Tennessee is not tracking how many vouchers will go to existing private school students

Back in January, I took a look at the governor’s $447 million Education Freedom Scholarship bill that promised to give 20,000 students about $7,300 each for private school tuition beginning in 2025 and asked: “Does the governor’s new voucher bill provide enough transparency?”

With the first round of applicants in, I think we can answer with a definitive “no.”

The most glaring problem is that the governor’s office is not tracking how many of the private school scholarships go to kids already in private school as compared with kids in public school.

States with similar voucher programs have collected and reported this information about recipients. But Gov. Bill Lee’s office told Chalkbeat Tennessee that it is not required to collect previous school enrollment from voucher applicants. And apparently, it didn’t.

Other states with new voucher programs have reported that their biggest voucher recipients are students already in private schools.  For the 2024-25 school year in North Carolina, for example, students coming from public schools made up only 8.4% of 80,325 private school voucher recipients. For the Florida 2023-24 school year, only 13% of the state’s 122,895 new voucher recipients came from public schools.

Similar outcomes were reported in other states, where existing private school students received 89% of voucher recipients in New Hampshire and 77% in Wisconsin.

Lee’s bill estimated that 65% of the students who receive Tennessee vouchers in the first year would be current private school students. But with an estimated 105,503 students attending private schools in Tennessee when the bill passed, and only 20,000 vouchers available, and a deadline for applications that might not account for the time it takes for a public school student to find, apply and get admitted to private school — who’s to say any public school students were able to take advantage the program?

The public deserves to know how many public school students were able to utilize the program to make a “choice” to attend a non-public private school. This statistic should be tracked and analyzed over the years. Other states are also measuring students who never went to a public or private school — specifically, kindergarteners, an important cohort. This type of statistic is not the only measurement of the scholarship policy outcome, but it’s also not an incidental measurement. Are the freedom scholarships simply maintaining the status quo or changing it?

At this point, Tennessee appears to stand alone among states in preventing that information from reaching the public.

By Deborah Fisher, executive director of Tennessee Coalition for Open Government.