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PAGE 7A
ForsythOpinion
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Good news for
Georgia students
TOM CRAWFORD
Columnist
With all of the attack ads
running on TV this election
season, Georgians have no
doubt had their fill of pessi
mism and negativity.
For that reason, it’s encour
aging to report there has actual
ly been some good news this
fall for public school students:
nearly two-thirds of the local
school systems are able to keep
their classrooms open for 180
days of instruction during the
academic year, as was once
required by state law.
- That reverses a depressing
trend that started more than a
decade ago and continued
through the first three years of
Gov. Nathan Deal’s administra
tion.
During that period, the for
mula funding provided in the
state budget to local school sys
tems was reduced each year as
legislators tried to balance the
budget. The combined amount
of these “austerity cuts” over
the past 10 years runs at about
$8.4 billion.
- After the great recession of
2008-09 and the resulting eco
nomic downturn, local school
boards had a difficult time deal
" ing with the cutbacks in state
funds. Many of them, especial
ly in rural counties, had to dis
miss teachers and eliminate
classroom days to keep from
cut more than 30 days from the
school calendar.
During the 2011-12 school
year, according to data from the
state Department of Education,
just 60 of Georgia’s 180 school
systems provided a full 180
days of classroom instruction.
That number declined to 56
systems for 2012-13 and 57
systems in 2013-14.
When you cut the number of
days that students are in the
classroom and reduce the num
ber of their teachers, you can
not expect positive results. We
were reminded of that recently
when the latest release of SAT
exam scores showed the aver
age score for Georgia students
had slipped to 52 points below
the national average.
During this year’s General
Assembly session, with the
governor and incumbent
lawmakers facing a reelec
tion campaign, Deal pro
posed adding back $314 mil
. lion in formula funding for
. local schools. The legislature
agreed and put the money
.-into the current state budget.
The extra money did not
completely reverse the
reductions in formula fund
. ing for local schools, but it
. helped.
For the current school
. year, nearly two-thirds of the
: local systems (119 out of
* 180) have scheduled 180
instructional days on their
: academic calendars.
* “It’s hard to say anything
- for certain without surveying
, all of the superintendents,
+ but it seems apparent that the
* major factor in the uptick in
systems adopting a full cal
. endar of instructional days
» this year was the additional
- money put into QBE (formu
la funding),” said Matt
Cardoza, a spokesman for
the Department of
Education.
“Districts have more
money on hand and they
seem to have used that to add
instructional days, which we
applaud.”
Of those districts that still
have shorter school calen
dars, a majority of them
scheduled at least 170
instructional days for their
students.
The systems that reduced
their calendars to 160-169
instructional days were
Butts, Cook, Franklin,
Murray, Pike, Toombs, and
Walton counties.
The counties that reduced
the number of instructional
days below the 160-day level
were Wilcox, Stewart,
Webster, Haralson and
Chattooga.
Education funding has
been a contentious issue in
the governor’s race between
Deal and his Democratic
challenger, state Sen. Jason
Carter.
Deal says this year’s
increase in funding is evi
dence of his support for pub
lic schools.
“We're doing, I think, -
extraordinarily well in terms
of funding K-12 education,”
Deal said during a recent
debate with his opponent.
Carter says Georgia also
should have put additional
money into education during
Deal’s first three years, when
more than two-thirds of the
local systems were forced to
cut the number of classroom
days.
“Education has to be our
priority every single year,
and not just in an election
year,” Carter said in that
same debate.
Voters will soon be able to
choose which candidate’s
approach to education fund
ing they prefer, which is at it
should be.
What matters is that
Georgia’s students are doing
better than they were last
year, because more of them
attend schools that are able
to keep their classrooms
open for 180 days.
When you see the positive
impact that increased state
funding has had for local
school systems, it makes you
wish every year was an elec
tion year.
Tom Crawford is editor of The
Georgia Report, an Internet
news service at gareport.com
that reports on state govern
ment and politics. He can be
reached at tcrawford@gare
port.com.
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Jim Powell for the Forsyth County News
Does the end of history
result in political decay?
Francis Fukuyama picked an
auspicious publication date for his
latest book, “Political Order and
Political Decay.” The news is full
of stories of political decay: the
Centers for Disease Control and
Ebola; the Department of Veterans
Affairs’ health service; the Internal
Revenue Service political target
ing.
