Truth-telling on school cost

In describing the complexities of the state’s education funding formula, State Rep. Terry England, R-Auburn, said, “You’ve got to be a rocket scientist” to understand it.

Here’s the real problem for England and the rest of a study committee assembled by the governor to modernize the 30-year-old funding formula: They have to cross a political minefield to change it.

Because spending reflects priorities, and the Georgia General Assembly has been murky on its education priorities. One of the most thorny questions that has faced the Legislature and now Gov. Nathan Deal’s Education Reform Committee: What is the best way to fund schools that assures equity and adequacy? The commission’s struggle to answer that question has already led Deal to push back a year his timetable for a rewrite of the funding formula.

Over the last decade, lawmakers focused on escape routes from traditional public schools, approving special education vouchers, generous tax credits for private school scholarships and state-commissioned charter schools. These programs diverted dollars from school districts at a time when the state slashed funding, forcing systems to furlough teachers, eliminate programs and shorten the school year.

At its core, a funding formula has to assure enough money so all 181 Georgia school systems can adequately educate their students. The formula must adjust upward for poor children who trail middle-class peers in school readiness.

To begin solving this problem, state officials should apply the political courage they conjured up this year to address skimpy transportation funding.

Georgia faces unique challenges that make it difficult to simply adopt the funding systems of states with enviable academic records. Sixty-two percent of students here are poor, based on free- and reduced-price lunch data, while only 40 percent are in Massachusetts, the nation’s highest performing state.

In adopting Common Core State Standards, the state now asks far more of students than any previous generation. We’ve tiptoed around a critical question, likely because it leads to an expensive answer: What is the full gamut of support these at-risk students and their teachers need to meet these higher standards?

Some schools are figuring it out on their own. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a highly regarded test known as the Nation’s Report Card, Georgia is a leader in the progress of its low-income students. “That is an indicator that educators have been over the last decade thoughtfully looking at what we need to do,” says Claire Suggs, of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.

Georgia not only has to build on that progress but increase the pace and the reach of effective reforms. But how do we pay for it?

Deal’s panel is the seventh attempt to rewrite the 1985 Quality Basic Education Act funding formula, which is so outdated that it lacks any technology component. Deal’s own 2011 Education Finance Study Commission met 30 times and recommended only smoothing the formula. Gov. Sonny Perdue’s Education Finance Task Force held 75 public meetings and ended up only advising greater flexibility.

The failures of earlier reviews speaks to a critical restraint: State leadership wasn’t willing or able to come up with enough money to fund the real cost of educating students to higher standards. This new commission seems torn over whether its job is to establish that actual cost — and it will be much more than Georgia, which ranks 35th nationally in spending per student, now provides — or whether its role is to determine how to best utilize current K-12 spending levels.