Andy Sher of the Chattanooga Times-Free Pressreports that Senator Todd Gardenhire will vote NO on vouchers when Governor Bill Lee’s ESA plan hits the Senate Finance Committee tomorrow. The revelation could spell trouble for Lee’s plan, according to Sher.
Here’s more:
“A week and a half ago, the governor asked to meet with me on another bill,” Gardenhire said. “I told him I was not for the voucher bill, but I’d carried every voucher bill for the past six years. But this was one I could not go along with.”
Among the reasons Gardenhire gave for opposing the current measure are the exclusion of undocumented immigrants and the fact that Lee didn’t consult Hamilton County lawmakers before initiating his proposal.
“Nobody asked any of the legislators at all that I know of for any input,” Gardenhire said. “They just decided just to come up with this plan.”
Gardenhire’s promise of a NO vote comes as parents prepare to descend on the Capitol to express support for public schools and opposition to vouchers. The bill is scheduled for votes in both the Senate and House Finance Committees on Tuesday.
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At an invitation-only meeting with Bill Lee and Betsy DeVos — a meeting featuring no teachers or public school administrators — a man named Douglas Jahner is in attendance. Jahner is also a frequent commenter on this page, often criticizing public schools while claiming superhero status for his own advocacy of school privatization.
Erik Schelzig tagged a photo of all who attended. Among those not invited, according to Chalkbeat, was the Executive Director of Tennessee’s State Board of Education.
Over in the comments section of this post, Jahner makes an interesting comment:
What a screwed up system whereby we open our wallets for illegal alien children yet we forbid legal neighbor child Johnny from education tax dollars simply because he goes to s school not approved by education unions.
Jahner here is encouraging the violation of what DeVos ultimately called “settled law” after her own mishap on the issue.
For all his commentary on support for “all children,” Jahner – a man close enough to Lee to get an invite to a closed door meeting with the U.S. Secretary of Education — appears to only support education for those children he finds worthy of his approval.
So far, the Senate version of Lee’s voucher plan appears to side with Jahner’s unconstitutional view of school attendance. No word from Lee on whether he backs his buddy on this one.
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This week is shaping up to be huge for education policy in Tennessee. Tomorrow, the TNReady testing window opens — while many will take pencil and paper tests, there will be significant numbers of students taking online TNReady. Our current Commissioner of Education is not quite sure how that will go.
If you’re an educator, student, or parent and you get wind of TNReady trouble this week, let me know ASAP: andy@tnedreport.com
Of course, during this busy week for our schools and teachers, legislators have planned key votes on voucher legislation. Governor Bill Lee’s “education savings account” voucher scheme will be voted on in the House and Senate Finance Committees on Tuesday. That’s the final step in both bodies before the bill hits the floor, likely the week of April 22nd.
A group of parents and teachers is planning a series of events tomorrow in order to protest the movement on vouchers.
Meanwhile, if you have any great voucher, charter, or TNReady memes, send them my way at andy@tnedreport.com
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As Gov. Bill Lee’s voucher proposal advances through the legislative process and, at least in the Senate, grows to cost significantly more money while reducing accountability, parents around the state are rising up and speaking out against the plan.
Chalkbeatreports on an event in Nashville on Tuesday where parents and teachers expressed opposition to vouchers and also indicated another demonstration was forthcoming.
“What this plan is going to do is take money from over 90 percent of our kids and give it to just a few,” said Lauren Sorensen, a Knox County teacher who helped organize the event.
“Our legislators actually have a constitutional duty in Tennessee to maintain and support a public education. They have no duty to support private education. And simply put, they are not doing their jobs,” Sorensen said.
The rally drew parents too, including Patty Daniel whose two children attend public schools in Williamson County, near Nashville.
“All of the parents I know do not want vouchers, and we are baffled as to why some of our elected officials are so intent on pushing this bill,” Daniel said. “I feel like they are listening to high-powered lobbying groups and not to actual parents and teachers.”
Daniel’s statement is right on the money, literally. Key legislative leaders received significant financial support from pro-privatization groups like the Tennessee Federation for Children and Tennessee CAN.
Meanwhile, dark money groups like Tennesseans for Student Success are attacking any Republicans who deviate from support for Lee’s voucher scheme. Even embattled state Rep. David Byrd, an admitted sex offender, faced attacks and repercussions from legislative leadership — not for his bad behavior but for his vote against vouchers.
The latest version of the plan will now cost a minimum of $219 million at full implementation. That’s enough money to give every teacher in the state a pay raise of around 7.5%.
Debate is sure to heat up in the next two weeks as the proposal moves toward a likely floor vote in both the House and Senate.
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Opponents of Governor Bill Lee’s school voucher scheme have long argued that once the program starts, it will expand significantly and take up ever larger chunks of state education funding. Turns out, the plan hasn’t even been enacted yet and it is already expanding.
