by Georgia Center for Opportunity | May 4, 2016
Now is an especially good time to support GCO financially. Thanks to the generosity of a key supporter and GCO’s Board, every donation given between now and May 31st – up to $87,000 – will be matched dollar-for-dollar. This means if we reach our goal, GCO will have an additional $174,000 that can be put to use immediately to increase job opportunities, expand access to a quality education, and promote healthy family formation so that all Georgians have a real chance to prosper.
This matching gift challenge was issued by individuals who believe in GCO’s mission and want to see others join in these efforts. Not only do your donations help us financially, they send a message that there are people who care about this work and want to see improvement in our state and more importantly the lives of individual Georgians who are ready to succeed – through hard work and determination – when given a chance.
We’re so grateful to all of GCO’s donors, volunteers, and advocates! As a non-profit organization our work would not be possible without the individuals who support us.
If you would like to make a tax deductible donation and have your gift doubled, visit GeorgiaOpportunity.org/Donate or mail a check to Kelly McGonigal, Georgia Center for Opportunity, 333 Research Court, Suite 210, Norcross, GA 30092.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Apr 27, 2016
Healthy families are the bedrock of a healthy, prosperous society. They are the place where children develop the values, skills, and habits that largely determine the kind of adults they will become.
Georgia Center for Opportunity’s Healthy Families Initiative (HFI) launch on Thursday, April 7th was a great success. The goal of the event was to bring together community leaders, certified trainers, pastors, businesses, and GCO supporters for a day of focusing on families and to provide them with news about this new initiative and the work being done in Norcross and Peachtree Corners.
Joyce Whitted, HFI Program Manager, shared detailed information about the five focus areas of the initiative, including:
1. Launching a PR campaign saturating the community with positive messaging about family.
2. Providing relationship education and enrichment courses.
3. Working with local churches and other religious organization to provide mentoring to adolescents and young couples
4. Improving vocational education and apprenticeship opportunities in the area
5. Working with leaders to ensure state laws encourage family formation
Community partners like the A.Worley Boys & Girls Club, Norcross Human Services Center, Robert D. Fowler YMCA, Single Parent Alliance Resource Center, and Community Based Mentoring were in attendance to lend their support for the program. Guest speakers Bishop Garland Hunt of The Father’s House, Greg Griffin, a Christian counselor, and Shay Marlowe, Goodwill Career Services and a HFI Certified Trainer in 24/7 Dad all echoed the importance of healthy families and how it impacts everyone in Georgia.
Beverly Washington, a resident of Norcross, stated that her greatest take-a-ways were “Networking and seeing so many passionate individuals focused on helping our community.”
The certified trainers who have been on the ground helping to educate individuals and families on healthy relationship skills were also on-hand to give personal accounts of their interactions with participants in the programs being offered through the HFI Initiative.
The event was a success because those in attendance expressed their passion to be part of the positive focus on healthy families and, ultimately, to see the negative trends plaguing families in Georgia reversed.
For more information about how to get involved with the Healthy Families Initiative visit www.hfigeorgia@opportunity.org or call 877-814-0535.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Apr 12, 2016
By April 1916, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s crew wanted to see land. The men spent more than a year sailing to Antarctica and six days drifting in lifeboats with little food or sleep. Finally, the men spied a narrow, 30-mile long enclave called Elephant Island.
Writing in his book Endurance, Alfred Lansing says the crew had “a feeling of astonishment which soon gave way to a sense of tremendous relief.”
A century after Shackleton’s adventure, Georgia parents should know the feeling. A state supreme court ruling almost disbanded many of the state’s charter schools due to a lawsuit five years ago (voters subsequently approved a ballot measure in 2012 that resolved the issue). In 2013, the Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent said no new charters should open in the city until a pension lawsuit was complete. Charter schools have served the city for years, and, according to a Georgia Department of Education report, half of the charter campuses in the state are located in metro Atlanta (the pension case was settled two years later).
Having weathered these storms, parents and policymakers would welcome the sight of land in the form of student success.
Yet charter school achievement does not always have a simple explanation. This is especially true in Georgia, where charter schools fall into four different categories. Raw test score analyses benefit from comparisons of similar students and schools (and random student assignment to schools if possible).
Even without such data crunching, there are strong results that vary across school types and grade levels that should give students, parents, and lawmakers hope for the direction of state charter schools.
First, on the nation’s report card, more low income Georgia charter school 8th graders scored at the “Basic” level or above than their peers in district schools (Figure 1). In reading, 82 percent of charter students score at Basic or above, while 69 percent of their peers in district schools scored at this level. In math, 65 percent of charter 8th graders scored above Basic, compared to 63 percent in district schools. Fourth grade students are behind their peers in reading and no data are available for math.
