Category Archives: Tennessee General Assembly

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Another Voucher Warning

As the 2026 legislative session comes to a close, lawmakers are now looking at yet another effort to expand Gov. Bill Lee’s signature scheme: A private school discount coupon plan for wealthy families.

Some call them vouchers.

Realists call it a scam – exclusionary, expensive, and harmful to public schools and Tennessee communities.

A reverse Robinhood scheme that would make Ronald Reagan proud – taking tax dollars from Tennessee’s working class and sending them to the wealthy to fund private school education discounts.

In an email, Metro Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda notes:

After securing an expansion of Governor Lee’s voucher scam, well-funded special interests are now pushing to grow the state’s older and more costly ESA private school voucher system and the legislation is already moving quickly.

Tennessee lawmakers are advancing amended legislation (HB 1881/SB 1585) that would significantly expand the state’s ESA voucher program.

Key concerns with the amended bill:

  • Dramatically expand the income limit for the Education Savings Account (ESA) program and add Knox County, in addition to the Achievement School District, Hamilton County, Metro Nashville, and Memphis-Shelby. The income limit would be so high that almost every Tennessee family would qualify. 
  • Remove the 15,000-student cap on ESA vouchers. School districts affected by the program must reimburse the state for each ESA scholarship awarded from their respective counties. Most of these dollars come from local funds in each of these four counties. Without the cap,  school districts may have to send additional funding to the state to cover the additional ESA recipients, taking resources out of the neighborhood public schools and classrooms. 
  • Allow the ESA program to serve additional students when the statewide voucher program reaches capacity. The four additional counties that would now be included in the ESA program already have the highest number of families participating in the voucher program. This could explode the number of vouchers in Tennessee and cause irreparable fiscal harm to the state’s largest school districts.
  • Remove TCAP testing and annual reporting requirementsfor the ESA program. By removing these requirements, lawmakers reduce transparency and accountability, leaving families and taxpayers without the information they need to see how students in the ESA program are performing compared to their peers in public schools.

Use the buttons below to take action to stop special interests from taking your tax dollars to give private school coupons to Bill Lee’s rich friends.

EMAIL: https://bit.ly/fundourschoolstn
CALL: https://bit.ly/vouchercallscript2026

Gov. Bill Lee promoting school privatization

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Legislature Passes $260 Million School Voucher Expansion

Despite a growing price tag and the reality that school vouchers so far are essentially providing private school discount coupons to wealthy families, the GOP Supermajority in the Tennessee General Assembly has approved a significant expansion of the state’s school voucher scheme.

The plan would increase the number of vouchers available from 20,000 to 35,000 effective in the 2026-27 academic year. The cost of the expanded program is expected to be $262 million.

Chalkbeat reports:

Tennessee will expand its universal voucher program to 35,000 students next school year despite bipartisan opposition to the program over its growing price tag and changes to the funding assurances made to public school districts last year.

A slim majority of Tennessee Senate Republicans signed off on the legislation on Thursday. The bill will go to Gov. Bill Lee to be signed into law.

While the Senate initially sought to expand the program to 40,000 seats, the chamber agreed to move forward with a House version for 35,000 students.

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Resisting Bill Lee’s Fight with Sun Bucks

On Testing and 8th Graders

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Lawmakers Push Back Against Bill Lee’s Summer Hunger Games

Gov. Bill Lee has made it clear he doesn’t want to feed hungry kids in the summer if it means he has to take federal money to do so.

While this may seem a cruel way to prove a political point (the point, ostensibly that TN doesn’t NEED federal help), Bill Lee just doesn’t care.

He’s opted-out of a program known as Sun Bucks two years in a row – in spite many hunger and education advocates encouraging him to participate.

Oh, and this starvation scheme doesn’t save the state any money – in the federal program, TN spends about $5 million to draw down $84 million. Those federal funds ensure some 700,000 kids get some meal help in the summer. Lee took that same $5 million in state funds and created a much smaller program – one that only feeds 25,000 kids. That’s a terrible ROI. It seems Lee’s capitalist supporters would be shocked at his terrible business sense on this one.

Or, well, just shocked that he’d starve kids and not even save the state some cash.

And, in fact, some lawmakers – among them, many Republicans – are resisting Lee’s cruel approach.

In an apparent rebuke to the governor, two rural Republicans — Sen. Paul Bailey of Sparta and Rep. Michael Hale of Sparta — are sponsoring a bill to require the state to apply for the federal Summer EBT funding. In past years, the program has distributed $84 million in federal funding to low-income families to help them buy their children food at the grocery store when school is out.

So far, a bipartisan group of 30 lawmakers have signed on – and the bill has passed unanimously in every committee where its been heard.

Will these lawmakers prevail?

And where do the current candidates for Gov stand on feeding hungry kids over the summer?

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Machines vs. Books

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Sepulveda Speaks Out Against Vouchers

In an email sent by advocacy group TN for All, Nashville Metro Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda issues a call to action against the legislature’s attempt to rapidly expand Gov. Bill Lee’s voucher scheme. If expanded, the plan could cost as much as $300 million next year.

The email reads in part:

Last night, the Tennessee House of Representatives voted to pass an expansion of Governor Lee’s voucher scheme.

