The Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury evaluated one of the state’s school voucher programs and found some shortcomings, according to a report from January.
Many school systems have criticized school voucher programs, saying they take money away from public schools, and this evaluation now shows that, for at least one such program, students in public schools seem to be doing better than those receiving vouchers.
The Education Savings Account (ESA) program is a school choice program only available to students in the Memphis-Shelby County School District, Metro Nashville Public Schools District or Hamilton County Schools District, not in the rest of the state. However, there are two other school choice programs that are available to every county — the Individualized Education Account (IEA) Program and the new Education Freedom Scholarship (EFS) Program.
The evaluation, which only examined ESA, found that recipients’ TCAP scores have gone up but generally remain below those of local public school students. Additionally, ESA students show less academic growth than expected according to the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System, which measures student growth.
