For over 10 years our Rebublican-dominated state government has made a deliberate and concerted effort to dismantle our public education system. For example, our state officials managed to conjure up $52 million dollars for a voucher program that was supposedly designed to enable low income students to enroll in private schools, but in reality this scholarship program has proven to benefit primarily high and middle income students.
Now state Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-Marietta, wants to add $30 million to this secretive tax-funded private school windfall and yet there is no corresponding call for funds to save our public school systems.
To put it bluntly, the majority of our Georgia legislators are driven by an ideology that wants to destroy our constitutional right to a public education and they are succeeding.
"Only about 34 percent of Georgia adults have a two- or four-year college degree" - The Lumina Foundation.
Georgia education is rated D plus, we're broke and our schools suck. Time to reboot.
Georgians were told this bill was a way to open opportunity to low income students; however, aggregate private school enrollment figures have not increased. This legislation should be evaluated for effectiveness and alignment with the Governor's goal of 250,000 more degree holding Georgians. Diverting tax dollars from the educational budget is not likely to achieve that goal.
And as a matter of justice, the fact that the wealthy can withhold their state taxes and use them to pay their child's private school education - at the expense of public education and the children of the middle class - is corrosive to society. It perpetuates inequality and inequity strangles upward mobility. Already, upward mobility in the US ranks at the bottom of the other industrialized democracies.
The widely reported increases in longevity are not shared equally. Sadly, between 1990 and 2008, life expectancy for 25 year old men without a high school degree fell 3.3 years; for women without that degree it fell 5.3 years. Rome and Floyd County children without the good sense to be born wealthy will live lives of limited expectations and fewer years. That's what tax cuts for the privileged produce.