North Carolina was once considered the most progressive state in the South. Since the Tea Party sweep in 2010, the rightwing has gerrymandered the state so that The Legislature (the General Assembly) has a super-majority of Republicans. The General Assembly is currently redrawing Congressional districts to eliminate Democratic seats before the 2026 Congressional elections. All this in a state that elects a Democraric Governor!

Of course, the General Assembly enacted vouchers and removed income limits. The state now subsidizes the tuition of all students in private and religious schools. The biggest beneficiaries are religious schools.

The state is on track to spend $600 million this year for vouchers, most of which subsidize students in religious schools. Many of these schools use a Bible-based curriculum.

That is $600 million of public taxpayer money that should have been spent on public schools, schools that educate all children, not just those they choose.

The News-Observer reported:

Nearly 100,000 North Carolinians are now getting Opportunity Scholarships — meaning taxpayers are subsidizing tuition costs for most of the state’s private school students.

As of Oct. 6, 98,917 students were receiving Opportunity Scholarships — a 204% increase from two years ago and a 23% increase since last school year. The number of voucher students has exploded since state lawmakers opened the program last school year to all families, including wealthy families and those already attending private schools. 

The number of voucher students will continue to rise because the N.C. State Education Assistance Authority is still accepting applications for the spring semester.

“North Carolina is on track to see over 100,000 students use an Opportunity Scholarship this year,” said Mike Long, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina. “PEFNC is fully engaged to ensure every scholarship is used and that schools have the capacity to serve families: expanding private school seats through our EduBuilder initiative and maintaining vital outreach so parents know their options.

“Together, these strategies sustain both access and opportunity, making school choice real for every North Carolina family.” 

It’s a milestone in the state’s education history that’s being criticized by supporters of public schools. 

“It’s unfortunate because the dollar signs are so huge and our public schools are really struggling, and it’s a direct result of lack of support and financial investment in our public schools,” said Heather Koons, a spokesperson for Public Schools First NC.

The Opportunity Scholarship program has changed since it began providing vouchers to 1,216 students in the 2014-15 school year. The program was initially promoted by Republican lawmakers as a way to help low-income families pay for private schools to escape low-performing public schools. 

Over time, the program’s demographics have shifted from majority Black to majority white as lawmakers raised the income eligibility limits. Now 75% of voucher students are white. That’s compared to 63% in the 2023-24 school year, when there were still income limits for receiving a voucher. 

Family income is still used to determine the size of the award. Voucher amounts range from $3,458 to $7,686 per student for this school year.

Most of the Opportunity Scholarship students are using the money to attend religious schools. 

“The true beneficiaries of this program are the students and families who now have the opportunity to access a Christian education that aligns with their values,” said Kevin Mathes, superintendent of North Raleigh Christian Academy.

Existing private students getting new vouchers 

Opening the program to all families also coincided with state lawmakers sharply increasing voucher funding. 

The state has awarded $279.9 million this semester, putting it on pace to give $559.8 million to private schools by the end of the school year. 

 In comparison, the state awarded $185.6 million two years ago and $432.2 million last school year. The increase in awards coincides with private schools encouraging both their existing and new students to apply for Opportunity Scholarships. Public Schools First NC found several private schools also raised their tuition as they got more voucher money. A report from the state Department of Public Instruction indicated most new voucher students last school year were existing private school students. 

Voucher students used to account for a minority of North Carolina’s private school students. In the 2023-24 school year, there were 32,549 Opportunity Scholarship students out of 131,230 private school students statewide.

Last school year, there were 80,472 voucher students out of 135,738 private school students. This school year’s statewide private school enrollment figures won’t be released until next summer. 

“I really think we’re just creeping up and up and up so that all the students and all the private schools that accept vouchers are going to be subsidized,” said Koons of Public Schools First NC.

Are private schools discriminating against voucher students? 

Public Schools First has accused state lawmakers of using taxpayer dollars to discriminate against students and families because private schools can limit who they enroll. In contrast, public schools are supposed to accept all students. 

