Introducing New Branchhead AND The Cruelty of NC Vouchers

Before we get started, I want to welcome you to New Branchhead. This is a Substack on North Carolina and national politics that is named for the political supporters of the great liberal Governor Kerr Scott. It will provide serious, well-informed insights on politics at the state and national levels. We will always strive to be interesting and avoid dogma and cliches. Our goal is to fill a niche in North Carolina political commentary: A dedicated and intellectually open center for the exchange of ideas on how to rebuild our state.

            Why New Branchhead? The title is an homage to North Carolina’s legendary Branchhead Boys, the working-class voters from the forgotten hollows who backed Kerr Scott in his campaigns for Governor and U.S. Senate. Kerr Scott was an imperfect man. He was crude and often-resentment-driven, and with his aggressive political style he often antagonized people in a way that limited his ability to enact his progressive program. But Scott’s governorship represented a spirit of limitless promise for North Carolina. It was in the ashes of World War II, when farm boys had been sent to the jungles of the Pacific and the Gothic ruins of war-torn Europe. For a brief moment in time, liberalism reigned across the South, nowhere more so than in North Carolina.

            I believe that we have lost that spirit. In the last 13 years, right-wing legislators have done everything they could to lower North Carolina to the level of the Deep South and to make us a meaner, narrower, and more inward-looking state. By recovering the memory of the Branchhead Boys, this publication seeks to remind North Carolinians that dark, vindictive politics are not the best we can do. I have over 10 years of experience writing about North Carolina and 33 years of experience living in it. I’m ready to go, and I thank you for showing interest in this new project.

The Cruelty of North Carolina School Vouchers

            Few politicians have managed such ironclad message discipline as Republicans expounding the virtues of “Opportunity Scholarships.” A euphemistic sobriquet for private-school vouchers, the “Scholarships” have become a signature component of the North Carolina Republican Party’s governing agenda. They now represent a sizeable financial grant to the state’s wealthiest families. The arc of their strange career, though, represents an effort to exploit poor people’s suffering as a Trojan Horse for an agenda aimed at enriching the wealthy.

            Inspired by the conservative economist Milton Friedman, school vouchers first emerged in Civil Rights-era Atlanta. In the 1960s, vouchers were proposed as an explicit tool for maintaining segregated schools in an era in which school apartheid was under legal assault. This was the dubious historical root of North Carolina’s “Opportunity Scholarships.” But the Tar Heel State’s vouchers were the direct brainchild of conservative state legislator Paul Stam and his intellectual allies at the John Locke Foundation. Vouchers were introduced, by Stam, early in the NCGOP era, and at the time their availability was limited to a few thousand very poor families.

            Republicans marketed this pilot program as a humanitarian effort to free poor children from a crumbling and incompetent public schools. But the poor showed little interest in the program. Early voucher funds consistently went unused due to a lack of interest from families poor enough to be eligible for the grants. But their apathy did not deter Dan Forest. Forest was Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina for much of the 2010s, and in that pre-Mark Robinson time he was considered a uniquely extreme social conservative. In his 2020 gubernatorial campaign, Forest proposed to expand school vouchers to every family in the state.

At the time, universal vouchers seemed like a manifestation of Dan Forest’s singular reactionary fervor, not something that could ever happen. And the sense that universal school vouchers would never materialize stayed intact even as more North Carolina Republicans began to entertain the prospect. As Forest sought the governorship, powerful State Senator Ralph Hise introduced a bill that would have expanded the so-called “Opportunity Scholarship” grants to every family in the state, even millionaires. Hise often sponsored aggressive “messaging” bills aimed at placating voters in his right-wing Mountain district, and that was how I understood his voucher legislation at the time. But then a year or two passed and Tricia Cotham became a Republican, and universal school vouchers were soon on the way into the mailboxes of every banker in South Charlotte and the tony suburbs of western Wake County.

            The anti-public-school Right had gleefully removed its mask. A program that was once limited to a couple thousand extremely poor North Carolina families was now sweeping and robust, with a $500 million budget and plans afoot to expand it even further. The program had also been thoroughly rebranded. With just enough shame not to continue their ruse, Republicans now framed the voucher program as “parental control over education,” replacing the previous slogan of “school choice.” They did this because they knew millionaires already had ample choices for where to send their children to school.

            Poor children languishing hungry in the shadowy interstices of North Carolina had been shown the door. Republicans had used them. Poor people had been made into the involuntary marketing poster children for a program that was never intended to benefit people like them. In a cruel twist, Republicans made the new, rich-people-inclusive vouchers more lucrative than the original “Opportunity Scholarships.” A 2013-era voucher was worth $5,000. The vouchers now pouring into the bank accounts of doctors and lawyers clock in at a cool $7,200. Thus, poor people had served their purpose again: to be the grunts, or the cannon fodder, of a social system that dismisses their very humanity.