Rev. Brandon Berg of Anderson County and a member of the Southern Christian Coalition said Lee’s plan does not reflect support for public education and instead could lead to using public funds for schools with zero accountability.
Instead, in spite of his constituents’ concerns, he insists on pushing his voucher plan that will bleed funding from our already underfunded, hyperscrutinized public schools and divert it to private schools with far weaker accountability. In fact, Lee and the other supporters of vouchers refuse to answer questions about accountability for those schools.
The group has previously spoken out against the voucher scheme:
TheCenter Squarereports that the state’s current ESA program gave out $9800 per participant – higher than original estimates and more than Lee plans for his separate universal voucher.
Tennessee students in a pilot educational savings account program in three counties are receiving $9,800 – the average statewide funding per public school student – this year.
That’s higher than the $7,075 first-year number in a proposed statewide ESA program and higher than what the funding was estimated to be heading into the approval of the pilot, which is currently taking place in Davidson, Shelby and Hamilton counties.
The state’s education commissioner admits that early results are not promising when it comes to student academic achievement:
“They are required to administer the TCAP,” Reynolds said. “The results aren’t anything to write home about, is my understanding.
Pratik Dash, from Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition Votes, said, “We are all here today on the first day of the 2024 legislative session – Black, Brown, White, younger and older, from different regions of the state because we love Tennessee. We’re here because we love our communities, our people, and our children enough to demand what we deserve. We deserve to live in a state where we can confidently say everyone – regardless of what we look like or where we come from, we are all safe from gun violence. Right now, all eyes are on Tennessee, but we know that our movement is bigger than this moment.”
The call for “love and hope” followed an earlier call for the rejection of school vouchers. Representatives of the Southern Christian Coalition noted that they believe vouchers are potentially harmful to Tennessee students and communities.
Lee moves forward with planned privatization of state’s public schools
Despite mounting evidence suggesting that universal school voucher programs are both expensive and ineffective, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee seems determined to deliver on a promise from his 2018 campaign. That promise? Privatizing public schools.
Gov. Bill Lee is preparing to announce a plan to dramatically expand Tennessee’s controversial school voucher program, allowing K-12 students to receive taxpayer funding for private school regardless of need, according to talking points obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates.
Lee has long been an advocate of using tax dollars to fund unaccountable private schools.
Even though as early as 2016, Bill Lee was extolling the virtues of school voucher schemes and even though he’s a long-time supporter of Betsy DeVos’s pro-voucher Tennessee Federation for Children and even though he has appointed not one, but two voucher vultures to high level posts in his Administration, it is somehow treated as “news” that Bill Lee plans to move forward with a voucher scheme agenda in 2019.
Lee has continued his steady march toward full privatization of schools since 2019. Securing passage of his voucher scheme, advancing legislation that created a charter school commission, inviting Hillsdale to hijack our schools.
He even made a successful push to change the state’s school funding formula to make it more appealing for private schools to accept vouchers.
Now, he’s going for the final blow: A universal school voucher plan.
This plan will be expensive and is not likely to have a positive impact on academic achievement.
Nearly 15,000 students who never attended public school suddenly receiving vouchers would mean a state cost of $98 million. That’s $98 million in new money. Of course, those funds would either be new money (which is not currently contemplated) or would take from the state’s BEP allocations in the districts where the students receive the vouchers.
Since then, two things have happened.
Lee’s plan envisions 20,000 students AND the guaranteed minimum voucher amount has increased.
The cost now would be $141 million. That doesn’t include any local offset for lost local funding (estimated to be about $8 million in Davidson County alone back in 2017).
If the state absorbs the cost, rather than passing it on to local taxpayers, there would need to be a fund of at least $100 million to cover those costs.
So, at minimum, Lee’s plan creates a voucher school district costing an additional $250 million a year.
All while our state remains in the bottom 10 in school funding.
Oh, and if the state does not create an offset fund, local taxpayers would be footing the bill – which would mean either local property tax increases (as happened in Indiana) OR a decrease in services offered in traditional public schools.
Lee is delivering on his promise, even though it’s expensive and even though data from other states and early data from Tennessee suggests it won’t improve student achievement.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
New education commissioner ready to implement agenda that undermines state’s public schools
Gov. Bill Lee’s new Education Commissioner, Lizette Gonzalez Reynolds, has been on the job since July 1st and says her priority will be implementing a raft of policies supported by Gov. Lee and passed by the General Assembly.
Three weeks into her job as Tennessee’s education chief, Lizzette Gonzalez Reynolds says her charge from Gov. Bill Lee is to implement existing major policy changes — from how reading is taught to the continued rollout of private school vouchers — not to craft new initiatives.
Privatizing the state’s public schools has long been a goal of Lee’s, and it seems he’s now chosen a chief implementer of that policy.
Tennessee lawmakers appear determined to expand vouchers to both Chattanooga and Knoxville this year. In fact, the Senate has already passed legislation expanding the state’s Education Savings Account (ESA) program to Chattanooga at the request of Hamilton County state Senator Todd Gardenhire. Now, the House may add Knox County to the voucher expansion and send the plan back to the Senate.
Meanwhile, Georgia lawmakers recently rejected a voucher plan.
Efforts to privatize Tennessee’s public schools were deferred today in a key House Committee.
The privatization push includes potential expansion of school vouchers into Knoxville and the other would open the doors for charter schools to operate in districts without first being subject to local review.
This bill (HB433), as currently written, would expand the state’s school voucher program (known as Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs) to Chattanooga. Currently, the voucher scheme only applies to students in Memphis and Nashville.
It’s bad enough that some policymakers are ready to expand this privatization program to another Tennessee school district. However, what’s even more alarming is that Education Administration Committee Chair Mark White has filed an amendment to expand the program even further – this time into Knoxville.
As you might recall, I wrote about an amendment to the charter legislation that would:
Create a scheme for allowing charter schools that serve homeschooled students
Allow for the creation of residential/boarding schools that are charter schools
These new charters would also be able to bypass local school boards and apply directly to Bill Lee’s State Charter Commission for approval.
That would mean zero local input and zero local accountability – even though millions of local tax dollars would be spent supporting these charter schools.
It’s important to look at these pieces of legislation for what they are: A clear agenda.
Gov. Lee and his legislative allies want to privatize our public schools.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
While Gov. Bill Lee’s school voucher scheme started this year in Memphis and Nashville, legal challenges to the plan continue. All of this while some lawmakers are seeking to expand the program to Chattanooga and possibly beyond.
Metropolitan Nashville and Shelby County governments, which jointly challenged the 2019 law that applies only to their counties, notified the Tennessee Court of Appeals late last month that they will appeal the latest ruling. Attorneys representing parents and taxpayers in a second lawsuit submitted a separate notice of appeal.
The appeals will extend the 3-year-old legal battle over Gov. Bill Lee’s controversial Education Savings Account program for at least several more months. The program provides taxpayer money for eligible families in Memphis and Nashville to help cover private school tuition for their children.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
Gov. Bill Lee has moved quickly to implement his school voucher scheme as courts have cleared the way for it to start this school year.
So far, though, not many families are expressing serious interest.
The Tennesseanreports that as of the first day of school in Memphis and Nashville (the only two districts eligible for vouchers), only 30 applications had been submitted for approval.
As of Monday morning, only 30 families had submitted an actual application, according to information from Department of Education spokesperson Brian Blackley. The department received applications from 40 schools, he said, noting that application process has closed.
While Lee has claimed that several thousand families want the vouchers, that has not yet been borne out in the application process.
