This excellent article in the Nashville Post explains why the proposal for vouchers didn’t go anywhere.
Republicans control both houses of the legislature, and the voucher proposal passed easily in the state senate. But it has stalled for four years in the house of representatives. The main sponsor of the bill is Bill Dunn, a Republican from Knoxville. His bill could be introduced later in this session but if he had the votes, he would have introduced it now.
Democrats opposed it, but they didn’t have the votes to derail it. The most important opposition came from rural legislators, even after the sponsor agreed to limit vouchers only to Shelby County, where Memphis is located. The rural legislators know what a foot in the door looks like.
The fight over school vouchers has gone on for the better part of a decade, arguing that low-income kids in failing schools should be able to pursue a private, and presumed better, education using public dollars. But opponents argue such a system would drain money from already struggling public school districts and use that government money to fund tuition at parochial schools.
With the Senate having passed a school voucher bill easily last year, the House version for the first time managed to claw its way through the committee system — including the House Finance subcommittee, done with the help some membership changes and a key absence — and made its way to the House floor for the first time Thursday.
Vouchers has become one of the most heavily lobbied bills on the Hill, with at least a dozens lobbyists working largely in its favor — including seven just from StudentsFirst, the education advocacy group launched by Michelle Rhee. Organizations like StudentsFirst and other interest groups have not been shy donating to political campaigns.
Of course, there is no evidence that vouchers help kids with low test scores thrive; it didn’t happen in Milwaukee or Cleveland or DC or anywhere else, but voucher proponents are undeterred in their determination to allow children to attend religious schools, even if those schools have no certified teachers.
Democrats were jubilant over the bill’s assumed demise. Tennessee Democratic Party Chairwoman Mary Mancini said, “It’s abundantly clear that all public schools in Tennessee simply do not have the same resources. Some are palaces with the most up-to-date technology available while others cannot supply a textbook to every child. Until this inequity is addressed and every child in every Tennessee ZIP code has access to an an equal, quality public education, diverting public dollars away from public schools is not be [sic] an option.”
The House Speaker said she favors the bill because, as everyone knows, private schools have a higher graduation rate than public schools. Note: Private schools do not enroll the same numbers of children from low-income homes, the same number of students with disabilities, or the same number of English language learners, as public schools. The private schools with the highest graduation rates are those that enroll students from high-income families where both parents are college graduates.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Rural areas, ESPECIALLY lower income rural areas, would be utterly destroyed if public schools were privatized and fragmented. The public schools are the absolute center of the community. They are the one shared entity holding a lot of these places together. I don’t know what would replace that.
Even inside cities, public schools have traditionally served as the center of local communities. It is for this purpose that reformers who wish to move out those who are not wealthy or perhaps not culturally acceptable come along and pretend that “due to the scores” being produced at these schools, both the schools and teachers are “bad” and thus must be closed, fragmented and divided while experienced, resistant teacher voices are silenced. It is a very effective way to break up a problematic community.
You are exactly right on this, which is why the privatization movement will be limited to inner city schools. And once these charters FAIL to produce legitimate gains they will be on to the next shiny thing.
Florida did an operational audit on Step Up For Students, administrator of Florida vouchers, and found they wrote off $166K due back from voucher schools in 2013-14. At the time of the audit, $1.2M receivables were due. $533K were between 121-1,590 days past due. Even if a school owns money back, Step Up For Students continues to send money to the voucher schools rather than deducting the amounts from current payments to the school.
Sounds like Florida legislators need to add language to the statues to kick schools out of the program if they are not returning money for students who didn’t enroll or were not eligible to receive funds.
Newsflash:
Even the schools serving the most expensive zip code in Knoxville- where Bill Dunn serves – cannot afford textbooks in the wake of implementing CC. And so we have none. The very, very few HS classes that have them don’t have enough to allow kids to remove them from school. If a parent begs- a teacher will give you one IF there happens to be a spare. And I repeat: this is In the most affluent schools in this city. So yeah- take some voucher money. Sure thing.