It’s Official: NC Justice Center Employee’s Survey Shows Massive Support for Opportunity Scholarships

80% of respondents support eliminating Opportunity Scholarship income cap!

The state’s most vitriolic Opportunity Scholarship opponent, NC Justice Center employee Kris Nordstrom, stepped in it by asking the Twitter-verse whether “the state should use tax dollars to subsidize rich families with kids in private school.”

His ridiculous framing notwithstanding, the answer is overwhelmingly yes! It doesn’t appear Kris got the kind of feedback he was hoping for this morning.

In any event, it’s a good opportunity to weigh in on Kris’s argument, which is that taxpayer-funded grants shouldn’t go to people above a certain income. (He doesn’t believe Opportunity Scholarships should go to lower income families either, but we’ll ignore that for now.)

The basic answer is every taxpayer puts money into K-12 education. If education money is to follow the child (which we believe it should), then it should follow every child. It’s not that different from Social Security – every taxpayer puts money into Social Security, and every taxpayer gets something out of Social Security.

And whereas Social Security doesn’t withhold payouts for people who earned more in their lifetimes, the proposed Opportunity Scholarship expansion does – higher earners will get less than half the funding as other earners even though they pay in far more in taxes. Advocates of progressive, or stepped, tax structures should love this model.

At bottom, elitist opponents like Justice Center employee Kris Nordstrom, who drip with condescension and vitriol, don’t want children to have any options beyond their zoned district school. (He suggested banning private schools in 2019: “The more effective plan would be to ban private schools rather than to expand vouchers.”)

We disagree: The more options for more children, the better.