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Monday, February 2, 2009
Choice would stop state school micromanagement
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After decades of watching one administration after another twiddle and twaddle with education inputs and throughputs, expending vast sums of human energy and intellect on finding precisely the right top-down formula to fix what’s broken, let the truth be known: It’s a 1950s strategy for unending failure.
This year in the Georgia General Assembly, a little partisan spat is likely to develop over school nurses. As part of the general effort to live within available revenues, an admirable and constitutionally necessary undertaking, Gov. Sonny Perdue has recommended eliminating the $30 million that the state spends on school nurses. Available money should go to the classroom, argued the governor’s spokesman.
Georgia is one of the few states that specifically fund school nurses, but Democrats, sensing a mom-and-apple-pie issue, are in high dudgeon.
Think about this. Year after year there’s some little minicrisis like this in education, where a single dollar less means that Georgia’s children will live in ignorance and poor health. Why medical care is yet another of those family responsibilities heaped on public education is a mystery.
Admittedly, there may exist some schools in some neighborhoods for some periods of time where it makes sense to position a nurse or nurse practitioner. But that’s why we have — or should have — local control. And with local control should come flexibility to spend money as needed, whether for tutors, classroom assistants, extended-day programs or nurses.
Two recent occurrences in public education are reason to hope that one day the state will move beyond constant churning of education inputs. The first is the contract a bold superintendent and school board in Gwinnett County signed promising results for greater control over where and how to direct state funding. The quid pro quo is that they deliver and the state backs out of their business, measuring them by results, not by the stuff that brings legions of education lobbyists to Atlanta to push for more money.
The other noteworthy occurrence is a bill introduced Monday by state Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) that would provide vouchers to the parents of any child in Georgia seeking an alternative to the available public school.
The vouchers, expected to average about $5,000 each, would represent just the state dollars that go to local systems to buy a decent education for the children in their charge. The local systems would get to keep the local and federal dollars, meaning that they profit from every child who leaves to find an alternative. When the child leaves, the local system is freed of the obligation to provide teachers and classrooms while keeping the cash that the child’s presence justified. Win-win.
Johnson’s bill would address a concern raised last year by Clayton County’s loss of accreditation. At the time, surrounding systems feared that their schools would be overwhelmed by an influx of children seeking better schools. As proposed by Johnson, children could go to another district, or to another school within their home district, but the choice on whether to take them is with the receiving school and district.
Another requirement is that parents would be required to sign a contract agreeing to participate in the child’s education progress and to respond to discipline problems. The union that represents hordes of public school employees has gone nuts, sending a flier to school teachers and staff statewide rallying opposition. “The Public Schools Need Protecting … Will YOU fight for them?” the flier screams.
This is to be the fight. Any governor or legislator who proposes any alternative to this constant inputs/throughputs wrangling over this or that funding formula knows that any threat to the status quo invites the entrenched alphabet-soup organizations and unions — like the Georgia Association of Educators (GAE) — to the barricades.
We really do have to invent an alternative to this process. Ultimately, the state should decide how much to pay for a decent education — and then allow parents of school-age children to buy those services from any willing provider. Most would choose the local system.
The General Assembly really shouldn’t be debating issues like school nurses.
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Would you buy?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The U.S. Senate votes today on whether to pass out a $900 billion spending bill that is alleged to be economic stimulus. New York Democrat Chuck Schumer thinks it’ll get 60 votes.
The interesting player in this entire process is President Barack Obama, who last week took the Wall Street securities industry to task for awarding $18.4 billion in bonuses in 2008. He thought that shameful and declared that”there will be time for them to rake in profits and bonuses later in the economic cycle. But now is not that time.”
And yet, he’s found nothing shameful or excessive about a bill that passes off massive new spending for social programs as stimulus. His reaction, instead, was to urge Republicans to hold the politics to a minimum. Easy to say when the underlying document is politics to the max.
Schumer said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation that Democrats are open to some proposals, including one advanced by U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) for a $15,000 tax credit for new home buyers. “That’s something we look favorably upon,” he said.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is arguing for 4 percent fixed mortgages backed by taxpayers “to any credit-worthy borrower,” which he said will reduce the average family’s monthly mortgage by $466 a month, or $167,760 over the l30-year life of the mortgage.
Some version of the tax credits and cheap mortgages are likely to make it in the final bill, which his growing from the $819 billion porker passed last week by the House.
The housing measures suggested by Isakson and McConnell would certainly stimulate the real estate industry, especially if there’s no income or first-home requirements. (I don’t need a house, but with the tax credit and cheap mortgage, even I could be tempted to buy.)
This bill is some of this and some of that. For the most part it’s not stimulus. And while Obama is quick to moralize about excesses in the financial sector, he’s strangely quiet on the outrage about excesses in the public.
