SB 990 and SB 1006, filed in Raleigh on April 30, 2026, build the infrastructure for the next step. SB 990 funds a $445K SEAA-administered account pilot at a single high school and authorizes a Collaboratory work group to study moving K-12 disbursement out of DPI. SB 1006 adds the credential rail and pre-positions named vendors. Neither is the universal-eligibility ESA program yet. They are the infrastructure every state that ran this built first.
Seven parts: the trajectory NC is on, what Florida looks like a generation in, what every state’s budget did, who actually receives the money, who pays the bill, the published institutional playbook, and where SB 990 and SB 1006 fit in it.
Each part ends with a link to the dispatch that holds the receipts. If a line looks weak, click through. The receipts page is where I show the work.
The first voucher was small. That was the point.
North Carolina launched the Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2013: a $4,200 voucher for families at or below 133% of the federal poverty line. About 3,500 students enrolled the first year. That program was the gateway.
In 2017, NC added ESA+: Education Savings Accounts for students with disabilities, awards up to $17,000. In 2023, the General Assembly removed the income cap from the Opportunity Scholarship and opened it to every family in the state regardless of income. In 2026, SB 990 and SB 1006 propose the infrastructure for the next step: an SEAA-administered wallet pilot, identity and credential rails, and a Collaboratory study on moving K-12 disbursement out of DPI.
None of this was hidden. In 2023, Robert Luebke at the John Locke Foundation described the trajectory in his own words:
That may mean a multi-year runway to a full universal type of ESA. Schools must have the ability to ramp up capacity. The market needs time to send signals to developers and investors. And we need time to address the kinks in small programs so that they do not replicate when the program is scaled up.— Robert Luebke, John Locke Foundation, March 23, 2023
That is a voucher advocate describing the staircase strategy on the record. Each NC bill since 2013 has been one step on his runway.
Florida used to be the example. ExcelinEd’s own chairman stopped pointing to it.
Florida launched its voucher program in 1999. For two decades, the school-choice movement pointed to it as the success story. After the 2024 NAEP results came in (the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal test that measures what students actually know), that stopped.
The voucher is not the only thing that happened to Florida schools in those years. But if the voucher were the rocket fuel its architects claim, the results would not be running in the opposite direction.
When ExcelinEd’s chairman published his post-2024 list of success states in January 2025, he pointed at Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Florida was not on the list.
Every state that ran this overshot its own projection.
Utah is the floor: 50% over Year 1. Arizona is the ceiling: more than eleven times the projection. Florida tripled in two years after the income cap came off. None stayed within budget.
Utah is the cleanest case. On April 18, 2025, a state judge ruled the Utah Fits All program unconstitutional. The legislature’s response in the next budget cycle: raise funding from $80 million to $120 million. The court ruling accelerated the program rather than slowing it.
The cost projections sold to legislators understated actual cost by factors of one-and-a-half to eleven. All five states ran the same playbook from the same authors and got the same result.
When the income cap comes off, the money goes to families already paying private tuition, or never in the public system.
Every state that publishes data shows the same pattern. The voucher is sold as access for kids who can’t afford private school. Once the income cap comes off, the money flows to the kids whose families already could.
The most recent NCDPI figure: of 106,704 voucher recipients, only 11.5% had previously attended an NC public school. The other 88.5% were families already paying private tuition, or never in the public system to begin with. The voucher absorbed their cost.
Arizona is further along. Some form of ESA has existed there since 2011; universal eligibility opened in 2022. Four years in, only about 9% of eligible students have enrolled. The program reaches a narrow slice, and that slice is overwhelmingly already private.
EdChoice publishes a 50-state scorecard called the Friedman Index that measures program success by funding parity with public-school spending. NC’s appropriations are scaling toward what the Index calls parity. The “opportunity for all children” part hasn’t shown up.
North Carolina is the only state in the country where teacher pay is going down.
NC ranks 46th in teacher pay and 46th in per-pupil funding. The NEA’s April 2026 Rankings & Estimates report shows NC as the single state where average teacher pay is projected to decrease this year.
The voucher program transfers money the public schools were funded to receive. The statutory replacement has not been paid.
The private side is consolidating around it. 520 of the 930 NC private schools accepting vouchers are now majority-voucher-funded. More than half. The schools whose budgets depend on the program now have a financial stake in its continued expansion.
The trajectory has been on paper for more than a decade.
ExcelinEd (Jeb Bush’s education policy organization) publishes a 10-component implementation framework for state ESA programs. NC has 8 of those 10 components visibly in place. The remaining 2 are SB 990 and SB 1006.
ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate-funded organization that writes model bills for state legislators across the country) has published an ESA model bill four times since 2008. Each version includes the same instruction in Footnote [ii]: legislators may “consider other capable departments, create a new small agency, or contract with a private nonprofit organization to oversee the program if they are concerned about the hostility the program would face from the existing state education department.” The core sentences of that footnote are identical across:
- ALEC 2015-16 Education Savings Account Act
- ALEC 2017 Education Savings Account Act (adds a Department of Revenue / Treasury option)
- ExcelinEd 2026 Model Policy: Education Scholarship Accounts
- SB 990 §2(a)(2), filed in Raleigh, April 2026
Same instruction. Three letterheads. Eleven years.
Heritage Foundation (the conservative policy organization that authored Project 2025) publishes the theoretical defense for keeping these programs deregulated. In Recalibrating Accountability (Burke + Bedrick, 2016), Heritage names four regulations to avoid: open admissions, price controls, testing requirements, reporting mandates. NC’s voucher bills don’t include testing or reporting because the published instruction said not to.
These organizations are not independent voices reaching similar conclusions. They cite each other’s research, share funders (Walton Family Foundation, Bradley Foundation), and their senior staff move between them.
SB 990 and SB 1006 are the next documents in an 18-year paper trail.
SB 990 §2(a)(2) directs a study on transferring voucher disbursement from NCDPI (the public-school agency, constitutional authority traces to Article IX of the 1868 NC Constitution) to NCSEAA (the State Education Assistance Authority, originally created in 1965 to administer college loans). The exact instruction came from ALEC’s model bill in 2015. The same language has been published, in the same form, four times.
SB 1006 sits alongside it: a digital-wallet rail for the program, plus specific procurement authorizations for tutoring, technology, and curriculum vendors. NC’s existing ESA+ program already runs on ClassWallet, one of the five wallet vendors named in EdChoice’s own implementation guide. SB 1006 scales an operating system that has been running for years.
The bill goes to vote during the short session. The architects have done their work. The receipts from five other states tell us what happens next.
The funding parity is showing up. The opportunity it was supposed to create isn’t.
The public schools are 46th in pay and the only ones dropping. The Reinvestment Fund holds zero dollars. The voucher money goes to families who were already paying for private school, or never in the public system to begin with.
And the bill that scales all of this is in Raleigh.