Will TN Lawmakers Pass Lee's Voucher Scam?
A special session on school vouchers starts this week
Gov. Bill Lee has called the Tennessee General Assembly into a special legislative session that starts this week. The session’s focus: a school voucher scam.
But Lee knows school vouchers aren’t popular with the public. So, he’s also included a hurricane relief package in the session - seemingly tying financial relief for hurricane victims to support for school vouchers.
Lawmakers could, of course, pass the relief package and then leave town.
In fact, it seems that in addition to strong Democratic opposition, Lee’s scam is getting significant pushback from Republicans. The plan failed to make it to a floor vote last year - because Lee didn’t have the votes.
It’s not clear that the votes are there this year.
Still, since the topic keeps coming up, this post offers a reminder about why policymakers should reject school vouchers.
In short: School vouchers are wildly expensive and don’t improve academic outcomes.
Florida’s voucher scheme is gobbling up bigger and bigger portions of that state’s budget:
The Education Law Center in conjunction with the Florida Policy Institute conducted the analysis of the state's school voucher program. The results of the study show the cost of vouchers growing steadily. Vouchers now consume 23% of state education dollars, up from just 12% in the 2021-22 school year.
In Arizona and North Carolina, ghost vouchers consumed scary amounts of public money:
The latest warning, though, comes from Arizona, where ghost students were receiving vouchers and around $600,000 was diverted to employees of the Department of Education.
Just a couple examples from North Carolina’s ghost voucher program:
Riverside Christian Academy-- 16 students enrolled, and 55 vouchers! At $6492 per student, that's a heck of a windfall. Mitchener University Academy reported an enrollment of 72 and collected 149 vouchers-- so about $230,000 of taxpayer money handed over for non-existent students.
Vouchers don’t expand “choice,” instead, they hand money to people already sending their kids to private schools:
This means the state (and local taxpayers) end up covering education costs for kids they weren’t previously educating. Rather than moving money around to “follow the child” as advocates of “choice” programs claim, voucher schemes create an entirely new school system that must also be supported by taxpayers.
Bryant notes that in Arizona, the voucher plan may cost taxpayers up to $1 billion and a universal program in Florida could require $4 billion.
Vouchers turn a public good into a privately purchased commodity:
Greene goes further to note the commodification of education could have some disastrous results:
Vouchers get us to the place of considering education a privately purchased commodity instead of a public good, a service provided to and for all citizens. Once we've established that it's a privately purchased commodity, then vouchers are just one more bit of welfare, another entitlement to be cut so that the Poors aren't a drag on the folks with resources.
The long game, then, is to dismantle public education, hand the profits to privateers, and restrict education resources such that the haves have more and the have-nots have never.
In Indiana, the cost of vouchers has skyrocketed:
Only instead of $54 million in new money being spent on vouchers, the total cost is expected to exceed $300 million.
Started in 2011 under former Gov. Mitch Daniels as an avenue to help low-income students escape failing public schools, the voucher program has changed dramatically in the last decade. While it has helped thousands of families choose their preferred school, the cost is projected to grow 263 percent in just five years. This expansion is predicted to force public school districts to either make severe cuts or ask taxpayers for more money through public referendums.
The expansion Pence started has effectively created a “voucher school district” subsidized by taxpayers. This voucher district both costs extra state money and takes money from local districts - which means local property tax increases.
Vouchers are expensive.
They fail to improve academic outcomes.
They raise local property taxes.
And voters across party lines don’t like them.
