School voucher bill off table
Sponsor: Lacks votes for passage
NASHVILLE — The controversial school voucher bill was halted on the floor of the House of Representatives Thursday morning after its sponsor, Rep. Bill Dunn, acknowledged he still lacks the 50 votes needed to pass it.
Dunn (R-Knoxville) told reporters after the floor session that he could resurrect the bill, but only if he sees the votes are there — and he indicated he doesn’t see that as likely before the General Assembly adjourns in late April.
“I think we kind of hit a high-water mark today and people are going to move on to other issues,” he said.
State Rep. Antonio Parkinson
(D-Memphis), a vocal opponent of school vouchers, tweeted Thursday morning that the issue was “dead,” though he said later in the day that it could be brought up again.
Dunn’s postponement of the bill was the second this week. It originally had been scheduled for a House vote on Monday but he deferred it until Thursday to give an army of lobbyists, mostly for outof-state “school choice” groups, more time to try to sway enough votes for passage.
On Wednesday, voucher advocates made a lastditch effort by advancing an amendment that would have limited vouchers — at least initially — to low-income students in the Shelby County Schools system, on an experimental basis. Under that plan, the state comptroller’s office would have evaluated the pilot voucher program, and the legislature could expand it at any time.
Parkinson called the amendment limiting the program to Shelby County “morally unacceptable” and said it gave legislators in other districts “cover” to approve a voucher program without it affecting their constituents.
“To me it looked like you were dumping on Shelby County yet again,” said Parkinson, who has long argued that the staterun Achievement School District unfairly targets Memphis for school takeovers.
Mendell Grinter, Tennessee state director for the Black Alliance for Educational Options, said failure to pass the bill Thursday morning was “legislators dropping the ball.”
“I think the feeling going into this morning was that we were definitely going to be able to pass the bill,” Grinter said.
Still, he was confident they would have another shot to pass the voucher bill next year.
Vouchers allow parents to take public-school funding to pay private-school tuition, on the same perpupil funding level — an average of $7,000 statewide — as public schools receive from state and local appropriations.
Dunn accused opponents of vouchers of “ly- ing” about the bill and pa r ticula rly about t he controversial Shelby-only amendment. The amendment’s wording referred in parts to schools in the bottom 5 percent statewide but in other parts to just the Shelby County Schools pilot program, and opponents charged that it could be read as applying statewide.
“The whole path to this bill has been attacked by lies — lies that said there was no accountability when the bill clearly said that. They said it has never worked before, when there were dozens of studies that showed that it had. Truth didn’t win out today,” Dunn said.
He said he had worked hard to gather enough support to pass the bill and did not call for a vote out of courtesy to his colleagues.
“I feel sorry for the parents who have children in failing schools,” he said. “All we were doing was trying to help them and unfortunately for another year they’re going to be on the path to failure.”
He also argued that the Shelby-only amendment did not make Shelby students “guinea pigs” for a study of vouchers in Tennessee.
“We have a long record, decades and decades, of schools that fail students, that have graduation rates below 50 percent ... and by golly we’re trying to find a cure for that. No state that has enacted a voucher program has rescinded it and I think that says a lot.”