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March 2007
By Jim Wooten, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgians, by experience and nature, take slowly to change. Part of it is our rural and small-town heritage. Part, too, is the experience of an impoverished region that found seniority in Congress to be an effective strategy for bringing good military-related jobs to poor, under-trained sharecroppers and mill workers.
We warm to new ideas, ease up slowly, talk around them, declare them not to be precisely what we need, agonize --- and then buy.
That's about where Georgia is on legislation now before a House committee to give education choice to parents of special needs students in the state's public schools. It's not a new idea in the least. Florida has run the program on which Georgia's proposed legislation is modeled since 2001. Arizona passed a nearly identical program to Florida's in 2006, Utah the year before.
And as the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit, public interest law firm based in Arlington, Va., will report on Monday, the idea of giving students and their parents something that, depending on perspective, is either a scholarship, grant or voucher, is not new at all.
"The state of Georgia offers no less than 11 scholarships, grant or voucher programs related to the care and education of its young people, from kindergarten through post-secondary education," conclude researchers Dick Carpenter and Sara Peterson.
The HOPE scholarship, created in 1993, is the biggest and most popular of them, this year going to 218,000 Georgians. Besides those getting free tuition at state institutions, HOPE also provides $3,000 in public money for full-time students, half that for part-timers, to buy the education services they want from any private college or university in the state, including those with religious affiliations.
For 35 years, public money has gone to private colleges as tuition equalization grants, specifically to promote private higher education in the state. Students choose where to spend. Last year, $900 grants went to 27,362 students. Over the years, more than half a billion taxpayer dollars have gone to nonpublic colleges, including those with religious affiliations.
In addition to voucher-scholarships for post-graduate study, taxpayers also fund a pre-k program for 76,600 children that involves the state purchasing education services from public, private and religious providers, that's then provided without cost to parents.
The list goes on. "Georgia has spent almost $6 billion helping nearly 4 million citizens since 1973 through choice-based aid programs," note the researchers for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian research and litigation organization.
Senate Bill 10 pending in the House Education Committee, where a vote is expected the last week of March, is the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act, authored by state Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah). It has drawn opposition from the alphabet-soup organizations that traditionally control the General Assembly debate on education issues. But one key to their clout historically diminishes with time. When virtually every member of the Legislature had a family connection to the public schools, either as a teacher or administrator, the agendas of their organizations effectively set the parameters for the debate.
Still, this is a General Assembly nervous about venturing forth with anything unfamiliar. That includes, especially, school choice even when the Special Needs Scholarship Act neither forces nor encourages any parent satisfied with the services their child receives in public schools to make any other choice.
As former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush pointed out in an op-ed in Friday's AJC, opponents offer gloom and doom scenarios claiming that choice will destroy public schools and that private schools lack accountability.
"Georgia can rest assured," Bush wrote, "that these doomsday statements have already been proven false in Florida. Our full scholarship program has been in existence for more than six years, and it is working. Equally as important, our public school system is doing better today than it was six years ago.
"Students with disabilities who remain in our public schools are learning more. In fact, we have an 11-point increase in the percentage of our students with disabilities who are reading on grade level or higher over the last six years."
The parents who leave are satisfied. Those who remain behind are doing better. Who loses?
It's time for Georgia to get over its nervousness, to get past its reluctance to embrace anything unfamiliar. Nobody loses.
* Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
The above column appeared in the March 18, 2025 Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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