Tennessee Education Advocates Make Push for School Funding

Andy Spears
5 min readApr 21, 2021

A bipartisan commission has said Tennessee is underfunding public schools by $1.7 billion. Meanwhile, the state has a surplus for the current year of over $1.4 billion, and projections are that number will be over $2 billion by the end of the fiscal year. Additionally, state reserve funds are sitting at about $7.5 billion.

Of course, this means that Gov. Bill Lee is planning a big, new investment in a state funding formula that places Tennessee at 46th in the nation in school funding.

Andy Spears

Writer and policy advocate living in Nashville, TN —Public Policy Ph.D. — writes on education policy, consumer affairs, and more . . .