WILSON COUNTY: “When Tennessee Conservative News & The Tennessee Holler agree, it’s something to take note of.” Jamie Farough says @GovBillLee’s voucher scam has unified the community against it, calls it “heartbreaking” Lee is tying it to hurricane aid. Full: www.instagram.com/reel/DFQ3r9R...
— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) January 25, 2025 at 1:28 PM
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Tennessee lawmakers are slated to take up Gov. Bill Lee’s voucher scam legislation tomorrow (Thursday, January 30th).
The plan is expected to cost taxpayers roughly $1 billion over the first five years.
While there is a “hold harmless” clause for local districts, the experience in other states (Indiana, Arizona, Florida) suggests the cost to local taxpayers will greatly exceed projections.
Dollars spent on vouchers are not available for public K-12 schools.
The plan effectively creates two school systems.
Tennessee currently ranks 45th in the nation in school funding. On a national report card ranking state investment in public schools, Tennessee earns a grade of “F” in both funding level and funding effort. While our state’s current formula is reasonably equitable, the level of investment is simply not adequate.
If Tennessee has an extra $1 billion to invest in schools over the next five years, that money ($200 million a year) should go to our existing public schools.
We can (and should) boost teacher compensation. We should begin addressing the multi-billion dollar infrastructure needs. We should ensure students attend well-resourced schools.
Instead, Gov. Lee and his legislative allies want to spend those dollars on a school voucher initiative.
And, it’s not like we don’t know how that will go.
The state’s pilot voucher program tells us students who accept vouchers see no academic gains - in fact, they tend to perform at levels below their peers in zoned schools.
This is not surprising. It is exactly what happens in other states. In state after state, school voucher programs have shown dismal academic results.
Lee’s plan, then, is to spend more money and get worse results.
Even the Tennessee Business Roundtable is skeptical of the voucher scheme.
To me, awarding new $7,075 private-school subsidies to families with six-figure incomes seems neither necessary nor fiscally conservative. Our state’s general fund revenues are expected to decline over the current fiscal year and to grow very little next year, while we’re also seeking to continue investing in teacher salaries, disaster relief, and tackling Tennessee’s multi-billion-dollar list of needed infrastructure investments.
Thanks to years of corporate tax giveaways, Tennessee’s budget is now strained.
Even if you support the state’s current tax policies, as the Roundtable notes, funding a voucher program for wealthy families is not the highest and best use of our limited funds.
We can remain a relatively low tax state and also dedicate new money to public schools - to the tune of at least $1 billion in new investment over the next five years.
Or, we can choose to fund a voucher program likely to strain local school system budgets and leave kids behind.
Finally, a note from our neighbors in Kentucky: Vouchers are not politically popular. In a state where Donald Trump won by a 2-1 margin, school vouchers lost a ballot initiative by a 2-1 margin. People in red and blue counties strongly oppose using public funds to fund unaccountable private schools.
Governor Bill Lee is in a lather to get the miseducative school voucher scam expanded during this “flood the zone” period of the Convicted Felon’s first 100 days. In order for Lee to get his attaboy from Trump and his broligarchy, and thus have a platform to run for the U.S. Senate when Marsha vacates her seat to run for Governor, Lee must get this voucher scam into law—by whatever means is required.
Therefore, Lee has called a special session of the legislature to take up the matter, along with immigration and disaster relief (which will be tied to the final voucher bill, no doubt, in order to get vouchers over the finish line, if it is to get there).
With the voucher scam scheduled to drain over $400,000,000 this year and over $1.1 billion from education funds over the next five years, this special session has no raises for teachers or other education workers. Instead, Lee and his fascist associates are offering a $2,000 one-time bonus to the state’s teachers if local school boards play along.
The Tennessean reports that the voucher bill that is sailing through various committees is now picking up amendments tacked on to make passage harder to resist. The latest is reported by the Tennessean this morning to require school boards to “affirm” that their system wants to participate in the voucher scam program:
For public school teachers to receive the $2,000, local school boards must "adopt a resolution affirming" that they want to participate in the Education Freedom Act. Teachers in a school system that does not pass a resolution and submit it to the state would not receive the one-time bonuses.
Betsy Devos and her family amassed their billions by exploiting untold numbers of people around the globe with delusional schemes of becoming rich by buying in to the Devos family’s de facto Amway pyramid scheme. With promises of wealth and financial independence spouted during capitalist cult revival rallies, generations of the gullible and desperate have fallen prey to the siren song sung by agents of the corrupt, immoral, and unethical Devos clan and their army of recruiters and marketers. (Check out this NBC segment of Dateline here, or read the transcript here.)
Hoping to escape its international reputation as a corporate bloodsucker based on recruiting, exploiting, and discarding its distributors, Amway is now rebranded as Quixtar.
Co-founded in 1959 by Richard Devos, the enormously profitable Amway scam grew alongside the Devos patriarch’s extremist conservative political commitments and the family’s white nationalist religious fundamentalism. Richard Devos was instrumental in founding and financially supporting the Council for National Policy (CNP), an ultra-right John Birch Society spin-off that sought to “remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders” (Dallek, 2022). DeVos served as CNP's President from 1986-88 and 1990-93.
For the Devos clan, “pro-moral” translates to mean Christian nationalist. As the school voucher movement failed to justify its existence on sound policy or empirical grounds, libertarian and fascist oligarchs like the Kochs and the Mercers turned to white Christian nationalists like the Devoses to sell their educationally-bankrupt and racist school voucher privatization scheme. After all, the Devos empire was built on a foundation of zealous propaganda, and these were exactly the skills needed to sell a voucher scheme that had been demonstrated inferior to public schools in terms of educational value.
And so Betsy Devos was the “chosen one” for the Lout’s first-term Education Secretary, not because of any educational knowledge she had but, rather, for her already well-established and zealous connections to a right-wing infrastructure built to destroy public education, specifically because of public education's non-sectarian, humane, and democratic foundations. Betsy’s leadership and support of voucher marketing organizations like American Federation for Children and Alliance for School Choice placed her front and center as the mouthpiece, albeit an ignorant one, for the latest fascist scheme to destroy public schools.
But the fascist oligarchs needed something else to sell increasingly unpopular school voucher schemes besides a theocratic billionaire zealot intent upon establishing her version of a white heaven on Earth. They needed willing politicians, either guided by greed, ignorance, and/or religious zealotry.
Enter Tennessee Governor Bill Lee.
