During his 2018 campaign for governor, one of Bill Lee’s top priorities was comprehensive criminal justice reform focused on rehabilitation, second chances and reducing taxpayer expense on incarceration.

But since he has to work with a General Assembly with a tough-on-crime majority that sees reform efforts as “soft,” he has accomplished little of that criminal justice agenda.

For example, he allowed a mandatory-minimum sentencing law to take effect in 2022 even though he opposed it, and this year, he failed to introduce a red-flag gun law after asking for one.

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But on another issue — education — Lee and Republican lawmakers are like-minded, and he has gotten essentially everything he’s asked for.

Lee has held office as a “conservative education revolution” has swept states controlled by Republicans. That was the term Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders — who earlier this year signed into law a statewide school-voucher program — used at Lee’s event last month announcing a similar statewide voucher proposal, the Education Freedom Scholarship Act.

In addition to Arkansas, school-voucher programs were established or significantly expanded in at least 14 states this year, including in Florida, Iowa and Indiana, according to Education Week.

“It was an unprecedented year in terms of the number and scale of parent choice programs passed by state legislatures,” said Shaka Mitchell, senior fellow and former Tennessee state director of the American Federation for Children, a school-choice advocacy group.

“If you’re a conservative lawmaker, I think it’s hard to ignore that this is the wave,” Mitchell told The Daily Memphian.

Lee’s record on education

Vouchers are far from the only pillar of that “conservative education revolution.”

Lee has significantly reshaped Tennessee’s education landscape.

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Aside from the voucher program targeting Shelby and Davidson counties, which was passed in 2019 and took effect last year, Lee’s education accomplishments include:

A new school-funding model, known as the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act, passed in 2022. TISA was billed as an easy-to-understand “student-centered” formula in which districts receive more funding for students with disabilities, English learners and low-income households, among other “weights.” Critics said it was too favorable to charter schools, gave the Tennessee Department of Education too much power and could force local tax increases. The model took effect at the start of the current school year.

A literacy bill that came to be known as the “third-grade retention law.” Passed during a special legislative session in 2021, the law requires tutoring, summer-learning and other programs if students aren’t reading at a certain level. Third-graders can be held back for inadequate growth or attendance. Efforts to amend the law in 2023 were unsuccessful.

Rapidly expanded charter school funding. The Tennessee Charter School Commission’s budget increased by more than $7.5 million in fiscal year 2024 to about $66 million. The budget for the Charter School Facilities Fund grew from $6 million under Gov. Bill Haslam to $32 million in fiscal year 2023.

A big funding boost for community and technical colleges. The State Funding Board approved more than $700 million in July 2023 for upgrades to the state’s technical colleges, including $89 million to replace the campus of Southwest Tennessee Community College in Memphis.

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The Age-Appropriate Materials Act, passed in 2022, which empowered parents to ban books. Supporters of the bill said they wanted to ban books about gender identity, sexuality and race. Another law bans teachers from promoting “divisive concepts” in an attempt to ban what Republicans labeled “critical race theory.”

The implementation of A-F school letter grades. Originally passed in 2016, a law requiring schools to be graded on an A-F scale was not implemented until earlier this month. The system gives greater weight to achievement than to improvement.

Privatization

Supporters see these policies as giving parents more options and flexibility in where their kids go to school and what they learn.

Others argue the common thread is privatization.

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Diane Ravitch, one of the country’s foremost public-education advocates, said statewide vouchers would separate the rich and poor.

“They’re a transfer from poor kids to affluent kids,” Ravitch said about Lee’s voucher proposal. “It’s a very, very bad forecast in terms of what this means for American society.”

In a statement after Lee’s announcements, Tanya Coats, president of the Tennessee Education Association, said “vouchers have never been about helping economically disadvantaged families whether they live in cities, suburbs or rural communities.”

“The goal has always been to privatize public education and use public dollars to fund private school education, which goes against our Tennessee values,” Coats said. TEA did not respond to an interview request.

Ravitch predicted that without an income limit, vouchers will primarily be used by people who could afford private school without them. She noted voucher programs began in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which required schools to desegregate.

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While surveys show parents are enthusiastic about voucher programs, data show students on average don’t perform better than students in public schools.

“School choice inevitably leads to segregation,” Ravitch said. “This is an end-run, again, around the Brown decision.”

‘Educate the public, not just fund a building’

Some of the obstacles to Lee’s education agenda have been removed in recent years, clearing the way for his Education Freedom Scholarship Act.

The 2019 voucher law was tied up in a lawsuit for three years as Davidson and Shelby counties fought it on the grounds that it violated the Home Rule provision of the state constitution, which prohibits laws targeting certain jurisdictions without their consent. The Tennessee Supreme Court allowed it to take effect for the 2022-23 school year.

“$140 million dollars is a drop in the bucket. It’s actually not that much money.”

Shaka Mitchell
Senior fellow and former Tennessee state director of the American Federation for Children

Then in the 2022 elections, a number of anti-voucher Republican lawmakers lost in primary elections to opponents who received significant campaign funding from advocacy groups.

Lee’s statewide voucher program would be available to 20,000 students in the 2024-25 school year with no cap thereafter. In the first year, half the seats would be reserved for students from low-income families. There would be no income or enrollment limits, nor would the program be limited to students zoned to underperforming schools, as is the case in some other states.

At around $7,000 per person at full 20,000-student capacity, the program would cost about $140 million in the first year. Mitchell said it’s worth every penny and is not much compared to the overall education budget.

“$140 million dollars is a drop in the bucket,” Mitchell said. “It’s actually not that much money.”

State Sen. Jon Lundberg, R-Bristol, who chairs the Senate Education Committee and is sponsoring the voucher bill, said Tennessee was happy to “plagiarize” from other states’ programs.

“What we’re trying to do is educate the public, not just fund a building,” Lundberg said. “We’re trying to educate the public. Whether that’s in a quote-unquote ‘community school,’ charter school, home school.”