No, Roy, I certainly don’t agree that school attendance is only an obligation, not a right. Right now, North Carolina children have a constitutional right to attend a public school paid for by general taxpayers. Under the law, their parents also have an obligation to either 1) send them to a public school until age 16, or 2) educate them via a private school or homeschool until age 16.
What I would change is the nature of the constitutional right: that North Carolina families have the right either to send their children to taxpayer-funded public schools or to send them to non-public schools with either taxpayer-funded scholarships (for poor families) or with the benefit of tax deductions or credits up to some amount of the tuition and other expenses they incur (everyone else). I would also allow other taxpayers to make contributions to private-school scholarship funds and take a tax credit for them, on the grounds that they are simply choosing an alternative means of satisfying their duty, under the constitution, to help finance the education of low-income children.
