North Carolina’s high court ruled 4-3 in favor of vouchers yesterday.
Even those who like the idea of using public funds to send students to private and religious schools, as well as to pay for home-schooling, may have trouble stomaching this bizarre decision.
Sharon McCloskey writes in NC Policy Watch just how bad this decision is, how it will set back the education of large numbers of children by using public money for home schooling and for schools that have no accredited teachers, no curriculum, no standards. This cannot be the way to prepare for the 21st century. It sounds instead like a headlong rush back to the nineteenth century.
McCloskey writes:
Chief Justice Mark Martin, writing for the majority and joined by Justices Robert Edmunds, Paul Newby and Barbara Jackson, couched the opinion in terms of judicial restraint and deference to the legislature, saying that the court’s role was “limited to a determination of whether the legislation is plainly and clearly prohibited by the constitution.”
Finding that the state’s “Opportunity Scholarship Program” did not clearly violate the state constitution, the court reversed Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood’s 2014 ruling reaching the opposite conclusion.
“The General Assembly fails the children of North Carolina when they are sent with public taxpayer money to private schools that have no legal obligation to teach them anything,” Hobgood wrote at the time.
The challenged law, enacted as part of the 2013 state budget, allows the state to appropriate more than $10 million in public money to award qualifying low-income families $4200 per child for use at private schools.
Those schools, which can range from religious schools with several students to a home school of one, are not subject to state standards relating to curriculum, testing and teacher certification and are free to accept or reject students of their own choosing, including for religious or other discriminatory reasons.
In reaching its conclusion — and despite the constitution’s language that state funds should be “appropriated and used exclusively for establishing and maintaining a uniform system of free public schools” — the majority held that public funds may be spent on educational initiatives outside of the uniform system of free public schools.
As to the lack of accountability required of the private schools receiving public voucher money, the majority said that the constitutionally required “sound basic education” for North Carolina students, set down in the landmark Leandro decision, did not apply to private schools.
– See more at: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2015/07/23/states-highest-court-upholds-school-voucher-program-despite-lack-of-accountability-and-standards/#sthash.K1zyIHFX.dpuf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Cue the Satanists – they can usually be counted on to throw a monkey wrench in these sorts of things. All we need are a couple of Satanist voucher schools or a number of Satanist homeschoolers and North Carolina may quickly realize the error of its ways.
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That is actually a quite brilliant idea! All hail the Dark Lord of Hell and Oxford Commas!
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You are right. And there are lot of Wickans in NC.
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To hell with the Satanists and Wiccans.
Let’s just start some madrassas with an emphasis on medieval sharia thinking and demand that all politicians children/grandchildren are required to attend with their parents/grandparents suffering the consequences (you know, like public beheading) if the children “fail”. Maybe that would work to enlighten what the consequences of the decision can be.
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Do any of these public employees spend any time or energy on the public schools that serve 90% of kids of all income levels?
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Rheephorm “world-class rigorous standards”—when it’s time to label public schools “factories of failure” and “drop out factories” that need to be displaced, replaced and eliminated.
Rheephorm “world-class rigorous standards”—absent when $tudent $ucce$$ is at stake.
All depends on the moment and mood…
😎
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In case anyone’s interested.
Click to access Vouchers.pdf
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I am all for public tax dollars directly supporting students and teachers. What I am angry about is the billions wasted on top heavy administration, testing, and ridiculous programs. As a homeschooling family, it is frustrating to see our tax dollars support Pearson, then have to spend our own money on our own supplies.
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Why is it acceptable for public dollars to be used for religious instructions?
I did a quick google search of “NC Christian Schools Abecka” and found 7 schools accepting vouchers use this curriculum (I am sure there are many more):
Here are a few descriptions from the Abecka website:
https://www.abeka.com
Science:
“While secular science textbooks present modern science as the opposite of faith, the A Beka Book science texts teach that modern science is the product of Western man’s return to the Scriptures after the Protestant Reformation, leading to his desire to understand and subdue the earth, which he saw as the orderly, law-abiding creation of the God of the Bible.
The A Beka Book science and health program presents the universe as the direct creation of God and refutes the man-made idea of evolution. Further, the books present God as the Great Designer and Lawgiver, without Whom the evident design and laws of nature would be inexplicable. They give a solid foundation in all areas of science—a foundation firmly anchored to Scriptural truth.”
Math:
“Unlike the “modern math” theorists, who believe that mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute. Man’s task is to search out and make use of the laws of the universe, both scientific and mathematical.
