The Southern Education Foundation said Tuesday that Georgia's program of giving tax credits to fund private school scholarships lacks accountability, fails in its original mission of helping needy children in failing schools, and should be overhauled or ended.
"The evidence is very clear. Georgia's tax credit scholarship program is a failed experiment," said Steve Suitts, vice president of the group, which describes itself as a nonpartisan foundation focused on the education of low- income and minority students.
The Georgia General Assembly passed legislation in 2008 allowing individuals and corporations, within limits, to claim a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for collectively donating up to $50 million a year to student scholarship organizations, who funnel the money to private schools.
Supporters say the program is doing what it was meant to do -- providing children of modest means a chance to attend private schools.
Critics charge it diverts public tax money to a program that has little to no accountability to taxpayers and has sidestepped its stated original objective of giving poor students the chance to escape low-performing schools and attend private schools.
Suitts said the foundation spent two years investigating the program. The group found that:
-- the law creating the program requires very little reporting of information by the student scholarship organizations and no reporting by the private schools benefiting from the program;
-- some student scholarship organizations and private schools have "engaged in a deliberate deception" by registering students in a public school so they can qualify for a scholarship, though they never actually attend a public school;
-- the private schools receiving public money are not subject to the same 85 state-mandated tests used to evaluate the performance of public schools and their students;
-- there are questions about whether one out of nine schools receiving the money are properly accredited in accordance with the law;
-- three out of four student scholarship organizations appeared in 2009 to fail to meet a requirement that they distribute at least 67.5 percent of the money they receive each year from the tax credits for scholarships;
-- and the program is not living up to its billing as a money-saver for taxpayers since at least some of the students never went to public school.
The foundation also said that, factoring in the administrative costs of the SSOs, the scholarships cost $11,830 per student in 2009, compared with $8,200 per student for public school education -- counting state and local expenses.
Jim Kelly, an education law attorney and founder of the Georgia GOAL Scholarship Program, one of the SSOs, said he takes exception with some of the foundation's findings, including that the private school scholarships cost more than the per-pupil spending for a public education and that too little of the money collected is going to scholarships.
Officials with the scholarship organizations say the law requires the SSOs to allocate money for the scholarships, not spend it. They say 90 percent is allocated each year, but is paid out over several years.
State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, one of the chief supporters of the scholarship program, said Tuesday: “Not one of these rabid individual extremists from the so-called education association can back up any of their assertions with facts."
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently spent a month researching the scholarship program and found that few of the student scholarship organizations were willing to provide information about their scholarship recipients, including family income.
The state Department of Revenue approves the tax credits and requires audits of the scholarship organizations, but appears to make no other attempt to verify that the money is being used as the law requires.
The Revenue department told the AJC that it is governed by taxpayer privacy laws and is doing what the law allows.
Staff writer James Salzer contributed to this article.
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