Tennessee School Districts Continue To Push Back Against Gov. Lee’s School Voucher Proposal
Image Credit: Alliance for Excellent Education / CC
The Tennessee Conservative Staff –
Tennessee school districts continue to discuss the topic of school choice after Governor Bill Lee announced a proposal that would give statewide access to his school voucher program.
If passed, the Education Freedom Scholarship Act would open up around 20,000 scholarships to allow parents to choose where their children attend school for the 2024-2025 school year. Half of those scholarships would be allocated to families who fall at 300% or below the federal poverty threshold. The others would be available to anyone who is eligible to attend public schools.
The proposal would allow for open access to scholarships in the 2025-2026 school year.
Jackson-Madison County School System’s Legislative Committee met last week to discuss just how the potential legislation would affect the district.
JMCSS attorney Dale Thomas stated his concern that parents could take the money but were not obligated to place their child in an accredited school program.
“You may see people just holding home school-type settings in their basements to get the $7,500 from the voucher,” Thomas said. “That’s the danger of this is that we’re going to lose students, which means we’re going to lose money.”
School board members also met to discuss the possibility of passing an anti-voucher resolution.
Marcia Moss of District 5 and Debbie Gaugh of District 3 noted the importance of “freedom of choice” for parents with Gaugh speaking out against the idea of an anti-voucher resolution.
Janice Hampton of District 6 asked why they were considering a resolution when the legislation had not even been introduced, but Chairman Johnson noted that they needed to “get ahead” of the legislation.
No decision was reached regarding a resolution, but the board will most likely consider it again in January.
A number of other school systems have been vocal in their opposition of school choice, including Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Lakeland School System, Murfreesboro City Schools, and Germantown Municipal School District.
Alternative Headline: “Organizations taking public money for education with no accountability for the last three years wring hands over parents voluntarily leaving their Great Public Schools”
“JMCSS attorney Dale Thomas stated his concern that parents could take the money but were not obligated to place their child in an accredited school program.”
By “accredited”, does that mean a program with 40% proficiency rates? 25% chronic absenteeism rates? I mean, I can make whatever claim I want right…since there is literally no state report card for these systems that take public money with no accountability.
But let’s say the basement-dwellers, as this attorney slanders them, are tested like other private school students in 3rd, 5th and 8th grades with the nationally-normed test of their choosing (not hiding in Tennessee’s TCAP echo chamber) and they outscore the Great Public Schools on average, because they likely will if this is opening up to all Tennesseans. What then? Whine about how parents get to pick and choose their children? Ask for more money again?
This is nothing more than a funding scheme to eventually suck private and religious schools into the swamp of the public school mandates and regulations. If our legislators are serious about getting TN out of the US Dept. of Education then our time and resources should be looking at how to implement the best education system in the US into TN and that starts with cleaning house and bringing in true experts in the field instead of woke ideologues into our state as we have been doing since Race To The Top/Common Core. Start by getting rid of standards. Our children are not standard. They are individuals that learn certain things differently and at different times in their development. Boys and girls also learn differently. Girls generally write and read earlier and more proficiently than boys. That does not mean boys don’t learn to read or write. Boys tend to be better at math. Girls tend to mature emotionally earlier than boys. Notice I use the word “tend.” That is not meant to indicate boys are smarter than girls or girls smarter than boys. It just highlights the average differences for some boys and some girls. For example, you cannot force ALL 5 year olds to learn the same thing at the same time. Prior to the Clinton administration we did not have standardized standards. They cause children to shut down, to hate learning. We need total phonics for reading, cursive writing (even though it is law in TN most teachers are not teaching because they themselves do not know how to write or read cursive….this law like many others has been a joke). But we need to remove all the waste in our education system. How come homeschools parents can educate a child cheaper and in most cased better than the public schools and do it in 4 hours per day? We have a ton of waste and rubbish going on in our schools. Stream line. Get back to the basics of education and get rid of the woke indoctrination. Sex and all it relative issues is a topic for the home. Schools are not parents and they need to stop trying to be parents.
I listened to an educator being interviewed on a podcast with Jordan B Peterson. The school he helped develop and run is Socratic in its teaching. Children are broken up into age ranges, and are given the tools to teach themselves with that Adult as a Guide. The adult’s job is to foster not only the seeking of knowledge but of also fostering community within their group, as well as other groups within the school. It was a very interesting interview on a different approach to education and learning, that was more balanced in it’s approach that what we currently have.
If you would like to listen to it, here’s the link…
https://youtu.be/FEUjcRWfu3c?si=CGo4_TLQGDnUyUzu
It is 2 hours long but an excellent conversation.
Once again it seems that the school administration is far more concerned with the golden fleece that they can harvest off the taxpayers, and not their primary goal: educating our children to be thinking, rational, and intelligent. Instead, they fret and worry about the money that they are losing. They seem to think homeschooling comes with zero accountability, or standards; which is does not. If anything, most parents expect more than the schools do.
If the schools that are decrying the expansion of school choice were investigated and evaluated, I suspect that almost 100% of them are not only failing our children, but also bloated at the top of the hierarchy when it comes to administration, and their staffs. It is time to pare the schools administration way back, raise our standards in teaching, remove the bad teachers, and some how take over the floundering schools to improve their rates of education. We have allowed the most learned technocrats and PhD’s run our schools, and all they seemed to have done, is reduce the standards, and teach our children how to be activists, instead of thinkers and achievers.
I agree with Karen Bracken but it’s unlikely that anything constructive will be done until the unions are broken. Bad teachers are abundant, good teachers do all they can and often have to fight their own union reps to accomplish anything. As long as the unions have power and the education lobby has money, the so-called “progressive” mentality will flourish and prevail.
Unless I have missed something, the TN gov. has a bucket of $$ set aside for education with X amount set aside for each publicly educated child. Private schools are funded by the parents that feel their child can get a better overall education —- which is true in most cases.
Tennessee ranks quite low in educational circles when compared to most other States. Is this due to a lack of state funding or simply misuse at the local levels? It is known that Tn teachers are underpaid compared to most other states! Tn has a basic std. in reading, writing, math, with some science, etc. yet many graduates from TN schools cannot make change f or a dollar without a calculator.
I fail to see how you can take dollars out of the bucket to support a few, when our entire educational system needs help !