If you want to see the two Georgias, look at map of where charter school amendment passed and failed

Charter schools should be restricted to math and science focused programs.

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All along, rural legislators from both parties maintained that this was a metro battle, and the map shows they weren’t far off.

The urban/suburban areas and the rural areas are two different worlds. Until we figure out that just because something might be good doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for the other, things won’t get any better. The more local control the better, whether it’s the schools or something else.

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It isn’t like this is taking gas tax proceeds from metro Atlanta and building “roads to nowhere” down in South Georgia.

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So, after two “Get Schooled” morning blogs mostly ignored this HUGE issue that was so covered here before it passed – we get to it.

The map does not represent population – it passed by a VERY wide margin. It passed all around the metro Atlanta area where the AJC is based, even though the AJC bias against it was blatant.

The rural areas where it did not pass is probably because they rightly don’t see a need locally. They probably won’t be having any charter schools there. Parents at least in the most concentrated populous Atlanta area saw a need, and easily overcame the administrators and liberals who turn a blind eye to so many failing schools.

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@ Mountain Man- they opposed because they will now pay even higher property taxes to support schools in Atlanta. It was just south Ga. Here in Gordon it failed 4 to one.

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Eddie – that’s a lie. The charter schools will actually save tax dollars. This is exactly what I’m talking about.

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The wording on the voting ballot was vague and DECEPTIVE.

The wording on amendments is always vague and deceptive. That’s one reason I vote against them about 99.9% of the time.

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Shouldn’t be too hard to change the sign in front private schools all over the state from Biff and Muffy’s Chirstian Academy to Biff and Muffy’s Charter Academy.

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Centrist, you wrote “and liberals who turn a blind eye to so many failing schools.”
I’m a liberal Democrat and voted for Obama twice. I also voted FOR the charter school amendment.

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Interesting that it passed even in APS/Dekalb. Good. At least the urban voters were NOT listening to the race pimps like Joseph Lowery.

I am not sure what to say about the rural/urban split. I think most rural schools are more “personal”. The teachers and faculty are more like family. The community can rally and create change in these schools. A school system like Dekalb or APS, though, is a mindless impenetrable bureaucracy. Perhaps the parents in rural settings don’t feel as though they are fighting windmills like the parents in the huge school systems?

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Maureen, it’s in the metro areas where failures of our traditional public school establishment to improve learning—are most glaring. That’s also where parents see their own children most at risk because of these failures.

Parents want more choices, and you and your teachers’ union allies simply aren’t able to dissuade them.

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@Hillbilly – “The wording on amendments is always vague and deceptive. That’s one reason I vote against them about 99.9% of the time.”

Wow. You’re certainly living up to your moniker. Are you really that unintelligent that you are unable to research an amendment prior to getting into the voting booth? You simply vote no 99.9% of the time because you don’t understand the “vague and deceptive” wording? Give me a break. Some people don’t deserve to vote.

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Perhaps the parents in rural settings don’t feel as though they are fighting windmills like the parents in the huge school systems?

That’s part of it. The big thing that gets over looked by the urban/suburban block is that most rural counties have one high school and many only have one middle school. How does a charter school fit into that? The reason they only have one school to begin with is that’s all that the population and money can support. Whether it’s a charter school or not, they’re still going to just have one school.

Another thing is if somebody on the school board (or other public office) does something we don’t like, we can walk right up to them at the grocery store and tell them about it. They can’t hide from the voters like they do in big population areas.

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Brasstown, you demonstrate your lack of understanding of a charter school. “Biff and Muffy’s Christian Academy” aren’t about to change to charter status and give up their Christian curriculum and be forced to teach the state of Georgia’s approved curriculum. They would be forced to teach public school curriculum, hire state certified teachers, and follow the same guidelines as your local traditional public school. Really? This is the type of false accusations that influenced many voters to vote no. As Susan said about Macon, these SouthGA counties fought this with media and school resources spreading blatant false information to people who don’t know what charter schools are. Otherwise it would have been a huge landslide victory.

