What makes the Georgia Gold Dome shimmer is its pure gold leaf — no fillers, no dilution, no watered-down components. The same can’t be said about the political debates under the dome, where the arguments often build on murky assertions and thin evidence.
That’s especially true in education matters where emotion and anecdote now prevail over fact and reality. Given that tendency, it’s wise to be wary of a possible state Senate effort to address school spending as a result of a performance audit released last week.
Seven state blue-ribbon commissions have pondered Georgia’s outdated 1985 Quality Basic Education funding formula over the last three decades, but all backed away from major revisions.
Why is it so difficult to design a fair and effective school funding formula? The main reason is you can’t set a budget, whether for Georgia’s 181 school districts or a family road trip to Florida, until you establish the priorities. Georgia has never been clear on its education priorities.
The state also often imposes new priorities without a commensurate rise in funding to pay for them. The belief most students ought to continue their education beyond high school is a recent cultural shift, and schools are working hard to make it happen, despite no new funding for more counselors to help students navigate the thorny college application process.
The General Assembly is urging an expansion of apprenticeship opportunities for Georgia high school students without acknowledging these programs demand resources and strategies to recruit employers. Lawmakers hold out Germany as a model, but German apprenticeships track students as early as fourth grade and funnel them into a regulated and heavily unionized labor market. Even European countries with long-standing vocational-tech options now struggle to keep their programs relevant in the face of artificial intelligence, automation and ever-evolving workforce needs.
Preparing Georgia students for an unpredictable future should be a main focus of our Legislature. Instead the Legislature has politicized education and used schools as a kickball in games of partisanship.
Consider the declaration last week by House Speaker Jon Burns that ensuring transgender female athletes can’t play girls’ sports is crucial for the General Assembly, saying “… nothing more important to me than ensuring the opportunity for girls across the state to compete on a level playing field is not hindered.” Lt. Gov. Burt Jones has also said this a priority.
Georgia lawmakers haven’t cited a single example of a transgender student in a public school tilting anyone’s playing field. At the same time, they ignore the 426,470 Georgia children living in poverty. Georgia is one of only six states where poverty is not among the student conditions that merit additional funding to schools. You might think those kids would be the focus of Burns and his colleagues rather than a fictive transgender softball player.
As with most of the South, Georgia has long underfunded its schools, especially in comparison with Northern states that have invested much more in students and have consistent higher performance as a result. Top-achieving Massachusetts spends $20,133 per pupil, while Georgia spends $14,660. A 2023 Education Law Center review that evaluated states on funding effort awarded Georgia a grade of D.
Georgia’s funding formula sets the bar at basic. Former Gov. Sonny Perdue charged his 2004 school funding task force with lifting education in Georgia from basic to excellent. Several years and 75 public hearings later, Perdue’s Investing in Educational Excellence Commission disbanded without recommending a new funding formula due to the high costs of ‘‘excellent.”
In 2015, a committee appointed by then-Gov. Nathan Deal also sidestepped its mission to figure out how much was necessary to educate Georgia students for college and career readiness. It ended up rerouting some existing education dollars rather than calling for additional spending.
Georgia has never funded its schools to meet the high bar of excellence. At a hearing in 2011, a state official stunned me and other audience members with an honest and true assessment of the limits of Georgia’s funding formula. “We are not going to come up with a formula that reaches for excellence,” said then-House Budget Office director John Brown. “We are not putting an orchestra in every school. We are going to create a formula so that every school system has enough money to get the basic job done.”
As long as the General Assembly maintains funding at a basic level, Georgia will never attain the gold-standard in education.
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