According to Article 9, section 2 of the North Carolina constitution, “The General Assembly shall provide by taxation and otherwise for a general and uniform system of free public schools, which shall be maintained at least nine months in every year, and wherein equal opportunities shall be provided for all students.”

Equal. Let’s think about that for a minute. Is it equal to siphon money away from the public schools to private schools via vouchers? For that matter, is it even constitutional?

Many who support vouchers cite the choice it offers families. But if that choice doesn’t equally allow all families to afford private schools, then is that something that tax payer dollars should be funding? Few private schools provide transportation, free lunch or special education services like public schools do, leaving parents to pick up the tab for these services. Even if the voucher covers a private school’s tuition, it doesn’t take into account these services — services public schools must provide to all.

Finally, one of the big problems is we simply don’t know the quality of education children using vouchers are receiving in comparison to a public school education. The Opportunity Scholarship, North Carolina’s fund for private education vouchers, hasn’t allowed for proper data collection to see how it is working and for whom. That’s a problem.

We recently published an article, Bringing Back Exclusion: NC’s School Voucher Program, by J. Drew Tonissen, a North Carolina teacher. The article aligned with Public Ed Works’ mission to educate people about the benefits of our public education systems and explain how public schools are funded and supported. Vouchers neither fund nor support public education in North Carolina.

To help continue to fulfill Public Ed Works’ mission, and to clear up any misinformation, we asked Dr. Tonissen to share some common misconceptions surrounding vouchers in our state.

Ginny Gaylor, executive editor, Public Ed Works

Eight myths about vouchers in NC

Myth 1

Opportunity Scholarships do not impact educational outcomes for scholarship students, and they provide measures of accountability to the public about whether such students have made academic progress or have fallen behind.

Numerous rigorous studies have found negative or statistically insignificant effects on student achievement. Abdulkadiroglu et al (2018) find: “Lottery-based estimates show that Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) vouchers dramatically reduce student achievement.” The effects of vouchers in this study were equal opportunity; they brought scores down in all four tested subjects, but particularly so in math, where having a voucher reduced the probability of scoring “approaching basic” by 15 points.

After finding negative effects for voucher students after a one year period, Mills and Wolf (2019) expanded their study to examine effects after four years to present more robust results. After the four year period, they found students who used vouchers performed “noticeably worse on state assessments than their control group counterparts.” Furthermore, “these estimates are statistically significant in the majority of models and are consistently negative in both math and science.”

Webber et al., (2019) found no significant impacts on reading or math achievement in its evaluation of the Washington, D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship program. Students in the group that received a scholarship offer scored .1 percentile points higher on the math test, and 1.6 percentile lower on the reading test compared with the control group. These findings were not statistically significant. Interestingly, the authors also note that future achievement evaluations will be impossible going forward because of a law passed in Congress preventing them.

Myth 2

Opportunity Scholars scored higher on standardized tests in reading, math, and language compared to their public school peers, according to a study conducted at NC State University.

NC State has provided one study that demonstrated an increase in student achievement for participants in the Opportunity Scholarship Program. Titled An Analysis of the Effects of North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship Program on Student Achievement, by Anna Egalite, D.T. Stallings, and Stephen R. Porter, the study has limitations. Not only did this study have a small sample size, but the authors note the following in introduction:

Specifically, an analysis comparing schools that regularly use Iowa Test of Basic Skills tests (which are majority Catholic schools) to those that regularly use an alternative assessment regime (e.g., the Terra Nova or Stanford assessments) reveals no differences in the academic achievement of voucher students in non-ITBS-using private schools. This suggests that the positive coefficients observed for ITBS using private schools could be driving the overall results, which may have important policy implications.

This comment implies that the positive results may not be a result of receiving vouchers, but rather an unknown variable connected with Catholic schools. This suggests that some of the positive findings may reflect characteristics of the participating schools rather than the effect of the voucher itself.

The NC State study also indicated that vouchers increased math, reading, and language test scores. However, Egalite, Stallings and Porter make clear that there was “no effect on reading scores” in the article’s abstract.

Myth 3

The 2016 Friedman Foundation Report by Greg Forster shared that 31 of 33 peer-reviewed studies found that a school choice program improves the outcome for public-school students in the neighboring area. One report found no effect and one found a negative effect.

Academics have noted that the Friedman Foundation Report from 2016 has critical limitations. It indicates that 31 of 33 peer-reviewed studies found that a school choice program improves the outcome for public-school students in the neighboring area.” To be clear, this does not suggest that vouchers have a positive impact on test scores, but rather that students who do not choose to use a voucher benefit from the program’s existence. However, the methods used in this study have been criticized, notably by the Director at the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University, Christopher Lubienski. He explains that the Friedman Foundation narrowed its focus on a limited number of studies in the U.S. that showed positive results for vouchers. From those studies, the researchers used a simple vote tally method, so if a study contained any positive effect for any subgroup, that study counted as a positive “vote.” Lubienski also explains that vouchers are the raison d’être for the Friedman Foundation; it literally would not exist were it not for the voucher movement, and therefore it has a vested interest in the movement’s success. Moreover, he concludes that this report “appears to be motivated by the need for positive evidence on the efficacy of vouchers, and they exclude research that does not align with their criteria.”

