Veteran education journalist Lindsay Wagner writes that anyone who wants to know what Betsy DeVos will do to schools need look no further than North Carolina. It has already happened there.

North Carolina was taken over by the Tea Party in 2010 and has gone on a rampage to privatize education and defund public schools. The legislature wiped out its very successful investment in teacher preparation–the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program–and replaced it with Teach for America. The Teaching Fellows made a five-year commitment and most became career teachers. TFA come and go within 2-3 years. Same cost, different results. One produces well-prepared career teachers, the other produces education tourists.

Charters, vouchers, cybercharters. North Carolina has it all.

Devos’ philanthropic efforts and her work running the American Federation for Children (AFC) have helped pave the way for North Carolina’s own school voucher program, which allows low-income families to use taxpayer-funded $4,200 vouchers each year for tuition at private, mostly religious schools that are not held to robust transparency and accountability standards and can discriminate against those who don’t pass a religious litmus test or identify as LGBTQ by barring them from enrolling.

In 2012, Democratic and Republican North Carolina lawmakers who were on board with the idea of school vouchers received more than $90,000 in campaign donations from AFC. The next year lawmakers enacted the school voucher program, which started out with an annual state commitment of just $10 million.

Then after winning a court case challenging the constitutionality of the program, lawmakers voted to significantly expand the school voucher program even though they had no data before them to indicate one way or another whether students leaving public schools using vouchers were actually doing better at private schools. The school voucher program is now scheduled to grow to $145 million annually by 2027. Between now and then, North Carolina will have spent nearly $1 billion on an unaccountable taxpayer-funded program.

The state’s top recipient of school vouchers, Trinity Christian School in Fayetteville, has received nearly $1 million in taxpayer funds since 2014. Last week it was reported that the state Department of Revenue arrested Trinity Christian’s athletic director following an investigation that turned up enough evidence to charge him with embezzling hundreds of thousands of employee tax withholdings over a seven year period.

It’s an unsurprising turn of events given that the state hasn’t enacted strong oversight measures for the school voucher program. Virtually anyone running a private school can receive publicly-funded school vouchers—most schools don’t have to routinely provide a look at how they balance their books or provide any robust evidence that their students are learning.

Now that DeVos is no longer just a private fundraiser pushing school vouchers at the state level but is now the federal education secretary, can she “voucherize” the entire public education system in the United States? No, not alone — besides, most of public education is financed at the state and local level. President Trump’s proposal to pour $20 billion into vouchers is contingent on state and local actors matching dollars and then some. As Vox’s Libby Nelson explains, DeVos could find some other creative ways to get federal dollars into voucher-like programs, but really the onus is on state legislatures to move the voucher agenda.

But if North Carolina’s steady march toward a school voucher program that continues to expand with very few accountability and transparency measures in place is any indication, DeVos has levers outside of her role as federal education secretary to try to keep the momentum going for state-born school voucher programs. And that is worth watching.

Charter schools

DeVos favors charter schools as well, although we’ve heard less about those from her as of late. Nonetheless, charter schools have been part of her philanthropic efforts over time and charter school advocates in North Carolina are enthusiastic about her confirmation as education secretary.

From 1997 until 2011, North Carolina experimented with charter schools, keeping a cap on how many can operate here at 100 schools. Charters are public schools too, but they are given more latitude in hiring and management practices and can do innovative things with their academic offerings—all in the name of improving education writ large.

But in 2011 something changed. Lawmakers did away with the cap on how many charter schools can operate here and since then, the charter school sector has grown at a fairly rapid rate—now at 167 schools. One effect of this expansion has been an an ever-increasing squeeze on public school budgets, which has in turn touched off a years-long fight at the legislature on how public dollars should flow to charter schools.
Meanwhile, resources and increased oversight have not grown concurrently with the charter school sector’s expansion, however; still a tiny group of people in Raleigh is charged with overseeing what is now approaching double the number of charters. And, according to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), recent legislation weakens charter school accountability and oversight and allows bad schools to stay open longer than they should be allowed.

A number of charter schools have suddenly closed in recent times, sometimes leaving students without an academic home in the middle of the school year. Poor governance and financial problems most commonly plague charters, and robust accountability and transparency measures still seem to be lacking as the industry experiences rapid growth. For-profit charter chain operators can run these schools and shield how they spend tax dollars behind a curtain—and lawmakers haven’t done much to force them to be more transparent.

The Tea Party leaders in North Carolina are thrilled with her selection as Secretary of Education. They have invited her to come and see how they have implemented all of her failed ideas. She has given generously to the political campaign’s of the state’s very rightwing senators.

As a result of DeVos efforts—along with those of other school privatization advocates—hundreds of millions of public dollars now flow to school vouchers, charter schools and virtual charter schools.

So when she does come to visit, it will be more like a welcome home party for DeVos. North Carolina has been her playground for years.