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I am pro-charter but voted NO and encouraged everyone I knew to do so. For me, it came down to this. Do I, as a voter, have control about who makes decisions about my taxpayer dollars? Now that the amendment passed, I can no longer say that. I recently moved from Gwinnett to DeKalb. I voted against Jim McClure in large part because of his vote on Ivy Prep. I felt the school should have been approved by GCPS when they were presenting their original charter. I, however, cannot vote against a member of the charter school commission if they make a decision I disagree with. I have no control, no representation, but my tax dollars still go to a school I do not support or are withheld from one that I do. I can only hope the lawsuit filed against the language places an injunction on the amendment. My greatest hope is that we are asked again in 2014 and the ballot language reads something like “Shall the Constitution of the State of Georgia be amended to allow for the creation of an appointed commission that shall have the power to override the will of elected Boards of Education in regards to the creation of charter schools?” That is what we were truly voting on. Unfortunately, I do believe too many people were mislead by the ballot language more than anything else.

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Librarian – Way off base. There will be no reduced funding for our legacy public schools. Charters though will get less. Because they can operate on less. There won’t be higher taxes. Children are funded on a per head basis. Period. If we have more kids, we fund them, at a charter or at a legacy school. Allowing charter schools doesn’t auto create new children.

The commission is filled with unpaid appointments. And, the staff to support them before had a budget of around $650K. The schools aren’t gutted. They are affected by bloated districts who pay their huge back office staff huge paychecks. The head of Gwinnett makes $410K per year. That’ a good number of teachers just for his salary. And there are other minions under him. Get rid of that wasted layer and you have more money for kids.

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Reality Check,
save your tax bills and compare them next year and the year after – the portion going to education. If your tax bill goes down next year, I’ll be around and I’ll buy you dinner at any place you chose.

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Public Teacher @ 11:34 posted it better than I did – except for this: “Otherwise it would have been a huge landslide victory”. It did pass by a huge landslide. Maybe it would have been even greater if there wasn’t so much media misinformation.

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Batgirl, we’ve been working on the schools we have for 100 years (the current public school design has been around that long.) We have build so much bureaucracy into the systems that manage these schools, we can’t change anything. Too many people with paychecks and contracts. Charters don’t have that. They can also be deemed a failure. Teachers and administrators can be fired. Vendors can be replaced.

Most of the Christian schools I know of here in metro Atlanta don’t seem to care about tax dollars. But, as we move towards vouchers and other education alternatives, these schools may ones we have to evaluate. We pay for our kids to be educated in the primaries. If a Christian school does that better than others, this may be a good investment. If I still had young kids though, I probably wouldn’t send them to such a school, even though I’m a Christian.

I sure as hell don’t ever want to see any money go to an islamic school. However, other faith traditions may also provide for a good education.

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Gilmer County
Highly Rural, Appalachian community
81% for Romney
55% Yes on Amendment 1

Wow in the other direction Maureen. Maybe you should look at why almost 90 counties in Georgia voted for the amendment and only just under 70 voted against. We all know that there are nowhere close to 90 urban counties in Georgia. The basic premise of your Wow does not hold up and does not show a pattern of an urban versus rural voting. Long County in south GA with 3,559 voters voted for the amendment. How does that work for your model?

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With respect to the overwhelming support the referendum received in Metro Atlanta, I will just say that Black people aren’t stupid. We know that the status quo is not working, and we are willing to take a chance on something new. We are tired of the race-baiting and misinformation dished out by politicos who are more concerned with following the party line (and not upsetting teacher organizations) than they are with fostering good schools that work for our children right now.

In what has become a way too frequent occurrence, and no surprise at all, the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus was completely out of step with its own constituency on this issue. Black elected officials need to stop trying to tell their voters what they should believe and need to start listening to them instead.

