Andy Spears is a veteran education journalist with a Ph.D. in education policy and a specialization in school finance. He lives in Nashville, but covers the national scene.

Spears writes:

In this post, he reports on an ominous development in Tennessee. A new organization in Tennessee has declared its intention to lure nearly 500,000 students out of public schools and into charter schools and voucher schools. The collapse in funding for public schools is likely to end public schools altogether.

Spears writes:

While state leaders consider expanding the state’s private school coupon program, a new nonprofit takes a bolder approach. A group calling itself Tennessee Leads registered with the Secretary of State as a 501(c)(4) issue advocacy organization with the goal of effectively ending public education in Tennessee by 2031.

The group was registered on October 14th and lists a business address of 95 White Bridge Road in Nashville. This is a nondescript business building in West Nashville.

The Registered Agent for Tennessee Leads is listed as “Tennessee Leads.” The group’s website says an IRS nonprofit application is pending.
In short, it is not yet clear who is backing this movement.

However, the group is not shy about its goals.

We support legislation to significantly increase the availability of Education Freedom scholarships, aiming to provide 200,000 scholarships annually by 2031. This initiative is designed to empower parents with more choices for their children’s education.

And:

Our efforts include advocating for the expansion of public charter schools, with a goal to increase student enrollment from 45,000 to 250,000. This initiative seeks to offer diverse educational opportunities and foster innovation in teaching.

If achieved, these two goals combined would take nearly half of all K-12 students in the state out of traditional public schools.

The group doesn’t really say the current model isn’t working – they just say they like “choice.”
The state’s current private school coupon scheme (ESA vouchers) has 20,000 students.

Moving that to 200,000 would cost at least $1.5 billion per year and take significant funds from local public schools.

Other states that rapidly expanded school vouchers saw huge budget hits to both state and local government.

[See Andy Spears’ post about Arizona’s universal school vouchers, which he refers to as “private school coupons for rich families.”]

[See his post on Indiana vouchers, where the costs rose neatly tenfold in less than a decade. The Indiana voucher is also a coupon for the rich to cash in at private schools. He predicts that Tennessee will be shelling out $1.4 billion a year for well-off kids to attend private schools by 2035.]

He writes that vouchers are a mess in Florida, because thousands of students are “double-dipping,” collecting voucher money while attending public schools.

[See his article on double-dipping and the voucher mess in Florida.]

He continues:

Florida relies on two official student counts each year — one in October and another in February — to allocate funding to school districts through the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP). But after the October 2024 Count, major red flags appeared. Nearly 30,000 students (at an estimated cost of almost $250 million) were identified as both receiving a voucher and attending a public school. In some districts, almost all (more than all in one district) of their state funding had been absorbed by voucher payouts.

So, the Tennessee Leads plan would lead to a rapid decrease in state funds available for public schools – or, a significant increase in local property taxes – possibly, both.

It’s also not clear how Tennessee Leads plans to build charter school capacity to house an additional 200,000 students. Unless the plan is to just hand existing public schools over to charter operators – you know, like the failed Achievement School District model.

Oh, and there’s something else.

Tennessee Leads wants all schools to use Direct Instruction at all times for all students.

We advocate for the implementation of Direct Instruction methodologies across all public schools, ensuring that teaching practices are grounded in research and proven to be effective in enhancing student achievement.

Except studies on Direct Instruction suggest the opposite – that it does not improve student learning – in fact, it may be harmful to student academic and social growth.
Here’s more from a dissertation submitted by an ETSU student:

No statistically significant results (p = .05) were found between the year before implementation and the year after implementation with the exception of one grade level. Furthermore, no significant differences were found at any grade level between students participating in Corrective Reading and students not participating in Corrective Reading on the 2003-2004 TCAP Terra Nova test.

To be clear, Direct Instruction is highly-scripted learning – down to the pacing, word choice, and more – the “sage on the stage” delivers rote learning models and students are told exactly how to “do” certain things – the “one best way” approach with little room for student discovery.

More on this:

A remarkable body of research over many years has demonstrated that the sort of teaching in which students are provided with answers or shown the correct way to do something — where they’re basically seen as empty receptacles to be filled with facts or skills — tends to be much less effective than some variant of student-centered learning that involves inquiry or discovery, in which students play an active role in constructing meaning for themselves and with one another.

That is: Scripted learning/Direct Instruction is not evidence-based if the evidence you’re looking for is what actually improves student learning.

It holds true not only in STEM subjects, which account for a disproportionate share of the relevant research, but also in reading instruction, where, as one group of investigators reported, “The more a teacher was coded as telling children information, the less [they] grew in reading achievement.”

It holds true when judged by how long students retain knowledge,7 and the effect is even clearer with more ambitious and important educational goals. The more emphasis one places on long-term outcomes, on deep understanding, on the ability to transfer ideas to new situations, or on fostering and maintaining students’ interest in learning, the more direct instruction (DI) comes up short.8

One wonders who, exactly, wants to advance an extreme privatization agenda while also mandating that those students remaining in traditional public schools are subjected to a learning model proven not only not to work, but also shown as likely harmful in many cases.
Eventually, an IRS determination letter will be issued, or the Registered Agent will be updated on the Secretary of State’s site. Or, perhaps, the “about us” section will offer some insight into the actors who would end public schools in our state.

On the day after this post appeared, Spears learned that a well-known political consulting firm was behind the proposal for Tennessee Leads. The firm had previously worked for the Tennessee Republican Party and for Governor Bill Lee. He wrote a new post.

It’s not at all clear why Governor Lee and his fellow Republicans are so enamored of charters and vouchers. Tennessee was the first state to win Race to the Top funding from the Obama administration. It collected a grand prize of $500 million. With that big infusion of new funding for “reform,” the public schools should be reformed by now. But obviously they are not.

Worse, Tennessee put $100 million into a bold experiment that was supposed to demonstrate the success of charter schools. The state created the Educational Achievement Authority, hired a star of the charter movement to run it, and gathered the state’s lowest-performing public school into a non-contiguous all-charter district. The EAA promised that these low-scoring schools would join the state’s top schools within five years. Five years passed, and the targeted schools remained at the bottom of the state’s rankings.

In time, the legislature gave up and closed the EAA.

Similarly, the evidence is in in vouchers. In every state that had offered them to all students, the vast majority are scooped up by affluent families whose kids never attended public schools. When public school students took vouchers, they fell far behind their public school peers.

Are Republican leaders immune to reading evidence?