Summary:
- Legislative leaders failed to pass many of their priorities, including private school vouchers
- Rural lawmakers balked at vouchers because they mostly benefit urban counties
- Voucher money was mostly earmarked for wealthy families
Why did Republican leaders of the North Carolina legislature fail to pass a second massive expansion of private school vouchers, as they had repeatedly promised their supporters they would, before adjourning for the summer recess?
This question has led to confused head-scratching among North Carolina political observers, as well as angry recriminations from conservative activists. To be sure, private school vouchers are far from the only Republican priority that has failed to materialize: 2023’s casino legalization scheme fell apart in a slapstick fashion that nearly resulted in a primary challenge to Senate Leader Phil Berger himself, and the legislature also failed to come to any agreement on what to do with the state’s nearly $1 billion budget surplus. Only time will tell if Republicans in the State House and their counterparts in the State Senate find a way to govern together before the end of this year, or not.
While some close observers have suggested the failure of the private school voucher expansion is due to the deteriorated relationship between House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate Leader Phil Berger, there’s another, more straightforward answer: Speaker Tim Moore most likely does not have the votes in his caucus for more voucher giveaways – yet.
Private schools are mostly for cities
To understand the political support for vouchers, it’s important to understand how private schools themselves are distributed. In short, private schools are mostly an urban-county phenomenon.
Of the 881 private schools registered in the State of North Carolina, about half (431, or 48.9%) are located in just 10 counties, all of them (sub)urban. The next 25% are spread across 19 counties, and the next 25% are in 60 counties. 11 counties in the state have no private school in them at all:
Shown another way, vast swaths of the state – mainly the rural east, northwest and western mountain regions – have very few, if any, private schools in them:
Private schools are clustered in densely populated areas because they are fundamentally a business which relies on customers. If there are no customers willing to pay, there’s no business. Lightly populated rural areas are unattractive to private school entrepreneurs in two ways: not only are do residents tend to have less income to spend, but their children are also more expensive to serve. Busing alone costs many rural public schools a small fortune because their student population is more spread out. Attracting qualified teachers and staff is also much more difficult than in urban areas.
For many rural lawmakers, private schools are just not a very relevant issue, because they are either marginal or don’t exist at all in their districts. Not only do their districts overwhelmingly rely on public schools to educate the next generation, but in many of them, the local county school system is also the largest single employer.
North Carolina’s rural school districts are (somewhat famously) not flush with excess resources these days. That very lack of funding has been the impetus behind the Leandro Plan, and its research-backed proposal to re-fund rural education in North Carolina. (See the Leandro Plan’s proposed funding increase in your county.) Yet vouchers do the opposite – they instead draw money into comparatively wealthier, urban counties – and to those in them.
Vouchers are for the wealthy
Besides the discomfort with sending yet more taxpayer funds back to wealthier counties, another concern for rural lawmakers was the recipients of that largesse. Most private school vouchers were to go to relatively wealthier families, the large majority of whom were already sending their children to private school. In a state where the median household income is $66,000 a year, the majority of applicants to the private school voucher program were families making over $100,000 a year, and about 1 in 6 made more than a quarter million dollars a year:
Thus, rural lawmakers were being asked to sign off on sending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to wealthy people in far-away counties to attend private schools which many of them already attended, and to which residents of their own county were ineligible for.
At least some of them concluded that this was a raw deal, and they withheld their votes for it.
In doing so, they joined rural Republican lawmakers in many states where private school vouchers have been pushed by monied ideological interests from out of state. Private school vouchers are an attempt to systematically dismantle public education, as many of its boosters freely admit. All North Carolinians, though especially parents, can celebrate the failure – even if temporary – of such rotten policy.
