Tennessee lawmakers are preparing to take up the governor’s $424 million private school voucher plan in a special session, so national researchers say such “voucher schemes” have hurt public schools. It says it will “destroy” students’ learning and put on financial difficulties.
Josh Cowen, author and professor of education policy at Michigan State University, told reporters that 75% of students using vouchers in other states are already enrolled in private schools. The other 25% are suffering academically, he said.
After years of research, Cowen described the private school voucher program as “education equivalent to predatory lending.”
Lawmakers will convene for special sessions starting Monday to send Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal to use state funds to send up to 20,000 students to private schools, using state funds, starting Monday. Do this. It will be considered along with Lee’s immigration enforcement package, but this is not yet costly. There will be $450 million to help Hurricane Helen rescue in East Tennessee, and the Department of Transportation to handle public and private projects.
In addition to the $144 million voucher, the governor’s plan includes a $2,000 bonus and a $77.2 million teacher from the state sports bet to pay for the construction of the school in lieu of a Tennessee lottery account. Includes money to give $77.2 million. Lee says that when the state loses students, the district creates a “whole,” but the law states that if the district loses students, the district’s state funding remains the same from the first year to the next year. Just make sure there is.
Educational committee members say voucher students didn’t do very well on the state tests.
The governor suffered a second stab wound in private school vouchers throughout the state after failing to pass them in 2024.
“The most important thing for me is that taxpayers have the opportunity to determine where their dollars are being spent,” Lee said recently.
Cowen, author of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Create Culture Wars and Sell School Vouchers,” supported private school vouchers 20 years ago when they began to expand into states around the country. He said.
Over time, his outlook changed due to poor outcomes for voucher students and schools.
He said lawmakers have enacted private school vouchers in Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., and the impact on students has deteriorated as the program grew.
“Pop-up” schools are run by out-of-state private equity companies or make up many of Florida’s voucher schools through offshore companies, he said. According to a Cowen survey, 40% of schools that received voucher funds in Wisconsin are closed.
“Running a school is expensive. They come in and a lot of them can’t make it,” Cowen said. He added that fraud is one factor that leads to the closure of schools that receive voucher funds.
However, following Louisiana’s Covid-19 pandemic and Hurricane Katrina, the biggest drawback for students using vouchers is their academic achievement, according to Cowen.
“What we were able to observe is academically tragic,” he said.
Students from Metronashville, Shelby and Hamilton counties are taking part in the Tennessee Educational Savings Account Program, but despite improving their English Arts and Mathematics test scores this year, they still have statewide counterparts It did not reach. The Shelby County students who received the voucher scored on par with others in mathematics and outperformed them in English.
Recently, when asked why he continues to push private school vouchers across the state when students in the program are scoring under peers, Lee said he had made his programme that began three years ago after a prolonged court battle. Some of the statistics that have been defended and reported are “a true misconception of fact.”
“Comparing inner-city students from Shelby County ESA programs with suburban school districts around Nashville is a true misrepresentation of fact,” he said. .
Cowen admitted that some voucher programs will work well for two to three years, but said they are not sustainable for long periods of time as the state cannot pay two education departments at the same time.
For example, Iowa is “permanent borrowing” to support the voucher system, and Arizona has shifted so much to its voucher program that it has been that money is being used from opioid litigation settlements to pay the prison system budget. I’m being forced to. He said.
In some cases, voucher recipients also spent money on SeaWorld and Walt DisneyWorld tickets and big screen televisions, Cowen said.
Early in the emergence of voucher programs, children spent money on attending private schools. However, over the past six or seven years, the most likely people have tended to be “disproportionately white and wealthy,” Cowen said.
Rural school districts in particular feel the impact of vouchers as stable funding from the state helps balance school funding when incomes drop.
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