Marta W. Aldrich reported in Chalkbeat that Governor Bill Lee will make universal vouchers his top priority in education this coming year. Tennessee currently has a voucher program that is limited to three urban districts and is not fully enrolled. The Governor, who is a graduate of public schools, wants all students, rich and poor alike, to have a public subsidy to pay for private and religious schooling.
Republicans have made universal vouchers a high priority, knowing that it will drain students and funding from their local public schools.
Governor Lee’s effort to pass universal vouchers failed last year because of opposition by urban Democrats and rural Republicans. However, some of the Republican opponents were defeated with the help of out-of-state money spent to elect voucher-friendly Republicans who were willing to undercut their local public schools.
The extremist Republicans were funded by an organization called 1776 Project PAC, whose purpose is to elect school boards who will oppose “woke” policies and support privatization. Its leader is a GOP operative named Ryan James Gidursky. Here is a video where he discusses “the Marxist takeover of America’s schools.” Check out the merchandise on their website, which says more about their purposes than the other parts of the website. The 1776 Project PAC was funded by a rightwing billionaire, Richard Uihelein, who wants to destroy public schools because they are “woke.”
From what we already know about vouchers, we can predict that the great majority of them will be used by affluent families whose children are already enrolled in nonpublic schools. In his recently published book, The Privateers, Josh Cowen of Michigan State University has shown that the low-income students who transfer to nonpublic schools do not make academic gains and frequently experience “catastrophic” declines in their outcomes.
A new universal school voucher proposal will be the first bill filed for Tennessee’s upcoming legislative session, signaling that Gov. Bill Lee intends to make the plan his No. 1 education priority for a second straight year.
Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson said this week that he’ll file his chamber’s legislation on the morning of Nov. 6, the day after Election Day. He expects House Majority Leader William Lamberth will do the same.
The big question is whether House and Senate Republican leaders will be able to agree on the details in 2025. The 114th Tennessee General Assembly convenes on Jan. 14 as Lee begins his last two years in office.
During the 2024 session, the governor’s Education Freedom Scholarship proposal stalled in finance committees over disagreements about testing and funding, despite a GOP supermajority, and even as universal voucher programs sprang up in several other states….
Similar to last year’s proposal, the new bill would provide about $7,000 in taxpayer funds to each of up to 20,000 students to attend a private school beginning next fall, with half of the slots going to students who are considered economically disadvantaged. By 2026, all of Tennessee’s K-12 students, regardless of family income, would be eligible for vouchers, though the number of recipients would depend on how much money is budgeted for the program.
“This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters”.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am not in the mind to criticize public schools, but Governor Lee is a poster child for the failure of Tennessee’s version. If Lee is truly a product of the public schools here, we have failed miserably. He repeatedly behaves for the good of his right wing minority, ignoring the public good.
I believe it was just yesterday that we were discussing how Tennessee had found ways to fund education through scholarships funded through a state lottery. This already takes money from the poor and passes it to the rich. Now Lee will take funding from the public schools and give it to the private schools, many of which are not the old and traditional schools that predated public education in Tennessee but are schools created when the Supreme Court ruled on school prayer, integration, or today’s iterations, mainly general reactions to fear of LGBTQ or whatever else.
I am disgusted. I think I will go back to carving that stick of cherry I found in the grown up easement
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There was an economist on NPR this morning that said vouchers have cost public schools an estimated $4.2 billion dollars thus far.
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How are they going to make sure that 1/2 of the vouchers go to students who are economically disadvantaged? The average price of a private school in Tennessee is $10,403 a year, so the poor kids are not going to have the same range of choice that the wealthier kids have. What happens in 2026 when all students are eligible? Will they still require that a large percentage of vouchers go to students who are economically disadvantaged or will poverty no longer be a concern?
On a side note, one of the big anti-woke public school propaganda stories is being told by a woman named January Littlejohn. If you google her name you’ll find the headline “How the public school system transitioned my child without my permission.” Journalist’s discovered that January actually told the school that her child was non-binary and to use her preferred pronouns. She said in one email to “let her child lead” on the issue. The school had a meeting to discuss it with the child and Littlejohn sued the school district afterwards for having the meeting. Then she made several speeches about her nightmarish trans experience with her woke public school. DeSantis has referenced her story many times.
It almost seems like the whole thing was set up to create the narrative that public schools are transitioning students without the parents permission. Either that or Littlejohn is exploiting her own child’s gender dysphoria for politics, which would be really despicable.
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The right has an obsession with trans issues. Always useful to find a very small minority and demonize them. Turns out many people get more excited by diversions than by actual policy issues that affect their lives, like health care.
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As a school board member, these stories have me alternately depressed and enraged. The one institution tasked with making people (children) living in the United States into United States CITIZENS is our public schools.
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