If you were planning to donate to a private-school tuition fund and claim a state tax credit this year, you’re too late. Georgia residents and businesses hit the annual $58 million cap for the credits in just 22 days.
And if you hope to enroll your child in a charter school, good luck. The newly reauthorized state charter schools commission approved just one school to begin holding classes in fall 2014, and locally approved charters continue to attract more applicants than there are desks available.
In short, parental demand for more good options for their children is far from being satisfied in Georgia.
There was a time when Georgia was at the vanguard of providing parents with more choices. It has since fallen back to the middle of the pack.
Students First, the education-reform outfit started by former Washington, D.C., schools chief Michelle Rhee, ranked Georgia 24th in the nation for “increasing quality choices” in its latest state “report card,” released earlier this month. If that doesn’t sound too bad, consider Georgia’s grade in that category was just 0.71 on a 4-point, GPA-style scale.
That’s a D-minus. Obviously, states weren’t graded on a curve.
School choice tends to be a partisan issue in Georgia. But in this Students First ranking, we trailed not only red states like Louisiana, Florida and Indiana, but also blue states like Washington, Hawaii and Rhode Island.
This year’s “small ball” legislative session isn’t any more likely to make major-league changes for school choice than for most other issues. However, some relatively small changes could be valuable steps toward making Georgia once again a leader in educational freedom.
For one, legislators could increase the amount of money available annually for donations to student scholarship organizations, which use the proceeds to subsidize students’ private school tuition.
Many past criticisms of SSOs were addressed in a bill passed last year. Among other things, the bill requires SSOs to spend a certain percentage of their funds on scholarships rather than overhead; award scholarships only to students who previously were enrolled in a public school or home-schooled; consider students’ financial needs; and report more information about scholarship recipients to the state.
It also prohibits them from making wink-wink arrangements with donors for certain children — the donors’ own, or others — to receive scholarships.
Despite all that, and a 16 percent increase in the annual cap, Georgians claimed all available educational tax credits in record time. Another significant increase in the cap is the logical next step.
Charter schools could also use a boost. To start, high-performing charters should have access to a faster, simpler process for expanding or opening additional campuses.
Scrutiny of potential start-up charters is warranted. But once they’ve proven themselves, we want them to serve as many children as they feasibly can. Lawmakers could pair such a change with a clearer process for penalizing or closing down low-performing charters. After all, that’s supposed to be the point of a charter school vs. a traditional public school.
Legislators shouldn’t do these things simply to get higher marks from Students First or any other group. They should do them to help fulfill the goal of ensuring a quality school for every Georgia child.
