Jason Carter staked his campaign for the state's top job in 2014 on an argument that Gov. Nathan Deal persistently under-funded the K-12 education system. Four years later, he took the time to praise the Republican for significantly boosting funding for schools in his last year in office.
Throughout the 2014 race, the Democrat accused Deal and his GOP allies of perpetuating “draconian” cuts to the education system by not fully funding the state’s complicated K-12 formula. He pledged to create a separate education budget that would be protected from deep cuts.
The governor dismissed Carter's plan as a "gimmick" and pledged to overhaul the decades-old funding formula, which he assailed as a disservice to students and a drain on taxpayers that hold schools back from achieving the "needs of a 21st century classroom."
Now, as Deal prepares to leave office, he announced this week that a rosier budget estimate will allow the state to fully fund the formula for the first time since 2002 – after billions of dollars worth of so-called "austerity" cuts of money that was supposed to go to schools but didn't because of tight budgets.
And Carter took to Twitter to give Deal credit, writing Wednesday that "we should salute @GovernorDeal for funding Georgia's education formula-a first in decades. I saw him yesterday and thanked him personally."
Deal's chief of staff, Chris Riley, thanked him for the tweet and wrote it "really means a lot Jason and is a class act from a friend but former opponent in 2014!!"
Later Wednesday, Carter retweeted a tweet noting that Deal has since abandoned his pledge to rewrite the formula. Most of the seven leading candidates running to replace him have called for some form of overhaul.
He also wrote that Riley’s tweet was his second favorite of the week, a close runner-up to this one:
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