The Senior policy analyst for Education and Law Project, Kris Nordstrom, looks at new data about school vouchers in North Carolina. Looks like they aren’t saving low-income students after all.
A new report from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) confirms what school voucher opponents have been saying: universal voucher programs are a wasteful giveaway to disproportionately wealthy families who have already enrolled their children in private schools.
According to the report, just 6,710 of the state’s 80,470 Opportunity Scholarship vouchers in the 24-25 school year went to students who had attended a North Carolina public school in the prior school year. The report did not examine the prior school enrollment of the 27,088 recipients who renewed the previous year’s voucher for 24-25, examining solely the prior school enrollment of this year’s 53,382 first-time voucher recipients.
The startling takeaway is this: a whopping 87 percent of new school vouchers in 24-25 went to families who have never attended a public school.
Diving deeper into the data, approximately 7,301 of the Opportunity Scholarship voucher recipients are kindergarteners. If we assume these kindergartners would have attended public schools in the same proportion as students currently in grades 1-12, it follows that 14.6 percent of the kindergarten recipients (1,063 students) would have likely attended a public school in the absence of the voucher program. This assumption means that most likely, 85 percent of school voucher money is being funneled to students who were always planning to attend private schools.