At the beginning of the 2008 legislative session, Sen. Dan Weber (R-Dunwoody), chair of the Senate Education Committee, fretted that proposed education initiatives lacked cohesion. Lawmakers, he said, were lining up bricks without a clear concept of what they might be building.

Now we know. They're building a mausoleum for public education.

In the scattershot education bills approved this year, a single theme has emerged: Gov. Sonny Perdue and the General Assembly have given up on the traditional public education system that changed the fortunes and paths of generations of Americans. The Republican leadership in Georgia has abandoned the notion that the state can or will deal with the transformative and thorny issues of funding, teacher quality or school size.

"The result is that they only grudgingly put any resources into the Quality Basic Education Act and the salary schedule and focus on relatively low-bore programs such as gift cards and graduation coaches," says Tim Callahan of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators. "Meanwhile, they assiduously pump up competing marketplace options such as charters, home and private schools."

The most ballyhooed initiative of the Perdue administration —- a blue-ribbon task force assigned by the governor to come up with a fair formula for funding local schools —- fizzled. When translated into legislation, the committee's three years of work don't address the funding problem in any way.

Instead, House Bill 1209 proposes a deal to local school systems. If they agree to set more rigorous academic standards, the state will give them flexibility in spending state tax dollars and freedom from state mandates such as teacher salaries, curriculum decisions and class size.

But there's a catch: If schools don't live up to their five-year "performance contracts," they can be put under private management or turned over to a nearby system. The details of how that process would work are far from clear.

"The choices we are giving school systems in this flexibility bill are between a rock and a hard place," said state Rep. Alisha Morgan (D-Austell), a member of the House Education Committee. "We spent many hours on this bill in committee, but it is not ready to be law. This bill doesn't make sense."

Meanwhile, the committee and the Legislature continue to ignore the most pressing and fundamental question: Is Georgia's system for funding schools —- with its heavy reliance on local property wealth —- fair or effective?

"Instead, we have a flexibility bill that we are handing off to school systems, saying we didn't figure it out, so here, you take this flexibility and do it," says state Rep. Barbara Reece (D-Menlo).

Other bills confirm the theory that lawmakers are more interested in developing an exit strategy than a reform strategy.

House Bill 881, for example, creates a state commission that can override locally elected boards of education, forcing local districts to accept charter schools and support those schools with their taxes.

"Local voter accountability is removed because local voters could decide to elect a board opposed to charter schools," says Decatur school board member John Ahmann.

In another example, the House endorsed a bill this week that encourages corporations and individuals to donate money to pay for public school students to attend private schools. Sponsored by state Rep. David Casas (R-Lilburn), House Bill 1133 creates generous new tax credits for such donations, a move that represents a back door tactic to transfer public monies to private schools.

Countering criticisms that he would be better off encouraging foundations to support public education, which has suffered state budget cuts totaling more than a billion dollars in recent years, Casas said, "I believe education is about children, not preserving our school districts."

But which children? In Georgia, 1.61 million children attend public schools, compared to 82,000 in private schools, and the preservation of public school districts is crucial to them and their families. Yet, the GOP legislative agenda focuses inordinately on the 5 percent of Georgia students in private schools.

For example, the Senate has passed Senate Bill 458, which awards private school vouchers to students in chronically underperforming public schools or in systems that lose accreditation. The sponsor, Senate Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah), compared children in failing schools to passengers on a sinking ship.

"If we're on the Titanic and we only have a few lifeboats, let's put the children on the lifeboats first and figure out who hit the iceberg later," he said.

While colorful, Johnson's analogy is an attempt to duck responsibility. If Georgia schools are being piloted into an iceberg, the people steering that ship are a General Assembly and governor who underfund schools, who refuse to tackle the issues of teacher quality out of fear of the political fallout, and who prefer to jump ship rather than plug the holes that they themselves have created.

—- Maureen Downey, for the editorial board (mdowney@ajc.com)