Students in poverty, who have the lowest test scores of the state, who don't have parents willing or able to do what it takes to get them in a voucher school, won't be helped by vouchers. In fact, vouchers will HURT those children because funding will be taken away from their local schools. It is a cycle that is designed to make their schools fail.
The students in the bottom 5% cannot possibly afford the required uniforms for private schools or the additional cost of textbooks, and many parents cannot provide transportation. Vouchers won't help them.
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Important Voucher Questions:
Q: If there is no money in the budget to increase teacher pay as promised (again), why does Governor Haslam want to spend money we don’t have on vouchers?
Q: Our public schools are in survival mode, literally starved of funding (just look at the buckets & trash cans placed under the leaks in our schools because there is no money for new roofs or repairs), why does Governor Haslam want to funnel our tax dollars to vouchers and charter schools?
Q: Everyone knows that vouchers don't work. Other states that do have vouchers have lower test scores in students, increased segregation bu race and by income, a wide achievement gap that only gets bigger, rampant fraud, and lots of lawsuits. Why is Tennessee not learning from their mistakes?
Q: Why hire even MORE staff at the TN DOE to run the voucher program when our state budget is stretched too thin to fund the priorities that constituents truly want and need?
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There's a LOT of money being poured into TN from out-of-state interests to support vouchers. Because vouchers weaken and cripple even the strongest public schools, these entrepreneurs are salivating at the prospect of siphoning our tax dollars from our public schools to send to their private hands. Tennessee will be no different if the Voucher bill is passed.
Vouchers will drain funding away from our public schools and send OUR tax dollars to mediocre private schools (because the best private schools wouldn't dare accept vouchers... they've already said they won't).
Not only that, the cost of the lawsuits against vouchers in other states is making many lawyers super rich! Wouldn't you rather that money go to help students and their community schools that desperately need it?
Here's a solution:
Let VOTERS decide.