Europe gives us the dysfunction
al euro and no-growth welfare
states. Not to mention failed states
in the’Middle East and the Russian
invasion of Ukraine.
Critics have lambasted
Fukuyama for proclaiming, in the
title's 1992 book, “The End of
’ t’s not entirely fair.
t there was that the
battle of ideas was over since no
one had advanced convincingly a
superior alternative to capitalism
and democracy.
Challengers have emerged in
recent years — [slamist terrorists,
Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s
capitalist Communists. But their
regimes lack broad appeal beyond
the reach of their arms. Most of the
world is still bent on “getting to
Denmark” — Fukuyama'’s short
hand phrase for an effective,
accountable, tolerant and law
bound society.
Getting even close to Denmark
took a long time. In his 2011 book
“The Crigins of Political Order,”
Fukuyama surveyed the develop
ment from prehistoric times to the
year 1800 of the three institutions
he argues are indispensable for a
decent polity: an effective state, the
rule of law and democratic
accountability.
The Chinese developed a com
petent bureaucracy around 200
8.C., but have still not yet
embraced the rule of law and have
only disorderly accountability (see
Hong Kong). In Western Europe,
the Catholic Church emerged as a
rival to weak states and imposed
the rule of law upon them.
Democratic accountability grew
from England’s Magna Carta in
1215, but had made only limited
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Jimmy Margulies The (New Jersey) Record
This is a page of opinion — ours, yours and
others. Signed columns and cartoons are the
opinions of the writers and artists, and they
may not reflect our views.
-
v
MICHAEL BARONE
Columnist
progress in Europe by
“Origins™’ 1800 cutoff date.
The going has remained hard.
because, in Fukuyama’s words,
“All good things do not necessarily
go together”” His three goals are
often in tension with one another.
Good things produce bad things;
bad things produce good things.
China produced an effective state
bureaucracy 2,200 years ago and
Prussia in the 18th century because
they faced aggressive neighbors
and needed to fund a competent
military. That gave them rule by
law, but not a rule of law capable,
of binding emperor or Kaiser or
Fuhrer.
Democratic accountability grew
in Britain’s distant North American
colonies and flowered in a repub
lic, with a Constitution and courts
imposing the rule of law and legis
latures establishing democratic
accountability through universal
(white) manhood suffrage. But
the young republic’s political
patronage system meant that
America lacked an effective state
bureaucracy until the Progressive
reforms of the early 20th century.
Moreover, there is the possibil
ity — probability, likelihood,
certainty — of decay. Fukuyama
is disappointed that the U.S.
Forest Service, his paragon of
(large-P) Progressive bureaucra
cy, has decayed because of con
tradictory congressional com
mands and court mandates. Too
much democracy and rule of law
make for an ineffective state.
But there’s a bigger problem
here. Fukuyama compares
Progressive bureaucracy with
Taylorite management of assem
bly lines. Neither factory work
ers nor bureaucrats are automata.
They work better when they have
discretion.
Markets discipline manufactur
ers, but bureaucracies, as
Fukuyama notes, decay through
intellectual rigidity and regulato
ry capture. The interests they
supposedly regulate use the
instruments of democratic
accountability and rule of law to
get their way over the years.
Despite his broad historical
sweep, Fukuyama’s diagnosis of
decay seems over-focused on the
minutiae of current American
political battles. Much recent
gridlock comes from President
Obama’s disinclination or inabil
ity to negotiate. His two prede
cessors did better.
Nor, as he acknowledges, do
parliamentary systems operate
much differently these days.
Some governments have man
aged to scale back unsustainable
welfare state commitments.
Others, like ours, haven’t.
The bottom line is that good
things (stable government, lack of
defeat in war or major economic
collapse) tend to produce bad
things (decay of bureaucratic insti
tutions, capture of regulators by
the regulated, protracted litigation
over needed projects and changes).
And conservatives’ lament that a
government that tries to do too
many things ends up doing none of
them well rings true.
The lesson I take from
“Political Order and Political
Decay” is that getting to
Denmark is Sisyphus’ work. You
can get that stone uphill, with
great effort, but there’s always a
tendency for it to slide down
again — and for those who start
ed off at the bottom to pass you
later on their way up.
Michael Barone, senior political
analyst at the Washington Examiner,
where this article first appeared, is a
resident fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, a Fox News
Channel contributor and a co-author
of The Aimanac of American
Politics.