School vouchers: Our state has tried that bad idea before
Published February 4, 2015
by Doug Clark, Off the Record, published by Greensboro News-Record, February 4, 2015.
The idea of school vouchers isn’t new in North Carolina. In 1956, the state enacted a program to provide private school tuition grants for children whose parents didn’t want them to attend integrated schools.
When North Carolina’s current “Opportunity Scholarship” program is argued before the state Supreme Court Feb. 17, the Pearsall Plan is likely to come up. It relates strongly to the legal issues at stake today.
When the U.S. Supreme Court released its blockbuster Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, North Carolina leaders quickly decided not to comply. Yet, most didn’t favor outright defiance.
A special committee headed by Thomas Pearsall, former speaker of the N.C. House of Representatives, recommended a devious course of action.
As adopted by the legislature in July 1956, it stated: “Our people need to be assured that no child will be forced to attend a school with children of another race in order to get an education. It is the purpose of the State of North Carolina to make available ... education expense grants for the private education of any child of any race residing in this State.”
This applied if there were no segregated school the child could reasonably attend. The private school had to be “nonsectarian” and meet certain standards. The grant would be limited to the amount the public schools would spend for the same student.
But the intent was perfectly clear. Rather than implement the court’s order, the state was willing to abandon its public schools and pay for the private education of its children.
The one catch was that this scheme required rewriting the state constitution. The legislature proposed language approving the expenditure of public funds for private education, “not withstanding any other provision of this Constitution,” and put it to a statewide vote in September 1956. It was approved overwhelmingly, to the discredit of North Carolina voters.
But it was never implemented. The state managed to drag its feet so stubbornly on desegregation that there was no need to buy white children’s way out of the public schools. By the time the schools did begin to integrate more than a decade later, the Pearsall Plan had been struck down in federal court.
Which brings us to today. The legislature enacted its voucher plan in 2013, not for the purpose of maintaining racial segregation but to give children equal educational opportunities — or so it said.
In reality, we could observe that most private schools are less integrated than are public schools. Furthermore, the new program does not exclude sectarian schools. It pays for Christian children to attend Christian schools, Jewish children to attend Jewish schools and Muslim children to attend Muslim schools — enabling religious segregation at public expense.
When the 2013 voucher plan came before Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood last year, he found it did not meet the state constitution’s requirement that public money be spent for public purposes. He also noted a conflict with the N.C. Supreme Court’s 1997 Leandro ruling, in which it said the constitution mandates offering a sound, basic education to every child. The state fails to meet that responsibility when it gives the job to private schools but doesn’t hold them accountable for results.
These constitutional problems reinforce the state’s experience with the Pearsall Plan. Legislators in 1956, though determined to resist the order of the U.S. Supreme Court, didn’t want to blatantly contradict their own state constitution. They realized that funding private schools with tax dollars would do exactly that, so they sought to rewrite the constitution to allow their scheme. Later, after the Pearsall Plan was struck down by federal courts, the enabling provisions were removed from the constitution.
Our state legislators did not replace the Pearsall language in the constitution with anything similar to it in 2013. They simply enacted a modern version through the legislative process, apparently hoping it wouldn’t be challenged in court.
Similar voucher plans exist in other places. But those other places may not have constitutions that require the state to provide exclusively for a uniform system of public education. They may not have our unfortunate history of attempting to gut public schools to achieve a political purpose.
We do, and it is not proper for our state to pay for private education — not in 1956 and not now.
February 4, 2015 at 9:07 am
Richard Bunce says:
Playing the race card now... the last desperate gasp of the government education industrial complex supporters to kill any competition to the government school systems they live on.
Every education voucher program I have seen had more parents applying for vouchers than vouchers available and many of those parents of means tested realtively low income households would self identify as minorities.
Education voucher opponents oppose all parents having a real choice in the child's education. Sadly many of the education voucher opponents and their peers a from relatively wealthy households, incuding elected officials, education bureaucrats, government school administrators and teachers, whose children attend private schools of their choice because their parents can afford it.
Private schools attendance is not racially driven for the progressive 1%... just for poor folks it appears.
