Tennessee is preparing for another debate over private school vouchers. Here’s what we know. • Tennessee Lookout

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A new universal school voucher proposal will be the first bill filed for the upcoming Tennessee legislative session, signaling that Gov. Bill Lee intends to make the plan his No. 1 education priority for the second straight year.

Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson said this week that he would file the legislation in his chamber 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 Republican leaders in the House and Senate can agree on the details in 2025. The 114th Tennessee General Assembly will convene Jan. 14, when Lee begins his final two years in office.

During the 2024 session, the governor’s Education Freedom Scholarship proposal stalled in finance committees due to disagreements over testing and funding, despite a GOP supermajority and even as universal voucher programs emerged in several other states.

Sponsors in the Tennessee House of Representatives, where voucher programs have had a harder time winning support from rural Republicans and urban Democrats, tried to win votes with an omnibus bill that also included benefits for public schools. But Senate Republican leaders balked at the size and cost of the House version.

On Monday, Johnson updated school board members in Williamson County, which he represents, on the development of new legislation.

Similar to last year’s proposal, the new bill would provide each of up to 20,000 students about $7,000 in taxpayer money to attend private school starting this fall, with half of the spots going to students considered economically disadvantaged. By 2026, all K-12 students in Tennessee, regardless of family income, would be eligible for vouchers, with the number of recipients depending on how much money is allocated to the program.

“The bill is not ready yet, but we are all working with the governor’s office to develop a bill that we can all support,” Johnson told Chalkbeat after the presentation.

One of the most important questions to be clarified is the verification of responsibility

Johnson said the 2025 Senate bill would again include some type of testing requirement for voucher recipients — either state assessments or state-approved national tests — to assess whether the program improves academic outcomes.

However, the Senate bill eliminates a previous provision that might have allowed public school students to enroll in any district, even if they are not zoned accordingly. That policy proposal came at the urging of Senate Education Committee Chairman Jon Lundberg, a Republican from Bristol who lost his re-election bid in the August primary.

Lamberth, the House leader, did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week about his chamber’s plan, which did not include testing requirements for voucher recipients in 2024. Instead, the House version aimed to dramatically reduce testing and accountability for public school students, including replacing end-of-high school exams with ACT college entrance exams.

The House bill also included numerous financial incentives to win support from public school advocates. One idea was to increase the state’s contribution to funding public school teachers’ health insurance by redirecting $125 million that the governor had earmarked for teacher pay raises.

Johnson told school board members that the governor plans a “significant” increase in public education funding in 2025, but did not provide details on how much and for what.

“I think we’re going to have some things there that are going to be great for public education as a whole,” he said when asked later about including costly incentives like funding for teachers’ health insurance. “Whether it’s included in this (voucher) bill or in a separate bill is a big question. We’ll see. I don’t know the answer.”

The Williamson County School Board is reversing a previous decision against vouchers

Johnson told board members in his home district that if the bill passes the Legislature in 2025, he expects a “nominal” impact on Williamson County’s two suburban school systems south of Nashville – high-performance schools and private school options.

Later Monday, the Williamson County board, which included four newly elected members whose campaigns were supported by an out-of-state conservative political action committee, voted 10-2 to overturn a resolution by the previous board opposing 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 school boards across Tennessee who were on record opposing his signature education proposal.

But Dennis Diggers, a new board member, argued that given the recent election, it was appropriate to revisit the issue and suggested reversing the resolution.

“Four of the six candidates who won their election ran publicly on this issue for more than six months, so it was commonplace,” Diggers said. “I will not deny parents in Williamson County the opportunity to help their children.”

Meanwhile, a Tennessee political organization that supports vouchers released a new poll showing that 58% of the state’s voters are more likely to support a candidate who supports giving parents public money to decide Where your child receives an education, including public, private, charter or charter home schools. The Beacon Center poll did not use the word “vouchers” in its question to voters, which tends to perform worse than the phrase “school choice.”

Universal vouchers would represent a significant expansion of vouchers in Tennessee, where lawmakers voted in 2019 to introduce education savings accounts for students in Memphis and Nashville. This targeted program, which has since expanded to the Chattanooga region, has 3,550 participants in its third year, still below the 5,000 student cap, according to the state Department of Education.

A spokeswoman for the governor said his administration is continuing to work with both legislative chambers on a “unified” universal voucher bill to begin discussions for the 2025 session. She also noted that $144 million remained in this year’s state budget for the program even though lawmakers did not approve the bill.

“We continue to be 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.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent covering the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact them at [email protected].

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational changes in public schools.