By Claudia Williamson Kramer, Ph.D.
My husband and I are in the thick of it. With two toddlers and a baby on the way, we have spent
the past several months touring classrooms, interviewing admissions directors, and comparing
tuition against our family budget. Like thousands of families across Chattanooga, we are
navigating a question that sounds simple but is anything but: where should we send our kids to
school?
Chattanooga has options. Charter schools, magnet programs, private institutions, homeschool co-
ops. But “options” and “access” are not the same thing. Magnet schools have waitlists. Charter
lotteries are exactly that — lotteries, where only a lucky few get in. Private tuition requires
a financial sacrifice that not every family can make. And the default option — your zoned public
school — may or may not align with what you believe is best for your child.
This is the problem that Tennessee Education Freedom Scholarships (EFS) are designed to address.
And this spring, it was at the center of one of the most heated policy debates in Nashville. The
legislature has now acted, and the result is a significant win for Tennessee families. The program
is expanding, funding follows the child, and parents, not bureaucrats, decide how their children
are educated. That is not defunding education. It is improving it by putting the people who know
their children best in charge of the decision.
What Vouchers Actually Are
The EFS program, as the state’s own website describes it, allows K-12 students to use “state funds”
toward tuition and fees at registered non-public schools. But that framing reveals precisely the
misunderstanding at the heart of the debate. Critics, and even the program’s own description, frame
vouchers as the government directing “state funds” to private schools. This gets the economics
exactly backwards.
The government has no money. Every dollar in the state budget originated in the pocket of a
Tennessee taxpayer. When a family receives a voucher, the state is not giving them a gift. It is
returning a portion of their own tax dollars. And for lower-income families, it redistributes
resources so that wealth is not the deciding factor in whether a child receives a quality education.
Either way, the result is the same: parents, not bureaucrats, direct the money toward the school
they believe best serves their child.
Milton Friedman made this argument in 1955, proposing that governments should finance
education through vouchers rather than operate schools directly. As he put it, the purpose is “to
enable parents to have free choice, and the purpose of having free choice is to provide
competition.” The insight was elegant: separate the funding of education from the delivery of
education. Taxpayers fund education. Parents choose the provider.
This distinction matters enormously. Under the current system, public schools receive funding
based on enrollment — money follows the institution. Vouchers flip this. Money follows the child.
The family, not the government, decides where education dollars are spent.
