As soon as the session ended, The Perdue Team was in front of cameras, promoting the fantasy that they have done great things for education in Georgia. I'll bet there are some folks in Twiggs County saying, "Not so fast, Sonny!"
As The Perdue Team congratulated one another, in the real world of school finance, the school board in Twiggs county faced angry and disappointed parents and voted to close the just renovated Dry Branch Elementary, a move necessary to address their million dollar deficit and projections that if the school were not closed, then the system would literally run out of money by mid-year. Twiggs is but one example of many high poverty and rural school systems that have fallen victim to a lethal combination of an eroding taxbase and increased unfunded state and federal mandates.
After cutting more than 1.25 billion from the state's education budget, Perdue, during this election year, hopes that teachers will be silenced by a long-passed-due 4% raise and a $100 gift card. He hopes parents and teachers alike will be fooled by the sound-bite-ready DC think tank election strategy to gut local control of schools, dubbed by some "The 65% Deception" and his move-finally-to reduce class size.
Perdue thinks that he has found the "Easy Button" for education-or maybe just the "Easy Button" for re-election. The truth of the matter is that The Perdue Team has abandoned our neighborhood schools, already starving some, like Dry Branch, out of existence.
Georgians deserve better than election year gimmicks. We deserve a Governor who will make a fulltime commitment to excellence in our schools, a Governor who answers to the people of Georgia, not to special interests or some DC think-tank. We need to elect Cathy Cox.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Perdue Policy Starves Neighborhood Schools
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There is also the problem with how the 65% is calculated and the problem that the research does not support the conclusion that this is a magic number. I also thought that it was interesting that Patrick Bryne, the owner of Overstock.com, who put this idea forward describes that this plan sort of came to him. It's like he created the soundbite and the strategy and the went out to look for confirming research. That's kind of backwards. Plus, he does not have training that would qualify him as an education expert. On the issue of having to look seriously at how we fund education, I agree, but I do think that a huge part of the problem is that politicians like to pass bills so they can ssy they did something, and that something most often does not include an adequate funding plan. I think that providing a billion dollar tax cut for big business while cutting 1.25 from education was a very short sited strategy. It would be interesting to look at a map tha show economic developement gains and losses in Georgia during the last three years. I wonder how that would relate to school funding/success?
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