Gearing up in Tennessee for the Fight against Vouchers
In fact, the Tennessee School Board Association has long opposed publicly funded vouchers as does the Tennessee PTA. And Cities are weighing in too. Metro Nashville points out that municipalities are having to pick up the slack when BEP is not fully funded. In safeguarding their municipal investment in public schools, Metro Nashville's Council also passed a resolution against school vouchers.
Despite this, there is still talk that the state legislature will attempt to implement a limited voucher program in Memphis next year. The justification will be to give Shelby County parents greater choices in education. But Steven M. Singer uses the pumpkin pie analogy in his blog to prove this is a fallacy. Vouchers are like cutting a center slice of pie, it ruins the rest of the pie for everyone else. You can read more here.
"...tax money meant to help all children is siphoned off for just one child. In the case of vouchers, tax money goes to pay part of the tuition at a private or parochial school. In the case of charters, we’re diverting tax money to a school that’s public in name but privately run. That means less money for traditional public schools and more money for privately run institutions. That’s really what school choice is – a way to further privatize public schools."
That means we need to fight this on a nation-wide basis. And we can start by saying NO to a Secretary of Education with an agenda to privatize our Tennessee public schools.