In April, 95 Tennessee lawmakers voted in the House of Representatives on a bill to expand the state’s fledgling private school voucher program.
It was an unusually tight vote in the legislature, where the Republican supermajority often votes along party lines.
The measure passed by nine votes — with 52 Republicans in support and a coalition of 43 Democrats and Republicans opposed.
This week, six of those 52 Republicans were voted out of office, defeated by Democrats.
While the blue tsunami didn’t crash into Tennessee Tuesday night as it swept statewide midterm races elsewhere, Democratic gains could make it harder for Republicans to pass controversial policies like expanding the Education Freedom Scholarship program, which has historically split the party’s legislative caucus. If lawmakers voted along the same lines under the new party totals, the April voucher vote would have failed, 46 to 49.
When the General Assembly returns to the state Capitol in January, Republicans will still hold a supermajority with the legislative muscle to whip the votes they need to push through many of their education priorities. But the Democratic gains and historic underperformance of Governor-elect Marsha Blackburn, who had the smallest margin of victory for a Tennessee governor in more than a century, indicate Republicans may have an unexpectedly tenuous hold on voucher expansion, the party’s defining education policy of the last two years.
All six Democrats who flipped Republican-held seats ran campaigns opposing vouchers and emphasizing public education.
Vouchers were an “enormous issue” for voters in Knox County’s District 18, Rep. Bryan Goldberg said.
Goldberg, a Knoxville Democrat who defeated incumbent Republican Rep. Elaine Davis this week, said public education funding was a key issue for voters amid budget problems at Knox County Schools. The state’s third-largest school district is considering consolidating schools, laying off employees, and staggering school start times to save money.
Tennessee’s voucher programs — the Education Freedom Scholarship and Education Savings Account programs — are funded separately from the state’s public school funding formula. But Goldberg said voters he spoke to were “making the connection” between Tennessee’s low per-pupil public education funding and the state’s increased spending on vouchers.
“We’re sacrificing an increase in per-pupil funding for vouchers, there’s no other way to look at it,” said Goldberg, who opposes voucher expansion and wants increased accountability for the program, if it can’t be rolled back entirely.
In her first Capitol press conference since the election, Blackburn sidestepped a Chalkbeat Tennessee question about whether she was concerned that the Democratic vote margins might affect her plans for voucher expansion.
During her campaign, she pledged to expand access to the voucher program. She has received millions of dollars from pro-voucher groups, according to an analysis by the Tennessee Lookout.
“We know that one-size-fits-all education does not work and want to make sure parents don’t have to win the lottery in order to have a say in their child’s education,” Blackburn said Wednesday, indicating she wants a program large enough to accept all eligible families who apply. More than 56,000 applicants applied last year for 35,000 available vouchers.
She did not answer whether she planned to seek incremental expansion or eliminate the 35,000-scholarship cap altogether.
“We’re going to work with the General Assembly,” Blackburn said.
Midterm results outside of Tennessee may also affect lawmakers’ appetite for school choice in the coming months, particularly the Democratic sweep of statewide offices in Texas, a longtime Republican stronghold with a similar approach to education policy.
Texas launched a similar, albeit pricier, universal voucher program the same year Tennessee did. And the state takeover legislation now playing out in Memphis-Shelby County Schools, with similar action suggested for other urban districts, was modeled after Texas legislation used to take control of Houston and Fort Worth schools.
In her victory speech Tuesday, Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa vowed to fire the state education chief who led those takeovers and end the voucher program.
Melissa Brown is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact Melissa at mbrown@chalkbeat.org.
