Rules for vouchers

If we're going to have state-funded private schools, they need standards and conditions.

I’m not opposed to school vouchers as a concept. I’m against taking money away from public schools when they are already underfunded. I’m against subsidizing wealthy families who would send their children to private schools. I’m against discrimination in schools. I believe schools need standards and accountability. And I don’t believe public money should go religious institutions, especially ones that already get tax breaks.

Right now, North Carolina has among the lowest per pupil spending of any state in the nation. Our teachers are among the lowest paid. Until those problems are remedied, no money should be shifted out of public schools.

North Carolina Republicans came into power screaming that our public schools are broken and promptly began cutting resources. They would like to shift the financial responsibility for schools to local government, but North Carolina’s constitution says that the state has the responsibility to provide children with a sound basic education. Now, 13 years after they first began writing public school budgets and eight years in control of the Department of Public Instruction, they are still claiming schools are broken. If that’s true, then they broke them, or at the very least, they have failed to fix them. For all of their complaints about public schools, the one thing they have never tried is adequately funding them.

Republicans claim that they want to make schools compete for students. In reality, they want to provide tax breaks for the rich because they don’t believe those who benefit the most from our economic system and society have any obligation to those who struggle. They claimed for years that the purpose of vouchers was to allow financially struggling families to send their children to private schools. Now, they are giving vouchers to families who already send their children to private schools in a direct transfer of money from underfunded school systems to the state’s wealthiest families. Yeah, I’m opposed to that.

I also don’t believe we should be funding private schools that discriminate. Any school that denies entry based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender or national origin should not receive public funds. If we’re going to ask people who meet those criteria to pay taxes, they should not be forced to have their tax dollars used against them.

Private schools and charters should be held to the same standards and regulations as public schools if they are accepting tax dollars. If public school teachers must post their lesson plans to increase accountability, private school teachers should be required to do the same. Test scores of private schools that accept public money should be made public. Teacher and administrative salaries should be publicly available. Private schools that accept tax dollars should be subject to audits from the state auditor to ensure our money is not being misspent. We should watch over our tax dollars in private schools just as carefully as we watch them in other government programs.

Finally, the whole concept of our country is built on a separation of church and state. No public dollars should be funding explicitly religious schools, whether they are Islamic madrasas, Christian academies, or Jewish yeshivas. Nobody is doing more indoctrination than religious schools. That’s the purpose of them: to indoctrinate students in a certain religion. If that’s what parents want, fine, but the state shouldn’t be subsidizing it. Religious schools propped up by state funds are, quite literally, state-funded religious schools. That should be an oxymoron in a country based on a separation of church and state.

Before the state starts offering families vouchers, they need to first fund public schools. Vouchers should be tied to per pupil spending and teacher pay. The state should be in the top 50% of the country in both measures before taxes subsidize private schools. The money for vouchers should not come out of public school coffers. They should be a separate line item.

Vouchers should also be tied to need. Wealthy families do not need them and public schools do. Any private schools that accepts public money should be subject to the same accountability as public schools. Schools that accept taxpayers dollars should not be able to discriminate. And finally, the state should not be funding religious organizations. Those are common sense rules that would allow vouchers without hurting public schools.