Public Schools First singled out North Raleigh Christian Academy, which has received the most money from the Opportunity Scholarship program so far this school year at $3.1 million. 

North Raleigh Christian’s admissions requirements include that at least one parent must be a Christian and students must score at grade level. In addition, the student handbook says “students with IQs of 90 or less are not enrolled because of the difficulty they will have in achieving academic success.” 

Koons contrasted the amount North Raleigh Christian is now getting for voucher students compared to the $541,217 it received two years ago when the state still had income eligibility limits. The school is on pace to far exceed the $4.3 million in voucher money it received last school year. 

“Wealthy families are now getting a state-subsidized tuition payment to go to a school that excludes students who may be challenging to teach,” Koons said. 

Mathes, North Raleigh Christian’s superintendent, defended the school.

“Our admissions process considers each applicant holistically, with thoughtful attention to how NRCA can responsibly serve students within the scope of our mission and available resources as we partner with families in their children’s education,” Mathes said. 

 “While private schools like NRCA do not have access to the same range of specialized resources as public systems, we work diligently to serve students well within our capacity and to recommend alternative settings when another environment might better meet a child’s needs.”

Nancy Bailey understands the need for special education services. She spent many years in the classroom as a teacher of students with disabilities. She was a principal and has a Masters and Ph.D. in the field. She is a relentless crusader for students, teachers and public schools. Like me, she opposes privatization of public funds. She knows that many charter schools and vouchers exclude students with special needs. Unlike public schools, charters and vouchers choose their students.

Nancy and I wrote a book together titled EdSpeak and Doubletalk: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling. In collaborating with her, I learned that she is a wise, dedicated, and deeply informed person. It’s a fun read for anyone who wants to cut through the misleading jargon of the day.

Nancy wrote about the origins and need for special education on her blog.

She wrote:

Donald Trump is destroying programs that help Democratic and Republican kids, including special education. He seems not to understand why laws exist to protect students.

Linda McMahon is eliminating the U.S. ED, without Congressional approval, which oversees critical federal laws for public schools, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). She fired the special education staff, mostly ending the department.

Health and Human Services (HHS) might manage special education, but HHS is a massive program with problems.

The Arc, an organization that supports those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, describes why this wouldn’t be a good idea.

…this move might be viewed as promoting a medical model of disability—one that treats disability as a diagnosis to be managed rather than recognizing students as learners with potential. Framing students with disabilities through a medical lens risks stigmatizing, segregating, and isolating them from their peers. It undermines decades of progress toward ensuring that students with disabilities are seen and supported as general education students first.

Some believe states will provide better accommodations. But history shows this has failed before. It’s why a federal mandate was created.

McMahon’s reckless changes, ending special education without viable solutions, demonstrate a lack of concern for a vulnerable population.

Those who have worked in the field over the years — parents and teachers — can certainly think of ways to help public schools better address student needs, including those with special education needs.

But that’s not what this is about. McMahon has no professional educational background to understand schools, students, children with disabilities, or the history of special education, or to make meaningful changes. She’s in this role to end services. She repeatedly brags about this claiming the U.S. ED isn’t necessary.

Instead of better funding for special education, which parents and teachers have demanded for years, she’s giving $500 million to charter schools, and, sadly, some Democrats will be onboard. They’ve wanted to privatize America’s schools for many years.

However, in all the years since their existence, charter schools have rarely been a solution for children with disabilities. Students are often counseled out and rejected, especially those with emotional and behavioral disabilities, ADHD, and intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Private schools are supposed to serve children with disabilities but religious schools are exempt. And who’s monitoring these schools which often don’t have the resources or the qualified staff to run good programs.

Also, importantly, charter schools and private schools don’t always include students with disabilities in general classes, called inclusion. Charter schools segregate children into disability groups for those with dyslexia, or schools for intellectual and developmental disabilities, much like the 1800s when children stayed at home or were primarily given religious classes.

Children don’t get opportunities to socialize with their peers and without oversight, these schools might not assist children to learn and find independence.

