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Cuts Make Schools' Job Tougher
Of all the bleak news in last week's state budget hearings, none was more discouraging than the answer that Georgia school Superintendent Kathy Cox gave to a question from Rep. Kathy Ashe (D-Atlanta).
"Does this budget allow us as a state to meet our constitutional responsibility to provide every child with an adequate education?" asked Ashe.
"I don't know," replied Cox. "The size of these cuts is going to have a direct effect on our local school systems' ability to do with students what we're asking them to do."
What the state and federal government are asking schools to do is bring all students to an unprecedented level of academic proficiency. And now Georgia schools will be expected to achieve that near-impossible goal in spite of $536 million in cuts this year and those planned for fiscal 2005.
The governor's promise of no new taxes is small consolation in view of such a massive state reduction to education. Cutbacks of such a scale will force local districts to raise taxes, fire teachers or dump programs, and some districts may have to resort to all three.
Georgia has never been an education leader because the state's traditional mill and farming jobs didn't demand a lot of schooling. The state still has one of the nation's worst records for sending kids to college, ranking 48th in the participation of 18- to 24-year-olds in postsecondary education.
Now, Georgia is in a frantic contest of catch-up. In the race for new business investment, the state's schools are a well-known liability. Yet the surest routes to improving student performance -- quality pre-k, smaller class sizes, targeted tutoring and well-trained teachers -- are jeopardized by the proposed budget cuts.
The current tack of the Perdue administration -- arguing that school systems are awash in property taxes -- overlooks the costs of meeting the federal No Child Left Behind law and dealing with the precipitous drop in state dollars. The argument also discounts the stark reality of the New Georgia, where immigrant children arrive at class unable to speak English and where slow or diffident learners aren't allowed to sleep in the back of the room any longer. School accountability, the saving grace of No Child Left Behind, holds educators responsible for subgroups of challenging students they used to be able to ignore.
With the disappearance of low-skill jobs and the new information economy, Georgia can't afford a second-rate education system. It also can't afford to set lofty goals for its schools and then yank the basic resources necessary to attain them.
— editorial
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
2004-01-28
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/0104/28schools.html
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