North Carolina flag painted with color chalk on old blackboard
It was only a few weeks ago in late August that North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper (D) unveiled a budget proposal that sought to defund the state’s opportunity scholarship program for children from low income and working class families. But by Friday, September 4, Governor Cooper found himself signing a bill into law that instead increases funding for that school choice expanding program.
The good news for North Carolina families in need of more education options is that thousands of additional children and parents will soon receive education funding that they can use to attend a better school than the one to which their home address currently ties them. Aside from the benefit this will provide to parents and children in need of more education options, this vote also sends a powerful political message given the overwhelming bipartisan majorities with which it was passed. This vote in North Carolina, one of the most hotly contested 2020 battleground states, is an indicator that near-uniform Democratic opposition to school choice is weakening.
Votes, campaign proposals, and platforms of the past decade demonstrate a move by leading Democratic politicians, at both federal and state levels, toward near-lockstep opposition to policies that expand school choice, which include education savings accounts, tax credit scholarship programs, and charter schools. The Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force, for example, is calling for the elimination of tax credit scholarship programs, the repeal of education savings accounts, and new restrictions for charter schools.
On Thursday, September 3 the Republican-controlled North Carolina General Assembly passed Covid-19 relief legislation that expands the state’s opportunity scholarship program, which was established in 2013 and today helps fund private school tuition for more than 12,000 children. This latest expansion of North Carolina’s school choice programs, which was approved with overwhelming majorities and bipartisan support in both chambers of the General Assembly, raises the income threshold for opportunity scholarship eligibility from $63,000 to $72,000 for a family of four. The bill also increases funding for education savings account and grant programs that provide children with disabilities access to higher quality education.
“The pandemic has increased dramatically the demand for school choice options,” said Senate President Phill Berger (R-Rockingham), who added that having more education options and greater school choice “should not be a privilege available only to those who are wealthy and can afford it.”
“I think about a single mother,” Berger said at a recent press conference on the relief package. “Maybe she can see her child slipping, not grasping concepts. Maybe she knows intuitively that her kid needs to be in a classroom.”
The North Carolina Senate is comprised of 29 Republicans and 21 Democrats. The relief bill that expanded school choice passed last week by a vote 44 to 5, with 16 Senate Democrats, many of whom have opposed school choice programs in the past, voting for this expansion of school choice.
There were also a number of Democrats in the North Carolina House who voted for the bill. The North Carolina House has 65 Republicans and 55 Democrats. This latest expansion of school choice passed the House last week with 41 House Democrats voting with Republicans for the bill.
Thanks to the large veto proof majorities with which Senate President Berger and Speaker Tim Moore (R-Kings Mountain) passed this relief package, along with the inclusion of other provisions that Governor Cooper wanted and would have a hard time vetoing, the Governor signed the bill into law one day after the General Assembly sent it to his desk. In doing so, Governor Cooper expanded the very opportunity scholarship program that he had proposed defunding only a few weeks prior.
The bill provided $6.5 million in additional funding for the Special Education Scholarship Grants for the Children with Disabilities Program and the Education Savings Account Program, which will get 2,500 children currently on waiting lists into the private school of their choice. Bill supporters point out that this will provide needed resources to families of children with disabilities who have been particularly disadvantaged during the pandemic.
“It is unconscionable that school districts aren’t providing students with special needs the support they’re promised,” Senator Joyce Krawiec (R-Forsyth) said. “We’ve all had to make sacrifices because of this pandemic, but we should not be sacrificing children’s futures.”
The bill signed into law somewhat begrudgingly by Governor Cooper also repeals the limit on the number of kindergarten and first grade opportunity scholarships that can be issued each year. Despite this victory for expansion of school choice in North Carolina, a pending legal challenge could undo much of it, sending thousands of children back to the government-run schools that have failed or inadequately served them in the past.
The North Carolina Association of Educators — whose leadership insists that they’re not a union, but they do lobby and call for what are effectively strikes, referred to ask organized walk outs — and a group of parents filed a lawsuit in July accusing the state’s Opportunity Scholarship program of operating with insufficient government oversight. The lawsuit also charges that some schools that receive funding discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and religion.
“The N.C. Association of Educators should be focused on helping educators prepare for the most difficult school year of their lives,” said Dr. Terry Stoops, vice president of research and director of education studies at the John Locke Foundation. “Instead, NCAE leadership has committed its dwindling resources to a lawsuit designed to seize private school scholarships from low-income families and force children to return to dysfunctional district schools.”
No matter the outcome of that legal challenge, this bipartisan vote in North Carolina indicates that Democrats might be learning from past mistakes. For example, there is a case to be made that Andrew Gillum’s opposition to Florida’s school choice programs, along with Ron DeSantis’s support for them, played a role in Gillum’s defeat in a gubernatorial election for which most polling had indicated the Democrat would prevail. The theory is Gillum’s opposition to school choice cost him a critical mass of support in a key constituency, black women.
“Of the roughly 650,000 black women who voted in Florida, 18% chose Mr. DeSantis, according to CNN’s exit poll of 3,108 voters,” William Mattox, the director of the Marshall Center for Educational Options at the James Madison Institute, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published a few weeks after Gillum’s 2018 defeat. “This exceeded their support for GOP U.S. Senate candidate Rick Scott (9%), Mr. DeSantis’s performance among black men (8%) and the GOP’s national average among black women (7%).”
This recent expansion of school choice in North Carolina, along with the significant bipartisan support with which it passed, indicates more Democrats may be catching on to the fact that opposing school choice, regardless of whether they want to acknowledge the policy merits, is a political loser and that is the case more so than ever in 2020, when demand for more education options is through the roof.
“I live an area that voted 92% for Hillary Clinton,” Reason Magazine editor-at-large Matt Welch remarked on the recent Reason Roundtable podcast, and yet “the amount of hot fire I am seeing by parents against the teachers union here and their role and their attitudes and even just their behavior in PTA meetings, it’s eye opening.”
New research could justify and add fuel to such parental rage, as it provides evidence that science and safety is not the determining factor in whether public schools across the U.S. are opening for in-person instruction.
“Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public districts covering about 38 percent of all students enrolled in K-12 public schools in the country, our study finds that school districts in places with stronger teachers’ unions are much less likely to offer full-time, in-person instruction this fall,” write the researchers, Corey DeAngelis, director of school choice at Reason Foundation and Christos Makridis, assistant research professor at Arizona State University and a senior adviser at Gallup. “For example, our models indicate that school districts in states without right-to-work laws are 14 percentage points less likely to reopen in person than those in states with such laws, which prevent unions from requiring membership.”
Teachers unions overplay their hand at their own risk, as the challenges presented in 2020 are causing many to rethink their views of the public school system and the power structure behind it.
“I don’t realize if they (they being teachers unions) realize how much they are pushing it in terms of public opinion against them and also making people come to all kinds of new and weird considerations about how public school is organized,” Welch added. “This will be a really interesting few weeks and months,” Welch notes, when it comes to “how parents and their relationship with teachers unions go.”
It will be interesting to see if more left-leaning lawmakers follow North Carolina Democrats’ lead and begin opening up to greater school choice. Increasing bipartisan support for more school choice would be bad news for teachers union officials and their lobbyists, but a welcome development for many children and parents.
