You get what you pay for.

The recent news that Georgia students' scores on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests were significantly below what is expected only serves to underscore the simple, difficult truth. Our schools are falling further and further behind, and our students are becoming increasingly unprepared to become productive citizens in the future.

Why can our elected officials not deliver on the simplest promises to our students? I believe that our problems with education can be traced to one significant cause. Over the past six years, Republicans in the General Assembly have consistently cut education funding by more than $1.6 billion. This year alone, the cuts to our schools amounted to more than $90 million. Now, after all these cuts, we see the effects of immature, irresponsible education policy.

As a member of the House Democratic Caucus, I can tell you that Democrats offer a better way. Our approach to education is formed by our values and shaped by our belief that education should be the first thing funded and the last thing cut.

We know that you can't solve a problem just by throwing money at it, but you also can't starve schools and expect students to succeed. Democrats stand for a mature, fiscally responsible approach to funding schools that guarantees our teachers and administrators the resources they need to do their jobs.

The fact is, our abysmal test scores cannot be blamed on the test or the teachers, and they certainly cannot be blamed on the students. You get what you pay for, and over the past six years, we have paid for an education system that is mediocre at best, and often substandard. Georgia deserves better than that.

This year, Democrats introduced a plan that would have restored the last six years of cuts to our public schools, and would have lowered property taxes in the process. The idea was a simple one: make the state government stop defaulting on its share of education funding and start keeping the promise we've made to our children. As with many good ideas, our education plan did not even come up for a vote, another victim of the distracting and vicious in-fighting that has characterized the Legislature under Republican control.

This year, voters will have many choices to make in the voting booth. Democrats are proud to support our schools, our teachers and, most of all, our students. Between now and November, we'll be undertaking an education effort of our own —- talking to the voters and educating them on how the Republican leadership has failed our children.

The time for change has come. We believe that it is our obligation to leave our children a better Georgia than we found, with more prosperity and security. For Democrats, that effort begins in our classrooms, as we educate our children and prepare them for the future.

State Rep. Rob Teilhet is a Democrat from Smyrna.

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