Tennessee Governor Bill Lee recently signed the Education Freedom Act of 2025 implementing a new voucher program state-wide. The Education Freedom Act will earmark 440 million dollars for a school voucher program that will use public money to provide private school vouchers to students. Voucher dollars are going to offer more choice and its implementation coincides the ending of Covid relief funds ESSA. Gov. How will this new law and the loss of ESSA money impact student learning and content recovery for public schools?

With the expanded distribution of public dollars, the Hillsboro Globe Editorial Staff took a deeper dive into the recently released 2019-2024 Education Recovery Scorecard to create a baseline for future comparisons. While ERS provides multiple data points for grades 3-8 math and reading, we found its report on absenteeism more enlightening. The staff decided to limit their inquiry to other districts similar in enrollment numbers and diversity numbers. Chronic absenteeism data was shocking and the Nashville community should pledge to work together with our local school district to unify efforts to improve content recovery.

The staff determined it doesn’t matter how many dollars follow a student under Lee’s 2025 Education Freedom Act, nor does it matter where parents choose to send their students, if the student doesn’t show up for school, arrives late and/or leaves early, no amount of money is going improve content recovery. The data reviewed indicates content recovery efforts like summer intensives and tutoring are working but they are only for those students who are not chronically absent. We believe that if the Nashville community at large chose this single data point to improve, other improvements will follow. We used the recently

More On the Resource Used for Comparison

This editorial is not meant to be comprehensive. The resource, Education Recovery Scorecard, presents its data interactively and was the most user-friendly of resources studied. In its third year of reporting on the pace of academic recovery measures in districts nationwide, the Education Recovery Scorecard (a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University) recently issued its annual report on district-level student growth in math, reading and absenteeism.

Readers can find more information by ERS here.

METRO NASHVILLE PUBLIC SCHOOLS DATA FINDINGS

There are bright spots in the data and MNPS is one of the more successful districts to recover content lost during and post Covid school years.

The latest report also provides the first high resolution picture of where Tennessee students’ academic recovery stood in Spring 2024, just before ESSA federal relief dollars expired in September 2024. While the National Assessment of Educational Progress described changes in average achievement by state, we combined those scores with district scores on state assessments to describe the change in local communities throughout Tennessee.

To summarize, MNPS is on track to close the gaps caused by COVID more quickly and significantly than other districts in Tennessee whose enrollment is over 50,000 students and who have a diverse student body.

Notable facts the Hillsboro Globe found:

• Tennessee ranked 3rd among states in terms of recovery in math and 9th in reading between 2019 and 2024.
• Average student achievement in Tennessee remains about one tenth of a grade level below 2019 levels in math (.13 grade equivalents) and one third of a grade level below in reading (.32 grade equivalents). In other words, the loss in math achievement in Tennessee is equivalent to 13 percent of the progress students typically make annually between grades 4 through grade 8.
• Yet, even in Tennessee, 64 percent of students are in districts whose average math achievement in 2024 remained below their own 2019 levels. The average student in some districts, such as Shelby and Montgomery, remains more than three quarters of a grade equivalent below their 2019 mean achievement in math.
• A sharp rise in chronic absenteeism (students missing more than 10 percent of a school year) from 13 percent of students in 2019 before the pandemic to 20 percent in 2022 and 2023 is continuing to slow the recovery in many districts in Tennessee.
• Tennessee received $3.9 billion in federal pandemic relief for K-12 schools—or roughly $3,800 per student (which is on par with the national average of $3,700 per student.) Nationally, our analysis suggests that the dollars did contribute to the academic recovery, especially when targeted at academic catch-up efforts such as summer learning and tutoring.

Possible impact of voucher program on larger school districts in Tennessee. 

The federal pandemic relief dollars are gone, but the pandemic’s impact lingers in many Tennessee schools. The most problematic change in behavior following Covid is the increase in absenteeism statewide. Federal dollars were effective in content recovery, and MNPS’s data indicates that improvement trends positively except absenteeism. Parents, students, educators, administrators and the Nashville business community must step up its efforts to lower chronic absenteeism.

Tennessee’s DOE continues to target federal Title I dollars by narrowing how schools qualify for

federal dollars, and state voucher dollars will spread resources exponentially. Schools who lose 100-200 students will suffer the most in large districts. Local school budget continue to increase, while state dollars that follow the student could decrease. Businesses who want to hire graduates should be most concerned as the habit of becoming truant will bleed in employee behavior. Businesses could participant in a pledge to use a student’s attendance as a factor in hiring and businesses should be vocal in these efforts.

The cost of running a school does not decrease because the enrollment decreases with with absenteeism or more school choice. Heating, cooling, cleaning, and maintaining are consistent school costs that do not change as enrollments change.

Generally, state money sent to local school districts is determined by school attendance. The impact of absenteeism on local districts in addition to the impact of the upcoming 2025 Education Freedom Act does not bode well for public schools or charters because it is a behavioral trend and not a learning trend. Especially, because the data demonstrates content recovery is working in MNPS. It appears districts across Tennessee are doing what they do best, educating, parents, students, and the Nashville business community’s  should support these efforts by making attendance necessary in a post-Covid community.

One of the project leaders, Professor Tom Kane from Harvard, said: “Unless state and local leaders step up now, the achievement losses will be the longest lasting– and most inequitable– legacy of the pandemic.”State leaders, mayors, employers and other community leaders should join schools to redouble efforts on the shared challenge of reducing student absenteeism.

About the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University 

The Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, seeks to transform education through quality research and evidence. CEPR and its partners believe all students will learn and thrive when education leaders make decisions using facts and findings, rather than untested assumptions. Learn more at cepr.harvard.edu.