A ‘Voucher’ Reading List

Bibliography for following Capitol Hill

Be advised: There is an important education policy dispute coming back to the Tennessee Legislature in a few months: What’s coming is the next chapter of Gov. Bill Lee’s troubled effort to insist on public funding to benefit private schools.

It’s an issue at the heart of the radical Republican agenda for Christian nationalism - and all Tennesseans have a stake in this one, whether your immediate family has children in our public schools or not. And the implications for state government finance are also largely unknown as yet - but sure to be staggering. Local school boards, superintendents and teachers largely know this and have opposed the voucher push.

In fact, Bill Lee has so far failed to accomplish this central aim of his donors and the Christian nationalist network. All his attempts - to get the Tennessee General Assembly to insert private-school interests into the state’s beleaguered public school funding - have been rebuffed in the legislature. He defiantly insists that this insertion of private-school vouchers into the public education funding arrangements - ought to be understood as “education freedom” for families. His opponents in the K-12 education sphere call it malarkey.

To my eye, at least this is clear: There’s a definite absence of broad-gauged public understanding of the origins of voucher schemes in our nation - including their roots in segregation or, if you prefer, racial separatism - and its part in the national Republican agenda for the country. But there’s also a dearth of credible information with which discerning citizens can separate right from wrong.

To counterbalance that dearth, I suggest we should also do some reading on our own into the background of this policy issue. (You may also occasionally find helpful information in the daily news media, but you might not.) There’s also been little organized public discussion of the social and educational issues that the voucher push raises. Time is running out to gather up such an essential tool for public understanding among more of the Tennesseans who care, so let’s start today.

See my bulleted list below, touching on some of both the pro and con sides of this complex issue. But this is just a basic list, and just the start of my own research into the voucher movement. What would you add?

It’s not all easy reading, but I have discovered there is nothing easy about punching through the fog around the truth of this specious voucher subject, from its origins in separatism (dating back to early conservative resistance to the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools).

The following reading list, in even this early form, also suggests why Gov. Lee may be having so much trouble furthering the aims of his elite support network. Our governor has tried various sub-strategies to advance this cause, including most recently (and with mixed results) opposing the re-election of certain state legislators who have opposed his voucher agenda.

Let’s all read together, at least these essential works, in preparation for the next battle up on Capitol Hill, …

• First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

• James Madison, The Federalist, Paper No. 10 and No. 52.

• Madison’s “Memorial & Remonstrance“ which informed the drafting of the First Amendment, and also led to passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

• Free to Choose, the book by Milton and Rose Friedman, containing the earliest essay on the benefits of free-market thinking, and applying that thinking to public schooling.

• Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, Viking Press, 2017.

• Josh Cowan, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, Harvard Education Press, 2024.

• Holly Meyer, “Vouchers Ease Start-Up Stress For Churches Creating Christian Schools,” Associated Press.

That final item, by the esteemed Nashville religion writer Holly Meyer, is a very current and timely AP news story revealing how some religious leaders are strongly urging development of more Christian schools, with private-school vouchers as a central tool.

What do you think of all this? And, as we count down the weeks to the next session of the Tennessee General Assembly, what essential reading would you add to this bibliography?

© 2024 Keel Hunt