In arguing last week for a constitutional amendment granting the governor sweeping new powers to take over failing schools, legislators said they could not stand by and let children languish in underperforming schools
Yet lawmakers stood by for a decade while schools endured budget cuts so devastating that two-thirds of Georgia’s districts slashed their school calendars. They stood by while systems crammed 40 kids in a math class and axed band, after-school enrichment and field trips.
Even as they acknowledged defects in Gov Nathan Deal’s school takeover bill, lawmakers contended they could not wait another day; students were suffering now.
But students have suffered since 2003 from $7.6 billion in funding cuts. Hardest hit by the cuts were rural districts that could not make up the lost funds through local property digests, and low-income children for whom lower class sizes and after-school programs mean the difference between passing and failing
When districts complained to the Legislature, the reply was succinct: Do more with less.
The state’s indifference to the plight of struggling districts contributed to the rupture between former state schools Superintendent John Barge and Deal, prompting Barge’s infamous letter to the Legislature in which he wrote, “It is a travesty and a shame what our state is doing to our rural and most needy school districts. The children in these districts deserve every opportunity that children elsewhere in Georgia have.”
The governor would counter he’s now giving those children their opportunity. The schools absorbed into his proposed Opportunity School District — no more than 20 a year, and no more than 100 total — will somehow be reborn as places of learning and promise under the direction of a hand-picked state school district superintendent. (Note the newly elected state school superintendent who, with the state Department of Education, are set adrift on an iceberg in this plan.)
“We have both a moral duty and a self-serving interest in rescuing these children,” Deal said after the House approved his plan. “Every child should have a fair shot at doing better than their parents before them, and we as a society benefit if more Georgians have the education and job skills needed to attract high-paying jobs
Like the governor, I want fewer failing schools in Georgia. But unlike the governor, I don’t think a new bureaucracy and a new name will be enough. Failing schools reflect failing communities and failed policies.
And many of those failed policies trace back to the Capitol. Gov. Deal and the General Assembly want voters to grant them new powers to intervene in failing schools. Yet those same state leaders don’t use the powers they already have to address the impoverishment and hopelessness of the communities that produce those schools.
Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones lamented children in failing schools facing "foreclosed" futures. How about the real foreclosures that strand thousands of Georgia families each year and decimate neighborhoods? (In a recent six-year period, nearly 654,000 homes in the state were foreclosed on due to lax laws the Legislature has refused to improve.)
Perhaps joblessness, economic development, predatory lending laws, mental health services and health care — areas the governor and Legislature legitimately ought to lead — are too formidable.
I used to believe a school could be the sole beacon amid the blight, that it could lead everyone out of the darkness. Now, I realize schools can’t light the way alone. Rebuilding schools begins with rebuilding communities.
