Public Schools First, North Carolina’s premier parent-advocacy group, warns that the GOP-controlled legislature plans to expand the state’s voucher program on Monday. It asks parents and concerned citizens to sign a petition and get active to stop the ongoing campaign to defund public schools.
Public Schools First NC writes:
In a familiar move, voucher supporters in the legislature are adding a $248M voucher expansion to an existing bill instead of proposing a stand-alone bill that can be debated and voted on separately.
House Bill 10 “Require Sheriffs to Cooperate with ICE” has been newly branded “Require ICE Cooperation & Budget Adjustments.” This is where they have included an additional $248 million for private school vouchers in 2024-25.
With the school year underway, parents have already had to make schooling decisions for their children. This means that the $248 million is primarily for private school tuition for students who are already enrolled in a private school this year. In other words, families that can already afford private school will simply receive a tax-funded tuition rebate.
Left out of the ICE/Budget Adjustments bill are any additional funds for teacher pay, which leaves the average pay increase at 3% for teachers this year. Due to inflation increases, the 3% raise is effectively a pay cut unless local communities add salary supplements large enough to make up the difference. Even worse, teachers with more than 4 years of experience received increases of less than 2% this year.
Why aren’t legislators spending the $248 million boosting teacher salaries so they’re not getting a pay cut?
Put into specific dollar amounts, the proposed voucher expansion would give $4,480 to families (of 4) making up to $259,740 per year and $3,360 to millionaires, while teachers with 10 years of experience make just $49,350 per year and are stuck with a skimpy $920 salary increase. Is this fair? Is this how we strengthen and support our public schools?
Also missing are dollars to support early childhood education or fund North Carolina Pre-K. Currently just 53% of eligible children are enrolled in NC Pre-K, leaving nearly 24,000 low-income children without an adequate pre-k option.
Instead of clearing the private school voucher waitlist to fund wealthy families, perhaps the legislature should spend the $248 million to clear the NC Pre-K waitlist and support low-income families.
There are many, many more important issues the legislature should be addressing during their time in Raleigh than adding dollars to a program that harms public schools and sends dollars to private schools that are completely unaccountable to the public.
It is critical that you act now! The NC Senate will open their session at noon. Join us if you can.
Please sign our petition to let legislators know you want them to OPPOSE THIS THREAT TO OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS – TELL THEM VOTE NO TO ANY PRIVATE SCHOOL VOUCHER EXPANSION!Sign the Petition
Need help explaining this to your neighbors and friends? Public Schools First NC just released a short video explaining vouchers in NC. Please share it widely!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
FINANCIAL FRAUD BY CHARTER SCHOOLS IS STEALING TAXPAYER MONEY FROM GENUINE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and pocketed by private corporate “school choice” charter school operators that the IG investigation declared: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals.”
In the 1990’s, hedge fund billionaires discovered that they could profit from the school choice movement and so they took over by founding corporate chains of charter schools that have reaped billions of dollars since then through various mechanisms, such as REITs that collect exorbitant lease and rental profits from charter schools…as the expense of public schools.
Charter schools claim to be non-profit. And yet, There are numerous schemes for running a non-profit for profit. For example, in two reports — “Chartered for Profit” and “Chartered for Profit II” — The Network for Public Education explains the most common schemes: Some charters lease their buildings back from related businesses. In one New York case, a chartering organization leased a space from the diocese, then leased that space to its own charter school for over TEN TIMES the amount it was actually paying.
Then there are “sweeps” contracts, where a non-profit charter hires a for-profit management organization to handle everything, in return for nearly every dollar the charter takes in. As one contract cited in the report states, the management organization receives “as remuneration for its services an amount equal to the total revenue received” by the school “from all revenue sources.”
In many cases, a non-profit charter school simply serves as a pass through for money headed to a for-profit business.
THE MOST EFFECTIVE STRATEGY FOR DISMANTLING THE CHARTER SCHOOL MOVEMENT is to simply require that charter schools file THE SAME, EXACT PUBLIC DOMAIN QUARTERLY AND ANNUAL BUDGET REPORTS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE REQUIRED TO FILE.
Every state in our nation should have that same common sense accountability requirement for charter schools.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a “public charter school”. Charter school operators spend a lot of taxpayer money telling taxpayers that charter schools are “public” schools — but they are not. As the Supreme Courts of Washington State and New York State have ruled, charter schools are actually private schools because THEY FAIL TO PASS THE MINIMUM TEST for being genuine public schools; that is — They aren’t run by school boards who are elected by, and therefore under the control of and accountable to voting taxpayers, that is, THE PUBLIC. All — ALL — charter schools are corporations run by private parties or are religious organizations. Taxpayers have no say in how their tax dollars are spent in charter schools.
CHARTER STUDENTS LOSE GROUND: The Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) — which is funded by pro-charter organizations — has reported that in the case of popular online charter schools, students actually lose ground in both reading and math — but online charter schools are the fastest-growing type of charter school because they make it easiest to skim away public tax dollars. CREDO has been conducting years-long research into the educational quality of charter schools and yet even this charter-school-funded research center’s findings are that in general charter schools don’t do any better academically than genuine public schools.
“SCHOOL CHOICE”: The catch-phrase “school choice” was concocted by racists following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that required racial integration in public schools. After that, racist organizations used racist politicians to conduct a decades-long attack that underfunded public schools and crippled their ability to provide the full measure of education and to “prove” that public schools were “failing”. That public school “failure” is an issue manufactured by racists organizations and politicians is well-documented in the book “The Manufactured Crisis”.
RACIAL RESEGREGATION of America’s school systems by the private charter school industry is so blatant and illegal that both the NAACP and ACLU have called for a stop to the formation of any more charter schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA summed it up, stating that charter schools are “a civil rights failure.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/29/report-the-department-of-education-has-spent-1-billion-on-charter-school-waste-and-fraud/#ab1fbdb27b64
(Share this with North Carolina voters.)
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This reminds me of how grateful I am that Kamala Harris chose unabashedly progressivive Tim Walz over smooth talking charter chum Josh Shapiro. Supporting religious indoctrination with public money is forbidden by both reason and the Constitution. And gutting public schools of vitally-needed resources in order to create risk-free perpetual capital streams for hedge funds has no place in the Democratic party.
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It’s sickening. But I am so glad to see the truth of the matter come through with such clarity–the “no accountability” thing for charter schools should have been the biggest red flag from the beginning of its inception.
The first time I saw that charter advocates were complaining about accountability, I had one of those head-slapping moments . . . WHAT? What’s THAT about? And then there’s lessening teacher credentials? Excuse me? . . . I thought, those are professionals teaching our children that you are talking about–treating them as if they were mere babysitters? That’s why they make terms like “gobsmacked” to account for the way I felt when I heard such things, and as a replacement for public schools?
The whole set-up is an obvious doorway to fraud and a reduction in service to the “general public,” which for them is an Orwellian double-speak for (as the note says, racism, classism, educational redlining for the poor. “Come on in, . . . here, . . . rob me,” charter people say to administrators of public funds.
Do they think they work at the Supreme Court? CBK
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Well said. It’s been an unregulated slippery slope. Now these right wing governors have their marching orders from their billionaire donors. They are all trying to impose vouchers on their states by any means necessary with or without public approval.
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Retired and Diane: I smell Leo and his method of legislative duplication? (ALEC?) CBK
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Ha!
Funny, isn’t it, that the same people who demanded high-stakes testing and accountability for public schools enthusiastically support vouchers, where there is no accountability. Think Jeb Bush.
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