James January-February 2025 web - Flipbook - Page 85
E D U CAT I O N
A 2025
GENE R A L ASS E M B LY E D UCAT IO N
Preview
BY K Y L E W I N G F I E L D
ducation accounts
for the largest part
of Georgia’s annual
state budget and often
consumes the lion’s share of lawmakers’ attention. After several years of
contentious debates over funding
levels and school-choice measures,
will 2025 be any different?
Probably not. Although the specifics facing the General Assembly
when it returns to Atlanta in January
may change significantly.
Start with school choice. For
about a decade reform advocates
pushed to allow state K-12 funding
to follow children to the educational
setting of their family’s choice. This
option, often (incorrectly) referred to
as the “voucher bill,” finally passed
last March. It will allow public-school
students zoned for the state’s
worst-performing schools to spend
up to $6,500 apiece on expenses for
private school or homeschooling.
Now the fight shifts to funding.
The Promise Scholarship Act will
enroll its first students for the 2025-26
school year, but how many? The statute limits funding to 1 percent of total
state funding for K-12 education in the
previous budget year. That puts the
cap at about $140 million, or enough
to fund nearly 22,000 scholarships.
But lawmakers must put that money
into the budget because it does not
flow automatically from a different
line item. If they don’t, the program
won’t be funded— despite the law
they passed. With families across the
state eligible for this long-awaited
opportunity and lining up to apply
when the portal opens in early 2025,
ensuring sufficient funding for them
deserves to be a priority.
MORE FUNDING OPTIONS
That’s not the only option in
need of greater funding. The state’s
long-running tax-credit scholarship
program is highly popular— so popular that the full allotment of credits,
$120 million, typically are claimed
on the first business day of the year.
That limitation on donors translates
into a limitation on students seeking
scholarships. These scholarships
have fewer eligibility requirements
than the Promise Scholarship, so they
serve a broader population. Keeping
up with this demand is the fiscally
responsible path for lawmakers: A
state audit in 2023 indicated the
program may save state taxpayers
up to $28 million per year and local
taxpayers between $24.8 million and
$33.4 million per year, as the average
scholarship amount is far less than it
costs to educate a child in Georgia’s
public schools. In this case, more tax
credits mean more scholarships and
more taxpayer savings— a win-win.
Let’s not ignore forms of public-school choice, starting with Georgia’s public charter schools. These
tuition-free schools, which are publicly
funded and managed by nonprofit
boards, can be authorized either by
local school districts or the State Charter Schools Commission. Unfortunately, Georgia is experiencing a drought
in the creation of new local charter
schools: only one in the last five years,
and just three in the past decade.
This not only limits the public choices
available to families but pushes the
full cost of operating these innovative
schools onto the state budget.
Lawmakers could address both
problems by creating incentives for
local districts to approve high-quality
charter applications. Then there’s the
state’s failure to fully fund facilities
grants for charter schools, which
otherwise end up using instructional funding to make rent or loan
payments. (Don’t get me started on
local districts’ refusal to give charter
schools access to unused buildings,
or to give charters a share of the proceeds from educational sales taxes.)
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