Old and busted: Voucher families are racists.
New hotness: Voucher families are religious freaks.

The disgusting and politically motivated attacks on School Choice families in North Carolina just keep on coming.

This time, it’s not the ‘you’re a segregating racist’ but instead, opponents of school choice have turned to religious bigotry.  This attack will go over just as well as the former.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from the News and Observer article embedded in the tweet above:

A recent League of Women Voters review of curricula used at schools receiving vouchers found that most are “biblical world view” schools where Bible stories are taught as scientific and historic facts. Taxpayers are paying for students to be taught that the world is 6,000 years old, that the Genesis flood created the Grand Canyon, that evolution didn’t happen and that environmentalism is a liberal plot. UNC-Chapel Hill professors who reviewed history and science textbooks used at the schools describe them as inaccurate “nonsense” and said they fall far short of educational standards.

The voucher program aimed at children from lower-income families provides up to $4,200 per student, per school year. This year, just over 7,300 students attending more than 400 schools were awarded vouchers at a cost of about $29 million. Most of the schools are using “biblical world view” textbooks.

The horror. A religious school is teaching… RELIGIOUS VIEWPOINTS. 

Parents CHOOSE what school to spend their scholarship funds on. Parents are CHOOSING to send their children to a parochial school.

Suggesting that parents do not have the right to CHOOSE but the state has the right to DICTATE to them where to send their kids is a really, really great message.

Run with that message, you guys.

It’s even better than calling School Choice parents bigots.

Let’s not ignore the source of this religious bigotry attack on NC families either. Didn’t you know? The world-famous academic scholars known as the NC League of Women Voters put together this cherry-picked pile of crap.

The very same League of Women Voters that backed Roy ‘get used to seeing men in the ladies room ‘Cooper?

Seriously – I cannot roll my eyes hard enough. This report looks at one type of curriculum only and then applies terminology like “Christian literal biblical worldview” without actually understanding what that means in an academic setting.

The League of Women Voters report does not include visiting a single NC school and did not interview a single scholarship family.  Instead, they cite University professors and California court cases.

And it is no coincidence the News and Observer resurrected a week old survey that went ignored for good reason. Another recent study came out praising the Opportunity Scholarship Program.

The report was put together by NC State University, includes a survey of 2,425 Opportunity Scholarship parents.  That survey showed that:

• 94% reported being “very satisfied” with their child’s school.
• 71% indicated that they were “very satisfied” with school safety.
• 71% said they were “very satisfied” with instruction in character or values.

What’s probably got the anti-School Choice crowd in a twist about the NCSU report is that “large positive impacts” on the academic achievement of scholarship participants were found year after year in reading, language, and math.

“It may be the case that the North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program truly has a positive impact on student achievement, perhaps because it reaches highly economically-disadvantaged students (Egalite, Stallings, & Porter, 2017) who have few school choice options in the absence of the program and perhaps the highest potential for academic growth, as a result.”
–NCSU OSP report, Test Score Impact

The Opportunity Scholarships serve low-income students only, by the way. There is a long list of criteria that must be met to be accepted into the program and the demand for these scholarships has been overwhelming.

Read the Truth about the Opportunity Scholarship Program.