ProPublica recently published “Segregation Academies Across the South Are Getting Millions in Taxpayer Dollars.” The article focuses on 20 private schools in North Carolina founded during the civil rights era with student bodies that are 85% or more white.
“Segregation academies that remain vastly white continue to play an integral role in perpetuating school segregation—and, as a result, racial separation in the surrounding communities,” ProPublica states.
The article holds that the Opportunity Scholarship Program represents some sort of neo-segregationist plot but misses the bigger picture—most highly segregated schools in North Carolina are, in fact, public schools. Using criteria established by the authors, public school “segregation academies” greatly outnumber the private schools identified by ProPublica. Moreover, they spend vastly more taxpayer dollars.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics reveal 136 public schools whose student bodies stood at 85% or more white during the 2022-23 school year. Collectively these schools enrolled 44,916 students, a number substantially higher than the 25,568 statewide voucher program participants.
Moreover, the average voucher amount stood at 50% of the average spending per pupil in the public school system—an average of $5,266 average voucher amount, compared to over $10,500 per student.
North Carolina thus spent approximately 350% more directly subsidizing predominantly white public school “segregation academies,” in an amount stretching into hundreds of millions of dollars.
In addition, North Carolina has 43 public schools whose student bodies are 85% or more black. The total of public segregation academies thus outnumbers the private versions identified by the authors approximately 8-to-1. The public funding disparity in favor of highly segregated public schools was much greater—hundreds of millions of dollars as opposed to hundreds of thousands.
The largest North Carolina public school with a student body of 85% or more black in North Carolina is a charter school. The students at this school attend this school by choice, and the school’s rate of academic progress stood at 11% above the national average. The school can only be described as segregated but calling it a “segregation academy” would be entirely inappropriate. These students attend this school by choice, not because they have no other options.
The Opportunity Scholarship Program in fact is designed to give all North Carolina students additional options. Moreover, of the eight empirical studies on the impact of school choice programs on school integration, seven found significant integration effects, and one found no significant impact.
The largest public school with a student body in North Carolina with a student body 85% or more white is a district high school. This school operates in a ZIP code in which 88% of the residents are white. Far from exonerating the school, this points to a simple fact—housing patterns in North Carolina and nationally tend to be highly racially segregated. Herding students by ZIP code into public schools thus results in high levels of both economic and racial segregation.
The article goes on to fret over possible equity challenges that low-income students might face in utilizing Opportunity Scholarships. The authors, however, failed to mention that the Opportunity Scholarship Program provides more than 50% more funding for the lowest income participants than the highest income participants.
If any of the access challenges hypothesized materialize in practice, the obvious solution would be to have a higher percentage of the funding follow the child to the school which is educating them. Only half of the funding on average is following them now.
If the supply of private schools in North Carolina proves insufficient to meet demand, lawmakers could convert the program into an education savings account. An education savings account program would give students the opportunity to attend college classes, hire their own tutors, and much more. Programs like the Opportunity Scholarship programs provide choice among schools, whereas education savings account programs provide that and choice among educational methods.
If ProPublica has an actual stance against highly segregated schools, it should have called for the closing large swathes of the American public school system. Professor Alan Kay famously noted that “context is worth 80 IQ points.” ProPublica’s missing the public school segregation forest for the trees demonstrates this perfectly.