Erik Schelzig of the Tennessee Journalreports that the Senate will consider an amendment that would allow the program to grow to 30,000 and will include homeschool students:
Just as in the House bill, the program would be capped at 5,000 students in the first year, followed by increments of 2,500 in the next four years. But while the lower chamber’s bill envisions limiting the pilot program at 15,000, the Senate bill would continue to allow the program to grow by 2,500 students each ensuing year until it reaches an enrollment of 30,000.
At today’s funding levels, that’s a total annual cost of $219 million at full implementation. That’s $219 million NOT available to fill in the gaps of the BEP or raise teacher pay, for example.
Additionally, the Senate envisions removing the requirement that students receiving voucher dollars take at least the math and ELA parts of TNReady. Instead, schools could administer a nationally norm-referenced test of their choosing.
Ironically, education advocates have for years suggested the state allow local school districts the flexibility to choose an alternative test to replace the failed TNReady. Instead, education policy leaders in our state stubbornly hold on to the idea that everything will eventually be “just fine” with testing.
As of this writing, the House version passed another subcommittee on the march toward the House floor. The Senate is scheduled to take up the expanded version this afternoon.
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Governor Bill Lee failed to call on admitted sex offender and state Rep. David Byrd to step down from his leadership post on an education subcommittee following a meeting between Lee and one of Byrd’s accusers. However, Lee’s henchman, House Speaker Glen Casada, removed Byrd from his leadership post following Byrd’s vote in opposition to Lee’s school voucher scheme. Now, a group funded by Bill Lee is attacking Byrd with online ads.
The Tennessee Federation for Children, the Tennessee affiliate of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children, is running ads accusing Byrd of refusing to stand with President Trump and Governor Lee on vouchers.
Before he was elected Governor, Lee gave thousands of dollars to the Tennessee Federation for Children and wrote pieces in favor of school vouchers. Once elected, he hired the former state director of TFC as his policy director.
The message is clear: If you oppose Bill Lee’s school privatization agenda, you’ll face the wrath of dark money political organizations funded by Lee. The attacks on Byrd come after another dark money group, Tennesseans for Student Success, spent money attacking House Education Republicans who stood in the way of Lee’s state charter authorizer. That plan is a way for Lee and his privatizing profiteers to circumvent local school boards and force charters where they aren’t wanted and don’t belong.
The next two to three weeks will be pivotal in the fight for Tennessee’s public schools.
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A Tennessee teacher writes about the education policies that make her sick.
I’m
sick.
Sick of
my students being over-tested and our schools being underfunded.
Sick of
teachers leaving the profession because they are underpaid and undervalued.
Sick of
Tennessee being 45th in the nation in per pupil funding.
Sick of
being disrespected by a Governor who has proposed increasing state funding for
unaccountable charter schools by 100% while only increasing funding for
teachers by 2%.
And how
I feel is only going to get worse if the state government passes voucher
legislation, which will further drain the resources our students need from
public schools and hand them over to unaccountable private companies.
That’s
why there’s a movement of teachers planning on calling in sick on Tuesday,
April 9th to travel to Nashville and flood the capitol.
We plan
on letting our state’s politicians know just how sick we are. And we plan on
making it clear to them: the war on public education in Tennessee ends now.
I’m a member of the Tennessee Education
Association, but I know that there are many in the state leadership who think
that collective action is too aggressive and premature. They still believe that
we can work amicably with state politicians. I disagree.
Anyone still entertaining that idea should have had a rude
awakening last week when Betsy DeVos visited our state and held closed door
meetings with privatizers and politicians.
Several months back, when Governor Lee announced his
unfortunate choice for the TN Commissioner of Education, I publicly stated that
he had declared war on public education. Some may have thought that was a bit
dramatic. However, the Governor wouldn’t have invited the most vilified
Secretary of Education in history to the state if he didn’t plan on dropping an
atomic bomb on public education. His voucher and charter bills are just that.
With the backing of ALEC and Betsy DeVos those devastating
bills will pass unless teachers wake up and do something drastic. Millions upon
millions of dollars will be drained from public education and siphoned away
from our students.
How do I know this? Because it was perfectly ok to have an
admitted child predator be the chair of the House Education Committee until he
voted against the voucher bill. Only then was he no longer fit to be the chair.
Strong arm tactics are running rampant and the writing is on
the wall.
The go-along to get-along approach of the state teachers
association, which means working with the enemies of public education, has been
a pipe dream for almost a decade, and it’s time for teachers to wake up. All
the emailing and phone calls in the world won’t stop politicians bankrolled by
billionaires like the Koch brothers and DeVos family from pursuing devastating
legislation that hurts our schools, students, and communities.
