Tag: Vouchers

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Private School Vouchers Held Unconstitutional

Governor Bill Lee’s 2019 voucher bill allowing taxpayer money to pay for private school attendance in two Tennessee localities — Shelby County and Davidson County — has been ruled unconstitutional by Nashville Chancellor Anne C.

Chancellor Anne C. Martin

Martin because it violates the two counties’ constitutionally granted “home rule” status.

The controversial bill — whose adherents referred to vouchers as “education savings accounts” — notoriously passed the Tennessee House last year by a single vote, which was bargained for by then-Speaker Glen Casada, who kept the chamber’s voteboard open for an extra hour.

Ultimately, Casada was able to prevail on Knoxville state Rep. Jason Zachary to change his no vote to aye upon the Speaker’s pledge that the voucher bill would not apply to Knoxville or anywhere else other than Shelby or Davidson Counties.

New House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who opposed the voucher bill last year, has been resisting Governor Lee’s efforts to fast-track implementation of the measure. Those efforts would no longer appear necessary.

Shelby County Schools Superintendent Joris Ray called the ruling “excellent news,” as did state Senator Raumesh Akbari of Memphis, who said, “Public school tax dollars are meant for public schools, to serve every kid with a high-quality education regardless of their ZIP code. Private school vouchers break that shared promise by defunding our neighborhood schools, student by student and brick by brick. That’s why so many school districts wanted no part of this faulty program.”

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Usual Shenanigans

Hey, it’s March! Which means it’s time for my annual rant about the Tennessee General Assembly.

A little background: For the past few sessions, since the post-2010 census gerrymandering by the Republican majority in 2012, the Democratic Party has basically been neutered. The House has 73 Republicans and 26 Democrats. The Senate is even more lopsided, with 28 Republicans and 5(!) Democrats. Yes, Tennessee is a red state, but no one could honestly claim that this level of party imbalance represents the political leanings of the populace.

Take a look at the Senate district map if you want to see how gerrymandering can pervert the democratic process. Some Tennessee counties are split into three, four, or even five districts in a effort to concentrate Democratic votes into fewer areas and spread GOP power. The Tennessee Constitution requires that state Senate districts “preserve counties whole where possible.” Yeah. That didn’t happen.

Tennessee is basically a one-party government. There are no checks and balances. There is nothing to impede the rural know-nothings who dominate the General Assembly from following their worst instincts. By that, I mean introducing bills that put the screws to the state’s cities, which are — coincidentally, no doubt — home to most of the state’s Democrats.

For a particularly absurd example, consider the recently introduced “Bag and Straw” bill, a measure that would make it illegal for municipalities to “regulate plastics,” i.e. banning or charging a fee for single-use plastic items, such as plastic bags or drinking straws. The discussion of the bill in the chamber centered around such horrific measures as have been passed in California (home of Pelosi liberals and those disgusting conservationists). There was no mention of the fact that Memphis is working on plans to phase out plastic bags, but it’s pretty obvious the measure was intended as a direct poke in the eye to the Bluff City.

Representative Susan Lynn, R(duh)-Mount Juliet, the bill’s sponsor, claimed that straw bans “abuse freedom.” The freedom to pollute? You tell me.

It’s just the latest in a long line of legislative actions meant to exert state control over issues that rightly belong to municipalities. Other examples include bills to prevent cities from passing minimum-wage laws; deciding what statuary belongs in city parks; passing anti-discrimination hiring ordinances, etc. And on the list goes.

Of course, in addition to the state legislature’s annual attempts to micro-manage the state’s uppity cities, there are the annual attempts to impose Christian Sharia Law. This go-around, there is much enthusiasm in the Capitol for the patently un-Constitutional “fetal heartbeat bill,” which prohibits abortion after a fetus’ heartbeat has been detected (typically at six weeks), with no exceptions for rape or incest — and no consideration of the fact that such bills have been struck down repeatedly in federal court. (For a more in-depth discussion of this bill, see Megan Rubenstein’s Viewpoint on page 9.)

And what General Assembly session would be complete without an attempt to pour millions of taxpayers’ dollars into private and religious schools’ coffers via vouchers? This time around, it’s being championed by newly elected Governor Bill Lee, who is pushing lawmakers to approve a plan that would divert $25 million in funds slated for public education to a voucher program that would give money to parents to put their kids in private schools.

Tennessee’s public schools are already among the lowest-funded in the country, and the state’s teachers are strapped and underpaid. So this move is especially galling for them. Here’s my view: You want to send your kid to a private or religious school? Go for it. Just don’t ask me to pay for it.