Myth 4

Segregation is not a factor with the Opportunity Scholarships because the statute creating them forbids “discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin and 21% of Opportunity Scholars are African American or Hispanic.

While admirable that the authors of the Opportunity Scholarship included this language in the law, it does not mean that segregation is not present in this system. Many private schools in North Carolina were founded as “segregation academies” to allow white parents to opt out of sending their children to integrated schools in the 1960s and 70s. In rural North Carolina, many private schools founded as segregation academies remain overwhelmingly white in counties with diverse populations. Researchers at ProPublica identified 39 such academies operating today that receive voucher money. Of these, 20 schools reported student bodies that were at least 85% white in districts where this did not come close to representing the demographics of the area. These 20 schools brought in more than $20 million in voucher funding over a three year period.

Myth 5

Opportunity Scholarships benefit way more lower income families than they do wealthy families. Two-thirds of the scholarship money goes to families in Tier One (poor) and Tier Two (getting by) income levels with only 11% of Tier Four (wealthy) families receiving any of the funding.

It’s true that two thirds of Opportunity Scholarship funding goes to students who fall into Tier One and Tier Two. But this leaves out an important point: 34% of the funding is going to families who are at the 75th percentile of household income in North Carolina, or higher. The Opportunity Scholarship recipients are divided up into four tiers based on income, according to the most recent figures from the 2025-2026 school year.

Tier	Income	Max Award
1	Up to $59,478	$7,686
2	$59,478-$118,956	$6,918
3	$118,956-$267,651	$4,612
4	Above $267,651	$3,458

The 11% of the funds that go to the highest Tier comes out to a $64 million expenditure. Some quick math based on U.S. Census figures demonstrates that a family income of $200,000 in North Carolina puts that household at roughly the top 89th percentile. To summarize, $64 million, collected as tax money from the general public in North Carolina, subsidized the private school tuition for families in the 89th percentile of income and above.

Myth 6

Average yearly private school tuition in North Carolina ranges from $6,700 to $10,000. 

Average tuition among schools responding to a 2025 John Locke/EdChoice survey of 177 schools found that the average tuition for private schools that participate in the Opportunity Scholarship program was $8,748. This means that Tier One participants, the most economically disadvantaged, would not receive full tuition costs to attend a participating private school in North Carolina with average tuition. A Tier One household would still have to come up with roughly $1,000 in that scenario, year after year.

According to the Public School Forum of North Carolina, for the 2024-25 school year, “over half of families who would receive taxpayer dollars to attend private schools make over $115,400, including 18% who make over $259,000 per year.”

It is also important to note that many of the state’s most selective private schools do not participate in the Opportunity Scholarship program, limiting the range of schools available to scholarship recipients.

In a breakdown of the 200 schools that received the most voucher funds in the 2023-2024 school year 68% required a religious curriculum for all students, 16.5% had religious requirements for teachers, and 90% were religiously affiliated, demonstrating that cost is not the only exclusionary measure taken by these schools.

Myth 7

Every student who leaves public school with a voucher saves the state the cost of educating that child when capital and local supplements are considered.

Economists distinguish between fixed and variable costs. Schools operate on fixed costs that don’t magically disappear when students do. For example, a classroom of 20 students will still require a full time teacher with 19 students. That same classroom will still need heat, air conditioning, maintenance, etc. So unless the Opportunity Scholarship operates at a much larger scale, public schools will bear the burden of decreased funding.

There is no citation to prove that public schools actually save money thanks to vouchers. But a recent study in Cleveland provides an estimate on the negative impact vouchers have on public school funding: “For a projected enrollment decline of 5% … Cleveland public school students stand to lose between $364-$927 per pupil in education spending, which adds up to a total fiscal externality of $12-$31 million.”

Myth 8

Private schools that receive Opportunity Scholarship money are accountable, via testing to evaluate school performance as public schools are.

Participating private schools in the Opportunity Scholarship program administer nationally normed tests to their students. However, these results are not reported publicly in a way that allows taxpayers to compare school performance as they can for public schools. In practice, the testing requirement provides little public accountability because the results are not released in a meaningful form. As Duke Law Professor Jane Wettach explained in 2020:

The public has no information on whether the students with vouchers have made academic progress or have fallen behind…The State Education Assistance Authority (SEAA)…concluded that the reporting of test scores in aggregated form, as required by the legislature, produces no meaningful information. Therefore, the SEAA has discontinued requiring schools to produce the data and it no longer publishes any reports on test scores.

The NC General Assembly has addressed this lack of comparable data, but it is not resolved. An NC State study from 2025, commissioned by the NCGA, noted that there are “fundamental challenges” for stakeholders attempting to compare academic performance from program participants and their public school peers. The authors recommend that the legislature adopt “a limited number of high-quality, nationally norm-referenced assessments in reading and mathematics for third and eighth grade students receiving Opportunity Scholarships.” If such a measure comes to pass, we will know more about the academic performance of OS participants. Until then, meaningful comparisons between Opportunity Scholarship participants and their public-school peers remain limited.

 

Drew Tonissen is the author of The Resegregation Racket, a Substack series investigating North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship voucher program. He is an English teacher in Charlotte with over 15 years of experience and holds a PhD in Education Policy from NC State University, where his dissertation examined teachers’ perceptions of accountability policies.