As lawmakers continue maneuvering to secure passage of legislation that would transfer hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to unaccountable private schools, they also continue ignoring a glaring need.
The first results came in late 2015. Researchers examined an Indiana voucher program that had quickly grown to serve tens of thousands of students under Mike Pence, then the state’s governor. “In mathematics,” they found, “voucher students who transfer to private schools experienced significant losses in achievement.” They also saw no improvement in reading.
The next results came a few months later, in February, when researchers published a major study of Louisiana’s voucher program. Students in the program were predominantly black and from low-income families, and they came from public schools that had received poor ratings from the state department of education, based on test scores. For private schools receiving more applicants than they could enroll, the law required that they admit students via lottery, which allowed the researchers to compare lottery winners with those who stayed in public school.
They found large negative results in both reading and math. Public elementary school students who started at the 50th percentile in math and then used a voucher to transfer to a private school dropped to the 26th percentile in a single year. Results were somewhat better in the second year, but were still well below the starting point.
In June, a third voucher study was released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank and proponent of school choice. The study, which was financed by the pro-voucher Walton Family Foundation, focused on a large voucher program in Ohio. “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools,” the researchers found. Once again, results were worse in math.
Bill Lee has spent his time and energy as governor finding a way to funnel public dollars to private schools and it is clearly not in service of improving outcomes for kids.
It seems this legislative session, he may be on the verge of achieving his ultimate goal: privatizing public education in the Volunteer State by way of a school voucher scheme.
Chalkbeat has a timeline of the march toward vouchers, and the details are quite interesting.
Here’s the key takeaway:
Also, the research hasn’t supported the case for vouchers as a way to improve academic outcomes. Recent studies find little evidence that vouchers improve test scores. In fact, they’ve sometimes led to declines.
Even now, big questions loom about the cost, impact, and legal merits of a program that threatens to destabilize Tennessee’s public education system.
A program that’s very expensive, doesn’t improve academic outcomes, and has “sometimes led to declines” is Gov. Bill Lee’s signature policy initiative.
The move to expand vouchers is being pushed by Williamson County’s State Senator, Jack Johnson, and Gov. Bill Lee, a Williamson County native.
In a joint statement announcing their opposition, the candidates said:
We are united in opposing vouchers because we’re listening to our neighbors, members of our communities and parents of students in Williamson County who are overwhelmingly against using taxpayer dollars to fund private schools.
Coalition of groups asks lawmakers to reject Lee’s voucher scam
As Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal to expand the state’s failing voucher program to all 95 counties moves forward in legislative committees, a group of public education advocates is speaking out against the bill.
Teachers from across Tennessee will flock to the Tennessee State Capitol on Tuesday for a rally against Gov. Bill Lee’s school voucher expansion plans.
The teachers will arrive at the Capitol at 9 a.m. for a day of action before the rally begins at 1 p.m.
They said the voucher plan is a scam and it will further defund Tennessee’s public schools, which are already ranked sixth to last in education investment.
The teachers will be joined by parents and others advocating for full funding of the state’s public schools. The group is coming together under the banner of Tennessee For All.
NewsChannel5’s Phil Williams has a recording of a prominent school voucher lobbyist calling for political punishment for Republican lawmakers who refuse to support Gov. Bill Lee’s voucher scheme.
“I don’t think anybody is going to get unseated without some substantial independent expenditures coming in there,” Gill says, acknowledging that wealthy special interests would need to spend a lot of money to knock off lawmakers who did not vote their way.
The point seems to be that privatizers (like Gill, affiliated with the Tennessee Federation for Children), are willing to spend what it takes to secure pro-voucher votes from lawmakers.
This is a familiar tactic. Tennesseans for Student Success employed similar methods when some GOP lawmakers refused to support a different privatization scheme.
Three former Arizona Department of Education employees were indicted on conspiracy and money laundering charges in what prosecutors say was a scheme to defraud more than $600,000 from an education voucher program that has drawn criticism for its skyrocketing costs and lax regulation by the state.
The scheme saw employees create fake student profiles and approve the “ghost” students for vouchers – funds that were then paid to DOE employees.
Tennessee’s proposed school voucher scheme has come under fire for its lack of accountability. Without strict tracking of both expenditures and student performance, fraud along the lines of what has happened in Arizona is quite possible.
Peter Greene writes about school voucher legislation on the verge of being debate in the Tennessee General Assembly.
He notes:
Tennessee SB 2787 (also, HB 2468) is one of those odd little legislative tricks beloved by both parties and mysterious to ordinary mortals. It started out as a bill requiring the department of education to study school choice in other states and then make a report. Except by the time it’s done it won’t be about that at all.
This bill will be the vehicle for delivering on Gov. Bill Lee’s promise to create a universal school voucher scheme in Tennessee.
Green goes on to note that based on Tennessee’s education track record, vouchers are likely to be a disaster in the state.
Choice fans talk about the needs of students and families, but Tennessee with its rich history of grift-centered education reformsterism seems poised to once again put the interests of profiteers ahead of protecting the rights of families. Heaven only knows what this bill is going to look like when it finally assumes its final form, but I’m not optimistic.
And Greene has this to say about the lack of accountability measures for the schools accepting vouchers:
It would be nice, in a choice marketplace, to have some basic guardrails in place. We mostly don’t depend on market forces to protect us from markets that sell poisonous food. One would think that the government could provide that basic level of oversight for a school choice system, but voucher fans are far more likely to explicitly forbid government oversight, and true to form, none of the discussion surrounding this bill seems to center on what requirements vendors would have to meet in order to get some of those taxpayer-funded voucher dollars.
