North Carolina Supreme Court
Two separate groups filed suit to stop North Carolina’s voucher program, but the North Carolina Supreme court ruled 4-3 Thursday in both Hart v. North Carolina and Richardson v. North Carolina that the state’s Opportunity Scholarship Program is constitutional.
The Court rejected all five of the plaintiffs’ claims, including a claim alleging that vouchers create an unconstitutional “non-uniform” system of education, an argument similar to the one that brought down a Florida voucher program nearly a decade ago. The North Carolina court found the state school fund was created to “preserve and support the public school system, not to limit the State’s ability to spend on education generally.”
The program is limited to students in households earning up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level and provides vouchers worth $4,200 for students to attend private schools. More than 2,000 students had been in limbo waiting to hear news of whether they would be able to enroll in private schools using the scholarships. The wait is over, and just in time. School is about to start
Grade: Satisfactory
David Hansen
David Hansen was an education official in Ohio who recently resigned over a controversy that he hid “F” grades for some online and dropout-prevention charter schools. He claims to have hid the grades because they “masked” the success of other charters.
Indeed, dropout prevention is notoriously difficult and newspapers and charter opponents sometimes aren’t keen on those details.
But hiding the evidence was worse. This hurts the credibility of charters that are doing well, fuels theories of deeper conspiracies, and allows charter school opponents to amplify the usual arguments against choice.
School choice supporters have to be honest and trustworthy. Charters are under far greater scrutiny and skepticism than the establishment types that oppose them, and are founded on the idea of greater accountability to the public. We can’t afford these kinds of mistakes.
Grade: Needs Improvement
Mashea Ashton
Mashea Ashton is a board member of the Black Alliance for Educational Options and CEO of the Newark Charter School Fund. She argues education reformers need to unite around three goals: Giving low-income students access to high-quality private schools, encouraging quality charter schools and working to improve existing public schools. None of these goals are mutually exclusive, she notes. We can have charter schools, tax credit scholarships, vouchers, virtual schools and great public schools at the same time.
“If charter, private, and district schools can all acknowledge that we have the same universal goal, if we can acknowledge together that our children are more important than politics, ego, or legacy, we can increase access to high-quality options across the board.”
Grade: Satisfactory