If the voucher bill passes this time around and public school funding gets cut, I wouldn’t be shocked to see the state’s public school teachers emulate their peers in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, and elsewhere, and go on strike. If they do, I suspect they’ll find a lot of support, maybe even enough to get the Nashville Hillbillies to pay attention.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Partisanship vs. Solidarity?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As is pointed out in this week’s Flyer editorial, the Shelby County Commission, the elective body entrusted with budgetary oversight over public education in the county, has made a point of voting unanimously against the school-voucher bill now moving through the General Assembly.

It did so for both financial and philosophical reasons. And the commission’s unanimous vote was reached in full anticipation that the voucher bill, sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), would, as has been the custom in legislation on this subject, be among the last measures coming up for a final vote in the current legislative session, due to expire in April.

The commission’s vote was a clear signal of its attitude toward vouchers, and it was made in anticipation of the fact that it would soon have the opportunity to designate an interim successor in state House District 95 to Mark Lovell, the Republican representative who, faced with allegations of sexual misconduct, was recently forced to resign by the leadership of his party.

While a special election to replace Lovell is set to conclude on June 15th, well after the completion of the General Assembly’s work, the commission made haste to set up machinery for the interim appointment whereby applications would be made available from March 21st to March 27th, interviews would be conducted March 29th, and an appointment made April 3rd, in time for the eventual appointee to be serving in the House for the duration of the current session.

Estimates of how long that period could be range from a week to the greater part of a month, but the assumption, again, was that the interim state representative-designate would have an opportunity to vote on the voucher question.

That was how matters stood until a move was initiated among various local Democratic activists to take advantage of the commission’s current composition — seven members elected as Democrats and six elected as Republicans — to appoint a Democrat as the interim state representative from District 5. 

That initiative was first made public in a letter sent to the commission’s seven Democrats by Dave Cambron, president of the Germantown Democratic Club and a member also of the 13-member ad hoc group appointed recently by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini of Nashville to revive the Shelby County Democratic Party. (For a variety of reasons, including what Mancini called “many years of dysfunction,” the dissension-prone local party was formally decertified by the state Democratic executive committee last year.)

Cambron’s letter began with a clarion call: “We have a unique opportunity to send a new progressive voice to the state capitol from Shelby County.” Cambron made the case for local party activist and state Democratic committee member Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, “a leading progressive activist, a club member, and a staunch Democrat who will not hesitate to stand up for the values that we are.”

Cambron said it was “critical that Adrienne is chosen to fill the vacancy for State House District 95” and went on to contend that four of the commission Democrats had committed to support her candidacy, while three — he named Eddie Jones, Justin Ford, and current chairman Melvin Burgess — had not. 

“This is simply not acceptable,” Cambron wrote. “Our Democrats must be unified and stand up against the radical right-wing agenda coming out of the State Capitol.”

In reality, not all of the four Democrats Cambron claimed as committed to Pakis-Gillon would confirm the fact, and at least one made it clear that he resented being put on the spot, as did one of the three Cambron mentioned as uncommitted. 

The Republican members who had put themselves on the record against vouchers began to react negatively to what they saw as the introduction of an extraneous partisan factor. Several of them noted the availability of anti-voucher Republicans among potential applicants for the interim position and said they saw the move to appoint Pakis-Gillon as a conscious rebuff to the constituency of District 95, one of the more consistently Republican-voting areas in the state. 

A motion by GOP Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington to forgo the previously agreed-on appointment schedule achieved only a tie vote in committee and therefore technically failed, but it picked up support from Republican David Reaves of Bartlett, a former Shelby County Schools board member who had spearheaded the commission’s move to appoint an anti-voucher interim state representative. 

As of this week, the situation was fluid, with neither Democrats nor Republicans having a unified position on the matter, and with the body’s previous solidarity on the vouchers issue so riven by disagreement on the partisan issue that there is now serious doubt as to whether an interim appointment can even be made.

The situation will have to be resolved on March 20th, the date of the commission’s next public meeting, or there will not be time for the appointment process to be carried out. Not only would District 95 lack a vote on a matter which is predicted to have a close final outcome, but the commission’s original intent to use the appointment to make a statement on vouchers will be surrendered as well.

Only once before has the commission broken with the tradition of filling a vacancy with a member of the same party as the person being replaced. That was in 2009 when a majority of seven Democrats chose fellow Democrat Matt Kuhn as an interim commissioner to replace Republican David Lillard, who had left to become state treasurer.

That move produced an immediate fallout in Nashville, where Republican legislators from Shelby County protested by imposing a stall on the commission’s legislative agenda, grudgingly relenting somewhat later when Republicans like then GOP Commissioner Mike Carpenter and then District Attorney General Bill Gibbons made public pleas for action on the agenda.