In an article in this past weekend’s Atlanta Journal Constitution, Governor Nathan Deal pledged to try and get the state’s education funding formula re-written…if he is re-elected. I am glad to hear this commitment (though it would be nice if the effort actually started now rather than as a campaign promise), but there have been calls for many years to reform the Quality Basic Education Act of 1985, the basis for how public school districts in Georgia are funded by the state. Governor Deal himself had a hand in picking members of a state “education finance study commission”, but several of the commission’s recommendations to address problems with the state QBE funding formula have not been fully implemented or ignored all together.
There are several issues with Georgia’s approach to school funding, but the main one is this: Georgia does not provide enough money to its public schools. Over the past six years, Georgia’s state spending on students in grades K-12 has dropped 15%, one of the largest declines in the country. In 2012, the percentage of Georgia’s state budget devoted to K-12 education was in the lowest quarter tile of all states. And lest you think all of this can be attributed to the economic recession of the past few years, an analysis by the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute shows that inflation-adjusted QBE funding is lower now than it was in 2003.
Of course, exacerbating the problems of this drop in state funding has been a similar decrease in local education funding. Being dependent on local property tax revenue allocations for the majority of a school district’s funding has meant that virtually every public school district in Georgia has seen a sizable decrease in local funding as well over the past six years. This combination of local and state funding cuts has been considerable–for ANCS alone, our per-student funding is about 30% lower now than it was in 2007.
The results of these funding reductions on public schools are old news by now: larger class sizes, teacher layoffs, programs cut. Yet, at the same time, expectations for schools are increasing, as evidenced by a new set of student achievement tests based on the Common Core Standards, new teacher evaluations connected to these tests, and the like. And, as a recent report revealed, the majority of public school students now live in poverty, presenting another set of challenges to schools.
If we believe that public education is important to helping us live out our democratic principles and economic ideals, then there are some significant changes that need to be made to bring our education finance policies into alignment with those beliefs. State budgeting and funding formulas should prioritize K-12 education as much as possible. The role of property taxes in local education funding should be re-examined. Much has been made lately of how U.S. students compare to students in other countries on standardized tests of achievement. Less attention has been paid to the fact that most countries devote more of their budgets to education and that the use of property taxes as the main basis of local funding is limited or non-existent. I’m all for holding schools to high expectations, but let’s at least provide adequate resources to get the job done.