A close look at the school voucher programs in NC shows that heightened scrutiny of operations, segregation impact, and student outcomes is warranted.
RALEIGH, NC, UNITED STATES, January 21, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — A new report North Carolina School Vouchers: Destroying Public Education dives deeply into the state’s 10-year voucher experiment.
North Carolina’s private school voucher programs use taxpayer dollars to pay tuition at private schools. The “Opportunity Scholarship” private school tuition vouchers have expanded rapidly over the past few years, transforming a once limited, targeted initiative into a universal entitlement that redirects substantial public resources to private education. Originally justified as a way to support low-income families seeking alternatives to the underperforming public schools their children were attending, the state’s voucher programs now function primarily as broad subsidies for private school tuition, including for wealthy families who have never enrolled their children in public schools.
Policy changes, especially the elimination of income limits and prior public school attendance requirements beginning in 2024–25, have fundamentally altered who benefits from vouchers. The overwhelming majority of new voucher recipients now come from families whose children previously attended/are already attending private schools. As a result, vouchers increasingly subsidize private education that families were already choosing and able to afford, rather than expanding educational options for underserved students.
At the same time there has been rapid growth of vouchers, public school funding has remained
largely flat in recent budgets. NC’s drop in the national rankings for teacher pay and per pupil expenditures reflect the legislature’s failure to sufficiently support our public schools. By the end of the 2024–25 school year, the state had appropriated more than $1.4 billion for vouchers. Under current law, annual voucher funding is scheduled to continue rising sharply, reaching nearly $1 billion per year within the next decade. These increases have occurred even as public schools face persistent underfunding, dropping the state to the bottom of national rankings. In the Education Law Center’s December 2025 report, North Carolina ranked #50 in education funding level and #50 in funding effort.
This new report examines the history of the NC’s voucher programs, explores the original justifications for implementing them, and documents their growth; analyzes the pedagogical and operational differences between public and private schools; considers the mechanisms through which private schools are exempt from accountability measures that apply to public schools; and discusses problems with voucher programs in North Carolina and in other states, including poor academic outcomes. In addition, the report identifies and analyzes problematic features of voucher schools such as racial segregation, discriminatory admissions policies, private school tuition increases, and lack of financial transparency. These features suggest that, despite the public funding for and growth of vouchers in North Carolina, heightened scrutiny by taxpayers and policymakers is warranted.
Heather Koons
Public Schools First NC
info@publicschoolsfirstnc.org
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