GA: Voucher Program Blowing Up Real Fast

Boom! Georgia's taxpayer-funded school voucher program turns out to be not so much "generous" as "huge." And all because reading is hard.

Georgia passed a law to create vouchers and a whole government agency to watch over them. Rural Republicans fought back hard, but in the end it was signed into law last March.

It turns out that a whole lot of people either didn't read the words in the law, or they just misrepresented them to other folks. The widespread belief was that, as many news reports put it, the education savings account style vouchers were for "students at low-performing schools who want to transfer to private schools."

Any student who attended a school in the lowest 25% of schools were going to get an ESA taxpayer-funded stack of money that they could spend on whatever edu-thing they wished.

Only it turns out that when the Georgia Education Savings Authority went to set up the rules for the Georgia Promise voucher, they read the actual language of the bill, and what it says right there in line
344 in the eligibility requirements is:

The student resides in the attendance zone of a public school that is included on the list of public schools provided for in Code Section 20-2B-29

See the difference? Not just attending the low-achieving school, but in the attendance zone for that school. So if an elementary school is on the naughty list, every middle and high school student who lives in that attendance zone is also eligible for a taxpayer-funded voucher.

The Associated Press is reporting this as if the GESA changed something. "Georgia makes many more students than expected eligible for school vouchers" says the headline. Like GESA pulled a fast one, or something was "changed." But the only fast one pulled here is by the people who knew exactly what the law said and let stand (or promoted) the idea that only those at low-scoring schools were eligible.

But here's House GOP Speaker Pro Temp Jan Jones saying that the "authority's interpretation" needs to be reined in. This, she says, is not what she advocated for. "That wasn't my understanding," she told the AP.

The House Education Committee chair, Republican Representative Chris Erwin has also announced that this needs to be fixed. “The scholarships are specifically designed for children in an individual school that meets the eligibility requirements, and are not intended to be provided to every student in a district where the qualifying school is located,” Erwin wrote in a text to the AP.

Look, I agree with the goal of reducing voucher damage to the school system of the state, and I'm even inclined to believe their current statements of protest, but come on, lawmakers-- the language is right there in the bill in plain English. Did nobody read it? Did everyone just accept the word of whatever lobbyist pushed the bill?

The law is set up to fund about 22,000 vouchers. The AP figures that about 400,000 students are eligible.

I retired after 39 years in the classroom as an English teacher, so it always saddens when people just don't bother to read (it has been a long year), and heaven knows that legislative bills are especially hard to wade through, but that's part of a legislator's job (or at least that of their staff). Georgia is now facing the result of some combination of ineptitude and turpitude. We'll see if they get anything changed in the next session.