From Jeanette Doran at the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law:
Parents and other proponents of education reform have long urged lawmakers to enact tax credits or other means of financial assistance for parents who send their children to nonpublic schools. This session, North Carolina lawmakers are considering House Bill 944 which would create Opportunity Scholarships to help empower parents to chose the school that will best meet the needs of their children. While HB944 is still in committee, opponents are claiming, rather inaccurately, that the scholarship program violates the First Amendment. Critics of such reforms, like the proposed opportunity scholarship program, condemn them as voucher programs; many maintain scholarship and tax credit programs violate the First Amendment because students often use the funds to attend religious schools.
Doran’s paper refutes the critics’ claim.
JLF’s Director of Education Studies, Terry Stoops, refutes other claims by critics of school choice here. Among them:
3. “Currently, North Carolina spends about $8,400 per student in public schools, which ranks us 48 nationally in per-pupil spending. Now the proponents of this bill are saying our kids can be educated for half that amount?”
Well, it is not quite “half that amount,” but it is still a fraction of the public school average. Indeed, the average private school in North Carolina spends considerably less than the state average expenditure to educate our children.
Recently, Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina surveyed (PDF) 700 private schools in North Carolina. PEFNC concluded, “When looking at average tuition rates for North Carolina’s private schools, including the aforementioned higher-priced schools, the average tuition is $6,235 a year. When excluding the top 10 percent of highest-priced tuition schools, the average tuition is $4,901 – a figure that is more reflective of the majority of North Carolina’s private schools.”
