How Not to Reform Education

The vitally important issue of K-12 school funding in Tennessee has, for the past 16 months, been caught in a closed loop of limited discussion about private-school vouchers. This is what you get with one-party government at the state capitol.

Until this month, that is. When the third branch of government called foul. Chancellor Anne C. Martin, one of Tennessee’s newest judges, declared the program that Gov. Bill Lee calls “Education Savings Accounts” unconstitutional.

You can read my new Sunday column on this development (online now at Tennessean.com) here: https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/columnists/2020/05/15/tennessee-education-savings-account-governor-bill-lee-keel-hunt/3120962001/

Before this development, the voucher conversation had been pretty much restricted to two kinds of advocates: the people who love vouchers and the people who love them a lot. Almost nobody else could get heard - not teachers, not local school boards, and certainly not Democrats.

And then its handling in the House became scandalous, caught up in the Speaker Glen Casada sorriness. It was a process that still smells to this day; most Republican House members got their own districts excluded, so desperate were its sponsors for “Aye” votes - and only then did it pass, by only a one-vote margin. (Make that “former” Speaker Casada by the way. In August his own GOP caucus stripped him of his speakership, for reasons unrelated to education.)

Gov. Lee has vowed to appeal Martin’s ruling. Fair enough. But then he mentioned his administration meanwhile would certainly continue to stir up applications for the voucher program. Chancellor Martin stopped that, too.

What she has also done has been to remind us all of an important civics lesson: Three branches of government are better than a supermajority of two.