An old Capitol hand once said of doings in the Legislature, “If you can see it, you’ve missed it.”
In other words, much of the day-to-day business of the General Assembly amounts to a menu of theatrical distractions, whether intended as such or not. The quiet, unseen issues are the ones that beg for scrutiny.
For instance, in the Senate, we are about to have a loud discussion about what's being taught in the best U.S. history classes in Georgia's high schools. Senate Resolution 80, sponsored by William Ligon, R-Brunswick, targets a new College Board "framework" for advance placement courses in American history.
“The framework presents a biased and inaccurate view of many important themes and events in American history, including the motivations and actions of 17th- to 19th-century settlers, the nature of the American free enterprise system, the course and resolution of the Great Depression, and the development of and victory in the Cold War,” Ligon’s measure states.
S.R. 80 demands the College Board change its ways. If it doesn’t, the legislation requires the Board of Education to pull all state funding for material aligned with the program. Nathan Deal would be directed to call his fellow governors to form a confederacy of historical purists.
Richard Woods, our new state school superintendent, has endorsed the measure. “Any opportunity for our academic or our nation’s historical integrity to be eroded must not be allowed,” he intoned.
And so hundreds of Georgia history teachers are gimping down schools hallways today, handicapped by underwear twisted around the very idea that some lawmaker in Atlanta doesn’t like their approach to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.
Yet there is little for these teachers to worry about. Beyond some unpleasant criticism, this will come to nothing. William Ligon is a sincere, upstanding fellow, but his legislation is a resolution, a sense of the chamber, and not a bill. It is a legal suggestion that no one is required to follow.
“It’s an effort to send a message to the College Board,” Ligon said.
The Republican-controlled Senate will pass S.R. 80, perhaps with some soon-to-be-legalized fireworks, as a gift to their hard-core supporters. But the House is under no obligation to take it up. If it chose to, that chamber would probably gut it, just as it did Ligon’s anti-Common Core legislation last year.
Contrast all of the above with the stealth that has accompanied the biggest educational push of the current legislative session: Gov. Nathan Deal’s proposed constitutional amendment to permit the state to step in and take over failing public schools.
You haven’t heard of it? That’s by design. But the governor is about to spring something on us. A bill is expected to be filed next week.
So far, the idea of permitting state intervention in local systems has been a slow seller among Democrats in the Capitol, who likely will be needed to win the two-thirds passage required in each chamber, so that it can be presented to voters in November 2016. "Giving Nathan Deal a school system to run is like giving a drunk the keys to the car," state Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, at a state Democratic convention in Macon last weekend.
The governor’s people tell us they have had quiet conversations with Democrats, and plan to include a few in a bipartisan field trip to New Orleans, where “recovery” school districts have seen some success. But no Democrats have yet ‘fessed up to being courted.
Georgia’s educational organizations were brought in this week for private sessions with Deal’s staff. “I think they understand it’s a very complicated issue. That was part of the reason we were asked to come in,” said Jody Barrow, superintendent of the Fayette County school system and president of the Georgia School Superintendent Association.
Most importantly, Deal will announce that he has narrowed the reach of his initiative – or, rather, that others have wrongly accused him of thinking overly broad.
“I think there’s been a misunderstanding talking about this. The press talks about it as the state going in and wanting to take over an entire system,” Deal recently said in a speech to the Georgia Municipal Association. “No, that’s not the case. Very rarely do we find a situation where an entire system is failing. It is usually one or two individual schools within a system that have been on that failing list.”
Presumably, avoiding another DeKalb County situation, in which the governor replaced several school board members, would take the edge off any nasty debates over usurpation of local control. (See "Fort, Vincent.")
In essence, the governor will pursue the creation of an extra, ad hoc school district of two dozen or fewer “failing” schools. If the stats hold true, 50 percent of them would be in Georgia’s urban areas – especially in metro Atlanta but also in Richmond, Chatham, Muscogee and Bibb counties.
Not surprisingly, the superintendent of that “failing schools” district would report directly to the governor. Not to State School Superintendent Richard Woods, the aforementioned defender of our academic and national historic integrity.
Just another one of those important decisions that happen long, long before you’re allowed to see it.
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