January 24, 2025
by David A. Pickler
President & CEO, Pickler Wealth Advisors, Collierville, TN
2025 Chair, Tennessee Business Roundtable
When our General Assembly convenes in special legislative session during the week of January 27, one of the central subjects will be Governor Lee’s proposed Education Freedom Act (EFA). I’d like to offer some thoughts about several of its provisions from my perspective as a longtime Tennessee business owner and advocate for excellence in public education.
Tennessee businesses embrace freedom to choose. In the private sector, choice promotes healthy competition, which leads not only to better products and services, but also to improvements for those which produce them. Free markets have allowed our businesses to flourish and deliver for Tennesseans, and are proof that choice works.
When I think about it, the debate about the proposed EFA doesn’t seem to be about “choice”, per se. Today, every Tennessee parent has the right to educate their child according to their convictions, and to choose whether he or she will be educated in their public school, a private school, or in a homeschool environment. Rather, what we’re really debating is how our state should best support parents’ school choices and the academic success of all Tennessee K-12 students.
The EFA proposes a new path toward those objectives through investing state dollars in as many as 20,000 “scholarships” – which some refer to as “vouchers” – per year, giving parents of approved eligible students $7,075 to pay for private school costs. But the proposal would also “hold harmless” public school districts, by maintaining state funding levels for those experiencing disenrollment when their students use EFA scholarships to leave for private schools.
To me, this recognizes that neither private schools, nor state subsidies for them, can replace Tennessee’s public K-12 school systems. The Constitution of Tennessee mandates that the General Assembly “shall provide for the maintenance, support and eligibility standards of a system of free public schools”, and that’s more true than ever because Tennessee’s future success depends on our ability to prepare today’s children for engaged citizenship and global competitiveness.
Most of the jobs which support Tennessee’s families and economy will continue to be filled by graduates of our public school districts – each of which, unlike most private schools, offers multiple Career & Technical Education (CTE) courses delivering the practical skills needed for most of those jobs. With or without the EFA, the overwhelming majority of our state’s K-12 students will continue to receive their preparation for life and careers from our public schools.
Our expectations about the EFA’s potential benefits should be realistic. Private schools cannot provide for the academic and practical needs of several entire groups of Tennessee students. Under the EFA, recipients would not retain the right to receive special education and related services from the school district in which they live.
And in practical terms, EFA scholarships can’t deliver freedom or choice for children whose families can’t afford private school even with a $7,075 annual subsidy, who are dependent on their school for food and other basic necessities, who live far away from a private school, or whose parent – or the grandparent or sibling who’s raising them – is overwhelmed, neglectful, or simply incapable of navigating the EFA or private school application processes. For the hundreds of thousands of Tennessee K-12 students in those situations, their public school is their only real option, with or without the EFA.
While many Tennesseans and their elected representatives have already decided whether they’re for or against the EFA, I’d nevertheless like to offer a few thoughts about some ways in which I believe that the accountability and fairness of any such new path to education freedom could be optimized.
First, we should consider whether eligibility for the EFA’s new state-funded scholarships should be tightened. Up to 10,000 of the subsidies awarded in the first year would be available to qualified students from families of any income level, while the top annual income limit for the other 10,000 would be as high as $113,442 for a household of just two persons – and over $170,000 for households of four.
To me, awarding new $7,075 private-school subsidies to families with six-figure incomes seems neither necessary nor fiscally conservative. Our state’s general fund revenues are expected to decline over the current fiscal year and to grow very little next year, while we’re also seeking to continue investing in teacher salaries, disaster relief, and tackling Tennessee’s multi-billion-dollar list of needed infrastructure investments.
We ought to consider limiting such assistance to families which truly need such scholarships in order to afford for their children to “escape failing schools”. We could consider limiting eligibility for all such scholarships, not just half of them, to families at or below 150% of Tennessee’s median household income, which in 2023 was $67,631. This would ensure that all of the benefits of this new subsidy would flow to Tennessee families with annual household incomes of less than $101,447.
Next, if the EFA scholarship program is to be enacted, we should consider requiring recipients’ academic performance to be measured with the same yardstick as their public school peers – our state’s annual TCAP exams. Yes, these tests are challenging for educators and students, and I know some are concerned that requiring scholarship students to take them might dissuade some high-performing private schools from participating in the EFA.
I also know that in business, we can’t improve what we can’t measure, and I think that’s true for government, too. Neither parent satisfaction surveys nor a “nationally standardized achievement test that is aligned to the respective private school's instructional plan” will yield the apples-to-apples data which allows scholarship recipients’ academic performance to be compared directly with that of their public school peers. Requiring EFA scholarship recipients to take the annual TCAP assessments, however, will give policymakers, parents, taxpayers, and voters the data they need to tell whether or not the scholarships are in fact leading to academic gains for their recipients.
Finally, if we really want to address choice in K-12 education, we ought to consider giving parents receiving EFA scholarships the freedom to choose one option that could be especially helpful for students in many rural and urban areas: a different public school from the one for which their child is currently zoned.
In areas of our state where a private school alternative is unavailable, unreachable or unaffordable, allowing our state’s public schools to accept and educate EFA scholarship recipients would make school choice a reality for thousands of Tennessee children. The receiving public school would receive the same base funding of $7,075 per student as they get from the state for each enrolled student in their zone, as “the money travels with the student” just as it would to any private school.
I offer these thoughts and suggestions as someone whose own life has been transformed through the opportunities made possible by education. Whatever the outcome of the special session debate on the EFA, I sincerely hope that the academic growth, career achievements, and life outcomes of nearly one million of our youngest generation of Tennesseans will be improved.