Every candidate for governor talks about education, but 2014 is shaping up as a pivotal election year for Georgia’s students.
State schools superintendent John Barge is challenging incumbent Gov. Nathan Deal in the GOP primary, joining Dalton Mayor David Pennington to make it a three-man race. While Pennington’s focus is on the economy and size of government — and, as I’ll explain, taxes are bound to play a sizable role in Barge’s campaign — expect education to be a staple of the primary campaign.
And not a semester too soon. Georgia has for too long muddled through with the same consensus so many people profess to dislike.
We still work with a funding formula from 1985, even though it’s widely viewed as antiquated.
We still maintain a huge number of public school districts (more than 180) for a population our size (nearly 1.7 million students).
We still assign the vast majority of students to a school based on where they live, regardless of how bad a match it might be.
We still buy into fad after educational fad, to the great frustration of teachers in the classroom.
And we still wonder why our results haven’t improved faster?
Deal came to office as something of an enigma regarding education policy. He touted the fact his wife was a retired public-school teacher, and he pronounced himself somewhat open to more school choice and accountability measures for traditional public schools. But he hasn’t followed in the more transformative steps of GOP governors in other states: Jeb Bush of Florida, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, even Robert Bentley in Alabama.
Deal did back last year’s charter schools amendment and took a lot of flak for it from educators, including Barge. But that amendment only restored the power the state wielded before a 2011 Georgia Supreme Court ruling striking down the previous Charter Schools Commission. Transformative, it wasn’t.
Barge is campaigning on three “E’s” — the others are ethics and economic development, and even the latter is rooted in education. His theme so far: The state has “ignore[d] and even punish[ed] education” by shorting it some $7 billion over the past decade.
Georgia’s public schools have seen a dip in per-pupil funding due to plunging state revenues — almost all of that $7 billion has been cut since 2009 — but other state agencies were hit harder on a percentage basis. Education (including higher ed) consumes more than half the state’s annual budget. Implied in Barge’s budgetary criticism is Georgians should have paid billions more in taxes.
We are used to hearing this debate between Republicans and Democrats, but it is a worthwhile debate to have in the GOP primary. Would more spending equal better results? Has it in the past?
Is money really the problem in a state that now has more administrators and other non-teaching staff than actual classroom teachers? The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice earlier this year calculated Georgia spends $925 million a year too much on non-teaching staff, because those positions have far outpaced the growth of our student population. Maybe that’s where we could find Barge’s missing $7 billion?
Do Georgians, and specifically Republican primary voters, really think parents shouldn’t have more choices for where to send their kids to school?
By all means, let’s have this debate in 2014.
