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.
As a longtime education analyst and current director of policy and advocacy for Brown’s Promise, I’m disappointed by how much one school’s success appears to come at the expense of another’s. Scores are compared, champions are named, and instead of asking whether a winner-take-all education system is healthy, policymakers are content to tsk-tsk “failing schools.”
“Higher per-pupil spending on instruction didn’t always translate to higher student test scores,” reads The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s summary of a finding from the recent Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts report on education spending.
Credit: GBPI
Credit: GBPI
If true, this discovery would offer some relief to the Georgia Legislature, which for the past 40 years, has been unable to make basic improvements to the way the state funds schools, such as tie the formula to actual costs or account for the needs of students in poverty. The text of the report, however, offers more of an explanation: “Higher per pupil spending does not always result in improved system performance due to other contributing factors such as poverty.”
It is no coincidence that the audit’s designation for “worst performing” districts have over half of their students living in poverty (54%) compared to only 21% in the highest performing. It’s clear that the competition is rigged.
Johnny and Sally can hardly be expected to achieve at the same level if Sally’s parents pay for summer camps while Johnny is struggling with a toothache because his parents can’t afford the dentist. These differences are exacerbated when they impact the school. For instance, nationwide high-poverty schools have a much harder time holding onto good teachers than low-poverty ones. Teachers regularly leave the classroom or transfer to a district where fewer challenges exist. The result is often students with greater needs being taught by the least-prepared educators.
If Georgia lawmakers want to address this issue, they need to embrace a popular concept in elementary classrooms that somehow goes ignored in education policy circles: working together. First, Georgia needs to join the rest of the nation and create a grant specifically for students in poverty. Without this funding, we are expecting some students to do the same with less. Unlike hyper-individualistic policies like vouchers that reward wealthy parents for leaving public schools, money to educate low-income students stays in the community for schools that serve every child.
Next, sharing goes beyond our tax dollars; we need our school districts working together as well. The issue of school poverty is not uniform across the state. One district filled with middle- and upper-income families sits right next to another buckling under the weight of concentrated poverty (to name a few pairs: Fulton/Atlanta, Oconee/Clarke, Laurens/Dublin City).
Research shows deconcentrating poverty has large positive results for students and it’s not hard to see why. In high-poverty schools, money that should be going to instruction is instead directed to meet basic human needs. When poverty is spread out, however, the intensity of these challenges lessens.
State lawmakers can incentivize regional cooperation so no one district is left on an island. These multi-district regions would have more power collectively to consider several options to help shoulder the burden of community poverty.
Magnet schools could provide a space where kids of every income bracket meet under a theme-specific education — Hartford, Connecticut, has an environmental science-themed school, for example. District transportation departments could save time and money by working together so that county buses don’t have to drive around the city district carve-out. Central offices could coordinate plans to address chronic absenteeism for transient families. Regardless of the task, it benefits no one to section off kids and systems from one another based on arbitrary lines alone. This combination of resource equity and school integration is fleshed out in more detail in the Brown’s Promise State Policy Agenda.
The concept of cooperation between districts is nothing new. In 2006, the Nebraska Legislature changed state law so 11 districts in and around Omaha could share funding, institute an interdistrict transfer program and increase early childhood education options for low-income families. Intuitively it makes sense as well. For our state to prosper, we will need all students to be able to read and calculate, not just a couple select districts where few poor kids live.
As Georgia lawmakers return to the Gold Dome, let’s ask them to stop encouraging these high-stakes competitions and move to a system of cooperation meant for excellent schools for everyone. Because without these sorts of changes, we will all lose.
Stephen J. Owens is director of advocacy and policy for Brown’s Promise.
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