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Tennessee Republicans Back Democrats in War Over Schools
School Board races in the Nashville suburbs are a school privatization battleground
Across the country, the forces of school privatization are seeking to access public funds to support unaccountable private schools.
No matter the program’s name (Education Savings Accounts, Freedom Scholarships, etc.) it’s all about school vouchers. This is the process by which public education funds are transferred to private schools — the rules vary by state, but the end result is the same. Parents are given an allocation of dollars and may use it at private schools.
Those schools are primarily religious and do not typically participate in state testing — so there’s no way for the taxpayers funding this experiment to know if the money is getting results.
In the cases where there have been studies of student achievement, the results are not great — student achievement is usually not better and often worse than what is occurring in local public schools.
One thing is clear, though: School vouchers cost taxpayers a ton of money.
In Arizona, vouchers are estimated to cost about $300 million in additional funding each year — that’s money that could be spent on other state priorities or invested in public schools.
But instead, it’s going to a voucher scheme that’s not getting results.
Which leads us to Tennessee.
In some key school board races there, the issue of protecting public schools is center stage.
And in the Nashville suburbs of Williamson County and Sumner County, some Republican elected officials are backing Democrats for school board seats.
In both cases, the Republican officials backing Democrats talk about the ability of their chosen candidate to “get things done across party lines.”
Because when it comes to education, Republicans and Democrats both benefit from excellent public schools. And policymakers on both sides struggle to make budgets work when voucher schemes are sucking cash out of the system.
