Written by Don Byrd
In Tennessee, school voucher proponents have been stymied in recent years by opposition in a key House subcommittee. Now that House Finance has a new chair, the Memphis Business Journal reports the path was cleared for a vote that sent a school voucher bill to the Tennessee House for consideration.
From the Journal’s report:
According to WPLN, the bill ( which you can read here) calls for initially creating 5,000 vouchers, a number that would eventually increase to 20,000. The vouchers would first be made available to students from low-income families who’ve been assigned to schools that are labeled by the state as failing.
The Baptist Joint Committee has long opposed school vouchers because they send taxpayer funds to support religious schools. Tennessee’s proposal sounds modest but suffers from the same basic problem: taxpayers should not have to support religious indoctrination of any faith, even indirectly through a voucher system.
