On Tuesday, March 10, 2026, a Republican-led move to double the number of students in Tennessee’s school voucher program passed the General Assembly. As of this writing, another vote is scheduled for the Senate Education Committee.
That push to expand the voucher program comes just weeks after Tennessee Governor Bill Lee chose not to apply for millions of dollars in federal summer food assistance, a move that some advocates estimate could affect up to 700,000 children across Tennessee. The two instances of political maneuvering have little in common on the surface, except that they will both negatively impact children by reducing or refusing to grow public funds allotted for their feeding and education.
March 10th’s voucher vote is but another step on Tennessee’s road to fully defunding its education system and, in doing so, finally realizing the state’s longtime goal of becoming nationally synonymous with ignorance, a dream we’ve been threatening to achieve since the days of 1925’s Scopes “Monkey Trial.”
“If Republican lawmakers are successful, the change could direct $303 million in public dollars to private schools in the state next school year,” writes Melissa Brown for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Excellent! Private schools, which already have the revenue source of charging tuition, will siphon approximately $303 million away from public schools, which are generally acknowledged to be one of the, if not the most under-funded institutions in the country.
Public education is being poisoned by choice. Parents, understandably, want to approve of what their children are taught, but that should not be done at the cost of the system available to all students. It is already bizarre and backward enough that a school’s funding should be tied to the ZIP codes of its students.
One is forced to wonder what the country would look like if all schools were funded equally and adequately, according to their needs rather than the means of students’ parents or guardians. On top of ensuring that all American citizens had access to a top-tier education in order to set them on the path to success, it would be an ideologically sound method, in that it would introduce all public school children to an instance in which the state cared for them and their classmates equitably. It would be a way for America to indoctrinate its youth into its stated values of strength through diversity, equity, and inclusion. As it is, most young Americans (and young Memphians in particular) are far more likely to see the punitive arm of the state long before its power has been used to shield them from harm.
It takes a village to rear a child, so the common wisdom goes, but the village has been fractured and commodified. Extended families live far away from each other, a necessity thanks to changing employment availability, but daycare can be paid for. In our increasingly fractured time, public school is one of the last bastions of the idea of the commons, and it should be protected as long as there is a single student who stands to benefit from it.
The idea of the common good is essential to the basic functioning of any community, and the hyper-individualized, tailored-to-your-order, privatized model we currently live under is perhaps part of the reason that the current culture seems so at odds with itself.
In the early seventeenth century, England and Wales began issuing Inclosure Acts, fencing off land previously held and cared for in common, and that was a step toward seeing our neighbors as a collection of individuals with whom we compete instead of, well, our neighbors. A community. To paraphrase American Graffiti’s John Milner, “Rock-and-roll’s been going downhill ever since they fenced in the commons.”
The point is that in the United States in 2026, we desperately need some common ground. Maybe the idea that all children should start off with an education that prepares them all for the future is a sensible starting point. Let’s halt the move to defund our education system, reverse this school voucher scheme, and make the Tennessee public school system the envy of the country.
Jesse Davis is a former Flyer staffer; he writes a monthly Books feature for Memphis Magazine. His opinions, such as they are, think we should make our public schools one we’re proud to send our kids to instead of funding private schools with public funds.