By Tim Benson
Executive Summary
Early in the 2025 legislative session, the Tennessee General Assembly finally acceded to the request of Governor Bill Lee and passed a universal education savings account program that would provide all Tennessee parents with state funding to choose the educational model that best meets their learning needs of their children.
The program established, the Education Freedom Scholarship Program (EFS), is a massive and important step forward in improving Tennessee’s educational landscape. However, to be successful in the long term, the program will require a robust statewide private school sector. Our paper describes the current regulatory burdens on private schools in Tennessee and recommends policy changes that can lead to new private school options for Tennessee students.
Because Tennessee’s current private school regulations are so complex and burdensome, many education entrepreneurs are not interested in opening private schools in the state. The legal team of one of our allies has worked with several leaders who initially wanted to start private schools in Tennessee but ultimately decided against it because of the difficulty of navigating Tennessee’s private school regulatory environment. In the course of conducting research for this paper, done before the passage of EFS, we spoke with several private school leaders from across Tennessee who said that they had declined to participate in Tennessee’s current education savings account program, the cleverly-named Education Savings Account Program (ESA), due to regulatory concerns and would continue to do so even if a universal education savings account program like EFS was created.
Given these constraints on private school growth in Tennessee and the enactment of EFS, we recommend the following changes to Tennessee’s private school regulations:
I. Consolidate Tennessee’s private school landscape into three types of schools – church schools, non-church schools, and EFS, ESA, and individualized
education account (IEA) schools – and reduce the regulatory requirements for all schools to streamline school approval processes and reduce schools’ compliance burdens.
II. Remove the testing requirement for schools participating in the EFS, ESA and IEA programs to encourage existing private schools to consider participating in school choice programs.
III. Extend the approval term for Tennessee private schools to 10 years to reduce school costs and administrative burdens.
IV. Rescind the May 2023 Board of Education rule requiring a commercial driver’s license (CDL) for drivers transporting students to school activities in school-provided vehicles to reduce the onerous financial burden on private schools and increase student safety.
V. Reconsider some of the safety guidelines passed in the wake of the Covenant School shooting to reduce stress and anxiety among parents, students, and school leaders.
If implemented, these regulatory changes could decrease the regulatory and administrative burdens on existing private schools while increasing the
likelihood that new, innovative private schools will begin operating in Tennessee.
While the above list certainly entails a significant number of regulatory changes, none of those changes would require legislative approval, as they are outlined in the Tennessee State Board of Education rules rather than in the Tennessee.
Tim Benson joined The Heartland Institute in 2015 as a policy analyst in the Government Relations Department. He is also the host of the Heartland Institute Podcast Ill Literacy: Books with Benson.