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Lots of opinions, and I certainly had my own – I must have a dozen pieces I wrote but didn’t post. What THE DATA show is that charters tend to segregate by income (richer kids go to charters) and even so, charters on average (at least as measured by the tests we use) do worse for kids than regular publics. In addition, many dollars were provided by private interests from outside the state in support of the amendment. (The above is the VERY short version.)

Put all that together, and what it suggests is that state politicians will use tax money that would otherwise go to local districts to fund private for-profit charters for higher income families that will not prepare their kids as well as existing public schools. In the process, of course, fewer dollars will be available to teach the lower-income harder to educate kids left in the public schools.

You do the math. For the sake of our kids and Georgia’s economic future, I dearly hope the math is wrong.

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Ms Downey, I think the posts @ 11:24 (Just Sayin) and 11:33 (Hillbilly) explained the south Georgia vote very well. I don’t think the vote was as “anti” as it was “not applicable here”.

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The one thing that is bad about blogs is that anyone can say anything, whether it is the truth or not. The only saving grace is that they are usually corrected when they make inaccurate statements.

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For some solid info on the funding aspect, check the Georgia Public Policy Foundation blog’s recent post on a GA Tech mathematical study that concluded that public charters do not harm traditional public schools:

http://www.georgiapolicy.org/do-charter-schools-hurt-students-in-traditional-schools/

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All this “babble” … All this “babble” folks … done deal … now the devil is in detail … they have to “write the bill” now.

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d at 11:37 am said it best. Voting against the amendment was NOT a vote against charter schools, it was a vote against state control of local schools. Unfortunately, many people I know voted for the amendment because they thought, based on the ballot language, they were voting for charter schools. This amendment is taxation without representation.

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Jerry Eads hit the nail on the head. Charter schools WILL encourage segregation on socioeconomic lines, and they WILL reduce the amount public schools have to spend on the education of the poor students who won’t make it to charter schools. What I haven’t seen mentioned is the fact that it is not a simple one for one swap, with each child and their state allotted funds moving to a charter school, and everything is wonderfully even. When that child and their state funds move to a charter school, that leaves the public school with fewer students, fewer funds from the state, but the same physical plant to pay the overhead on. Moving a child and their state funds to a charter school does not mean that all the expenses faced by public schools will move in the same proportion. Some expenses are fixed, and have to be paid regardless of the number of students. How do you think those expenses will be paid? Either through increased taxes, or a reduction in the amount that is actually spent on the education of the child. In other words, kids who don’t fit in with the charter school clique will receive less attention from fewer teachers in less viable facilities. At the same time, you can watch the financial statements on the companies running the charter schools as their bottom line takes care of their owners or shareholders, with little regard for the welfare of the kids.

I’ll be very surprised if there is an improvement in student progress in the charter schools, while it will be absolutely no surprise when the performance of the public schools gets even worse. This can be attributed directly to the fact that we gave up on public schools, determining that our children’s future wasn’t worth the fight it would have taken to hold federal, state, and local administrators responsible for poor performance. I know many teachers, and their biggest complaint is that, due to the inflated bureaucracy imposed on public schools, they don’t have time to “teach”. All they have time to do is prepare their kids to take standardized tests, and do the attendant paperwork. Then, once the test is over, it’s time to start preparing for the next standardized test. We don’t teach our children to think, we teach them to memorize answers to tests.

Regardless, the amendment passed. Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong, but I doubt it very seriously. As one of the other posts mentioned, watch your tax bill and the amount allocated to education over the next few years. In the meantime, if your school system is forced to support a state mandated charter school, I would suggest you try to get your kids enrolled there, because public schools will suffer even more because of it.

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@ Mountain Man, (I will type slow for you)
As the STATE funds these schools, LESS money will go to traditional public schools from the state, therefore, LOCAL BOE’S will be forced to cut services, or RAISE LOCAL taxes. Up is up, if I write the check to the state or county, more tax is MORE TAX.