Source: National Center for Educational Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress Data Tool. Author calculations.
These results mean a higher percentage of low-income 8th grade Georgia students attending charter schools demonstrated at least the basic skills necessary in these subjects. Similar research is available from the Goldwater Institute using Arizona charter school data (with even more positive results) and in the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual report card.
The complication in these data is that Georgia charter schools fall into four different categories (the number of schools of each type is in parentheses):
- “Start-up” (77): These are the independent public schools most policymakers and parents are familiar with. Teachers and community leaders form these schools as an alternative to assigned district schools.
- “Conversion” (18): A “converted” public school, as the name implies, is a school that changed its status from a traditional public school to a charter school and given more operational autonomy in exchange for higher levels of accountability.
- “State start-up” (20): A state commission authorizes these schools (the state supreme court ruling mentioned above threatened these schools).
- “Charter systems” (326): These school systems are traditional districts given more autonomy so that the rules under which the schools operate resemble charter school regulations.
More test scores are available in the the state department of education’s annual report on charter schools to help parse through these distinctions. According to end of grade test results, converted charter schools and start-up charters are well ahead of their district peers in nearly every subject in 8th grade in the percent of students exceeding the state standard (see Figure 2 for an example of 7th and 8th grade comparisons; for more results, see the link beneath the chart for the full report).
Source: Georgia Charter Schools and Charter Systems, 2014-15 and 2015-16, Georgia Department of Education, p. 44, http://www.gadoe.org/External-Affairs-and-Policy/Charter-Schools/Documents/2015%20Charter%20Schools%20and%20Charter%20Systems%20Annual%20Report.pdf.
The most encouraging finding is that the average results for all charter schools (the orange bar in Figure 2) are higher than non-charter schools (light blue bar) for every subject, in every grade except 8th grade Social Studies and Math in the state report. Charter high school students also out-performed district peers in English, geometry, biology, and economics.
Georgia charter schools should have parents breathing a sigh of relief. The project of creating and sustaining quality schools so that every child has the chance to succeed is never finished, but Georgia has given parents several ways to do so. With all that Georgia charter school families have been through, this success is welcome.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Mar 21, 2016
Like many observers, I was surprised and appalled by the events in Chicago a week ago, when Donald Trump’s campaign cancelled a rally in the face of concerted, well-organized protests both inside and outside the venue. Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have been all that surprised. It was a college campus, after all, and our students have become all too proficient and shutting down and shouting down speakers they don’t like. Donald Trump just received the same treatment campus social justice warriors have been meting out to a long and distinguished list of speakers. There’s nothing special about Trump in this regard.
But this isn’t another essay about the intolerance of campus activists or about the violence associated with Trump rallies, or even about the perfect storm that can be created when those two forces collide.
It’s about the First Amendment, which Trump invoked in responding on Twitter (apparently his favorite medium) to the events at and around the cancelled rally. Here’s his tweet: “The organized group of people, many of them thugs, who shut down our First Amendment rights in Chicago, have totally energized America!”
Some observers have been quick to point out that the First Amendment only protects speech against (some) government restrictions, not against private individuals or groups that interfere with your ability to speak your piece. Stated another way, neither side in a cacophonous shouting match is depriving the other of any First Amendment right, however both might in certain circumstances have a claim against government agents who sought to silence them.
So Donald Trump was speaking loosely on Twitter, which is par for the course, both for him and for his chosen medium of expression. But he actually was onto something that lawyers or pedants like me who sometimes try to sound lawyerly in front of a classroom all too frequently forget: a bill of rights, of which ours is an outstanding example, isn’t only the basis of an actionable legal claim. It is also meant to teach us which of rights are most important, which we should be most jealous of, and which we should respect in our daily lives as neighbors and citizens. In other words, a bill of rights can teach us what to cherish, both for ourselves and for others.
Let me explain by recurring to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. In the first chapter, Mill writes of a number of developments in “the struggle between Liberty and Authority,” the first of which was “obtaining a recognition of certain immunities, called political liberties or rights, which it was to be regarded as a breach of duty in the ruler to infringe.” Such a bill of rights—think of the Magna Carta as a prime example—historically preceded other measures to protect individual liberty, like institutional checks and balances and representative government. Indeed, even at the time of the American Founding there was no necessary connection between arguments insisting on the necessity of a Bill of Rights for the new constitution and those suggesting the advisability or necessity of judicial review. The former wasn’t thought necessarily to imply the latter as the principal vehicle of enforcement.
