A new poll has found 65 percent of North Carolina voters support expanding charter schools and allowing tax-credit scholarships, and 55 percent believe the state’s education system is “on the wrong track.”
“Parents want choice in education. Support for charter schools, tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts tells us that,” said Robert Luebke, a senior policy analyst with the Civitas Institute. Civitas and the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice commissioned the poll.
If voters could enroll their child in any school they wanted, they told pollsters from Braun Research, Inc., 34 percent would pick traditional public schools, while 39 percent would choose private schools, 15 percent charter schools, and 11 percent would home-school.
Currently, 87 percent of North Carolina students attend traditional schools, under 3 percent attend charters, nearly 6 percent attend private schools, and 5 percent are homeschooled.
Seventy-eight percent of voters said they paid attention to K-12 education, while 21 percent said they pay “very little” or “no” attention. Seventy-one percent, however, either guessed the state spent less than $4,000 per student or said they couldn’t guess. North Carolina spends nearly $9,000 per student.
Braun polled 601 North Carolinians. The poll’s margin of error was 4 percent.
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Joy Pullmann is a research fellow on education policy for The Heartland Institute and managing editor of The Federalist, a web magazine on politics, policy, and culture.
