The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked educators, policymakers and advocates to share what they deem the most important priorities for the upcoming 2025 General Assembly. Their answers are included in a collection of guest columns. This is the latest of these columns.
After years of debate, the General Assembly in 2024 finally voted to create a new private-choice program for K-12 students, the Promise Scholarship. The inaugural cohort in this program, beginning in fall 2025, will be able to use up to $6,500 per child on the nonpublic education of their choice, such as private school or home schooling.
Plenty of to-do items remain on the list for private choice in Georgia, from fully funding the Promise Scholarship to relieving waiting lists for long-oversubscribed state tax-credit scholarships. But lawmakers also have the opportunity in 2025 to help local school systems compete for students. They can do that by loosening restrictions and providing incentives for local districts to offer students more public-school choices.
Credit: Copyright 2023 BILL ADLER - ALL
Credit: Copyright 2023 BILL ADLER - ALL
Let’s start with Georgia’s public charter schools. These are publicly funded, tuition-free schools that can be authorized either by local school districts or the State Charter Schools Commission. Georgia has nearly 100 public charter schools, and they serve almost 65,000 students — with thousands more students stuck on waitlists.
Clearly, the demand exists for more high-quality charters. But these students on waiting lists are being let down by local authorizers. As of 2025, there will have been only one new local charter approved within the past five years and just three in the previous decade.
Many of those seeking to open charters end up getting approval from the state. But this longer process not only limits families’ choices but forces the state to pick up the full cost of operating these innovative schools.
What to do? Lawmakers could create new incentives for local districts to approve high-quality charter applications, and they could consider penalties for those that deny such applications.
Another unfulfilled promise lies with the state. Lawmakers approved grants to help charters pay for their facilities rather than having to delve into their instructional budgets to make up the difference.
But those grants have never been fully funded. That needs to change.
Beyond charters, there’s the possibility of making it easier for students to transfer between traditional public schools.
While transfers within or outside one’s home-school district are already legal, the process can be cumbersome. Until recently, students seeking to attend a public school outside their district not only had to get permission from the “receiving” district but from the home district as well.
Georgia still lacks consistency and transparency around transfer requests, as a study by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation found earlier this year. At a minimum, lawmakers ought to require more thorough and consistent enforcement of Georgia’s transfer laws and more transparent reporting about how the laws are working.
Finally, for all the ever-changing trends and fads in education, one thing that stubbornly remains the same is the way we fund it.
Georgia’s Quality Basic Education Act, which created our current funding formula, turns 40 this year. That’s older than many of our school buildings, most of the technology within them and a majority of Georgia residents. The world has changed, and the Quality Basic Education Act should as well.
QBE dollars are driven by program-centered aspects of education. States such as Tennessee and Mississippi have recently adopted student-centered formulas that are tied more closely to each student’s individual characteristics. This could include things like a student’s family income or whether English is her native language.
Rather than adding another layer to make up for QBE’s obsolescence, lawmakers could begin the hard work of revamping the entire formula to make it work better for all students based on all of their relevant characteristics.
Getting K-12 education right is one of the most important things the General Assembly can do. In fact, that’s why lawmakers devote the largest chunk of the budget — $13.25 billion out of the state’s $36.14 billion in general funds, or more than a third of the total — to K-12 education.
But simply spending more money won’t guarantee success. The money needs to be spent wisely, with priorities informed by current best practices about student needs and sharpened by a healthy sense of competition.
Lawmakers can take great strides toward both goals in 2025.
Kyle Wingfield is president and CEO of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a nonprofit research institute based in Atlanta.
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