School takeover Plan B debuts
The virtues and flaws of … well, pretty much everything, as pretty much everyone knows, are in the details.
Georgia voters resoundingly rejected last year’s proposed constitutional amendment allowing for a state takeover of chronically underperforming public schools. That measure got a collective thumbs-down, we believe, not because voters didn’t like the details, but because they were never really told what the details were. They suspected, not without ample reason, that nobody did — or, that if anybody did, nobody was telling.
The most glaring Doublethink aspect of it all was the way the word “accountability” kept getting thrown around with regard to a system involving an appointed executive, appointed officials and appointed bureaucrats accountable to nobody except, apparently, the governor and each other.
Educators and administrators, also not without ample reason, viewed such a nebulously ominous prospect with alarm. To the proposal’s supporters, its defeat was attributed not to the voters, but to the dreaded “teachers’ unions” who, along with “trial lawyers” and “activist judges” and the rest of the usual-suspect barrel of political rotten apples, spoil every good-faith effort at “reform.”
Thursday, the House Education Committee is expected to discuss a new version of state intervention. If it answers the questions that were never addressed by its predecessor, it deserves consideration.
Filed by Rep. Kevin Tanner, R-Dawsonville, it would, like last year’s proposal, give the state broad authority to intervene in failing schools. According to Associated Press, it would create what Tanner calls a “chief turnaround officer,” accountable to the state Board of Education, who would have the authority to take drastic measures if a school placed under state oversight doesn’t improve significantly after two years. He or she could fire a principal, administrators or teachers, order a school be put under the authority of another school district or nonprofit, or require that children in the underperforming school be allowed to attend another local public school.
The bill would also, AP reports, authorize the governor to remove local school board members of districts where more than half the schools are graded “unacceptable” by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement.
“We’re basically giving [local schools] two years to work hand in hand with us,” Tanner said, “and as long as they’re making an effort and making progress there won’t be any directive that they have to do anything.”
Most of the initial reaction is that affected people and organizations want more details.
A crucial one, left over from last year: What happens if the state “fails” to “fix” a “failing” school it takes over? Nothing in the 2016 proposal even implicitly acknowledged such a possibility — maybe because the authority that would decide what constitutes “failure” would be grading itself.
Is this a better-designed formula, or just last year’s wine in a relabeled bottle? If it’s the latter, it’s not a vintage that will have improved on the shelf.
This story was originally published February 14, 2017 at 4:07 PM with the headline "School takeover Plan B debuts."