On One Elsewords: North Carolina School Privatizers Are Subverting Democracy
Nora De La Cour writes for Jacobin.com and The Economic Hardship Reporting Project
Hi friends. This week Nora follows her reporting on the North Carolina legislature’s ongoing scheme to destroy public education, with a deeper look into the undemocratic means with which privatizers have imposed their voucher scam on parents and students against their wishes:
“In 2013, North Carolina’s right-wing legislature enacted a school voucher plan called the Opportunity Scholarship, offering public funding for parents to send their children to private schools. There was just one problem: people didn’t want to use it.
Demand for Opportunity Scholarships (OS) consistently lagged far behind available funds until 2021, when the legislature allocated half a million (now one million) annual dollars just to market the program. But even with this generous advertising budget fueled by tax money the state’s public schools desperately need, the OS program struggled to attract parents. In fact, as of last spring, nearly 70 percent of polled North Carolina voters had no idea what Opportunity Scholarships are. The General Assembly even felt the need to include a provision in its anti-LGBTQ “parents’ rights” bill forcing public schools to educate families about private school vouchers.
The deep-pocketed donors powering the GOP’s laser focus on school privatization have always found vouchers to be a tough sell. Perhaps the main reason for this is that, even with organizations like Moms for Liberty working day and night to gin up chaos and controversy around K-12 education, most parents are still fond of their kids’ public schools. As Robert Asen, a school privatization expert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told Jacobin: “Public schools are lively centers of activity that benefit whole communities and engender civic pride, as, for example, when high school sports teams make the playoffs. People get this.”
Reporting from states like Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee shows that vouchers are unpopular even among Republicans, particularly rural Republicans, who perceive the existential threat that school privatization poses to rural communities.
In September, North Carolina became the tenth state to universalize private school choice. Starting next school year even billionaires will be able to cash in on the OS program, extracting tax revenues that might otherwise be used to support the state’s public schools, which are in crisis due to defunding. Data from other states with universal programs show that vouchers enable a phenomenal upward transfer of wealth, with about three-quarters being claimed by privileged families whose children have never attended public schools. That’s partly because tuition at high-quality private schools far exceeds what a voucher will cover, meaning average people are priced out of robust private education even with the subsidies their tax dollars are paying for. It’s a reverse Robin Hood scheme.”
Read the full article at Jacobin.com