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Jerry Eads,
charters tend to segregate by income (richer kids go to charters)
* richer kids go to charters – I think all the parents in South DeKalb sending their kids to the various Ivy Prep schools would disagree. Any community is welcome to petition for a charter.
* charters tend to segregate by income – How do they do that? State chartered schools have attendance zones and blind lotteries to get in.

charters on average do worse for kids than traditional public schools – So what? Parents don’t have to send their children to state chartered schools. They only go there if they decide the alternatives are not as good.

tax money that would otherwise go to local districts – If you look at the History of Education Spending in Georgia you’ll see that local school districts have been receiving more and more money every year for the last 16 years. I don’t think more money is the solution.

I would like to fix traditional schools as well. What’s the plan?

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Eddie Hall
LESS money will go to traditional public schools from the state – Correct, but the traditional public school will have more money per child.

So, that’s the million dollar predicate as noted by Dr Reis
Districts that can reduce costs by more than the loss of revenue will actually gain financially when a child transfers to a charter.

I believe too many things are labeled “fixed costs” within local school districts. This will be the challenge.

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Pride and Joy
Why didn’t the charter amendment pass in rural areas? What do you think about this theory:

Rural areas have generally less money and the Superintendents are the potentates of their county. The Superintendents, administrators, et al were driving the opposition to this amendment. Those types have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

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Interesting data on the funding. The Board has long been promoting the ‘fact’ that the numbers had flipped. Thanks to Nancy Jester (a board member) for clarifying.

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To Dekalb Inside and Out — the crooked supers and administrators and the scared sheep in educrat land sure did try to scare the bejesus out of rural voters. I agree wtih you.
But history tells me differently.
Everything starts in California. Look at gay marriage, trends in education and so on. It starts there and moves across teh country and ends up in the South usually years later.
Homeschooling used to be something odd. Now it is downright mainstream in the rural South.
Teaching strategies and tactics and theories are developed in the North east or in CA and are adopted later by the rest of trhe country.
I’m in a predicting mood.
I predict rural counties in Georgia will have charter schools later, when it becomes familiar.
Andd if I’m wrong., that’s OK too.
What I just love about today is that it is all over.
We don’t have to listen to the gloom and doom predictions from anyone anymore.
We simply just wait and see.

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The teachers depressed about the passage of this amendment need to stop whining and see this as an opportunity for entrepreneurship.

Teachers have been complaining on this blog for years that they are micromanaged and cannot run their classrooms the way they see fit. Now successful teachers and administrators have the opportunity to band together, innovate and develop charter petitions for their own schools.

You don’t have to languish in Gwinnett as an assistant principal for 15 years or wait on some biased program to be tapped for administrative leadership training. You don’t have to know the right people that can get you in the pipeline to be principal.

Use your education to create your own destiny and influence the lives of children by offering them a high quality education. Network with grant writers and accountants to join your governing board.
Georgia has a strong need for more career academies and themed charter schools. Other states that out-perform us on the SAT and on graduation rates have charter schools that offer international languages, an arts focus and more.

Dry your tears and get busy brainstorming. If you lose your 9-5 as a teacher leader at a traditional local school, with the right team behind you, and an exceptional charter application, you could eventually become the charter school superintendent of a new charter school.

Most of the start-up charter schools Georgia has today were launched by teachers, administrators and parents with specialized expertise. The journey from charter idea to charter approval may be intimidating, but there are networks in place to help people through the process.

So start networking with some of those parents you love to complain about and create new positions for Georgia public school teachers.

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http://blogs.ajc.com/mike-luckovich/2012/11/02/114-mike-luckovich-cartoon-gift-horse/

AJC’s beloved “Cartoon Boy” pretty much covers it. Of course, it easily escapes the thinking of those who say: “We know that the status quo is not working, and we are willing to take a chance on something new.” (Erica Long, 12:05 pm)

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Ed, Mike doesn’t have a kid in a failing public school.

