Yes.
More than 7,500 kids have gotten scholarships to better schools.
By Leslie Hiner
Change is never easy to accept, particularly when it comes to education. For too long it has primarily been the government’s role and now, in Georgia, steps are being taken to empower parents to assume more responsibility to educate their children.
Such is the case with Georgia’s 3-year-old Tuition Tax Credit Program. To say that it is a success, when 21 Student Scholarship Organizations have blossomed in the past three years and more than 7,500 kids have been awarded scholarships to better schools, is more than an understatement.
But change is difficult to embrace and organizations such as the Southern Education Foundation, local school boards and others entrenched in the education “establishment” refuse to reform a system that has failed kids for decades. Instead, they desperately search for problems with this new private-sector program to take the focus off a failing, taxpayer-funded monopoly.
When it comes to educational outcomes, Georgia continues to be in the basement in SAT rankings. In June, Education Week ranked Georgia among the bottom five with a graduation rate of 58.5 percent. The National Center for Education Statistics says Georgia public schools in 2007 spent $10,597 per child.
Yet this tax credit program is making it possible to educate children for much less and at schools with more stellar success stories. Tuition in Georgia private schools averaged $5,940 in 2008, according to research scholar Brian Gottlob.
Scholarships distributed by Student Scholarship Organizations are donated to families that need assistance in getting their kids into a school that meets their needs and where parental satisfaction abounds. For example, the Archdiocese of Atlanta’s Grace Scholars fund is helping families in need attend Catholic schools. The GOAL scholarship program, one of the largest in the state, distributed 1,877 scholarships in 2010 averaging $4,168 so kids could attend a variety of private schools.
Instead of throwing rocks at a program that opened doors for more students to get a better education, we should examine what this program has done in three short years and find ways to improve it.
The Georgia Legislature agreed in 2008 to allow corporations to donate up to 75 percent of their taxes due the state to Student Scholarship Organizations and earn a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for taxes due. Couples can donate up to $2,500 and singles can donate $1,000 for the same credit. Scholarship-granting groups can raise a total of $50 million annually.
The scholarship-granting groups, run like any other non-profit, can then raise money and distribute the grants. Several of the SSOs report online how much they raise and the number of children they benefit — including the average scholarship award. They should be commended and others should follow.
There is room for improvement. The others should report how they assist children. But we must remember these are private organizations working with private dollars donated by individuals, and not redirected government money. Individuals and companies freely choose to donate to these worthwhile groups, just as they would choose to send their hard-earned dollars to a charity they’ve selected.
For those who continue to resist change, we’ve all been there. But when it comes to kids and their future, Georgia has had enough with bad report cards. It’s time to stop searching for reasons to destroy a benevolent program that allows Georgians to give their own money to a private-sector program that puts children first. Compare that to one that taxes citizens and provides a dismal education for far too many.
Leslie Hiner is vice president of the Foundation for Educational Choice.
No.
Program encourages deception and helps those who don’t need it.
By Steve Suitts
Georgia’s program diverting tax dollars for private school tuition has failed to achieve its primary public aim — providing opportunities for a good education to the state’s low-income children in troubled public schools. With a near-complete lack of transparency and accountability, the state program has enabled widespread abuses at considerable expense to Georgia taxpayers.
As of 2010, this program had diverted more than $72 million in tax revenues from the state treasury to private Student Scholarship Organizations operating almost in secret during a time when public k-12 and college education in Georgia have suffered deep cuts.
A two-year study of the implementation of the tax diversion program was released by the Southern Education Foundation four weeks ago. Its findings have been assailed but not refuted. The report found:
● Some SSOs and private schools have engaged in deliberate deception by encouraging parents to only register their private school students at public schools, without ever attending, in order to qualify for the taxpayer-paid scholarships.
● A disturbing number of SSO-affiliated private schools appear to be ineligible to receive tax-diverted funding. Many were not accredited as private elementary or secondary schools as required by law.
● Georgia requires SSOs to distribute at least 67.5 percent of each year’s tax credit funds as scholarships, but IRS records show that the SSOs that raised most of the tax-diverted funds in 2009 failed to meet this requirement.
● The tax diversion program has failed to save taxpayer funds, as promised by the law’s sponsors. IRS documents show that SSOs diverted $11,830 in state taxes for every private school student awarded a scholarship in 2009 — more than twice what the state paid that year to support a student in public schools.
● Private schools receiving tax-diverted funds publicly report nothing — not even how much they receive in tax-diverted funds or how many students receive scholarships and in what amounts. The private schools report nothing publicly about how tax-funded scholarship students perform on standardized tests. In contrast, Georgia’s k-12 public schools administer annually more than 85 state-mandated tests — with all results reported publicly.
● SSOs have apparently failed to serve a significant number of low-income students. Georgia private school households have twice the median income of those whose children attend public schools, but Georgia law fails to set income limits for eligibility. Almost all SSOs do not require private schools to consider family income in awarding scholarships. And the only available data from the largest SSO for 2009 showed that the average adjusted gross income of scholarship families was at least $10,000 higher than the average for 97 percent of all Georgia taxpayers.
● Half of all SSO-affiliated schools are “virtually” segregated — where one race constitutes more than 90 percent of the school’s population. Because a significant number of scholarships have gone to existing private school and high-income students, tax credit scholarships probably have only supported well-to-do whites in racially isolated schools.
Amendments to the tax diversion law passed in May will only worsen the problems. They criminalize the public disclosure of meaningful information about the program (even audits of SSOs are secret) and establish an automatic annual increase in the $50 million cap for diverted tax funds.
The Southern Education Foundation calls on Georgians to help end or mend the SSO program before millions more are spent with no accountability, little or no compliance with the law and no measurable gains for the public good.
Steve Suitts is vice president of the Southern Education Foundation in Atlanta.
