School Choice Already Won. North Carolina Proves It

Despite attempts to block their growth, red states are moving towards an education freedom future—and parents love it.

The parent revolution of 2020­–2025 was a momentous shift in American education that fought for—and won—higher standards, an end to indoctrination, and parental control over curriculum. It showed the world that school choice is not just the future. It's reality.

From 2019 to 2022, North Carolina saw a surge of 20 percent charter school enrollment in just three pandemic-dominated years. Millions of frustrated parents discovered education opportunities for their children they would never have considered before the closures.

Charter school enrollment skyrocketed from 100,000 students in 2019 to over 150,000 in 2025. Now more than 10 percent of North Carolina students are educated in charter schools. Meanwhile, district non-charter school enrollment has never reached pre-pandemic levels.

I Personally Discovered Why Charter Schools are Valuable 

To discover why parents have sought out school choice options, I recently served as a substitute teacher at four North Carolina public charter schools with students from Kindergarten and 8th grade. I saw firsthand how these schools form a distinct value proposition for both students and parents.

One school in Huntersville tried to incorporate as much outside learning for their students at possible. Another one in Matthews emphasized classical learning strategies. Still another one was a "big-box" charter school that had everything for their low-income community: Team sports, spirit days, and events that made it feel like it was no different from a neighborhood school—except for the fact that it wasn't run by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) and their "anti-racist" policymakers.

And because charter schools are evaluated by students' performances on state-sponsored tests, there was an intense focus by the administrators on helping their kids perform on tests—a critical skill these children will need to learn for their lifetime as professionals.

I even witnessed a charter school close. And yet, I could see the reason why: Their kids were not scoring well. It was a sad moment but increased my faith that charter schools were being managed accountably.

Charter Schools Still Face the Eye of the (Leftist) Tiger

I also got a handle as to why charter schools face hurdles to their flourishing, despite the opportunities they provide children.

North Carolina's biggest school districts, such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) and Wake County Schools, run billion-dollar operations, yet still has an "entitlement" mentality towards the funds that the state gives charter schools.

Mo Green, a former CMS lawyer who currently serves as North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, believes that the number of charter schools "should be capped."

"[CMS] has an incredible disdain for charter schools and their children," says Jonathan Vogel, an education lawyer in Charlotte interviewed for this article. "Any dollar that follows the child [out of CMS] is considered stealing."

Because charter schools challenge the CMS monopoly, they don't get any additional support from the district.

As a result, they typically work hard to serve the interests of both students and their parents—unlike school boards which often thumb their nose at parents over woke and DEI issues, or even over technology and safety. Charters also must pass kids through state-sponsored EOG (end-of-grade) tests, which they do at the same rate as CMS schools.

One overlooked reason why charter schools continue to perform effectively is their ability to attract and train a pool of teachers that are overlooked by the district public school system: Non-credentialed teachers.

Not everyone decides to teach straight out of college, and adults often make the decision to go into teaching later in life. Charter schools are still required to have 50 percent of their teaching staff be credentialed—rather than 100 percent "on the path to credential" as neighborhood schools do. But they have more room to experiment with hiring teachers from non-traditional paths, generating thought diversity—and a needed reprieve from disastrous left-wing schools of education which facilitate these credentials.

Critics contend that charter schools are less racially diverse than neighborhood schools. They fail to understand that charter schools are required to abide by universal, non-discriminatory admissions criteria—including random lottery selection for waiting lists—and that any parent eligible for public schools in North Carolina may apply their child to a charter school. That is one reason that charter schools are experiencing booms in Hispanic enrollment in North Carolina—rising 53.5 percent over the COVID-19 pandemic according to one study.

As charter schools continue to become more popular and well-known, word will spread in these communities—and applications will rise.

Despite school districts' condescending stance, charter schools are proving their worth to North Carolina's parents through their diverse models of education and opportunities to teachers from non-traditional paths. They show that to Americans, school choice is not just the future—they are the present.

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