All 72,000 applicants for Opportunity Scholarships this year are one step closer to securing awards after the North Carolina Senate passed a funding boost for the program on Thursday. The proposed committee substitute (PCS) for House Bill 828 passed by a party line 28-15 vote after more than an hour of contentious debate. Yesterday, the...
North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship Program has gotten a lot of headlines recently, and with good reason. The state’s voucher for private schools is poised to more than double its enrollment, dependent on whether lawmakers OK additional funding in the short session that convened just last week. But a lesser known school choice program in the...
According to the National School Choice Awareness Foundation (NSCAF), more Americans googled “school choice” during National School Choice Week in January 2023 than during any other time over the prior six years. This should come as no surprise to North Carolinians. Since January 2023, our state legislature has made major expansion possible in both charter...
Gov. Roy Cooper called for a moratorium on spending on the Opportunity Scholarship Program during a meeting of the State Board of Education on March 7, even as demand for the voucher program more than doubled this year. “Most private schools are not better than our public schools,” said Cooper, a Democrat. “[This] is a...
Nearly 72,000 applications were received for the expanded Opportunity Scholarship program in North Carolina by the close of the priority application window March 1, according to new data from the state government agency that oversees the program. That record-breaking number more than doubles the current number of recipients. Demand was so high in the first...
Some school leaders are embracing the competition inherent in school choice and working to make their local public schools the best choice possible for the general community.
Forty-one years ago, under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan, the National Commission on Excellence in Education found “a nation at risk.” If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we...
Despite signs of progress, the latest test results show that most North Carolina students have yet to regain the ground lost during the pandemic. There are at least three barriers to academic recovery. First is chronic absenteeism. Compared to five years ago, the number of chronically absent students has doubled. Second, there has been a...
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Around 12:15am Thursday morning the website where parents can apply for the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) crashed as people rushed to apply. OSP became universally open to all North Carolina families after the state legislature passed a bill making all income levels eligible on a sliding scale, with families at the lower income levels being...
A press release from the governor this week accused Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, of “angrily and directly” acknowledging “that the legislature’s school voucher expansion is funded through cuts to public schools.”
