by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Mar 29, 2017
Education savings accounts could help Georgia lawmakers ease overcrowding in public schools, an ongoing challenge for some school districts. Legislators are considering bills that would allow students to use an account to choose how and where they learn, modeled after the accounts in Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Nevada.
Under the proposed legislation, and as described on this blog, the state deposits a portion of a child’s funds from the state formula into a private account that parents use to buy educational products and services for their children. Parents can choose different learning options like online classes, personal tutors, and private school tuition simultaneously, customizing a child’s education to meet their needs.
Some Georgia parents have complained of surging enrollment in public schools in recent years. Between 2014 and 2016, Georgia public school enrollment increased 7 percent or 117,000 students, according to state and federal sources. Decatur’s increases have been dramatic: District schools experienced a 123 percent increase over the past decade. Recent reports of overcrowding have also come from Horry County, Dalton, and DeKalb. In some cases, students have been forced to sit on the floor of school buses on the way to school due to class reassignments.
In Dalton, a Daily Citizen headline said residents are imploring lawmakers to “do something” about student overcrowding. Data from states where lawmakers have enacted education savings accounts demonstrate that student participation can help relieve the pressure on schools that see rapid enrollment growth. In Arizona, 3,500 are using accounts today (approximately 1 percent of the eligible student population). In Florida, 7,000 students are using the accounts. These modest figures can help with overcrowding issues.
Estimates that 156,000 Georgia students would use the accounts after 3 years and cost taxpayers $700 million bears no resemblance to student participation or funding in other states where students are using the accounts. This estimate is equivalent to having all the students leave DeKalb County and Atlanta Public Schools.
Even Georgia’s existing private school choice options which have been in place for many years have not grown this fast. Georgia’s private school scholarships for children with special needs have been available for nearly a decade, and fewer than 4,000 students are using a scholarship. Another Georgia private school scholarship offering is available to nearly all state students, and 13,000 children are using a scholarship (less than 1 percent of students in the state)—a figure that has held steady since 2012.
Meanwhile, lawmakers should consider how education savings accounts can be an efficient use of taxpayer money. According to the legislation, each Georgia account would be worth $4,500. The average student attending a traditional public school in Georgia is funded at $10,300. Average per student funding figures indicate Decatur’s 4,662 students—an all-time high—require more than $48 million from taxpayers annually. Their education savings accounts would use less than half this amount.
Estimates that education savings accounts would syphon students and funds from Georgia schools do not correspond with existing evidence. But the accounts can be a solution for Georgia lawmakers to moderate crowded classrooms while also providing families more educational options.
For more information about ESAs in Georgia, click here.
by Eric Cochling | Mar 23, 2017
We know that to avoid poverty, it is essential to get a high school diploma, maintain a steady job, and marry before having children (see research from the Brookings Institution and Harvard University on these points). Not only are they key to avoiding poverty, upward mobility and financial stability are closely tied to this family-education-work sequence, as well.
That is why our recent reports are so disturbing. They show that most of our welfare programs are systematically undermining two of the three keys to avoiding poverty and are doing so for some of the most vulnerable groups in our society.
In the first paper, Disincentives for Work and Marriage in Georgia’s Welfare System, we show that many of our welfare programs – alone or when combined –actually penalize earning more and create dramatic “welfare cliffs”.
For many parents on public assistance, receiving a raise or working longer hours can result in dramatic reductions in welfare benefits, often completely erasing what they gain by working more or receiving a raise. Even worse, there are times when earning more money through additional work or a pay raise can result in less income to the family because government benefits are reduced so much all at one time.
When families find themselves in this position, they are effectively locked into dependency, unable to work themselves into self-sufficiency without having to endure sometimes long, crippling periods of financial hardship.
To make matters worse, a similar set of perverse incentives exist when a parent on welfare decides to marry.
For many moms on public assistance for example, deciding to marry a boyfriend or the father of their children can mean that family income is dramatically reduced due to an immediate and steep loss of benefits. In many cases, the disincentives to marriage only go away if the potential husband is earning much more money than would be expected or likely under the circumstances. The result is that these moms must choose between forming a family (and the financial and relational stability it can bring in the long-term) or the short-term financial health of their families.
For a parent in this position, it is easy to see why many would simply choose to stay single and cohabit rather than marry. Unfortunately, research also shows that cohabiting couples struggle with relational instability in ways that married couples do not, so the welfare system ends up encouraging people to enter into relationships that are less likely to last and less likely to provide the stability that would allow them to escape poverty.
While the welfare system was not intentionally designed to work this way, it is unjust nonetheless. If it worked as it should, the system would encourage work and family formation at every turn – as the surest antidotes to poverty.
That is why in our next report, we will be setting out a suggested set of reforms that the state and federal governments can adopt to reform the system in a way that creates a sustainable safety-net that encourages the behaviors that we know are needed for individuals and families to escape and stay out of poverty. We will also be providing a plan for a how a state can implement these reforms on the ground if it chooses to take on reforming the system.
If you want to see how the welfare cliff works for different family types and in each of Georgia’s 159 counties, visit www.welfarecliff.org.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Mar 16, 2017
While lower, middle and upperclass can be defined in various ways, a State of the States report, defined lower class as those who did not complete high school; middle class (or moderately-educated, as referred to in the report) as those who graduated high school but did not go on to complete college; and upper class individuals as those who graduated from college.
The middle class has seen a 29 percent rise in women cohabiting between 1988 and the late 2000s. Historically, the lower class has always had a higher percentage of women who cohabited, but with the recent percentage increases, the middle class is almost equal to the lower class.
