Education
Developing and funding a quality educational system should be the top priority of our State government.
When developing our budget, education programs should be the first thing funded and the last thing cut. For the past six years, the Republican leadership at the state level has failed to fully fund its legally mandated portion of the education budget. Many years ago the state adopted a law known as Quality Basic Education "QBE". Under this law the state is required to provide certain funding to each local school district based on a formula which includes the number of students to be educated by each local system. During the past six years the state has failed to provide the local school districts with 1.6 billion dollars required to come from the State government under the current funding formula. During this past year, Glen Richardson, Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, proposed that the local property tax, a major funding source for all local school districts in the state of Georgia be abolished and that all education funding be provided by the state through a state administered sales tax. This proposal was put forward despite the fact that this year alone the state failed to fund 91 million dollars of the state mandated funding to local school districts required under QBE. Fortunately for the local school districts this proposal was defeated because of strong opposition from the Democrats in the Georgia House of Representatives and the Georgia Senate.
While House Speaker Richardson was seeking to do away with local funding of education, the legislature was passing legislation which limited the control of local school boards over how their resources are used and that used local tax dollars to fund programs over which the local school boards have no control. The recent controversy over CRCT test scores was merely an example of the problems created when the State government makes policy without proper coordination with the local school districts.
We must recognize that good teachers are our most important asset in developing a quality educational system. We must stop making policies at the State level and imposing them on the classroom teacher. Instead we should involve the teachers in policy decisions and let them teach us how to educate the students and involve the parents in their children’s education. Finding and keeping good teachers and involving these teachers in developing curriculum and testing policies should be a high priority of our educational system.
During the past few years, the Republican leadership at the state level has taken more and more authority away from the local school districts and transferred it to the state level while failing to fully fund the education formulas already established by law. I believe these policies should be reversed. I will support the State fully funding its share of the educational programs while retaining local control of educational programs.