Quality Schools Key To Economic Development
This week’s Courier Herald column:
The sales pitch for investment in education is tried and true. We can pay now, or we can pay more later.
Most often, this equation is linked to the rising expense of our criminal justice system. Most education advocates can quickly equate the cost of educating a student versus the cost of housing one prisoner. Those without a quality education are significantly more likely to end up behind bars. Thus, the sales pitch is made that we can spend more now on education, or end up spending much more later on prisons.
Governor Nathan Deal used the groundbreaking of the new Cyber Innovation Training Center in Augusta to change the sales pitch a bit. The Center, which will train Georgians for positions supporting the Army’s new Cyber Command based at nearby Ft. Gordon, is a strategic investment to leverage the Command with Augusta University as a foothold to incubate a community of private sector employers to co-locate nearby.
The Governor didn’t mince words when it comes to the weak link in the plan. According to a report by WJBF’s Anne Maxwell, Governor Deal said of Richmond County “They have too many failing schools…people do notice…the military takes note of that.”
Richmond County Schools have some of the worst performing schools in the state. A double digit number would have been eligible for state takeover had the Opportunity School District amendment passed. It didn’t, and many school systems (including Richmond County) are pretending that we no longer have a problem. More on that later.
The Governor, for his part, has adopted a two prong strategy. Given that his plan didn’t meet the approval of voters, he’s leaving “Plan B” to the state legislature. Multiple bills have been filed in the state House that would specifically address failing schools with additional oversight, grant state charter schools parity with local schools, expand Student Scholarship Organizations, establish Education Savings Accounts, and even provide vouchers for children of active duty military parents.
There’s a second strategy to invert the education establishment’s non-stop sales pitch for more money. The Governor wants to make it clear that communities that rely on their local school boards to operate a jobs program that they can produce better results now, or they will pay in jobs later.
The companies that would locate to be near the Cyber Command will evaluate the area like most other companies do. School quality factors heavily, as parents who work in the high tech field tend to be highly educated themselves, and want their children to have access to quality schools. Luckily, neighboring Columbia County does just that. Richmond County, to be blunt, falls well short of expectations.
Parts of Georgia that fall well outside Atlanta often wonder why the Atlanta area gets all the growth and most of the good jobs. Solutions proposed often rely on additional lanes of asphalt, rather than better returns from their investments in education. Without schools that would attract the parents that would work in the jobs these communities want to have, better roads only make it easier for top talent to leave town faster.
In many of Georgia’s smaller counties, the local school board is the county’s largest employer. As such, systems are run as a jobs program first (with much of the payroll met by state tax dollars), and results are clearly secondary. This is great if you work for a local board of education. Not so great if you need skills to get a 21st century job when you graduate from one of their schools.
The response from the Richmond County School Board’s response to the Governor was emblematic of the problem. Spokesperson Kaden Jacobs in the same WJBF report responded to the Governor Deal’s remarks by saying “…I’d like to remind the Governor and others that OSD did fail by a wide margin so the chronically failing school list doesn’t exist anymore.”
And that epitomizes this problem. The Governor understands the link between today’s education system and tomorrow’s economic activity. Entrenched and well paid bureaucrats see failing schools only as a political battle. Worse, they believe since they won a round, the problem no longer exists.
Meanwhile, they continue to fail an entire generation of students who are destined to a life of poverty. They believe they won. It’s only the students who lose a lifetime of economic mobility. And the communities they live in will continue to pay that price until something dramatically different is done.
Charlie Harper is the publisher of GeorgiaPol.com and the Executive Director of PolicyBEST, which focuses on policy issues of Business Climate, Education, Science & Medicine, and Transportation.
About Author
Charlie
Founder of GeorgiaPol.com; Now weekly columnist Very interested in Georgia and Georginas. Interest in politics is waning daily.
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“Meanwhile, they continue to fail an entire generation of students who are destined to a life of poverty.”
Are the schools failing or are families failing children? A child from a dysfunctional (often single parent) situation where little emphasis is placed on education is a difficult student to educate. I am not ignoring the role of schools/school systems because some of our Georgia schools are run poorly but education and a desire to learn starts at home.
They’re very difficult to educate. But not impossible to educate.
The problem comes when these children continue to be held out as the reason these systems with failing schools demand more money, then don’t allocate the resources to them to fix the problem. Instead, they cite the same problem, ask for the same solution, and repeat as necessary.
The entire OSD process was about breaking this cycle. Given that many systems refused to come to the table to help solve the actual problem, it’s time to find new ways to make sure it is solved. We have the entire next generation depending on it.
Recently read an article in Forbes on big bet philanthropy where the Gates Foundation underwrote one of the biggest philanthropic losses ever.
“$650 million focus on reducing class size resulted in a startling conclusion: school size had very little to do with student outcome.” “Money wasted?, not how they see it” as Buffett said “you have to swing for the fences.”
“Melinda said taking the idea to a full conclusion had great social value.
Countless school districts have presumably moved money toward the outcome that does move the needle: teacher excellence.”