These vouchers, called “Education Freedom Scholarships,” have so far gone primarily to wealthy families whose children were already enrolled in private schools, with no evidence from the Lee administration to suggest otherwise.

For the upcoming school year, each voucher will be worth $7,530 per student attending a private school, which is more state funding per pupil than Tennessee provides to K 12 public school students. Meanwhile, Tennessee ranks 47th in the nation in per pupil spending for public education.

In short, this means more strain on our public schools and less support for the students who rely on them.

Vouchers are a bad deal for Tennessee families. Our children deserve strong, stable investment in their public schools.

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Lawmakers Fight Back Against Lee’s Bullying

Jerri Green Takes a Stand Against Turning Point USA

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TN Campus Speech Law Named for Racist Podcaster

Rep. Gino Bulso, a Williamson County Republican, claims that a man who repeatedly denigrated women of color on his podcast “encouraged everyone to love others.”

Bulso sponsored the “Charlie Kirk Act” which aims to prevent Christian Nationalist and white supremacist speakers from facing backlash on college campuses. Yes, Bulso wants Tennessee college campuses to be a more welcoming environment for men like Kirk who, like David duke, cloaked their racism not in a white hood, but in a suit and smooth talk.

WPLN reports on Bulso’s effort to protect future Kirks:

HB 1476/ SB 1741 would require colleges and universities to sign the University of Chicago’s policy on freedom of speech — and prohibit administrations from uninviting a speaker based on their opposition to abortion or LGBTQ rights.

Meanwhile, the state’s leading Democratic candidate for Governor, Jerri Green, says she’ll work to keep Kirk’s “Turning Point USA” political clubs off of Tennessee high school campuses.

Public schools exist to serve all students—regardless of race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, or political belief. Organizations that are allowed into these spaces must meet that same standard. Turning Point has repeatedly demonstrated practices and messaging that many educators, civil rights advocates, and families view as discriminatory and exclusionary. Its public rhetoric has too often targeted marginalized groups, framed diversity and inclusion efforts as threats, and promoted ideological litmus tests that chill open discussion rather than encourage it. That approach undermines the fundamental mission of public education: to create safe, inclusive environments where students can learn to think critically and engage respectfully with differing views.

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The Kansas Voucher Saga

Utah’s Backwards March

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What’s Up with Vouchers in TN?

TC Weber tracks down the latest in the ongoing fight over expanding school vouchers:

Take the voucher expansion bill.

The House recently amended its version, pushing the program to 35,000 students next year—an increase of 15,000.

The Senate? They want 40,000.

Because of course they do.

The House version also adjusts “hold harmless” funding—meaning districts would only receive funding for students who actually take vouchers, not for overall enrollment losses.

That’s not a small tweak.

That’s a structural shift.

And it has the potential to hit district budgets hard.

The big question now is whether there are enough votes to get anything across the finish line.

Republicans have a supermajority, but even within that, there’s division.

And when divisions show up this late in session, strange things can happen.

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Keeping Turning Point Out of TN Schools

A Note on Standardized Testing

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$55 Million

That’s the cost of turning Tennessee public schools into ICE agents:

The advocates cited a new report from the Immigration Research Initiative (IRI) that shows:

  • Verifying the status of all students in the state would entail hiring, training and equipping an estimated 934 school personnel. For context, that is roughly half the number of school nurses in Tennessee public schools.
  • The cost of hiring these 934 employees would total roughly $55 million statewide.
  • These are not one-time costs. The expense for each district would be highest in the first year of implementation but would continue to recur every school year.

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Cold Water

House GOP Caucus Chair Jeremy Faison pours cold water on the idea of expanding Gov. Bill Lee’s private school coupon scheme:

https://twitter.com/thetnholler/status/2011449101163065765?s=46
Gov. Bill Lee promoting school privatization

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Gov. Bill Lee Takes on Hungry Kids – and Wins . . . Again!

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Union Time

TC Weber suggests that state lawmakers may inadvertently drive up union membership among educators.

One bill I’m hearing about would eliminate Collaborative Conferencing altogether.

To be clear: they’re not replacing CC. They’re just eliminating it.

Which is rich, because collaborative conferencing already forces educators to do enormous amounts of work to produce guidelines the district is under no obligation to follow.

Teachers will quickly realize that interpreting state law will come down to them versus the district—and they’ll need qualified help.

The unions will be standing there with membership forms.

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Snowflake School Board Members Meltdown Over Diversity

Some members of the Hamilton County School Board aren’t happy about the district’s efforts to recruit teacher applicants from diverse backgrounds.

Board members Larry Grohn and Felice Hadden, both Republicans, practically melted down at a recent meeting.

What burned them up? The district’s policy that, according to the Chattanooga Times-Free Press:

Under the updated policy, educator diversity refers to a teacher workforce that “reflects a broad range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, language, socioeconomic backgrounds and pathways into the profession.”

Grohn said the policy was “racist” and Hadden suggested the diversity was fine as long as the district didn’t spend too much effort or money on recruiting diverse candidates.

The whole issue was spurred as Hamilton County updated its diversity policy (to the policy noted above) in response to a state law requiring the dismantling of DEI efforts.

That dismantling included undoing a previous state law – also passed by Republicans – that required school districts to adopt a diversity policy.

Chattanooga Sign
Photo by Jeff Miller on Unsplash

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