So what was, then, a Bill of Rights? It was an attempt to list the rights that the people regarded as most important to protect, by one means or another, from government encroachment. It was certainly addressed to those who exercised political power, warning them that such encroachments would evoke a response. But it was also addressed to the people, reminding them of the rights they should cherish and defend, so that any government attempt on them would indeed evoke an appropriately vigorous response. We’re not just supposed to wait for someone else to protect our rights, but, knowing what they are, we’re supposed to take it upon ourselves jealously and zealously to guard them.
The almost inevitable consequence of this jealous and zealous defense of rights is that it might be invoked in “technically” inappropriate contexts, against other citizens rather than against government. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if it prompts, not litigation (all too often Trump’s first recourse), but a little self-reflection. Perhaps we can remind ourselves, or perhaps we can be reminded, that the rights we cherish for ourselves we ought properly to cherish for everyone. When I claim freedom of speech for myself, I should remember that my freedom is not mine alone, but everyone’s. As I demand that my rights be respected (in the first instance by government, but ultimately by everyone), so I should respect the rights of others.
One possible result of loose rights talk, corrected not by lawyers, but by (say) political theorists or historians, is an appreciation of the roles that mutual respect and civility play in facilitating the speech that makes self-government possible. Here both Donald Trump and his detractors have a thing or two to learn. For Trump, while it’s entirely appropriate to be indignant when someone interrupts you, it’s altogether inappropriate to threaten or encourage a violent response. (In fact, if you want to get technical or legalistic here, the kind of speech in which Trump engages in response to hecklers approaches incitement to violence, which is potentially actionable and is not protected by the First Amendment.) For the protesters and hecklers, a decent respect for one’s fellow citizen requires that you let the man speak. If you disagree with him, find your own forum, don’t try to hijack his.
Courts in any event should be our last resort, especially if we cherish our rights and demand that others respect them. Above all, we should make ourselves worthy of respect, or, if you will respectable. That ought to be the first lesson of all our rights talk: with rights come responsibilities.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Mar 14, 2016
Last week, the Virginia senate passed what could become the nation’s sixth education savings account law, pending a governor’s signature. HB 389 would allow children with special needs to apply for an account. With an account, Virginia would deposit a portion of a child’s funds from the state formula in a private bank account that parents would use to buy educational products and services for their children.
Virginia’s proposal is similar to laws enacted in Arizona, Nevada, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Education savings accounts in these states allow families to use a child’s account to customize a child’s learning experience with online classes, private school tuition, curricular materials like textbooks, and, critically for children with special needs, educational therapy like speech and occupational therapy.
In Virginia, 13 percent of students—some 161,000 children—have special needs and could use an account to find educational services to help them succeed. As this blog has explained previously, Arizona families are hiring individual tutors to help children with autism, students who were struggling to learn basic skills prior to using an account. Others are combining public school extracurricular activities with home-based instruction, which gives children the chance to interact with their peers and learn in a setting that meets their needs. Such opportunities give hope to children and their parents.
Education savings accounts also provide lawmakers with a solution for large, statewide policy issues looming on the horizon.
Research from Matthew Ladner, Ph.D. at the Foundation for Excellence in Education finds that Virginia and Georgia have something in common: High age-dependency ratios. For Virginia, their score of +19 means the state has a “high percentage of people out of the workforce and a relatively small percentage of people trying to cover the costs of their education, retirement, and health care.”
The U.S. Census projects that Virginia’s public school enrollment will increase by 300,000 students over the next 15 years while the population of adults over 65 will almost double. The expansion in these two sectors will put a strain on taxpayer-funded services in education and health care.
Georgia finds itself in a similar position. Georgia’s +16 score is slightly below the national average of +17, but still points to a future where fewer people are pulling the cart of social programs and increasing numbers are sitting in the cart. The Census estimates Georgia’s student population will increase by a half-million students, while its elderly population will increase by nearly 1 million.
Education savings accounts and other private school choice options like tax credit scholarships (already available in Virginia and Georgia) will help ease the pressure on taxpayers who would be asked to pay for new district school buildings and public school staff. Parental choice in education comes at a significant discount compared to district school services. In Arizona, education savings accounts for children with special needs are worth 90 percent of what is spent on these children in traditional schools while, on average, mainstream students’ accounts amount to 50-60 percent of what taxpayers spend per child in district schools.
Virginia and Georgia badly need solutions like these. Education savings accounts improve the quality of life for participating families and can provide students with choices as the demands for public services increase.
Jonathan Butcher is education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee.
