This article was originally published in Chalkbeat Tennessee.
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A new universal school voucher proposal will be the first bill introduced in Tennessee’s upcoming legislative session, signaling Gov. Bill Lee plans to make the plan his No. 1 education priority for the second year in a row.
Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson said this week that he will introduce his chamber’s legislation on the morning of Nov. 6, the day after Election Day. He expects House Majority Leader William Lamberth to do the same.
The big question is whether the Republican leaders of the House of Representatives and the Senate will be able to agree on the details in 2025. The 114th Tennessee General Assembly convenes Jan. 14 as Lee begins his final two years as president.
During the 2024 session, the governor’s Education Freedom Scholarship proposal stalled in the finance committees over disagreements over testing and funding, despite a Republican Party supermajority, and even as universal voucher programs emerged in several other states.
Sponsors in the Tennessee House, where voucher programs have had a harder time winning support from rural Republicans and urban Democrats, tried to gain votes with an omnibus-style bill that also included benefits for public schools. But Senate Republican leaders objected to the scope and cost of the House version.
On Monday, Johnson gave a voucher update to school board members in Williamson County, which he represents, on the development of new legislation.
Like last year’s proposal, the new bill would provide about $7,000 in taxpayer money for each of up to 20,000 students to attend a private school starting next fall, with half of the spots going to students considered economically disadvantaged. By 2026, all elementary and secondary education students in Tennessee, regardless of family income, would be eligible for vouchers, although the number of recipients would depend on how much money is budgeted for the program.
“The bill is not finalized yet, but we are all working with the governor’s office to come up with a bill that we can all support,” Johnson told Chalkbeat after the presentation.
Testing accountability is one of the most important issues to be resolved
Johnson said the 2025 Senate bill would again include some sort of testing requirement for voucher recipients — either state assessments or state-approved national tests — to gauge whether the program improves academic outcomes.
However, the Senate bill would eliminate a previous provision that would have allowed public school students to enroll in any district even if they were not zoned there. That policy proposal was included at the urging of Senate Education Committee Chairman Jon Lundberg, a Bristol Republican who lost his reelection bid in the August primary.
Lamberth, the House leader, did not respond this week to multiple requests for comment on his chamber’s plan, which had no testing requirements for voucher recipients in 2024. Instead, the House version sought to drastically reduce testing and accountability for students in public schools, including replacing high school exit exams with ACT college entrance exams.
The House bill also included numerous financial incentives to try to gain support from public school advocates. One idea was to increase the state’s contribution to health insurance for public school teachers by using $125 million the governor set aside for teacher salary increases.
Johnson told school board members that the governor plans a “substantial” increase in public education funding in 2025, but did not specify how much or for what purpose.
“I think we’ll have some things in there that will be great for all of public education,” he said when asked later whether costly incentives would be included, such as funding health insurance for teachers. “Whether it is on that (voucher) note or whether it is on a separate banknote is a big question. We’ll see. I don’t know the answer.”
The Williamson County School Board withdraws previous anti-voucher resolution
Johnson told board members in his home district that he expects a “nominal” impact on Williamson County’s two suburban school systems south of Nashville if the bill passes the Legislature in 2025. – performing schools and private school options.
Later Monday, the Williamson County Board, including four newly elected members whose campaigns were backed by a conservative out-of-state political action committee, voted 10-2 to rescind a resolution passed by the previous board that opposed Lee’s Education Freedom Scholarship Act.
The governor is from Williamson County and graduated from a public high school there in 1977. So it was significant when his local board voted in March to join more than 50 other Tennessee school boards known to oppose his signature education proposal.
But Dennis Diggers, a new board member, argued it was appropriate to revisit the issue given the recent election and suggested withdrawing the resolution.
“Four of the six candidates who won their election have spoken out publicly on this issue for over six months, so it was there,” Diggers said. “I am not going to deny parents in Williamson County the opportunity to help their children.”
Meanwhile, a Tennessee policy organization that supports vouchers has released a new poll showing that 58% of voters in the state are more likely to support a candidate who supports parents in collecting public funding to choose where their child is educated , including public, private, charter, or educational. school at home. The Beacon Center poll did not use the word “vouchers” in the question to voters, which tends to poll worse than language about “school choice.”
Universal vouchers would mark a major expansion of vouchers in Tennessee, where lawmakers voted in 2019 to create education savings account options for students in Memphis and Nashville. That targeted program, which has since expanded to the Chattanooga region, has enrolled 3,550 in its third year, still below the 5,000-student cap, according to state Education Department data.
A spokeswoman for the governor said his administration continues to work with both legislative chambers on a “unified” universal voucher bill to begin discussions for the 2025 session. She also noted that there is still $144 million in the state budget for the program this year, even though lawmakers have not passed the bill.
“We remain grateful for the General Assembly’s continued commitment to providing Education Freedom Scholarships to Tennessee families by keeping funding for last year’s proposal in the budget,” said Elizabeth Johnson, the governor’s press secretary.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site about educational changes in public schools.
