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Monday, February 26, 2007
Let vouchers help kids, not pain schools
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lanetta Estrada is a special education teacher in the public school system of Miami-Dade County, Fla.
She came to Georgia last week to tell state legislators why they should pass the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act, which is being fought here by the alphabet-soup organizations that congregate to defend their public school turf.
She stood before a House education subcommittee as a teacher — and as the mother of a 10-year-old autistic son. Her story of his journey through public school, and of her growing awareness that despite her “utmost respect and admiration” for her fellow teachers, “my school was not the best place for my son.”
Like most special education parents, she devoted enormous time and effort to finding out what her son needed. Her research led her to the decision to remove her son, Lucas, from “the school I loved.” She applied for one of Florida’s McKay scholarships, the program on which the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act is patterned. “I was scared,” she said. “I loved my school. After all, this is my job. I prayed that this was the right decision.” She enrolled her son in a private school specializing in disabilities. “At this school, he is now reaching his full academic and emotional potential,” said Estrada.
“The bottom line is that the Florida McKay Scholarship program has been a blessing for me and my son and for 17,000 other children and families in Florida,” she said.
Estrada was one of a string of teachers, parents, alphabet-soup lobbyists and others who argued for and against bills sponsored in the Senate by state Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) and in the House by schoolteacher and state Rep. David Casas, (R-Lilburn). Casas and Johnson have different ideas about the extent to which private schools should be subject to state regulation in taking special needs students on scholarships or vouchers, whatever one prefers to call these and the HOPE stipends that currently go to private schools.
This effort, along with charter school legislation initiated by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and state Rep. Ed Setzler (R-Acworth) and a bill by state Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs) to offer educational tax credits to individuals and corporations, marks this as the most reform-minded legislatures yet.
Nothing being offered is revolutionary in the sense that it is particularly daring. It’s patterned, by and large, on programs elsewhere. It’s noteworthy simply because Georgia has been so resistant to altering the status quo, except by the means endorsed by the traditional interests that dictate public policy — the unions and alphabet organizations representing public school groups. None of them are bad people or bad organizations. They are, like every other industry confronted by a changed marketplace, eager to limit and manage the competition — and for decades, they’ve done that.
The trick now — and it was evident in last week’s debate — is to avoid planting poison pills in the special needs scholarship act. On regulation, for example, the alphabet organizations know that the quickest way to eliminate the appeal of scholarships to potential private sector competitors is to package them with paperwork, with rules and regulations that make it too time-consuming and expensive to admit scholarship kids. It’s paper choice — existing on paper, but not in reality.
That was part of the problem with No Child Left Behind’s choice provisions, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings acknowledged here earlier this month. Parents of poor children in persistently nonperforming public schools could go elsewhere. They had choice, but some systems made that information difficult for parents to access or understand. Choice, then, was chance.
As the House and Senate work together to advance reform, it is essential that choice and scholarships for parents of special needs children not become, or be seen as, an indirect way of regulating private schools. The intent should be to actually give parents options and to trust them to buy the education services they believe their child needs from any willing and able provider.
It’s up to the parents, not the government, to decide — just as Lanetta Estrada did — which approaches will best serve the needs of their children. The goal here is to empower parents, not to regulate the competition.
* Jim Wooten is associate editor of the editorial page. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
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Fat city — that’s Atlanta
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A much under-appreciated citizens’ group in this city is the Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation, Inc., headed by John S. Sherman, the former mayor of Bal Harbour, Fla. The group has just issued an analysis that compares the number of employees and per capita operating cost of the City of Atlanta with cities of comparable size across the country. Guess what. “Atlanta’s number of employees per 10,000 population is 53 percent higher than the average of comparable cities,” the foundation reports. Atlanta is compared to Portland, Oklahoma City, Tucson, Albuquerque, Long Beach, Sacramento, Cleveland, Missouri’s Kansas City, Mesa and Omaha.
The foundation’s March newsletter notes that a 2002 “turnaround plan” for the city, prepared by a management consulting firm, indicated that Atlanta’s workforce was 7,428 employees “21 percent to 37 percent larger than the average for comparable cities.” Rather than reducing employment, or holding even, the city has increased the payroll by 1,204 to “a whopping 8,632,” the organization reports. Population growth, meanwhile, is expected to remain relatively flat over the next five years, it said.
The foundation recommends privatization of city services as a way to reduce costs 10 to 20 percent. I’d not put too much energy in trying to get Atlanta to reduce its spending or bureaucracy — though I do admire the Taxpayers Foundation for its steadfastness in attempting to get the city and the county to be more mindful of the pocketbooks of the flock. Sherman, in particular, reminds me a geat deal of the people in Sandy Springs, who played the game responsibly for years, always getting blown off by the powers downtown, before they finally got their city.
Fulton County officials discovered too late — after the City of Sandy Springs was created — that it would have been smarter to pay attention to their pleadings years earlier. Will City of Atlanta officials make the same mistake? Yes.
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