State must do homework on its rules for schools

The state Board of Education gave itself a new title last week: Liberator.

In a unanimous vote, the board freed Gwinnett County schools from some pivotal state rules and regulations, including those governing salaries, teacher certification and class sizes.

“There are state rules and regulations that keep us from being effective,” Gwinnett Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks told the board. “We believe this is an opportunity to really let the professionals decide what are the best programs to offer and how they should be offered.”

No one on the state board mentioned that some of the policies Gwinnett found suffocating had been developed by professionals —- the several hundred employed by the state Department of Education. Yet, state school Superintendent Kathy Cox, who runs that department, echoed Wilbanks, saying that Gwinnett was succeeding in spite of state regulations.

With Cox’s blessing, Gwinnett became the first Georgia system to gain greater independence under a new state law that offers flexibility in exchange for achievement. Gov. Sonny Perdue’s “Investing in Educational Excellence,” or IE2, grew out of a three-year task force that was supposed to devise a new per-pupil funding formula. When that assignment proved too daunting, the commission settled for a call for more flexibility.

There’s nothing new in that recommendation. Before it became a footnote to Gov. Roy Barnes’ defeat for re-election in 2002, the Education Reform Study Commission concluded that teachers’ spirits and drive were being crushed by too many dictates from on high. As an antidote, the 63-person commission urged wider flexibility for schools demonstrating high achievement. If schools were doing the right thing by their students, the commission reasoned, they should be left alone to do more of it.

Essentially, Perdue’s law developed the same framework. Under IE2, school districts and the state enter into five-year performance contracts during which systems are exempted from certain rules and regulations. In exchange, the systems must produce higher academic achievement.

If schools don’t live up to their “performance contracts,” the law says they can be put under private management, converted to charter schools or turned over to a nearby system. Exactly how any of those options would work is not spelled out in the law. Nor did the state board seem clear on how such drastic consequences could or would be imposed.

That’s not all that’s fuzzy about the law. When IE2 passed last year, state Rep. Ed Lindsey (R-Atlanta) proclaimed, “This bill is the greatest no-brainer since the invention of earth if you want to transform our education system from its strait-jacketed, bureaucratic-form-over-substance past.”

But if there are strait-jackets on Georgia schools, why don’t Lindsey and other legislators loosen the binds for all of them?

Instead, while it criticizes state regulation of local districts, the Georgia General Assembly keeps enacting laws that impose new responsibilities, costs and rules on schools. In the past few years, for example, the Legislature has voted to require districts to devote 65 percent of their budgets to the classroom, despite a lack of evidence that such a threshold makes any difference in student achievement. It has passed a law establishing a right for 2-, 3- and 4-year-old preschoolers to go to the bathroom in private, a provision based on the preschool experience of one legislator’s granddaughter. Fretting that the state’s moral compass was awry, lawmakers also ordered the state board to draft a list of values to be taught in character education programs, including cheerfulness and respect for the creator.

And with a new legislative session starting today, bills have already been pre-filed proposing to tell districts how to arrange parent-teacher conferences, expressions of religious belief and student self-injection of epinephrine to treat allergic reactions.

Because really, school districts can’t be trusted to sort out such issues on their own. Except in Gwinnett.

mdowney@ajc.com