvened in September, both chambers voted to fund the expansion—and to reimburse waitlisted families who had already begun paying tuition expenses out of pocket. Once again, the legislature is expected to override a likely gubernatorial veto.
Under the new rules, funds are awarded along a four-tiered graduated scale. The changes would do away with the requirement that money only go to students not previously enrolled in private school, and each tier’s award level would be adjusted according to family size and income level. The voucher program could award Tier 1 families—the poorest—the full amount possible (up to around $7,500 per child), while the most affluent Tier 4 families, whose household income exceeds $618,048—and could be in the millions or even billions—would be eligible for a maximum award of $3,360 per child.
School choice has a deep history in America. Although voucher opponents often trace the genesis of the modern school choice movement to the wave of “segregation academies” that opened in the South in the mid–twentieth century in reaction to school integration, the historical reality is more complicated. Vermont’s “tuitioning” system is far older than the Civil Rights movement, or the blowback to it: since the nineteenth century, towns in Vermont too small to support their own schools have paid to send students to public and private schools elsewhere, sometimes even out of state. And support for school choice has come in waves, and from heterogeneous ideological camps.
According to Andrew J. Rotherham, co-founder of the educational nonprofit Bellwether, in the 1960s it was the left, made up of Berkeley law professors, Harvard sociologists, and the like, who first advocated for school vouchers. Yet at around the same time, conservative economist Milton Friedman was writing that education grants for families could create “a market for schooling.” In the 1990s, thinkers at the center-left Brookings Institution were making market-style arguments in support of a more competitive American education system. Black legislators were looking for solutions to stagnant education in urban areas, Rotherham writes—but they have since grown to feel “used by conservatives,” who they see as promoting choice at the expense of improving communities. Ultimately, Rotherham writes, “be skeptical of anyone who tries to tell you about the ‘history’ of school choice in this country. There is no one narrative.”
Indeed, Dianne Feinstein once backed school choice for Washington, D.C., schools, and Democratic state legislator Polly Williams was a strong advocate for Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program. Today, however, a simplified left-versus-right narrative does hold sway. Josh Cowen, who teaches education policy at Michigan State and is the author of the just-published book The Privateers: How Billionaires Started a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, says fights over school vouchers have become much more adversarial than when he first began studying the issue. “Certainly in the pilot phases where these programs were actually set up, it was much more collaborative,” Cowen says. The programs were “absolutely driven by conservatives,” he says, “but not in so ideological a way.”
As with legalized gambling, school choice now wins so often that people aren’t paying much attention.
Liberals and conservatives can generally agree that many of America’s public schools are failing. In North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenberg County, just under 42 percent of its schools received a performance grade of D or F on North Carolina state school report cards in 2023, and around a third were counted as “low performing,” meaning they received a performance grade of either D or F and failed to meet their growth goals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the number of North Carolina’s students receiving Opportunity Scholarships more than doubled between 2020 and 2023. But at a recent county school board meeting, board members expressed disagreement with the expansion, which one member said had “gotten out of hand.” In response, the county school board voted to add to their legislative agenda a plan to lobby the General Assembly to hold private schools that receive Opportunity Scholarship funds to the same standards as public schools—to require them to comply with the same standardized-testing and teacher-qualification requirements.
Which brings us to one area where conservatives and liberals are in deep disagreement: the question of accreditation. Liberals say they don’t want church schools, or other private schools, exempted from any state mandated standards; conservatives say cumbersome regulations make public schools worse, and besides, the state has no right to meddle in religious institutions. To be sure, some private schools are better than the state’s average public schools—but some are far, far worse, and right now the state does not seem to care.
A policy impact brief from the Public School Forum of North Carolina, a group that seeks greater accountability for school choice programs, argues that schools receiving Opportunity Scholarship funds—over 90 percent of which are religiously affiliated—ought to be accredited, and that their teachers ought to be state-certified. Last school year, just under half of these schools were accredited, and only 2 percent required state certification for teachers. Advocates also would like to see those schools brought in line with state curriculum standards and standardized testing requirements.
“This issue of school accreditation keeps coming up,” says Cowen. “North Carolina is one that still stands out as like, willing to die on the hill of non-accreditation.” A 2020 Duke University Children’s Law Clinic brief compared the Opportunity Scholarship with eleven comparable voucher programs. North Carolina was one of only two state programs that did not require private schools to be accredited to receive state funds. “The reason that I support accreditation,” Cowen says, “is at a minimum, you’ve got to have your act together.” He referred to reports last year about so-called “ghost enrollments” in North Carolina private schools, schools collecting money for no-show students. The North Carolina Justice Center conducted data analysis of private schools in the state; in at least one instance, they found schools receiving double the amount of vouchers as there were self-reported students enrolled. For example, according to the North Carolina Justice Center’s data, Bethel Christian Academy in Haywood County reported just six students enrolled in 2022, but had ten Opportunity Scholarship recipients.
Voucher advocates in North Carolina are nervous about any strings that might be attached to receiving public money, and they point out that there is far less controversy when government funds flow to colleges and universities (although religious colleges and universities must be accredited to receive federal aid). “You can use public funds to go to UNC or Duke or Notre Dame or somewhere else, nobody bats an eyelash,” says Bob Luebke, of the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina think tank. But if you do that in K-12 schooling, “there’s a huge tussle over it.”