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jra asks “Some expenses are fixed, and have to be paid regardless of the number of students. How do you think those expenses will be paid?”
Fixed costs are easy, jra. We do it all the time already by consolidating schools or closing schools or levelling kids in a classroom so they each have a similar number.
The NUMBER ONE expense of a school system is the employees and their health care plans and benefitts.
If a traditional public school loses kids, they can do what they ALREADY do — and “level.” That means they move teachers around to different schools. A public school near me did not have as many students attend as was projected — so they removed a teacher from that school and sent her to another school where the attendance was higher than projected.
Your boogeyman scare tactics are silly.
And if the public school system loses so many children that less teachers and staff are needed, those teachers need to be laid off. That’s how it works in the real world. I’ve been downsized, right-sized, reorganized — fired — whatever the buzz word is for the moment, it’s happened to me and it will happen again because I am a business woman and i work in the real world. It’s harsh out here but I know I have real skills and a real education and I will find another job.
Good teachers have nothing to worry about. We still have the same number of children in Georgia and charter schools need teachers too; however, bad teachers should be concerned. When lay offs are needed, bad teachers will be the first to go and charter schools won’t hire them.

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Can’t wait to see that Islamic/Muslim charter school file for status. Yep, and there is nothing anyone will be able to do about it. If its not approved it will be amazing how fast the court paper work will be filed. Public money will be used to push an agenda; I just can’t wait until its an agenda no one likes….

LMAO

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Someday we can all be sorry when all the public schools have been destroyed by the syphoning off of money by the corporate-owned charter schools…perhaps we’ll even get to the point where we’re like Haiti or Zambia where if you can’t pay, you don’t attend. As long as the corporate leaches can get their grasp on taxpayer provided money they’ll have a great time promoting more charter schools. Hedge Fund managers point to charter schools as a good investment…that should be a red flag to everyone, when the masters of Greed approve of an investment for the benefit of the 1%. The public schools that are failing are failing because they’ve purposely been defunded…they have never been funded properly. Now the plan is to defund them even more and drive the parents to the charters…very clever for the Wealthiest Americans, the 1% richest among us and their handpicked public servants who are all we’re allowed to vote for. We are shooting ourselves in the foot!

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@Erica Long, APS is the perfect example of what you are saying, and exactly why the charter school amendment passed. Because the majority of the school board and the upper administration is African-American, they pay lip service to be doing right by the African-American community. In fact, APS has had many terrible schools for decades and does little about it because the families that attend them do not have the resources to fight the school system.

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It is unbelievable what has happened to public education. The old addage was “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. In the 1940s- 70s, public schools were GREAT. Why? Number One was that they had involved, strict-discipline parents. Second, schools EXPELLED behavior problem kids because that did RIGHT by all the families that wanted a decent education and whose kids were respectful and hard-working. . Third, ethical professionals all the way up to the school boards ran the schools and demanded that students EARN diplomas. Education was viewed as the ticket to a better life and success in America, and schools and teachers were RESPECTED. In the last 40 years, a weird idiocracy has occurred that has resulted in what can only be termed a desperate search for ANYTHING that could be better, including the ludicrous election of charters. Charters cannot and will never be private schools, and as long as the politics that control public schools hold sway, neither traditional nor charters will work.

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I know lots of pro-charter people in south GA who were campaigning against the amendment. They aren’t against charter schools; they are against state officials, who they feel know little to nothing about their local communities, having the power to overrule local decisions. Maybe they feel like they know and trust their local leaders more than metro people do — they see them at the grocery store, their kids are in scouts together. They may feel like their voices really are heard at the local level in their small communities. Geography matters too. Metro Atlanta people having decisions made by the state may not feel that power as been far removed from their communities. I could see people in Brunswick being less comfortable with decisions being made for them by unknown people a 5-hour drive away.

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