Poll finds support in rural Senate districts for Lee’s school choice proposal

A new poll of 1,591 voters in five rural Tennessee Senate districts showed strong support for Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal to offer state-funded grants to 20,000 students statewide to attend a private or homeschool of their choice.

The poll found that more than 70% of residents of those five districts support the governor’s proposal to “enable parents to take back control of over $7k of their education tax dollars to educate their child in a private or home school environment if they choose to, giving parents more control over how and where their children are educated.”

The poll was conducted by Spry Strategies and commissioned by Americans for Prosperity Tennessee.

“Parents want to be in control of how education tax dollars allocated for their children are spent and be empowered to decide how their children are educated. It’s as simple as that,” said AFP-TN State Director Tori Venable.

AFP Tennessee has hired 100 part-time workers to knock on thousands of doors, and funded mailers, digital ads, and billboards to advocate for the statewide school choice program.

More: Americans for Prosperity, school choice groups assemble army to push for voucher expansion

Of the respondents, 70.9% agreed that the program should “be made available to all Tennessee tax-paying citizens,” and not be limited to those who are the lowest income. Another 9.9% said the program should be limited to low-income, while nearly 16% were undecided.

Almost 74% of their respondents described themselves as conservative or very conservative.

Only 16.5% of the respondents self-identified as parents.

The poll engaged voters in Tennessee Senate Districts 2, 9, 24, 25, and 28 – seeking to get a picture of rural voters’ outlook in East, Middle, and West Tennessee. Two of the five senators who represent the poll's target districts voted against Lee’s Education Savings Accounts bill in 2019: Sen. Art Swann, of District 2, and Sen. Steve Southerland, of District 9.

“It doesn’t matter if you make $30k a year, or $300k a year, every parent should have the right to access this program,” Venable said. “People who make more money shouldn’t be responsible for paying into a failing system they don’t even use, then be forced to pay even more on top of it to get their children out of that failing system.”

Jason Freeman, on behalf of the TN4ALL coalition, criticized the poll questions as biased, pushing for an answer from one perspective. Respondent demographics reached by pollsters, Freeman said, do not reflect the priorities of constituent families of school-aged children across the state that the coalition has interacted with.

"Diverting money from public schools to private schools is not popular because most families have kids in public schools. That is why over 40 local school boards have passed resolutions opposing this plan, including 7 in the counties included in this poll," Freeman told The Tennessean. "The special interest groups pushing this voucher scam have unlimited resources to pay for polls with deceiving questions, but we are out in the community talking to real people and overwhelmingly people are telling us they want more money in their public schools so they can have smaller class sizes and more resources for their students."

A handful of polls have sought to gauge Tennesseans’ support for expanding state-funded vouchers to give parents more financial flexibility while choosing between schools.

A poll by conservative-leaning think tank the Beacon Center of Tennessee found in January that 68% of respondents support the governor’s statewide Education Freedom Scholarships program.

A poll of 756 people in January by analytics company Co/efficient, sponsored by the Tennessee Education Association, reported that about 55% of likely Republican primary voters oppose the governor’s poll. The poll has faced criticism for its methods by school-choice supporters.

TEA President Tanya T. Coats also described the AFP poll questions as "misleading," arguing that the governor's voucher proposal would jeopardize public school funding.

“Another privatization group releasing a poll with misleading questions does not change the fact that private school vouchers would divert much-needed resources from our already underfunded public schools and threaten the strength of our Tennessee communities. Fewer students and less funding will put beloved neighborhood schools at risk for closure," TEA President Tanya T. Coats told The Tennessean. "Additionally, the majority of Tennesseans do not pay the proposed voucher amount of more than $7,000 in state taxes. This is not a proposal to ‘take back control of your money’; it’s a plan that puts a select few in control of every Tennessean’s tax dollars."

The Tennessee Education Association has pledged to roundly oppose any effort to expand the ESA program, decrying expansion as "irresponsible and reckless." Meanwhile, Democrats already are voicing their fierce opposition to any expansion, accusing the Lee administration of devaluing public education.

The governor’s bill is up for first hearings in both the House and Senate this week.

AFP poll crosstabs by USA TODAY Network

Vivian Jones covers state government and politics for The Tennessean. Reach her at vjones@tennessean.com. 

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Tennessee school vouchers: Poll finds support in rural Senate districts