Over the last year, I have watched educators in one state
after another rise up, take their power back, and force legislators to actually
represent THEM and not privatizers. It didn’t matter that the strikes were
illegal or sick-outs were risky. When educators stick together and have the
backing of the community, they can make real change possible. Teachers can take
on billionaires and win. They already have in other states.
In my opinion, the only thing that will stop this insanity
is for teachers to walk out. Shut it down. Take back our schools. Take back our
profession. Do our job……. and fight for our kids.
I hope to see you in the capitol on Tuesday, April 9.
Lauren Sorensen is a second grade teacher at Halls Elementary School in Knox County and a former president of the Knox County Education Association.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
Knoxville columnist Frank Cagle has some thoughts on Bill Lee’s voucher scheme. To be clear, Cagle thinks it’s a very bad idea. This is because Cagle has actually read evidence and understands basic math — two concepts that seem to escape many at the legislature.
Here’s some of what Cagle has to say:
The plan issues a debit card with $7,300 on it and the parent can spend it on anything deemed “educational.” Field trip to Disney World? A flat-screen TV study aid? These programs have been found to be infested with fraud and abuse elsewhere. Who in Tennessee will police the program and find out if it is being abused? Is the Comptroller’s Office supposed to audit 15,000 students? And who decides if a questionable item is an “educational expense?” An audit of the program in Arizona revealed parents misspent $700,000 in one year.
The plan uses one-time general fund money to set it up and to fool people that the ultimate cost won’t come out of the existing education budget. By 2025 Lee would have spent $125 million to have a program in place for 15,000 students. It is unlikely that the administration would spend this kind of money to set up this program if it did not plan to expand it exponentially. At that point BEP funds to local school systems will be cut to pay for the vouchers. The only thing one can conclude is that this plan will gradually disburse funds to parents to send students to private schools, education funding from the state will be cut to pay for it and the end result is not a happy outcome for public schools.
Cagle is exactly right — the plan is expensive, with a 10-year cost approaching $1 billion. Yes, Bill Lee wants to devote $1 billion of taxpayer money to funding unaccountable private schools even though similar schemes in other states have yet to yield positive results.
Finally, Cagle notes that legislators are being punished by legislative leadership for opposing vouchers. Cagle notes that admitted sex offender David Byrd was given a subcommittee chairmanship, but had that honor stripped after he opposed Lee’s voucher plan. That’s how Glen Casada governs Tennessee’s House of Representatives — admitting to being a sex offender is all well and good, but when you get in the way of Bill Lee’s plan to privatize Tennessee’s public schools, you are suddenly unfit to lead.
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The BEP — Tennessee’s funding formula for schools — is a reliable source of revenue for local school districts each year. While projections from the Comptroller’s office suggest the state underfunds the BEP by $500 million a year, the formula is relatively stable and districts can typically predict the amount of new BEP dollars they will receive each year.
That’s why Knox County was surprised this year to see a number about $6 million less than expected. The Knoxville News-Sentinel has more:
The state has typically added roughly $180 million new dollars into the BEP statewide in recent years. This, plus other smaller percentages of state funds, allowed the county to budget roughly $12 million extra BEP dollars each year. Last year it added an extra $14.1 million new BEP dollars after the state added $188.4 million new dollars to the fund.
However, that number is expected to be down to $117.5 million in new money this year, meaning the county’s share of new dollars is projected to be only $6.2 million, nearly $8 million less than last year, Knox County Finance Director Chris Caldwell said.
Here’s the historic data on BEP funding for Knox County:
$196.4 million, $12.9 million (2016-17);
$207.9 million, $11.5 million (2017-18);
$222 million, $14.1 million (2018-19);
$228.2 million estimate, $6.2 million estimate (2019-20)
As you can see, Knox County could reliably count on at least $12 million in increased BEP funding each year in recent years. That number was down more than half in this year’s projection.
What’s different in 2019-20? Well, Governor Bill Lee is proposing a statewide voucher scheme, for one. He’s also increasing funds available for charter schools. This comes after several years of former Governor Bill Haslam adding roughly $100 million a year in teacher salary increases. This year, that number is $75 million, with the other $25 million going to start Lee’s voucher plan.
If teachers in Knox County want to know what happened to their raises, the answer is vouchers. If residents want to know why building new schools is delayed, it’s because Lee is committing a lot of new money to charter schools for their facilities.
Bill Lee’s “school choice” agenda has consequences. The projected shortfall in Knox County is a clear example. Of course, Lee has done nothing to address the persistent low funding of our state’s schools and given no indication he intends to address that issue.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
This picture from Eric Schelzig of Tennessee Journal tells the story of the private meeting with Governor Bill Lee, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and invited guests to discuss vouchers.
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