This article was produced by Our Schools. Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Bluesky @jeffbinnc.
In what is being touted as the “Golden Age of School Choice,” the option that is most popular with American families—to fund and attend their local public schools—is gradually being made less viable.
Take North Carolina, for instance. For years, the Republican-dominated state legislature has chosen to cut the state’s funding for public schools, resulting in a decline in inflation-adjusted per-student funding of about 13 percent since 2003, according to the NC Budget and Tax Center. The Education Law Center’s (ELC) 2025 national ranking of state education funding, “Making the Grade,” report shows that the Tar Heel State is dead last out of 51 states in school funding effort—a measure of PK–12 public education funding as a percentage of the state’s overall economic capacity (its GDP). “North Carolina spent $12,193 per student during the 2022–23 school year. That’s $5,660 less than the national average,” states WRAL News, citing the report. The state also ranks 46th in teacher pay.
A decades-long legal struggle to bring North Carolina’s school funding levels in line with its constitutional requirement, resulting from a state Supreme Court ruling in the Leandro v. State of North Carolina case in 1994, culminated in a decision by the current court. The state’s Supreme Court was “taken over” by a Republican majority and dismissed the Leandro ruling on procedural grounds with no possible recourse. “The court held that the trial court lacked the authority, or subject matter jurisdiction, to rule on this much more expansive case,” according to EdNC.
North Carolina lawmakers have also ramped up efforts to redirect taxpayer dollars for education to private operators through charter schools and private schools that opt into the state’s school voucher program.
Thanks to the legislature’s efforts to ease the process for opening and expanding charter schools, the percentage of students enrolled in charters has steadily increased, surpassing 10 percent since 2022–2023, raising the state’s rank for charter school growth to fourth in the nation, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools 2025 Enrollment Brief.
And since the state opened its school voucher program to all families in 2023, North Carolina ranks seventh in voucher usage, with 3.4 percent of the state’s public K–12 expenditures going to vouchers, an annual expenditure of $624 million, based on 2026 rankings by EDChoice. “[T]he program represents cost increases and relatively little savings, given the price tag of more than half a billion dollars,” WRAL News reports.
Not satisfied with these efforts to defund public schools, North Carolina lawmakers are now considering legislation to cap local property taxes—an important source for funding public schools in the state.
“Property taxes provide revenue for critical local services like public schools,” Joanna LeFebvre, a policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), tells Our Schools in an email. “Property taxes are one of the most stable sources of revenue because they are insulated from economic downturns.”
In North Carolina, state funding accounts for 60 percent of school resources, while local funding, mostly from property taxes, contributes 23 percent (the federal government chips in only 17 percent).
Despite the importance of property taxes as a revenue source for public schools, Republican lawmakers passed a bill to place a constitutional amendment on the November 2026 ballot that would give the state legislature the power to limit property tax increases.
Proponents for the amendment say it’s “a result of constituent complaints about rising property taxes,” according to NC Newsline. Various news stories from around the state, however, point to another cause for the increases—the state’s inadequate funding for essential infrastructure like schools.
Border Belt reports that in many rural counties where property taxes are spiking, county officials are raising taxes as an “[attempt] to punch above their weight in ‘funding effort.’” Because the Republican dominated state legislature has been lagging in its effort to address increased costs for local services, “[t]he poorest counties in our state tax themselves at greater rates,” explains Public School Forum senior researcher Elizabeth Paul.
Larger, more urban school districts are also feeling the squeeze. As Indy Week explains, Wake County, the state’s largest school district that includes Raleigh, is looking at raising property taxes to balance its budget in the fiscal year 2027. “[I]t’s another example of the state legislature and Congress falling short of their fiscal responsibilities and passing the buck to us,” the county manager, David Ellis, says.
In Mecklenburg County, the state’s second most populous county, which includes Charlotte, state assembly member Brandon Lofton tells NC Newsline that “the county has spent about $2.9 billion on items that are the state’s responsibility,” resulting in 700 teaching positions being funded completely by the county.
In Orange County, one of North Carolina’s wealthiest counties, the county budget for the fiscal year 2027 is being hit with a barrage of higher costs, including increased expenses for debt service, gas prices, health insurance, and the federal government’s decision to slash reimbursements for food benefits for low-income families (known as SNAP). County officials blame state and federal funding cuts and persistent inflation for these increases.
If these efforts to defund public schools seem like a coordinated campaign, that’s because it is. And North Carolina is not the only state where this campaign is rolling out.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit that advocates for public schools, points to “a common project” among many states, mostly governed by Republican majorities, that are seeking to “end democratically governed public education,” she writes in an email to Our Schools.
