Moving Beyond Soft Skills: Applying Noncognitive Factors in Georgia’s Schools
This article is the first in a series of posts that will address key issues impacting college and career readiness in Georgia, as discussed in the overview report, Fortifying Pathways: Themes to Guide College and Career Readiness in Georgia. By Aundrea Gregg and Eric...
Addressing the Constitutional Challenge to ESAs
Critics of Educational Savings Accounts often raise the issue of the constitutional challenges of using taxpayer funds to purchase private education. Recently, Jason Bedrick of the CATO Institute and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation highlighted this issue in...
New GCO Report: Fortifying Pathways
While education plays a tremendous role in shaping individual life outcomes, the number of students in Georgia who do not advance beyond K-12 remains astronomically high. Over 1 in 5 young adults in Georgia are not attending school, not working, and have no degree...
GA Lawmakers Seek to Tighten Sex Trafficking Laws
Safe Harbor/Rachel's Law Act - sponsored by Sen. Renee Unterman, R-Buford Georgia legislators, led by Sen. Renee Unterman, R-Buford, are seeking to tighten Georgia's existing sex trafficking laws. The combination of Senate Bill (SB) 8 and Senate Resolution (SR) 7...
Michael Bowers’ Religious Freedom Contretemps
I used to admire and respect Michael Bowers, Georgia’s Attorney General from 1981 to 1997, but his recent intervention in the debate over the religious freedom bills ought to embarrass him. To be sure, losing my respect won’t cost him any sleep and the mainstream...
Gov. Deal “Banned the Box” in Georgia
It's official. Governor Nathan Deal signed an executive order on February 23rd to "ban the box" on applications for state employment in Georgia. This order will remove the question about felony convictions from the initial job application and postpone it to a later...
Georgia Has Tried Reforms, But Are They Working?
Attempts at reforming the public education system in Georgia are not new. Even just looking over the last 20 years, numerous reform efforts have been introduced as a means to improve educational outcomes among the state’s youth. Some of these ideas have had a better...
Criminal Justice Reform Council Releases New Report – Focus on Reentry
The Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform (CJRC) released their latest report this past Friday (Feb. 6th) with recommendations aimed to increase public safety, hold offenders accountable, and reduce recidivism in our state. This is the fourth consecutive report...
Not More Money, But More Options
Georgia's public school system is failing many of our children, and it seems everybody has an opinion in regard to what needs to happen. But one truism has become apparent: More money is not the solution. Nationally, spending on public education in constant dollars...
Religious Hiring and State Religious Freedom Legislation
In a blog post, the AJC’s Jay Bookman tried to use a case in Kentucky to raise the spectre of what might happen in Georgia if the legislature passed the “Preventing Government Overreach on Religious Expression Act,” its version of the Religious Freedom Restoration...