Out-of-wedlock childbearing more than doubled for the middle class between 1982 and the late 2000s; completely outpacing the lower class with a more than 30-point jump. In contract, those considered highly educated, or college graduates, only saw a very small increase of out-of-wedlock births.
Both lower and upper class couples had a decrease in divorce rates from the 1970s to 1990s (with the drop in divorces for lower class individuals, unfortunately, primarily attributable to much lower marriage rates).
The increase in cohabitation, divorce, and out-of-wedlock childbearing shows the middle class is now morphing into something that looks much more like the lower class. These changes appear to, at least in part, be driving a perception that the traditional “American Dream” is more and more out of reach for the average Americans. As the report points out, however, the American Dream is becoming more elusive because some of the habits that help assure financial success – like having babies after getting married – are becoming much less common.
While many factors have contributed to the middle class falling further behind the upper class, (including unemployment, lower wages, fewer social connections and less social capital) the strongest factor seems to be the failure to follow the ‘success sequence.’
As explained by Bradford Wilcox and Elizabeth Marquardt, the success sequence has long been the routine of those considered the upper class. They “embrace[d] the bourgeois values and virtues—for instance, delayed gratification, a focus on education, and temperance…[and] adhere devoutly to a “success sequence” norm that puts education, work, marriage, and childbearing in sequence, one after another.” Until quite recently, the middle class has embraced the important aspects of the success sequence in its behavior, which has allowed it to enjoy financial stability. By abandoning marriage, the middle class is abandoning the institution that allowed it to thrive. In many ways – and especially financially – it is now paying a price.
In order for the middle class to reappear from its disappearing act, marriage and the key supports that make successful family life more likely – a quality education and stable employment – must be addressed. This is the essence of our work and the decline of the middle class in America is one of the reasons we believe this work is more urgent than ever.
by Eric Cochling | Feb 1, 2017
National Marriage Week will be celebrated next week, just in time for Valentine’s Day. The celebration is now in its eighth year and seeks to foster collaboration around the country to “strengthen individual marriages, reduce the divorce rate, and build a culture that fosters strong marriages.”
The Marriage Week campaign website cites to tons of research on the many benefits of marriage and they have provided a list of events taking place in Georgia next week to celebrate marriage.
At GCO, we believe marriage is indispensable to the creation of healthy families and a stable society. That’s why we encourage you to love your family, teach your children to value marriage and the commitment it requires, and to take part in next week’s celebration.
If you want to strengthen your own marriage, check our Healthy Families Initiative and the resources we offer there.
by Kimberly Sawatka | Jan 12, 2017
GCO’s Director of Government Affairs discusses school choice in Georgia with Rusty Humphries, host of Trending Today USA.
For more information visit Georgia Parents Alliance or learn more through the GCO website.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Jan 12, 2017
Research evidence loves company. Consistent findings from different populations mean the results are less likely to be an accident and more likely to demonstrate a trend.
A new report from Mississippi finds that parents using education savings accounts report high levels of satisfaction, consistent with surveys of a similar law in Arizona. Ninety-one percent of respondents reported some level of satisfaction with Mississippi’s accounts, and 98 percent of respondents reported being either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with their educational choices after using an account. Seventy-one percent of parents in the survey reported being “very satisfied” with their choices.
Similar to accounts in Arizona, Florida, and Tennessee, the education savings accounts in Mississippi allow parents to buy educational products and services for their children using a portion of their child’s funds from the state funding formula. Parents can make multiple purchases simultaneously according to their student’s needs.
Mississippi lawmakers gave parents of children with special needs this flexible option in 2015 after years of criticism of state services for these students. Empower MS’s Brett Kittredge says, “It was clear that many of Mississippi’s most vulnerable children were being left behind and this pattern would only continue unless policymakers took action.” In 2014, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that just 23 percent of Mississippi children with special needs graduated from a state high school.
Kittredge explains how Mississippi’s accounts are helping children like Lana Beard, who doctors diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome and visual perception disorder. The accounts helped the Beard’s access a school that has specialized services for children like Lana when her assigned district school was no longer the right fit. Her parents used the account to help cover tuition and services at the new school.
Thousands of families across Arizona and Florida have similar stories. In some cases, families use an account to help pay for personal tutors, online classes, home educational needs, and even college savings plans. In Arizona, where students from failing schools and military families are eligible for the accounts, along with children with special needs, approximately one-third of participants are using their account for more than one learning option.
In 2013, researchers from EdChoice and the Goldwater Institute studied the nation’s first education savings accounts in Arizona and also found parents were pleased with their choice to leave an assigned public school and use an account. All parents in the survey reported some level of satisfaction, and 71 percent of participants were “very satisfied,” even among the families that were satisfied with their child’s previous public school. Focus group research conducted by the Goldwater Institute has also found similar satisfaction levels.
Georgia policymakers preparing for the 2017 legislative session should use the growing research evidence on parent satisfaction with education savings accounts to support efforts to give state families similar options.
Even though Mississippi’s program is still in its infancy, Kittredge reports the number of applicants for the accounts in 2016-17 exceeded the state’s cap of 425. He says families are now on a waiting list for a chance to participate next year.
“Parents are the ultimate accountability rating,” Kittredge says. “That is why we believe understanding parental satisfaction with [education savings accounts] is so important in judging this program.”
Jonathan Butcher is a contributing scholar at GCO in addition to his role as the education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee.