“Under the guise of school choice,” Burris says, “they will eventually narrow choice for the majority of American families. The agenda was never hidden: create a school marketplace, then shift the burden from the public to families.”
This “plan,” according to Burris, drew its initial inspiration from the writings of the late economist Milton Friedman, who argued that education and other public services should be purchased as consumer goods in a commercial marketplace rather than provided as a taxpayer-supported service, which is publicly governed as an essential infrastructure accessible to everyone.
It’s easy to see how Friedman’s doctrine would be hugely popular with the wealthy who resent paying taxes for services other people use. Over the years, donations by the rich have lifted up Friedman’s pronouncements and funded the dissemination of these viewpoints through numerous conservative and libertarian organizations pressing for a smaller and less democratic government presence in society.
Now, under the federal ascendancy of the Trump administration and state legislatures that are gerrymandered to ensure decades-long conservative rule, the campaign to dismantle public schools appears to be entering its home stretch.
Property tax cuts and caps have devastating impacts
In February 2026, Fox Business reported that five states—North Dakota, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Indiana—were considering repeals of property taxes that generate 90 percent of school funding for local districts in those states.
Some of these efforts have died in committee or failed during a floor vote, according to an April 2026 report by Realtor.com, but a few have moved forward and have since been joined by newer efforts in other states to either curtail or end property taxes, including Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. In Oklahoma, the measure is more targeted, confining tax relief to homeowners 65 and older who own their homes outright, while Indiana is offering a replacement source of revenue by substituting property taxes with expanded sales taxes.
Neither of these news reports mentions what’s going on in North Carolina, but regardless of the details, the goal is to end or severely limit one of the primary funding sources for public schools.
The goal has been long in the making. As the Institute on Tax and Economic Policy (ITEP) explains in a 2025 report, a once-popular “tax revolt” in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in “over a dozen states” enacting measures that limited local governments’ “ability to tax property fairly and accurately.”
These property tax cuts and caps have devastating impacts on school funding, CBPP’s LeFebvre explains, citing California’s property tax cap policy known as Proposition 13. That measure, passed in 1978, resulted in per-pupil funding declining from 18 percent above the national average to below average, according to her. Funding levels didn’t recover until 2017. Consequently, “[a]cademic achievement declined and continues to lag national averages, and the state has one of the highest student-teacher ratios in the country, thanks to the policy, which is still in place,” she says.
LeFebvre continues, “Research suggests that property tax cuts and caps lead to increased student-teacher ratios, reductions in new teacher qualifications, and declines in students’ reading and math test scores.”
While Republicans in North Carolina, and elsewhere, claim reining in property taxes is an “affordability issue,” LeFebvre argues there are other ways to address the impact of rising costs on low-income families, including “property tax circuit breakers that trigger tax refunds when a family’s tax liability rises above a certain percentage of their income, and renters credits that put money back in the pockets of low-income renters.”
“Instead of hamstringing local governments’ ability to raise revenue through property tax cuts and caps,” LeFebvre says, “states should support localities’ flexibility to raise sufficient revenue to invest in excellent public schools.”
A Constitutional Amendment in Ohio
In Ohio, also ruled by a Republican majority, state lawmakers have dramatically reduced state funding for schools while rolling out privatization efforts, such as charter schools and vouchers.
While the state’s effort to adequately fund its schools is not rock bottom, according to the ELC report, it barely clears the level, earning a C-rating. In 2025, state lawmakers passed a flat income tax and abandoned their previously adopted plan to bring funding levels for high-poverty school districts more in line with wealthier districts. As a result, the state’s contribution to funding public education will decline from 47 percent in 2019 to just 32 percent in 2027, according to public school advocacy coalition Honesty for Ohio Education. And “Ohio has fallen from 35th nationally in the state share of K–12 revenue in 2002 to 45th in 2023,” according to a 2025 report by the Ohio Education Policy Institute.
On the privatization front, Ohio is somewhat ahead of North Carolina, with 4.2 percent of the state’s students receiving some kind of voucher to attend a private school or homeschool. There are also a larger number of charter schools in Ohio, with 318 in 2020–2021 compared to 202 in North Carolina for the same period. Both states enrolled about the same number of students in charter schools in 2020–2021—119,100 in Ohio, compared to 125,913 in North Carolina. But Ohio’s privately operated school sector may have an even more negative impact on school funding, especially in the state’s largest districts.
According to a 2026 analysis by former Ohio state legislator Stephen Dyer, in eight major urban districts, 80 percent of state education funding goes to privately run schools.
These efforts by Ohio lawmakers to undermine the state’s funding for public schools have put pressure on local governments to steeply raise property taxes, resulting in Ohio having the eighth-highest property tax rate in the U.S., Statehouse News Bureau reports.
