Voucher Alert: Bill Coming Up Wednesday Before Committee, Click Here to Contact All Committee Members

If you, like me believe that adopting a school voucher program in Tennessee would represent a poor use of public tax dollars, then I urge you to contact the members of the Tennessee House Finance Subcommittee before this Wednesday when the voucher bill comes up for a vote.  The specific bill is HB 190 and titled “Tennesee Choice and Opportunity Scholarship.”  You can find the entire text of the bill here. State legislators are typically much more impacted by constituent correspondences than federal legislators, so enough contacts might just be the thing that pushes them over the hump one way or the other.  Here are the members of the House Finance Subcommittee, along with a block of text that you can copy and paste into the address line of an email to reach all the committee members at once:

1. Chairman Charles Sargent
2. Chairman Mike Harrison
3. Rep. Craig Fitzhugh
4. Rep. David Alexander
5. Rep. David Hawk
6. Rep. Dennis Roach
7. Rep. Gary Odom
8. Rep. Gerald McCormick
9. Rep. Joe Armstrong
10. Rep. Karen Camper
11. Rep. Kevin Brooks
12. Rep. Steve McDaniel

[email protected], [email protected],
[email protected], [email protected],
[email protected], [email protected],
[email protected], [email protected],
[email protected], [email protected],
[email protected], [email protected]

If you want some text to send to these legislators but don’t have the time to write something yourself, here’s the email I’ll be sending them as soon as I publish this post.  Feel free to reuse!  And if you’re not sure where you stand, check out the NEA’s webpage, “the case against vouchers” for an overview.

I am writing to you to request that you vote against HB190, also known as the Tennessee Choice and Opportunity Scholarship, when it comes before the House Finance Subcommittee this Wednesday.

This bill claims to offer a path out of failing schools for children in the bottom 5 percent of schools in our state.  However, the body of research on school vouchers suggests that these programs are not an effective way to achieve this outcome.

Research shows that voucher programs do not lead to improved student academic outcomes.  This is true regardless of the geographic location of the program or the study in question.  Additionally, poor transparency and accountability mechanisms mean that students may leave one failing school only to attend another on the taxpayers dollar because we cannot hold these schools to the same level of accountability as we can public schools.  This has happened just south of us in Louisiana where the AP found that 40% of voucher users were found to be attending failing or near failing schools this past December.

I believe that students deserve to attend an excellent school.  But all evidence indicates that voucher programs are not an effective way to accomplish this goal.  If we want to improve school quality here in Tennessee, we can find much better ways to allocate our scarce public resources than through the creation of a voucher program.

For these reasons, I again urge you to vote against HB190 when it comes before the House Finance Subcommittee this Wednesday.

Sincerely,  <name, address>

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*update: I’ve updated this piece several times since publishing it because of formatting problems with copying and pasting into emails.  If you notice a formatting error with copying and pasting text into an email, please post it in the comments so I can fix it ASAP!