For Jennifer Owen, the coming battle over school vouchers in the Tennessee state Legislature is nothing new.

The Knox County school board as a whole has not taken a position on Lee's proposal.

“I mean, this push has been going on since 2009 or ‘10, somewhere in there,” she said during an interview one recent afternoon at the Knox County Teacher Supply Depot at Cedar Bluff, where she volunteers regularly. “And it got really ramped up in ’11. It felt a lot like this in 2011.”

The Supply Depot accepts and distributes donated classroom supplies for Knox County Schools teachers and teaching assistants. Owen’s commitment to it arises from her own years of experience as a teacher — as does her unwavering opposition to proposals that could divert public education funds away from public schools.

She was among the teachers making regular trips to Nashville to fight against school vouchers under former Gov. Bill Haslam. It has remained a major focus for her since being elected to the Knox County school board in 2016.

She has warned for years that the state’s ever-increasing emphasis on new forms of accountability for public schools — most recently including the controversial 3rd-grade retention law pegged to state reading tests — is intended to denigrate public education and make privatization more appealing.

“I always compare it to The Music Man,” Owen said, referring to the musical about a huckster trying to fleece small-town residents. “We’ve got to create a problem so we can create a solution, right? And so this is what (is happening), it’s many many problems all headed toward that one solution eventually.”

Shifting Stance

Lee announced his proposal for statewide school vouchers with great fanfare on Nov. 28, accompanied by the Republican leaders of both houses of the state Legislature. The plan would supplant the existing Education Savings Account pilot program — which is currently available in only Davidson, Hamilton and Shelby counties, and only to low-income families — with Education Freedom Scholarships.

If passed as proposed, the scholarships would be available to up to 20,000 students statewide for the 2024-25 school year. They would provide $7,075 per student that could be used toward private school tuition or for educational materials and experiences for homeschooled students.

Starting in the 2025-26 school year, the vouchers would be available to any K-12-aged student in the state, subject to whatever budget cap the Legislature sets for the program.

Owen ran quick estimates of what it could potentially cost Knox County if one student per grade level at each county school opted for a voucher rather than attending public school. That would be 419 students, for a total of about $2.96 million a year. Three students per grade level would triple it to $8.89 million.

On one hand, that is a small percentage of the district’s budget, which this year is just over $660 million. But Owen said that in most cases, there would be no reduction in expenses for the district from a few students withdrawing here or there, because it would still need the same number of buildings, teachers, custodians, etc.

“It can be significant,” she said. “I really do not understand how some of our board members do not see that.”

Indeed, the posture of the Knox County school board overall toward vouchers is one thing that has changed in the past decade. When Owen joined the board, she was part of a majority made up of former teachers, and the board voted unanimously year after year to include opposition to vouchers in its legislative priorities.

But with the shift to partisan school board elections in 2022 and Lee’s persistent push to make vouchers a signature Republican issue, that stance has shifted as well. The board now has a five-member Republican majority, and it has dropped its anti-voucher stance from its priority list.

Current board Chair Betsy Henderson has been a proponent of multiple forms of school choice since her first school board campaign in 2020. She welcomed Lee’s proposal, saying, “I hope this legislation will expand school choice so that more families can ensure their child is getting an excellent education.”

Free to Object

The board also removed Owen as its legislative liaison to the Tennessee School Boards Association this year, naming instead Vice Chair Steve Triplett, another voucher proponent.

Owen said she was not surprised by the move and said it was actually liberating. As an individual board member, relieved of responsibility for representing the whole board, she can support or oppose any legislation she pleases.

“I have been cut free from the shackles of those legislative priorities,” she said. “I can now go out and advocate for whatever I want, for whatever group may need me to do that.”

Even if the Knox County board as a whole has not so far taken a position on Lee’s voucher proposal, other boards across the state have begun to weigh in. In Collierville, an affluent suburb of Memphis, both the city school board and its board of mayor and aldermen have passed resolutions against the plan.

Closer to Knox County, the Roane County Board of Education voted in opposition to the proposal just last week. Rural districts across the state are also raising concerns. And the TSBA itself — to which the Knox County school board belongs — maintains opposition to vouchers as one of its key position statements.

Many public school administrators and advocates have questioned Lee’s stated intention to not require any state accountability measures from private schools that would receive the taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers. Owen shares those misgivings.

“The money’s not my biggest concern, believe it or not,” she said. “My bigger concern is that there's no real oversight there. So these are public funds, not going to any kind of public entity with any kind of public oversight.”

While it may seem paradoxical that the same politicians who have ratcheted up accountability measures on public school teachers and systems for more than a decade are now proposing to require almost nothing of non-public schools receiving public dollars, Owen said she thinks it has all been part of the same plan.

“They’ve always been working hand in hand,” she said. “If you want to shove the money into your buddy's private school, you need to find a way to also shove the children into your buddy's private school.”

Imposing stressful testing and retention requirements like the 3rd-grade reading law on public school students will automatically make schools without such burdens more attractive, she said.

Also in the works is a new state grading system for public schools, which will assign them letter grades on an A-F scale based on how their students perform on tests. That will serve to make some public schools look bad, Owen said — particularly those with lower socioeconomic demographics. Private schools so far are not proposed to be subject to that system.

In reality, Owen said, the biggest beneficiaries of statewide vouchers are likely to be students who aren’t even in public schools to start with. Lee’s proposal would seem to allow all 98,000 of the state’s current private school students to start receiving state checks every year. Many of those students do not come from the lower-income families that Lee has emphasized as his biggest concern.

“It will be kids that have some kind of means,” Owen said. “It's definitely not going to be who they claim would benefit from it. Because you have to be able to get there, you have to be able to go.”