McMahon, by not enforcing the law that mandates public schools open their doors to children with disabilities, creates a dangerous situation, that will result in children with disabilities sliding backwards in time.

Make no mistake, special ed. has consistently been underfunded, but the belief that every child can learn and be educated is a promise Americans should support and protect.

Parents are told the law remains, but a law must be enforced, or it will likely fall apart. Reviewing history is necessary to remember why such a law became significant.

Warning! The following links include pictures and videos that are difficult to view.

Burton Blatt’s Christmas in Purgatory

In 1965, Burton Blatt and photographer, Fred Kaplan, began a research project at a Connecticut center for the developmentally disabled. They visited five state institutions in the east that housed individuals with developmental disabilities. Kaplan carried a miniature spy camera on his belt, secretly snapping pictures as they toured the facilities. They never identified the institutions, likely understaffed.

You can view Christmas in Purgatory HERE.

Burton Blatt increased our awareness of the inhumane treatment of those with disabilities, his legacy is described here. 

As an advocate of deinstitutionalization, he helped initiate community living programs and family support services. In his clinical work he emphasized the provision of education to children with severe disabilities, those whom he called “clinically homeless.” As a national leader in special education, he called for programs to integrate students with disabilities into public schools and worked to promote a more open society for them….

Here’s what to watch for and what we’ve already seen.

• More unaccountable charter and private schools that exclude children with disabilities.
• A reduction or end to IEP (Individual Educational Plan) or 504 plan meetings.
• More charter and private schools lacking inclusion, e.g., Schools for Dyslexia, Autism, etc.
• Vouchers that won’t cover the total cost of private school tuition.
• Private schools that reject students with disabilities, especially those with more severe disabilities.
• Fewer qualified special education teachers.
• More unaccountable homeschools.
• The threat of another eugenics movement.
• Children with difficulties in the classroom being ignored because there are no special education services.
• Unproven online programs or cyber schools known to fail.
• An increase of religious schools and curriculum.
• Abuse, as there will be less oversight, less teacher preparation, and more behavioral difficulties.
• Children sent home or expelled from school for acting out and not following rules.
• A return of badly run state institutions with little oversight.

For many who remember 1975 and the beginning of Public Law 94-142, who fought for children with disabilities to be served in their public schools, ending the All Handicapped Children Act —now IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) —is a bitter pill.

How will America turn this around? There doesn’t seem to be any silver lining at this time. The best hope is for a new President who makes education, public schools, and special education a priority.

I have been to the White House on several occasions. I first went there for a State Dinner in 1965 when Lyndon B. Johnson was President. I was there as a guest on several other occasions. Every time, I was in awe, star-struck. I felt as though I was walking on hallowed ground. I tried to hold onto every minute, wishing I could stop time.

And now a coarse vulgarian lives there, who has horrible taste. He paved over the Rose Garden. He hung gold-sprayed shlock from Walmart all over the Oval Office.

And now he is demolishing the East Wing to replace it with a ballroom for 999 people. The ballroom will be larger than the White House.

Trump doesn’t understand that the White House belongs to the people, not to him.

He said that the ballroom would not interfere with the White House. He lied.

He has no respect for the White House or its history.

This makes me sad. It makes me sick.

He waited until after #NoKings Day to desecrate the People’s House.

Donald Trump is a vandal.

Trump and his administration are determined to impose their rightwing agenda on the nation’s colleges and universities. They have withheld federal funding for scientific and medical research, using that money to demand compliance.

Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, former wrestling entrepreneur, recently rolled out their “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”

The Compact asked universities to pledge to do the following:

1. When admitting students, institutions must not take such factors as “sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, religious associations, or proxies for any of the foregoing into account, unless they are institutions “solely or primarily comprised is students of a specific sex or religious denomination.”
   Therefore, no factor such as sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation,
2. Institutions shall have all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test (i.e. SAT,
   ACT, or CLT) or program-specific measures of accomplishment in the case of music, art, and other
   specialized programs of study. Universities shall publicly report anonymized data for admitted and rejected
   students, including GPA, standardized test score, or other program-specific measures of accomplishments,
   by race, national origin, and sex.
3. To protect a vibrant marketplace of ideas, the signatories agree to foster ideological and political diversity and to “transform or abolish” institutional units that punish, belittle or spark violence against conservative ideas.
4. In hiring faculty and administrators, signatories shall not take into account race, gender, nationality, etc.
5. Women and men must be accorded separate and appropriate facilities, meaning trans people don’t exist.
6. Universities must agree to accept no more than 15% of their students from foreign countries and no more than 5% from any one country. They must also screen them to be sure they are not “anti-American.”

There is much more. Read the text of the 10-page document. It represents a very large degree of government intervention in the affairs of universities. And raises the question: who will police all these requirements?

The administration asked nine institutions to sign on to the Compact. So far, seven of the nine said no. The seven recognized that they were being asked to give up academic freedom and institutional independence in return for a guarantee of future funding.

The administration initially invited nine universities (on or around early October 2025) to accept the Compact:

These are the nine:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 

Brown University 

Dartmouth College 

University of Pennsylvania (Penn) 

University of Southern California (USC)

University of Virginia (UVA) 

University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) 

University of Arizona (UArizona) 

Vanderbilt University 

MIT was first to say no. Within a few days, the Compact was rejected by Penn, USC, Brown, Dartmouth, UVA, and–most recently– the University of Arizona.

Currently, only the University of Arizona and Vanderbilt are holdouts and are engaging in “dialogue.”

A group of scholars from different political perspectives explained their opposition to the Compact in an article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The article was co-written by Robert P. George, Tom Ginsburg, Robert C. Post, David M. Rabban, Jeannie Suk Gersen, and Keith E. Whittington.

We write as scholars of academic freedom to respond to the proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” We are politically diverse and do not share common views about the wisdom of particular proposals contained in the compact. Nor do we agree on the extent or substance of the reforms needed in American higher education today. We are, however, united in our concern about key features of the proposed compact.

The compact’s demands that universities and colleges eschew foreign students with “anti-American values” and that they impose a politically determined diversity within departments and other institutional units are incompatible with the self-determination that colleges and universities must enjoy if they are to pursue their mission as truth-seeking institutions. So also is the compact’s demand that universities and colleges select their students only on the basis of “objective” and “standardized” criteria. Colleges may of course voluntarily elect exclusively to deploy objective criteria (such as standardized-test scores and high-school or college grade-point averages), but these standards should not be imposed on institutions which, operating within the law, wish to include consideration of nonquantifiable criteria in selecting students.

Furthermore, we believe that certain aspects of the compact violate core principles of academic freedom. Academic freedom comes with obligations and limitations, to be sure; its essence, however, involves the liberty of faculty within the bounds of professional competence to teach and to research as they choose. The architect of America’s public-private research partnership, Vannevar Bush, asserted that “scientific progress” requires “the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” Some of us believe that colleges today are failing in important ways to promote independence of mind and protect academic freedom, but we are united in the conviction that an attempt to solve this problem by government intervention, even if in the form of conditions for eligibility for grants, will be counterproductive.…

As recognized for over a century, faculty should be able to engage as individual citizens in extramural speech. Faculty should exercise these rights responsibly and professionally, but when they fail to do so, it is not the role of the government or the university to sanction them. Colleges that censor their faculty will quickly undermine the vibrancy and initiative so vital for teaching and research.

The power to punish extramural speech has been abused against both conservative and liberal speakers in the past. The requirement of the compact that universities and colleges censor students and faculty who voice support for “entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organization” imposes overly intrusive regulation of constitutionally protected speech.

Almost all colleges enshrine the basic principles of academic freedom in contractual agreements with faculty. Elements of the compact seek to use financial incentives to pressure colleges to break these contractual agreements. For a university to bend to this pressure and sacrifice the academic freedom of its faculty is to abandon constitutive institutional commitments essential to both education and the pursuit of knowledge.