Vouchers Rejected in Utah, Missouri

As Tennessee moves forward with expensive voucher scheme, other states are rejected the bad idea

The effort to divert public funds to unaccountable private schools ran into roadblocks in Missouri and Utah last week.

Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe’s plan to rapidly enlarge a scholarship program for private and religious schools with an infusion of state tax funds was cut out of the budget Wednesday as the Senate Appropriations Committee finished revising spending plans for the coming year.

The Republican Senator who stripped the voucher funding said public schools should be the state’s top funding priority.

In Utah, a judge came to the rescue of the state’s students:

Utah’s $100 million school voucher program violates the state’s constitution, a judge ruled Friday.

“[Because] the Program is a legislatively created, publicly funded education program aimed at elementary and secondary education, it must satisfy the constitutional requirements applicable to the ‘public education system’ set forth in the Utah Constitution,” Third District Judge Laura Scott wrote in her ruling. “The Program is not ‘open to all children of the state.’”

The judge said public education funds in Utah must be used to support schools that accept all students – and that private schools may restrict admission, so cannot be recipients of public education dollars.

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Vouchers: Terrible Policy, Terribly Expensive

Bill Lee’s signature achievement as governor will be the destruction of TN public schools

Over at The Education Report I wrote about a new policy analysis exploring how vouchers impact local public schools.

The answer: It’s not good.

As if we needed even more evidence that vouchers are a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad policy idea – Public Funds for Public Schools is out with a new policy brief that includes case studies focused on the financial impact of school voucher schemes.

The bottom line: Voucher budgets suck limited funds out of education funding allocations and the result leaves public schools behind.

Gov. Bill Lee promoting school privatization

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A Decade of Education News

The first education news story published at Tennessee Education Report went live 10 years ago.

Since that time, there have been hundreds of stories.

Issues like TNReady’s online testing failure, teacher compensation, the aggressive advance of charter schools, the failures of the Achievement School District – and so many more have been covered here.

Since 2019, the drive to privatize Tennessee’s public schools has grown more intense.

We now have a voucher program in Memphis and Nashville and Gov. Lee and his legislative allies are seeking to expand it.

Hillsdale College has their sites set on opening as many as 50 charter schools in the state – and has five applications (Madison, Maury, Montgomery, Robertson, Rutherford) active right now.

We have a new school funding formula – TISA – and this is the first year it will impact districts.

Oh, and there’s a new third grade retention law that will be impacting students and schools this year.

Tennessee Education Report has covered it all.

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