Understandably, there is now growing evidence of a popular uprising among Ohio voters to repeal property taxes through a ballot initiative, and Republican lawmakers are responding to voter unhappiness, not by reversing state funding austerity and growth in privatization, but by proposing a bill that would amend the state constitution to exempt owner-occupied residences from property taxes.
Swapping property taxes for sales taxes in Indiana
Indiana is another Midwestern state where a combination of state funding cuts and school privatization efforts is putting more pressure on local governments to raise property taxes, which has, in turn, prompted calls for property tax repeals.
The state earned a D-rating on ELC’s funding effort report card. Indiana does not have a large number of charter schools, except in Indianapolis, where 62 percent of students are enrolled in charters. It, however, has a slightly higher percentage of students accepting school voucher money than North Carolina.
Indiana’s property tax burden is not among the highest, ranking 29th overall in 2024 according to the Tax Foundation. Nevertheless, state lawmakers are considering legislation to completely phase out property taxes in 2027 and raise sales taxes and user fees to help replace the lost revenue.
The idea that revenue lost by capping or eliminating property taxes can be simply swapped out for sales tax increases is an especially “unfair” tax policy, according to an analysis by CBPP.
That analysis found property taxes are especially important for funding public services because they are “the most stable of the three major taxes (income, sales, and property) even in the face of economic downturns.” Also, property taxes are “less regressive than sales taxes, which require a greater share of income from people with less financial means and a lower share from people who are well off.” And “[p]roposals to substitute sales tax revenue for property tax revenue also ignore an important fact: most people already pay more in sales tax than they do in property tax.”
Regardless of these realities, Republican leadership in Indiana’s state capital is proceeding full steam ahead in its efforts to champion tax cuts as a hallmark of good governance.
The ‘long game’ by conservatives in Florida
Florida is the poster child of the conservative movement’s “long game” to end public education. The Sunshine State ranked 47th in ELC’s funding effort analysis for 2023. It had the third-highest number of students enrolled in charter schools in 2022–2023 and the fourth-highest percentage of students in these schools among all states. Meanwhile, it is number one in terms of the percentage of students using school vouchers.
Florida state law already limits the annual increase in the assessed value, not market value, of homesteaded property to 3 percent or the consumer price index (CPI), whichever is less. And polling data has shown that home insurance rates, not property taxes, are a bigger concern for homeowners.
Nevertheless, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is leading an effort to “eliminate property taxes ‘completely’ for homesteaded residents,” Fox Business reports, “a move that, if adopted, would make Florida the first state in the nation to eliminate property taxes on primary residences while also having no state income tax.”
Taking their cues from DeSantis, Republican lawmakers in the Florida legislature are moving with a bill that would place a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2028, ending all property taxes.
A 2025 study by the Florida Policy Institute found that should the ballot referendum succeed, Florida school districts will lose $7.7 billion. In districts that are already fiscally constrained, like Highlands County, eliminating all property taxes would cost $60 million or “about 25 percent of all revenue.”
The Trump administration does its part
The federal government, under the leadership of President Trump, is doing its part in the conservative campaign to dismantle public education.
Trump’s proposed FY 2027 budget would slash $8.5 billion in federal funding for certain K-12 programs, and his administration is blocking $2 billion in congressionally approved grants for public schools in 2026.
His Department of Education, under the leadership of Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, has withheld millions in federal funds for its Full-Service Community Schools program, as well as grants for special education, while expanding $60 million in grants to charter schools.
And in 2027, a nationwide federal school voucher program, which Trump pushed for and was approved by a Republican majority in Congress, will divert billions in funding from the U.S. Treasury to school vouchers while harming funding for public schools.
What Friedman wanted
Proponents seeking to end or limit property taxes try to make their proposals seem reasonable, arguing that property tax increases are examples of “runaway spending at the local level,” while ignoring the funding cuts at higher levels of government trickling down into dire financial consequences at local levels.
“Now more than ever,” CBPP’s LeFebvre says, “state and local revenue will be the backstop for funding public services. Instead of hamstringing local governments’ ability to raise revenue through property tax cuts and caps, states should support localities’ flexibility to raise sufficient revenue.”
She suggests lawmakers consider raising revenue from wealthy households and corporations. “Since 2021,” she notes, “11 states and the District of Columbia have meaningfully raised revenue to invest in services like public schools. Momentum for these kinds of policies is building in 2026, with Washington State and Maine approving tax increases on households with high incomes.”
However, often lost in the discussion is the fact that limiting or ending property taxes doesn’t eliminate the cost of educating the nation’s school children. It just shifts the costs onto working people who end up paying for schools through higher sales taxes and user fees, or paying private corporations for education services. Which is exactly what Network for Public Education’s Burris argues Friedman and his acolytes have wanted all along.
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