Tennessee policymakers and Gov. Lee have decided that funding a separate, $300 million voucher school system is more important than investing in our state’s public schools.
That decision carries real costs, as this letter writer to the Tennesseanpoints out:
The wonderful public school my precious granddaughters attend has been informed that they will lose $338,000 this year. In essence, to have the same services in 2026-2027, they will have to find donors and philanthropies to chip away at this hole in the next few months, or drastically reduce staffing. Already, current staff cover two or three job descriptions, double up on learning support and, at the same time, have produced better test scores and student retention. The system disincentivizes success.
Four months to raise $338,000 that won’t provide extras or undergird new efforts. It’ll be just enough to maintain. Metro and the State do not provide fundraising support. PTAs are keeping the doors open, and moms are popping their trunks in the pickup line to provide diapers, hygiene products and food for students whose government-supported benefits have been reduced or stopped altogether.
The Unity Group of Chattanooga says in an email that the rapid expansion of school vouchers in Tennessee will lead to a dual system of education – a resegregation of schools.
Here’s what they have to say:
The Unity Group of Chattanooga remains firmly opposed to the expansion of school voucher programs in Tennessee, including Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and the newly created “Education Freedom Scholarships.”
In the most recent actions of the Tennessee General Assembly, lawmakers have advanced and enacted sweeping voucher expansion through legislation including Senate Bill 1585 / House Bill 1881, as well as House Bill 2532 / Senate Bill 2453. Together, these measures significantly expand the state’s voucher system, increasing the number of publicly funded scholarships and further diverting taxpayer dollars from public schools into private education.
House Bill 2532 / Senate Bill 2453 in particular demonstrates the scale and direction of this effort, expanding the number of scholarships available statewide and tying state funding to student movement out of public schools. These actions make clear that Tennessee is not simply experimenting with vouchers, but actively building and growing a parallel, publicly funded private education system.
We have said before, and we will continue to say, that these programs are ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable. That conclusion is grounded in what we’ve seen in other states and in Tennessee itself: declining academic outcomes; rising costs to taxpayers, and programs that too often benefit those already positioned and affluent enough to access private education.
But for us, the issue runs deeper than cost or performance.
What we are witnessing is the State of Tennessee moving back toward a dual system of education, one public system that remains accountable to all, and another publicly funded but privately controlled system operating under a different set of rules.
That reality stands in direct conflict with the principles established under Brown v. Board of Education and reinforced through decades of court decisions requiring states to dismantle segregated systems and achieve unitarystatus.
When public funds are redirected to private institutions that are not bound by the same transparency, admissions standards, or civil rights obligations as public schools, we risk recreating conditions that those rulings were meant to eliminate.
We have seen this before. Following Brown, similar mechanisms were used to avoid integration and maintain separation under a different name.
We cannot ignore that history.
At a minimum, these policies raise serious questions about whether Tennessee can still be identified as a state that has achieved and maintained unitary status. From our perspective, this is a step backward, toward separation, toward inequality, and away from the shared responsibility of providing a strong public education for every child.
The Unity Group of Chattanooga will continue to speak clearly on this issue. We believe in one system of public education that is fully funded, fully accountable, and open to all, not a divided system that leaves too many behind.
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 limitfor 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.
The Nashville Public Education Foundation (NPEF) offers some insight into vouchers.
Short version: The don’t work to improve academic outcomes, they eat state budgets, and they provide private school discount coupons to wealthy families.
MORE about the impacts of the bill that expands vouchers to 35,000 seats and is expected to cost taxpayers $262 million:
The amended House bill would have three main effects on public school districts. First, as part of the process to recoup funding due to disenrollment, districts would be required to collect and share the social security numbers of students at the time of public school enrollment. Critics of the bill argue that this is a measure intended to begin tracking the citizenship and immigration status of students by public school districts. Second, while the state’s funding formula factors in regular increases to offset funding losses, the amended House bill’s requirements place a significant administrative burden on districts that has the potential to require districts to spend more money to recoup funding than the money they would recoup in the first place. Third, the amended House bill also significantly increases the household income threshold built into the program, making more vouchers available for higher-income families than previous legislation allowed.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
The leading Democrat running to be Tennessee’s next Governor is calling for an end to the state’s voucher program.
Jerri Green says in a recent Substack post that if elected, she’ll work to end the state’s voucher program and redirect the funds to the state’s public schools.
Every dollar diverted to vouchers is a dollar taken directly from classrooms, teachers, and students across Tennessee.
In an OpEd in the Jackson Post, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerri Green highlights the challenges of school vouchers and calls on the state to use the money – now up to some $300 million – to invest in public schools:
Even more troubling, multiple reports show that students who use vouchers often perform worse academically than their peers who remain in public schools. Lower test scores, disrupted learning, and less accountability are becoming the norm—not the exception.
She outlines how to invest the money:
Imagine what we could do if, instead of draining public schools, we invested in them:
We could pay our teachers what they deserve and finally address the staffing shortages hurting our schools.
We could expand special education services so every child receives the support they need to succeed.
We could build strong career pathways, certifications, and workforce training programs that prepare students for good-paying jobs right here in Tennessee.
