Amendment vote is all about the money

“Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended to allow the state to intervene in chronically failing public schools in order to improve student performance?”

That’s the question that will be on the ballot in November. Seems simple enough and something every parent and any supporter of public education would want to see happen, right?

That would be wrong. First, let’s examine what this simple sentence empowers the state to do. It would allow it to organize an Opportunity School District that could have 100 schools under its umbrella across the state. The superintendent of the OSD would answer to the governor and the OSD could decide to do one of four things with a failing school:

• Close it.

• Hire and fire teachers, principals and staff.

• Leave it in the hands of the local school board via contract with the state.

• Transfer control to the State Charter Schools Commission.

Each step is awash in its own set of problems. A chronically failing school is defined as one that has scored 60 or below on the College and Career Readiness Performance Index for three consecutive years. The problem with that criteria is the CCRPI is a work in progress and the state can’t seem to get it right.

While that’s a big enough issue in and of itself, the state can present no evidence it has the expertise to run schools better than local boards of education. This is a statewide issue that hits locally. Nine Bibb County schools are on the OCD list. The state district would confiscate three things:

1. Local tax dollars.

2. Local school facilities (local boards would still be responsible to fund major repairs and capital expenses plus liabilities). This includes all desks, computers, chairs, basketballs and other equipment.

3. Local school boards would have no control of the OSD schools. The OSD superintendent would only be accountable to the governor, whomever that might be when this operation gets up and running.

What is behind this effort? To hear the lawmakers who voted for Senate Bill 133 and Senate Resolution 287 in 2015 tell it, they would say they are following successful models of similar state-run systems in Michigan and Louisiana. They must not have read the newspapers. Michigan’s Education Improvement Authority has been steeped in corruption and kickbacks while test scores have not risen. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said late last year that he would be willing to dissolve the authority if the legislature would install his “new” plan for education reform.

Louisiana’s Recovery School District, according to an Education Week report, was sparked by Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans started from scratch with the state firing most of the 7,000 employees working for Orleans Parish public schools. While graduation gains have been posted and ACT scores are up, the jury is still out. “A year before the storm,” Education Week reported, “there were nearly 66,000 students in the system. By October 2006, a year after the storm, the district’s headcount had not even recovered to 30,000. A decade later, the number of public school students in New Orleans hasn’t returned to pre-storm levels.”

There are other areas with state-run districts. Tennessee, like Louisiana, uses a model with some of the schools run by charter management organizations, which could happen here if this amendment passes.

When Tennessee started its program in 2012-13, it started with only six schools, according to a study by Vanderbilt University. Three schools were run by the state and three by a charter management organization. By the 2014-15 school year, 23 schools were run with only five run directly by the state and 18 by CMOs.

Therein lies the answer to this riddle. Why go to all the trouble of taking over schools: Follow the money. CMOs are for profit management companies — and for what? The Vanderbilt University study (www.tinyurl.com/ht2t9o5) said, “The effects in the ASD (Achievement School District) schools were mainly statistically insignificant and occasionally significant, sometimes positive (three times) and sometimes negative (two times) depending on the subject, cohort, and academic year.” To be fair, the study also suggested that “it may take three to five years for reforms to take hold.”

There are a plethora of educational organizations that have come out against Georgia’s constitutional amendment. Next month, the Bibb County Board of Education will be among many boards this year that will pass a formal resolution urging the amendment’s defeat. We couldn’t agree more.

This story was originally published July 30, 2016 at 9:00 PM with the headline "Amendment vote is all about the money."