Joshua Crawford, Senior Fellow of Public Safety Policy, joined FOX 5 to discuss issues about high-crime and criminal justice policy impacting voters ahead of the midterm elections.
(The Center Square) — The U.S. Department of Education has awarded a nearly $38.3 million grant to fund the expansion of charter schools throughout Georgia.
The money awarded to the State Charter Schools Foundation of Georgia is from the fiscal 2022 Charter Schools Program State Entity grant competition. The grant will fund the expansion of the Georgia Strategic Charter School Growth Initiative.
“Charter schools are one of many innovative ways available today in Georgia for families to customize their student’s education and give them the best learning environment possible,” Buzz Brockway, executive vice president of public policy for the Georgia Center for Opportunity, said in a statement.
We are excited to announce Randy Hicks is the winner of the Thomas A. Roe Award given by the State Policy Network.
The award was created 30 years ago to pay tribute to leaders who embody innovation, conviction, courage, and solutions in public policy and whose achievements have advanced free-market philosophy. The award was named for the State Policy Network’s founder, who spent much of his life encouraging states to grow organizations who preserve American liberties.
Georgia Center for Opportunity has been one of the host organizations for the State Policy Network’s Annual Meeting which is being held this week in Atlanta, GA. This is a gathering of organizations working on a state-level to promote realistic solutions to policy. It’s also a time for our team to collaborate with like-minded people and be inspired by new ideas and tactics.
Randy Hicks is the winner of the Thomas A. Roe Award!
Randy Hicks is the winner of the Thomas A. Roe Award.
Georgia ranked 14th in the nation for its educational freedom, according to a new indexfrom the Heritage Foundation.
The Peach State ranked in the middle of its neighboring states. Georgia performed better than Alabama (No. 16), North Carolina (15) and South Carolina (23) but trailed Florida (1) and Tennessee (10).
“The Heritage Foundation Education Freedom report card shows that some progress has been made in empowering parental choice in Georgia. But there is much more that can be done,” Buzz Brockway, the vice president of public policy for the Georgia Center for Opportunity, said in a statement.
“Neighboring states like Florida and Tennessee offer their parents more options, and are higher ranked in education achievement,” Brockway added. “We owe it to our children to give their parents more options with programs like an Education Scholarship Account and continuing to increase Georgia’s Tax Credit Scholarship program.
A core part of our mission at the Georgia Center for Opportunity is to give the poor and working class a leg up on the economic ladder. This doesn’t come through cycles of generational government dependence, but through career training and credentialing that provides the pathway to fruitful full-time work and, ultimately, a better life.
We believe the White House’s plan is wrong on many levels, but a top way is the way it unfairly penalizes the poor and working classes, which disproportionately do not have college degrees and have not attended any college at all.
Many of these individuals are working service-oriented jobs, entry-level positions, or laboring in the skilled trades. They are paying taxes. Yet under the Biden administration’s plan, they will bear the burden of paying off the student loans of their wealthier neighbors through their tax dollars.
Another way this plan hurts the poor and working class is by increasing inflation. This demographic spends a disproportionate share of their income on essentials like food and gas that have seen the most dramatic price increases in recent months.
As the Brookings Institution points out, $10,000 in debt forgiveness “would involve a transfer that is about as large as the country has spent on welfare … since 2000 and exceeds the amount spent since then on feeding hungry school children in high-poverty schools through the school breakfast and lunch program.”
The White House has labeled the plan a “forgiveness” of student loan debt. But in reality, this approach simply transfers the burden onto the backs of taxpayers.
We’ve already discussed how the poor and working classes are treated unfairly by this plan. But the unfairness extends to many middle class families as well who worked hard to pay off their student loans or their children’s student loans. Once again, government policy is punishing hard work.
According to Forbes, between 1980 and 2020, the cost of a college education jumped 169%. Meanwhile, the economic value of many four-year degrees has declined. The rapid inflation in the cost of college is, in large part, due to rampant government subsidies in higher education. Forgiving student loans only makes that problem worse.
