Lawmakers approved a $447 million statewide publicly funded school voucher program last week.

A combination of persistence, timing, messaging, and a grassroots ground game finally helped bring universal school choice to the Volunteer State after two decades worth of work on the issue.

Lawmakers approved a $447 million statewide publicly funded school voucher program last week, with the 23-page bill easily passing in the Republican controlled senate (20–13) and house (54–44).

“I’ve long believed that we can have the best public schools and give parents a choice in their child’s education, regardless of income or zip code,” Governor Bill Lee said in a statement to National Review. 

Lee, who has been fighting for school choice in the state since he was first elected in 2018, added: “Passing the Education Freedom Act to deliver Universal School Choice for Tennessee families is a milestone in advancing education in our state, and I’m grateful to the parents, students, educators, and all Tennesseans who have engaged in this effort.”

Lee’s Education Freedom Scholarship program will fund 20,000 scholarships of $7,300 for Tennessee students. In the first stage of the rollout, half of the spots will be earmarked for students whose family income is below a prescribed threshold that works out to below $173,000 for a family of four. The income restriction will be removed in the program’s second year.

The scholarships are open for students enrolled in both public and private schools; some 65 percent of the vouchers are expected to go to students who already attend private schools, according to the legislature’s analysis of the proposal, with the rest going to students switching out of public schools.

The bill also includes several measures to benefit public schools, including one-time bonuses of $2,000 each to Tennessee public school teachers and the establishment of a public school infrastructure fund that will draw funds from sports betting tax revenues.

“Kids and families are the big winners,” Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told National Review in a statement. “It’s exciting to see Tennessee join ever-growing number of states where education freedom is a reality for every single child. This was a long-fought victory, and Governor Lee and the legislative leaders who never flinched in their commitment to putting students first deserve much praise.”

The bill now heads to Lee’s desk and will take effect as soon as he signs it. The state Department of Education will be tasked with implementing the program by next school year.

The Republican governing trifecta achieved what school choice proponents have been working on in the state since 2006. 

Tennessee senate majority leader Jack Johnson has been an advocate for school choice since he was first elected to the legislative body nearly 20 years ago. Thursday “was a really, really momentous day,” he told National Review.

A major part of getting others on board with school choice has been proving that you can be pro–school choice without being anti-public education, Johnson said. The new measure will reimburse public school systems for any state funding lost if a student disenrolls to use a voucher.

“I’m a very strong advocate for public education,” Johnson said. “But you can support public education and also recognize the need for parental empowerment, empowering parents to make different choices.”

He said lawmakers will continue to ensure that Tennessee has the best public school system it can, while recognizing that “no matter how hard we try, our public education system is not going to be able to satisfy the needs of every child in Tennessee.” 

Lee’s persistence on the issue, combined with more widespread school choice momentum throughout the country post-Covid, and a grassroots effort to grow awareness about the school vouchers undertaken by Americans for Prosperity and other groups, finally allowed state advocates to declare victory in the state after many years of fighting the system.

Tennessee Republicans first tried to advance a voucher program in 2008 when they took control of the legislature. But when the senate approved a program for low-income students in the state’s four most populous counties, a house subcommittee squashed the measure.

The legislature then shifted its focus to Individualized Education Accounts, a program that was implemented in 2016 and that allows families of students with certain disabilities to use public funding for education services including private school, home school, and physical therapy. 

It advanced a more limited school voucher program in 2019, but passing universal school choice remained a priority for Lee and Johnson.

Tori Venable, the Tennessee state director for Americans for Prosperity, said her team had been running a school choice campaign for at least two years to “build awareness and to show lawmakers that this is something that Tennesseans want across the state.” AFP and its volunteers knocked on more than 176,000 doors in support of school choice and made 2,000 phone calls.

“[Volunteers were] talking to people about why it’s important to empower parents to make these decisions for their children and what that could mean for them,” she said, adding that they focused in on the universal aspect of the bill because many times wins achieved by the school choice movement had been limited to only low-income families. 

The main concern that she heard from people was that the bill would somehow defund public schools – which is not the case. “This just needed to be an option for families that . . . were not having their needs met in the current system.”

As for lessons other states could learn from Tennessee? Go all-in.

“The one thing that we know is it’s important to fight for universal school choice and to make it accessible to all families because the opposition — teachers’ unions — will fight us the same way, whether it’s a tiny scholarship for a very limited set of a low-income families, as it would for every single child in the state being eligible,” Venable said.

Another key facet of the measure is the fiscal responsibility baked into it, said Johnson, the state senate majority leader. A provision in the bill allows the program to grow by 5,000 students annually. However, it is “not unlimited” — any growth in the program is subject to appropriation by future approval from the general assembly.

Tennessee is one of the most fiscally stable states in the country, he said. “We are very, very fiscally conservative so we’re not going to allow any program — no matter how much we believe in it, support it — to jeopardize our fiscal stability in the future.” 

Tennessee now joins a dozen other states that have adopted universal school-choice programs. Thirty-three states have some form of publicly funded school choice programs.

At the national level, President Trump recently signed an executive order freeing up federal funding and prioritizing spending on school choice programs.

Lee told reporters last week, which was National School Choice Week, that he thinks there’s “opportunity there” within the executive order, though he said he hadn’t looked into how it might impact Tennessee’s new program. 

“The president wants to support states like ours who are advocating for school choice,” he said.