“If it is the state leadership’s secret plan to slowly choke the life out of public education by reducing funding, the plan may very well be succeeding,” state School Superintendent John Barge wrote in a blistering letter released Monday.
“You can slowly cut the flow of funds so that teachers lose their jobs, class sizes grow larger, and programs are cut to the point that student achievement no longer increases, but begins to decrease,” warned Barge. “Then, you can shout that our public school systems are failing and they must be privatized, but you will be doing this state and our society a tremendous disservice.”
Yup, that does seem to be the plan.
It’s important to note that the letter is to a degree political in nature: In an act of political suicide, Barge has decided to run against his fellow Republican, Gov. Nathan Deal, for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, and the letter is directed in part at Deal’s leadership. But there’s also too much truth in Barge’s broadside to dismiss it as mere politics. His entire candidacy is a quixotic effort to draw attention to what has been happening to public education in this state, and for that he ought to be applauded.
As the superintendent suggests, the state’s Republican leadership is grossly underfunding education in this state, and it’s by no means solely recession-driven. Their so-called “austerity cuts” in state education began back in 2003, well before the recession hit, and by now its consequences are obvious: Class sizes have soared, teachers are being forced to take unpaid furloughs, and most Georgia schools just can’t keep their doors open for the minimal 180 days of instruction. Just a few years ago, that would have been all but unthinkable; today, it is in real danger of being accepted as the new normal.
In an analysis of what spending cuts have done to schools nationwide, the New York Times reported that Georgia would have to add 29,000 new school employees just to bring the ratio of employees to students back to what it was in 2008. Nobody is proposing that state officials do that, but it’s a stark indication of just how deep the cuts have gone.
The same is true of higher education. According to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Georgia has slashed its per-student state spending on higher education by 29.5 percent between 2008-2013, and it has raised tuition at four-year institutions by 63 percent in that same time frame.
In many ways, the impact of those tuition hikes has been softened by the HOPE scholarship, but the use of HOPE in that fashion violates one of the foundational promises in the enactment of the lottery. Georgians were promised that money raised by the lottery would not be used to displace already existing education funding, but that’s exactly what’s been happening.
And as Barge points out, the cuts to K-12 education have been particularly brutal in rural Georgia, which has been harder hit by the recession and lacks a tax base to draw upon to compensate for lost state funds.
“Some of the schools I visited turned the lights off in the halls to save money on the electric bills!” he wrote. “I saw carpet that was completely threadbare, holes in walls, and water fountains that had obviously broken and were removed rather than being fixed because there was no money to fix them. I am not talking about a Third World country! I am talking about our schools, right here in Georgia!”
And the tragedy is, state legislators representing those districts probably voted for the cuts that produced such conditions.