The Success Sequence is a formula that outlines areas we can work in that will reduce poverty.
The Success Sequence is a formula that outlines areas we can work in that will reduce poverty.
Instead of loan forgiveness, we should work with borrowers to structure their loan repayments in a way that’s manageable but also helps them honor their commitments. We should also work to find a way to lower the cost of higher education to make it more affordable and encourage high school graduates to consider stable, good-paying jobs that do not require expensive college degrees.
There are other interventions that have been shown to have effects, it’s just that no single intervention gets you all the way.
It has been well documented that school closing due to the pandemic caused students to lose ground (see here and here). Recent polling suggests that parents are very concerned about this learning loss and want political leaders to focus on this issue.
Consider this from The74Million.com:
Matt Hogan, a partner at Impact Research, said that it was striking to see Republicans seize an edge on an issue that “has historically been one of the Democrats’ strengths.”
“There’s just a perception that Democrats’ focus on education is not where voters want it to be, which is helping kids make up the ground they lost,” Hogan said. “They think both parties are too focused on race and gender issues in schools, rather than focusing on catching kids up — but notably, they think that is true of Democrats even more so than Republicans.”
Notice that voters are not saying other issues, such as race and gender, are not important, just that learning loss is more important. Yet as we survey the political landscape, very few politicians or candidates are talking about what parents are most concerned about.
Perhaps this is because there is no magic wand that can be waived to fix the problem. There is no list of “five easy steps to catch your kids up, and number four will blow your mind.” There are, however, things that can and should be done immediately.
Recently, Harvard economist Tom Kane produced a study of the impact of learning loss and proposed solutions. Kane’s research found that one-on-one tutoring was effective, but not effective enough to eliminate the learning loss for students in schools that were closed most of the 2020-2021 school year. Schools, he said, should plan on implementing learning recovery strategies for multiple years. Kane said:
So what can schools and districts realistically be expected to do in this situation?
We can’t be thinking of this as a one-year catch-up. If we really are committed to making students whole and eliminating these losses, it’s going to be multiple years. There are other interventions that have been shown to have effects, it’s just that no single intervention gets you all the way.
In March, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 which included substantial funding for education. However, only 20% of those funds are required to be spent on recovering learning loss. Kane suggests districts spend more than 20% or perhaps all of their ARPA funds on learning loss recovery:
We try to put the scale of the [learning] losses and the amount of aid that districts have received in the same scale. We report both as a share of an annual school district budget, which I think is a useful starting point for thinking about what it’s going to cost a district to recover. If a district has lost the equivalent of, say, 22 weeks of instruction as a result of being remote, and you’re asking what it’s going to cost to make up for that, the lower bound of the estimated cost would have to start with [the question], “What does it cost to provide 22 weeks of instruction in a typical school year?”
We think that’s a useful starting point for people, and what they’d see is that in the high-poverty districts that were remote for more than half of 2021, the amount of aid they received is basically equivalent to — maybe a little more, but not much more than — the magnitude of their losses in terms of instructional weeks. That just means that, rather than spending the 20 percent minimum that was required in the American Rescue Plan, some districts should be thinking that they’ll need all of that aid for academic catch-up.
Imagine how much better off our society would be if politicians and school leaders truly committed to not only eliminating the pandemic learning loss, but using those interventions to insure every student is on grade level. How wonderful would that be?
Additionally, empowering parents to choose a school that best fits their child, be it traditional public school, tuition-free charter school, private school, or homeschool, should also be a tool we deploy to help get kids caught up.
Polling has made it clear that parents want learning loss recovery to be a high priority for their child’s school. In this election year, candidates and elected officials would be wise to make this an issue in their campaigns. Parents should demand this of their candidates, and then hold them accountable to eliminating learning loss for every student.
Imagine how much better off our society would be if politicians and school leaders truly committed to not only eliminating the pandemic learning loss, but using those interventions to insure every student is on grade level. How wonderful would that be?
