Founder and president of Professional Educators of Tennessee JC Bowman joined Tuesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss funding issues surrounding Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice plan, known as the Education Freedom Scholarship Act.
Lee’s bill, according to the undated draft leaked to the media this week, would make 20,000 scholarships available for Tennessee students in the 2024-2025 school year while universal eligibility would be available to students in the 2025-2026 school year and beyond – prioritizing currently enrolled students, low-income, and public school students if the demand exceeds available funding.
Bowman argued the draft of the bill validated concerns surrounding Lee’s plan before its details were released, including the issue of funding.
“Every time we started talking about it, what did they tell us? “Hold off. You haven’t seen the draft.” Guess what? We’ve seen the draft now and it’s exactly the problems we said. Goes back to, they say they’re gonna serve 20,000 kids, right? 10, 000 kids that’ll be low income or whatever in the first year, but here’s the problem with that… We don’t have the money to go out and spend $900 million on private schools right now. You’re still going to be educating kids who are already in private schools,” Bowman said.
Bowman went on to highlight the lack of clarification in the bill’s draft in regards to the specific number of scholarships available when the plan becomes “universal” during the 2025-2026 school year.
“When the demand comes in, the money goes into that. So it will be growing perpetually. That’s why you have to cap it, whatever your number is – if it’s $170 million, $200 million – you have to put a cap on that hard number, so that it doesn’t exceed that. You’ve got to do that to make it appealing,” Bowman said.
Bowman noted that Lee’s plan has the ability to “blow a hole” in the state budget if “left unchecked.”
“I went back and looked at some numbers, Michael, and in June of 2011, Bill Haslam signed the state budget – it was $30.8 billion. This past year, the 2023 budget was $56.2 billion under Bill Lee. We are growing government…There is somebody spending money and we have got to go back to the principles – limited government, individual responsibility, and keeping physical constraints on government,” Bowman added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Bill Lee” by Bill Lee.
This is not a lack of funding issue for education. This is a fundamental lack of leadership and management issue within academia and government. What we have grown is the false narrative that any of these people are capable of managing any of this.