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Friday, October 12, 2007
Posing questions a start to fixing education woes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While briefing legislators on the work of the task force he heads that’s examining how Georgia funds public schools, former State Rep. Dean Alford of Conyers was asked: “Aren’t there three big problems with schools and if we fixed those, wouldn’t that solve all the ills?”
Yes, replied Alford, and that’s the problem — there are three, but they differ from one school to another.
Public education is Grady Hospital, an institution with an insatiable appetite for money, onion-skin layers of hidden agendas and turf-protecting special interests, and a hell-no-never resistance to actual change hidden in public rhetoric that hints at cooperation and a willingness to embrace it. The reality is that there will always be one more hurdle, one more excuse, one more plea for a new financial savior.
No wonder that, on Grady, the top-ranking member of the Georgia Senate, president pro-tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) said in exasperation: “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it did go under. Maybe the phoenix that would rise in its place would be better than the hospital that’s there now.”
Nobody’s proposing to give up on public education. But one welcomed consequence of the shift in power under the Gold Dome is that on a number of fronts, the inquisitive minds of intelligent people are beginning to examine institutions and ask “what if?” questions.
Alford, incidentally, was a Democrat when he served in the General Assembly and may still be. I’ve never asked, nor does it matter. More important, he’s an engineer and a businessman, a Georgia Tech graduate and a former member of the state school board who’s devoted the past three years to a 23-member commission examining public education and the way we finance it.
Essentially what they’ve found is a model that doesn’t work for children, their parents, taxpayers at the state and local level, and local school boards and administrators. It’s a do-this, do-that compliance model. “The state told you what to do, and what was measured was whether you did it, not performance,” he said. “We found that to be an inefficient and an ineffective model built for a homogeneous population out there that does not exist.”
Nobody was happy. The solution, Alford and others concluded in visiting 106 local systems, was to develop a “partnership based on real clearly defined roles and responsibilities and real covenants.” Local systems, under a model the commission is expected to recommend, would be able to “buy” their way out of mandates by agreeing contractually to achieve specific results. An example is improving graduation rates. The national average is 69.9 percent; Georgia now stands at 56.1, third from the bottom. “At the end of the day, we have to get to a 90-plus percent graduation rate in this state,” Alford said.
“Systems, I am convinced, are not afraid of accountability,” he said. How much control the local boards exercise depends on how much responsibility for doing their jobs they’re willing to take. If they fail, they risk losing authority over nonperforming schools. My preference, but not a part of the commission’s expected recommendations, would be that parents be given the full state funding share to buy the services their children need from any competent and willing provider of education services.
Alford’s panel is also attempting to determine precisely how much a quality education should cost and what portion should be borne by locals and by the state. Now it’s about 55-45, state-local.
The public education and funding model does need to change. As Alford noted, the current system was designed for a homogenous world that no longer exists. Georgia has 180 school systems and three times that many critical problems with them. The solution is statewide standards and local control, with accountability and consequences, even down to the individual school level.
“To spin more money into a system that doesn’t work for both sides is a bad use of money,” Alford said. “We are spending 38.5 percent of the state budget on k-12 education. It is the most important economic development issue facing the state. We have to get it right.”
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