A Beka Book provides attractive, legible, and workable traditional mathematics texts that are not burdened with modern theories such as set theory.”
History:
” A Beka Book history texts reject the Marxist/Hegelian conflict theory of history in favor of a truthful portrayal of peoples, lands, religions, ideals, heroes, triumphs, and setbacks. The result is positive, uplifting history texts that give students a historical perspective and instill within them an intelligent pride for their own country and a desire to help it back to its traditional values.
We present government as ordained by God for the maintenance of law and order, not as a cure-all for humanity’s problems. We present free-enterprise economics without apology and point out the dangers of Communism, socialism, and liberalism to the well-being of people across the globe. In short, A Beka Book offers a traditional, conservative approach to the study of what man has done with the time he has been given.”
From an Abeka brochure about Reading:
Click to access ABBReading.pdf
“Delightful
classics and poetry, as well as
stories and children’s novels,
give students insight into
their culture and their world
while presenting Christian
ideals and spiritual values.
….
Students also read
the Bible as a regular part of
their reading instruction, and
because of the outstanding
reading instruction, they are
able to read the Bible accurately
and with understanding
from a very early age”
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It’ll be an interesting country when everyone is heading off to their individual education provider with their backpack voucher.
I love the massive contradictions in ed reform- we need 45 states in the Common Core and parents who opt out of standardized testing are selfish monsters, but they then turn around and completely bail on the existing public school system they inherited and probably 95% of them benefited from.
It’s completely and utterly incoherent, this “movement”. Here I am turning my kid over for every experiment they come up with the understanding that he attends a public school with all the compromises that come with every public entity, while at the same time they are busy bailing on my kid’s school.
Can they at least decide what this is, what they believe in, what they support? “Agnostic” really isn’t cutting it on the ground.
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Our leadership (NC) seems like they want to head towards anarchy to me.
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I wonder if those Beka Book types would like to fly on a plane built with just Bible math.
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It’s all about economics. Those in power don’t need thousands of factory workers anymore, so the government is finished with providing free education to the masses (mass education). The only reason they did start public schools was to serve the masters of industrialization. Well now that industrialization has been outsourced, they could care less how educated the masses are. There will be enough kids who go to private schools to control and run the system. How educated do you need to be to work at a big-box retail store selling plastic junk from China? Think about it. How many scientists or intellectuals does a society need? Not too many. They can also insource brilliant minds from Germany, China and India. The era of public schooling is coming to an end. Without a vibrant middle class, you really don’t need mass education anymore, do you?
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Oh my gosh . . . That makes so much sense.
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“The era of public schooling is coming to an end.”
That’s what some of them want. But will it happen?
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Well, to defend the elite, history shows they are good at inbreeding and starting wars.
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About time for common sense. Parents of children in private and home schools pay public school taxes too, you know, yet don’t use a penny of a public school’s resources. What you see in the comments above and likely yet to come are public union teachers who fear their cushy 9 month a year overpaid jobs going away. Public schools have been failing most kids for decades, and people want to keep them ? Every time a new president or governor gets in office, the new Sec of Ed wants to “reform” public schools and throw more money at these unaccountable institutions. What does that tell you but that they are constantly failing. Private school and home school kids have been beating the pants off public school kids in standardized testing, again for decades, but we still hear all the myths about “kids won’t get an education” outside of public schools. John Taylor Gatto rightly called public schools a jobs project for unions and he should know. Public curriculum has floundered for decades, kids “graduate” high school reading at the 4th grade level, and are usually math illiterate thanks to public school curriculum and public school teachers who plainly don’t know any better than to teach such garbage, all overseen by administrators who are obsessed with controlling every nonconformist thought of their charges. Wake up people, there are a lot of better ways to learn than to be stuck in a 19th century prison-like building with uninspiring curriculum and boring teachers, only same-age classmates, police patrolling the hallways, and having “subjects” cut into 40 minute periods. There’s a big world out there that kids don’t get to explore until they’re 18. What kind of a life is that ? We can’t wait to kill off the dinosaur that is public education.
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It is clear that you are just another “drive by expert” when you believe that standardized tests are the marker of what goes on in school classrooms; when you ignore the effect of poverty in educational “outcomes;” when you make the logical error that when someone wants to reform something, that means that whole thing is objectively “failing;” when you claim that teachers are overpaid (LOL, look at a salary chart of professions, or at millionaires and billionaires who contribute nothing to society?); when you imply that public schools cannot be improved simply because they are “public;” when you miss the obvious contradiction in your statement that “killing” public education means most students WONT have the opportunity to experience a better life during or after their education.
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