Some education numbers
$510 million – The average amount of funding Georgia received each of the past four years to help Title I schools, those with a high percentage of students in low-income families. Georgia schools received more than $2.3 trillion overall in Title I funding, including $351 million through the 2009 stimulus bill.
33 – The number of states, including Georgia, that sought and received a waiver from federal No Child Left Behind education requirements. In exchange for being allowed to opt out of NCLB, the state has promised to implement its own system of measuring academic progress.
$400 million – The size of the grant Georgia received through the federal Race to the Top program, designed to encourage states to use creative approaches to improve student performance. Georgia is using some Race to the Top money to implement its new academic measuring system and some to recruit, train and retain teachers.
$57.4 million – The amount the U.S. Department of Education has given to Georgia through the School Improvement Grant program, which was set up to help improve the academic performance of students in struggling schools. Georgia received $18.9 million in 2009, $19.3 million in 2010 and another $19.2 million in 2011.
33 – The current gap between the average score of students in Georgia and the average score of students in the U.S. on the critical reading and math sections of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Georgia students scored a 977 on the critical reading and math sections of the test this year. Students across the country averaged a 1010 on those sections. That gap has fluctuated during President Obama’s term. It stood at 41 points in 2009, the first year of the president’s term. The gap was 37 points in 2010 and 39 points in 2011.
Wayne Washington
Sources: The U.S. Department of Education and the Georgia Department of Education.
Before Monday night’s presidential debate, Families for Better Public Schools, an organization advocating the charter school amendment on the November ballot in Georgia, posted an illustration on its Facebook page with photos of the two candidates.
“Something that both President Obama and Governor Romney agree with: We need charter schools!” the post proclaims.
In these bitterly partisan times with the presidential candidates clashing on issue after issue, education policy does not easily match up with party labels.
Obama has spent liberally to promote conservative ideas in the states, from charter schools to teacher accountability standards. Romney proposes many of the same goals, but he says he would push harder for reforms in a market-based way, scaling back the federal role in education.
For example, as a way to promote charter schools and other alternatives to local public schools, Romney proposes to make federal Title I funding for poor and special-needs children portable to wherever a child goes to school, rather than sending it to the local school district automatically. Romney also proposes to publish report cards evaluating public school achievement to help parents decide where to send their children.
The plan “puts the federal government firmly behind the principle that public education funding should be used to empower students, not to empower sluggish and change-resistant district bureaucracies,” said Romney education adviser Martin West at a recent policy forum in Washington.
Romney says he would not cut education funding, but Obama often points out that the congressional Republican budgets Romney has supported include cuts to programs like Head Start early education. The president has said he wants to commit more federal money to hire math and science teachers, while Romney has resisted new spending.
Romney also would reverse Obama’s funding of the Common Core learning standards that most states, including Georgia, have adopted.
But Romney has praised Obama’s Race to the Top, a $4 billion program from the stimulus law that had states offer competing school-improvement plans that the government would agree to fund. Among the criteria being rewarded were an expansion of charter schools and merit pay for teachers.
Georgia was one of the states to have its plan funded, and Bert Brantley, an aide to former Gov. Sonny Perdue who now helps run Families for Better Public Schools, said Perdue and Education Secretary Arne Duncan had a good relationship. Families for Better Public Schools at one point considered sending an Obama-themed mail piece to Democrats and a Romney-themed item to Republicans promoting charter schools.
“The president has embraced a lot of quote-unquote conservative ideas, and he may have tweaked them some to make them more palatable to him or traditional constituencies,” Brantley said. “And if you look at policies there, they have been certainly moderate compared to … traditional Democratic stances.”
West’s primary criticism of Race to the Top was that it was too small a chunk of the $100 billion in the stimulus for education. Most of that money went to stabilizing state budgets and preventing teacher layoffs, or, in West’s words, “propping up the status quo.”
Georgia also got a waiver from the No Child Left Behind law from the administration. Some say that step was an expansive, and extralegal, move to gut the George W. Bush-era law that imposes federal standards on public schools.
Obama education adviser Jon Schnur, who appeared with West at a forum this month at the American Enterprise Institute, said the positives of No Child Left Behind include new nationwide data and a focus on racial and income achievement gaps among students.
But the proficiency standards proved unattainable for many states, and many altered their standards to compensate. The Obama administration allowed states to get a waiver from the law’s requirements if they came up with acceptable alternative achievement measurements.
“Instead of the one-size-fits-all of No Child Left Behind, we have given incentives for state and communities to do what they want,” Schnur said.
Romney’s campaign argues that Obama should have fought harder for an overdue reauthorization of the law, with reforms, and that the waivers are a slapdash solution to a serious problem.
Brookings Institution scholar Russ Whitehurst, who worked at the Department of Education under Bush, said the chances are better for a reformed No Child Left Behind to be authorized under a Romney administration that can bring the Republican House along with its plan for funding tied to the student rather than the district.
“One of the problems is there is really no one left in Congress that supports No Child, the premise behind it,” Whitehurst said. “The premise behind it is that the federal government should be carrying this big accountability stick for schools around the nation. I don’t think Republicans ever had much of an appetite for that. … It has been a wildly unpopular law. And that is really what has allowed the Obama administration to take the license it has with waivers. There’s been no one to stand up for Congress.”
Whitehurst said even though the administration has taken some overly aggressive steps, its zeal should be commended and its success will be judged years from now.
“The Obama administration is full of education reformers of a new ilk, and they are not well-aligned with the traditional political parties,” Whitehurst said. “They are folks who are terribly dissatisfied with the status quo, think education reform is critical and want to go at it in ways that are disruptive to traditional school districts and teachers unions.”
Last month teachers in Chicago, where Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is mayor, went on strike over a contract that included merit pay and stricter teacher evaluations.
Public employees cannot collectively bargain in Georgia. Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, said teachers have several concerns with Race to the Top and the No Child Left Behind waivers, including the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.
Some teacher groups argue that Romney’s proposal to assign funding to students rather than school districts — Callahan called them “vouchers” — might undermine public school funding.
The Georgia association does not endorse candidates, Callahan said, and that is especially true in the presidential race.
“There’s really not an excellent education candidate in either case,” he said. “Folks will have to make up their own minds.”
About the Author
