Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee pushed through a voucher program in 2019 that was limited to two counties, Shelby and Davidson, which are where the two biggest cities, Memphis and Nashville, are located. A third county, Hamilton, was added this year. Under his leadership, Tennessee joined Arkansas and other red states in expanding vouchers. 

Now Governor Lee wants to expand vouchers to every county in the state and to remove income limits. Florida and other states have enacted this program, known as universal vouchers.

There are two certain results of universal vouchers:

1. They are very expensive to the state. Most of the students who obtain them are already enrolled in private and religious schools. The state assumes responsibility for subsidizing the tuition of parents who can afford to send their child to private schools. The parents now paying $25,000-30,000 annually will be happy to collect $7,000-8,000 from the state.

2. The public school students who use them fall behind their public school peers because they attend religious schools or low-quality schools (not elite private schools) that do not have certified teachers. Michigan State University Professor Josh Cowen, who has spent two decades as a voucher researcher, has written that the academic impact of vouchers on these students is worse than pandemic learning loss.

Governor Lee’s plan has encountered two obstacles. First, a group of parents who want to block vouchers won the right to sue in the state court of appeals. 

Chalkbeat Tennessee reported that: 

A legal challenge to Tennessee’s private school voucher law is back on track after a state appeals court ruled that a lower court erred in dismissing the case.

The three-judge Court of Appeals said Wednesday that a trial-level judicial panel acted prematurely in 2022 when it declared that Davidson and Shelby county governments, along with a group of parents, had no legal standing to challenge the 2019 Education Savings Account law, which provides families with taxpayer money to pay toward private school tuition.

The appellate court, in sending the case back to the trial court, also said the case’s remaining legal claims are “ripe for judicial review.”

The unanimous decision breaks a string of legal victories for voucher backers in Tennessee, where Gov. Bill Lee’s administration is proposing an expansive new program that would ultimately make vouchers accessible to all students in all 95 Tennessee counties, without the family income limits that are part of the current program.

The second problem for Governor Lee’s expansion plan is that the test scores came back for the first year, and they dashed the expectation that going to a voucher school would produce impressive academic results. In other words, the scores were bad. 

Meanwhile, Tennessee Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds told lawmakers Wednesday that the first state test scores of students using vouchers to attend private schools in Shelby and Davidson counties were lackluster.

“The results aren’t anything to write home about,” Reynolds told the Senate Education Committee. “But at the end of the day, the parents are happy with this new learning environment for their students.”

The first results came out of Davidson and Shelby counties in 2022-23, before the legislature added Hamilton County to the program this school year. According to data from the state education department, most of those 452 students performed worse than their peers in public schools after the program’s swift rollout early that school year.

Democratic legislators asked why the program should be expanded if the results were not good. But Republicans were not dissuaded. 

Of course, if they conducted any research, they would find that voucher students who leave public schools typically fall behind their public school peers. This is not a one-time occurrence. 

The biggest beneficiaries of vouchers are affluent families who get a tuition subsidy. 

The new state commissioner of education, Lizette Reynolds, was asked whether the voucher schools would be held accountable as public schools are. She couldn’t give a straight answer. Because voucher schools will not be held accountable. 

Governor Lee has a compliant legislature with a supermajority of Republicans. They don’t care about results.