By Francis Koster, Ed.D.

Almost all the public education systems in America receive the overwhelming majority of their funding from their own state legislature. North Carolina’s contribution is absolutely not overwhelming. In the 1970s, the percent of our state budget that went was invested in K-12 education was 52 percent. In 2022-23 it was 39 percent.

We hold the shameful national ranking of 48th of all 50 states in our level of state government funding of K-12 schools because our state legislature has reduced it so much.

Total funding for North Carolina K-12 public school students comes from three sources: 23 percent from local school districts, 17 percent from the federal government and 60 percent from our state legislature. If you reduce that 60 percent, it will have a devastating impact on our kids’ future.

Actions underway in Washington, D.C., to dismantle the Department of Education could deeply harm our children. Our kids badly need that 17 percent federal funding contribution to our state’s public K-12 system. This federal money is mostly invested to assist kids with health or learning problems, provide them healthy food or support Head Start.

As upsetting as the elimination of federal funding could be, it is not nearly as bad as what I am about to share.
You better sit down.

A lot of our state income used to come from taxing corporations’ income. In 2003, the income tax rate on the profits of North Carolina corporations was 6.9 percent. This has been reduced over the past 21 years to 2.5 percent. As harmful as that was to funding our state’s educational system, the news gets worse. In the latest North Carolina tax reduction law, which was passed Nov. 21 of 2021, corporate income tax is scheduled drop to zero in five years!

Meanwhile, your personal income tax rate remains at 4.5 percent.

The situation is getting worse. After funding schools in the bottom ranks of all states and cutting corporate taxes so less money will be available to fund schools, our legislature expanded a special program called “school vouchers.” This program takes money from the public school’s budget and grants it to students that can attend any public or private school they want. In school year 2023-24, the state spent $185 million of state public school funding on the program. Most of these students who were awarded the voucher were already attending private schools.

According to District 115 State Representative Lindsey Prather, more than half of all students who got vouchers came from households that earned more than $115,000 per year. The funding level (financial loss to the public school system) was increased from $185 million in 2023-24 to $463.5 million in our current school year. Seventy-two thousand students are now eligible for these funds.

To be clear, I am not personally bothered by increasing the freedom to choose to attend a regulated and financially audited non-public school — but I am deeply troubled that this law takes $463.5 million from students in the already-lowest-in-the-nation funded student population and gives it to students from high-income families without otherwise increasing school system funding.

And it gets worse. Governor Josh Stein recently said: “Recent research from the Public School Forum of North Carolina found that among the 200 private schools that received the most funding from the Opportunity Scholarship program during the 2023-24 school year (collectively, these schools received 75 percent of all voucher funding last year), 89 percent of them had some form of discrimination in the admissions process. More than one-third of the schools (38 percent) excluded students with disabilities, and more than two-thirds (68 percent) had a religious requirement to attend the school. Nine out of every 10 of these private schools has a religious affiliation and less than half (42 percent) were accredited.”

To summarize: Our state elected officials, who have already put us at the bottom of the list of all states in America for per-student funding, have also reduced public school funding by assigning $463.5 million to a voucher program favoring affluent non-public school students. And on top of that they passed a law to lower corporate income tax rates to zero, which will inevitably lead to further cuts in the state budget.

The big picture is that our state elected officials keep changing the rules of our state in ways that make the rich richer while harming our kids in public schools.