'Education Freedom' from whom?

Vouchers and their Moral and Financial problems

MLK Day is actually a good time for some straight talk about Gov. Bill Lee’s dream of putting private-school vouchers into Tennessee law. It’s a brazen policy change that is, in fact, monstrous on two levels - moral and financial.

Let’s be clear: This major shift in Tennessee’s school finance traditions was not born in Tennessee. It’s part of a national push that’s centered on an elistist disdain for public education. Tennessee is just a pawn in their dark game.

The people pushing private-school vouchers across America – and their willing puppets in the state capitols - know they have tapped into old private resentments about school desegregation. This is a hidden, shameful part of their movement.

The lawmakers who mill around our state capitol’s second floor - and especially all the voters who might speak to them - need to understand a few stark facts.

First, diverting public dollars to private schools actually springs from a decades-old strategy of racial separatism that sprang up from white resentment over the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 outlawing “separate but equal” schools. After Brown, it took no time for “segregation academies” to rise across the nation, especially in the South. Many of these became “respectable” private schools.

One teacher who has been following Lee’s voucher push told me it is “a new model for racial separatism.” No one should be proud of this, and local school boards and their superintendents should not accept it so passively. Not on MLK Day. Not on any day.

Next, there are too many unresolved financial questions. In the most revealing local news report yet, USA Today Network this week put the current estimate of the voucher cost at a whopping $400 million, not counting several unknown categories. Read more here.

Clouds Over the Capitol

Further, this voucher push would seem to run counter even to the “rural agenda” that Bill Lee came into office hoping to champion. Remember that? The importance of local public schools, especially in rural counties, has been the source of much of the stonewalling that the governor has encountered so far with local officials.

When the final, true costs of vouchers become known, will there also be draw-downs from state road budgets and even higher-education projects to fund the deal?

In its earliest days, the Lee administration was eager to tout its commitment to rural areas of our state. The governor’s first executive order declared such a promise, but nowhere has the threat to Tennessee’s rural schools, hospitals and their financial solvency been recently mentioned. In fact, the governor’s team has been loading the voucher plan with financial incentives to buy the silence of teachers, school boards, and school administrators.

About those unknowns. Tennessee’s public-finance experts need to be on their best game now as the Legislature convenes in its special session, with their sharpest pencils in hand, before short-sighted policymakers give away the store. Just last week, Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis raised a new alarm. A long-time champion of Tennessee’s Education Lottery Corp., Cohen said the voucher scramble for dollars is putting the state’s Lottery-based funding for college scholarships at risk.

What other sources will have wound up on the carving table when the final, true cost of private-school vouchers becomes known? Will there be draw-downs from state highway budgets? Will higher-education projects be sacrificed?

Bill Lee is steeped in his own personal tradition of private schools and privilege. But vouchers should be more of a public cause now, not simply letting it roll forward as one more grievance point on a conservative national punch list. Speaking out clearly to its origins and purpose deserve a full mobilization now on the part of teachers, school boards, and every member of every county commission across Tennessee.

Solid questions are being raised, such as the very usefulness of vouchers in rural counties that don’t even have private schools.

Now is the time for lots more Tennesseans – including the editorial boards of all the state’s newspapers – to speak out with a single, insistent voice about this financial monster in the making, this moral throwback to the era of separate schools.

This woebegone policy gambit suggests a crushing financial train-wreck for Tennessee’s public schools - and for all the children and families who rely upon them.

© 2024 Keel Hunt