“In my opinion, there was never a persuasive justification for the difference,” says Michael McConnell, director of Stanford University’s Constitutional Law Center and a former federal judge. According to McConnell, attempts have been made in the courts to distinguish between tuition aid for K-12 education and higher education. In some instances, that meant making the case that higher education institutions tended to be less pervasively sectarian than grade schools—that Notre Dame or Bob Jones University was somehow less completely religious than this Christian high school or that Jewish yeshiva. It’s a line of argument which “was a violation of the principle of neutrality, to treat different religious institutions differently based on how religious they appeared to an outsider,” McConnell said.
“Public dollars going to, you know, specifically private religious schools is legal, lawful, and has withstood Supreme Court rulings,” says Brian Jodice, executive vice president of Parents for Educational Freedom North Carolina. And it does seem to be a matter of when, not if, vouchers in North Carolina are available to every student. Jodice sees a future for his pro-voucher organization in a post-voucher landscape. They’ll be “down in the weeds in communities,” Jodice says, advising private schools in the state, providing resources and guidance as the schools increase in size and number.
But Cowen is skeptical that universal school vouchers necessarily translates into improved private school access. In Arizona, private schools raised tuition after vouchers were implemented last year. “It’s not about access, it’s just not,” Cowen says, “It’s about standing up to supply schools and helping the parents—the parents that are already there.”
The National Catholic Education Association supports vouchers, which they believe honor the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, meaning that the people most affected by the actions and concerns of the community should make the decisions. “Vouchers provide aid to parents to use on behalf of their child and, when properly implemented, allow parents and the school to protect the dignity of the child in the school community,” says Dale McDonald, the group’s vice president for public policy. Yet even so, McDonald does not see vouchers as a panacea. “Most of the financial support that vouchers provide does not usually cover the cost of the full tuition or actual cost of providing the education,” McDonald says.
Perhaps the most pressing question is whether vouchers lead to better schools. Josh Cowen contends that vouchers have not delivered on the promise of improved educational outcomes. Early voucher studies in the 1990s and early 2000s showed promising gains in academic achievement, but were smaller in scale. More recent statewide studies have shown evidence of learning loss. A report published in 2018 on the first four years of Indiana’s statewide voucher program found decreased academic achievement in math for students who switched from public to private school, and no statistically significant difference in English.
But for advocates like Luebke, school choice programs are about “trying to provide some sort of stick for the public schools to reform and be more customer-focused on students and families,” he says. He sees school choice as an engine that could drive educational improvement across both the private and public sectors. “They’re in a business of educating students,” he says, of public schools, “and the only way they’re going to stay in business is if they serve their customers.” He even says that public school superintendents should “embrace” the voucher program. “In the end,” he says, “it should make both of you better,” public and private schools alike.
“By having more choice in education,” says Brian Jodice, “hopefully you can cause everyone to kind of step their game up a little bit. And a little bit of competition in the marketplace, I would argue, is a good thing, and can be can be viewed as a good thing as it relates to education as well.”
But Cowen maintains that the evidence doesn’t bear this out. He says that states should invest directly in their public schools, rather than leaving funding to localities and federal aid. States are better able to weather economic storms than local school districts, he says. Cowen mentioned equalized-funding formulas, which allow states to close funding gaps between wealthy and poorer districts. In Kentucky, for example, the state determines a base per-pupil spending amount, as well as a minimum property tax rate. The state then distributes supplemental educational funding to localities that are unable to meet the per-pupil spending requirement with property tax revenues. As larger entities, states are better able than local districts to weather economic downturns, he says. Cowen also says that “whole child” approaches to education are an example of evidence-based education reform; such policies include practices like universal school meals and improved facilities. “Turns out that kids who are cold in the winter or hot in the summer learn less well,” Cowen says.
Cowen sees today’s version of the school voucher fight as a motte-and-bailey move by conservative lobbyists. The academic achievement data began arriving around 2017 and 2018, and Cowen says, “What else was happening at that sort of time? Trump presidency. Charlottesville. Michael Brown.” In his book, Cowen argues that as the longitudinal data on vouchers proved underwhelming, conservatives shifted focus to the culture wars, and reframed school choice as a moral issue. Buoyed by a series of recent Supreme Court decisions that have reinforced the principle that tax dollars can go to religious education, religious school advocacy groups like the Herzog Foundation emerged as prominent school choice advocates in order to propagate and advance a conservative ideological agenda. “I think those things are not accidents,” Cowen says. “Many of the states that have passed voucher systems the last several months, either just before or just after, also severely curtailed access to reproductive care.”
If the bill passed by the General Assembly Senate and adopted by the House becomes law, the Opportunity Scholarship expansion will fund vouchers into 2032, by which time they project an annual appropriation of $825 million. Due to the variety of state laws and voucher programs, the school choice debates take on different contours. But the debates are not going away. In September of this year, a Maine Christian private school filed a lawsuit in the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals, challenging a district court decision regarding school vouchers. In Maine, religious schools can exempt themselves from state non-discrimination requirements that go against their sincerely held religious beliefs, provided they do not participate in the state school voucher program. In North Carolina—which has adopted the updated Title IX provisions that include protections for gender identity—a similar voucher standoff that addresses church, state, and culture could be in the offing someday, particularly as appropriations for the program approach $1 billion. Luebke believes that the expansion will be read by the philanthropic and business communities as “market signals” to invest in private education in the state, particularly as private school enrollment in the state continues to increase each year. For now, school choice remains on the back-burner of American political discourse. But it is unlikely to remain there for long.