IMO quick thoughts, set performance benchmarks, provide much higher pay for teachers, leverage technology, fewer admins and with salary limits, consolidate small districts, set them free with 401k’s, not indentured fixed plans, let the burnouts walk and keep the dedicated to age 62+…..
@Icarus:
This is one area where conservatives and Republicans lose the educational debate: by engaging the progressives and liberals on the subject of how to deal with the lowest performing students. Do not get me wrong … dealing with the lowest performing students is a worthy and necessary goal. But doing so will not drive economic development in any meaningful way. So, dealing with the lowest performing students should more rightly be seen as an anti-poverty measure or a social measure to combat with issues like community disintegration and (yes) crime and – for a more positive spin – provide economic mobility. I suppose that it can be some sort of rebuttal/alternative to income redistribution using social programs, especially for those who now see public education as (a huge) part of the social welfare complex.
But economic development is about the top performing students. To a degree, it is about getting more above average students to perform at elite levels. But primarily, it is about getting elite students to perform even better. Now of course, this runs counter to the last 50 years of political discourse, which tends towards egalitarianism on the left and populism on the right. But the truth is that nearly all of the kids who are going to be job-creating difference makers and industry builders in areas like engineering, computer science, banking, finance, accounting etc. are going to come from the ranks of kids who are in the top 5%-15% of academic performers and moreover have been since when were in middle school.
If you look at the states who produce the most and best of such performers – i.e. California, Massachusetts, New York, D.C., New Jersey, Connecticut and the like – what they have are large networks of superior private and magnet schools with competitive admissions as opposed to charter school lotteries. (By the way … DO NOT roll your eyes at the mentions of Massachusetts, New York, D.C. and New Jersey, as right-leaning folks are wont to do. Such folks like to focus on the dysfunctional urban mainline public schools in those areas while totally ignoring that the rest of the schools – the ones that the vast majority of the people in those states attend – are on average very good, including many of the very best in the nation.) The products of the private academies and magnet schools are the ones who for the most part dominate the Ivy League schools as well as Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, Duke, UVa etc. type schools in their states. Those are the ones who drive economic development.
By contrast, states who do not have a strong system for wringing the best out of the top 15% of their high school students tend to have universities (public and private) that are not among the national leaders in research or reputation. So, the best students in those states wind up leaving for states that have such institutions and ultimately staying and working there (brain drain). And even the institutions that do have strong national reputations and high research levels in those states usually do so by relying on a huge number of out-of-state and foreign students (see Georgia Tech) who are also not very likely to stick around once their education is done.
And this is why the school choice agenda – charter schools and even vouchers – falls short. The private schools who would receive most voucher-assisted students aren’t going to be the best ones that educate the top students. Instead, they would be institutions that educate kids that perform around the mean or slightly higher. Charter schools for the most part have the same effect since they are not allowed to have competitive or merit-based admissions. Also, the number of charter schools and private schools that have the financial resources to provide a rigorous, competitive education in grades 6-12 are small. In fact, the number of charter schools that even offer grades 10-12 in Georgia AT ALL is shockingly low precisely because offering a competitive high school education to college-bound students (requiring electives in STEM, foreign language, music etc. to speak nothing of the advanced and college prep classes) is so expensive.
The (mostly) No Child Left Behind agenda for things like the Opportunity School District and an agenda that would, say, triple the number of peach state kids who graduate from Georgia Tech, UGA and Emory (let us leave Georgia State, Mercer, Georgia Southern and Kennesaw State – fine institutions that they are -aside for another day) and stick around to found startups are two different things. They are not in conflict. You can do both. But you cannot and should not claim that you can accomplish the latter by doing the former.
Now obviously, scholarships to help parents pay the $26,815 a year that it costs to go a Westminister is out of the question. Even if it wasn’t, a bigger problem is that there aren’t very many Westministers in Georgia – as compared to other states with far better and more developed private school systems – especially outside metro Atlanta. And the idea that there would be more Westministers if we had a voucher system to support it is a great theory but something that needs to be observed in practice before a state that is already in the bottom quartile of education spending – we never did get around to fully funding QBE did we? – tries it.
So, the GOP needs to come up with a policy agenda that would significantly increase the number of public magnet or other competitive admissions junior high and high schools in this state, and political rhetoric to sell it. Absent that, you really can’t claim to have a “public education as economic development” agenda. Instead, you should just join the left in viewing public education as a social justice instrument.
Great post! While I didn’t support the OSD, I have to give the Governor credit for trying to make progress on this important issue.
Having been in the schools now, I’d say that we need to look carefully at how the money is spent, how efficiency can be improved, and how teachers should be empowered and better compensated. I personally do not think more money at the top of the system will make any difference at this point. You’ve got to put it toward paying and rewarding teachers and incentivizing them to stay in the classroom.
As to low income families and students, the various agencies that are supposed to address this area (housing, food, welfare, etc…) should be required to coordinate with the educational providers so that everyone involved with a child’s life can be on the same page as to needs to ensure the greatest possibility of success and a path out of poverty. Just like special needs children have an individual education plan, low income students should have a similar plan and attention in our schools.