Education Week - October 1, 2014 - 20

Key Georgia Electoral Contests Put K-12 Front and Center
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Race to the Top grant. (See Education
Week, June 4, 2014.)
"I don't think the work itself is any
tougher. But the political environment
is a lot tougher
than it was four
years ago," said
Dana Rickman,
the policy and
research director
at the Georgia
Partnership for Excellence
in Education, a nonpartisan
policy and advocacy group founded
by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce
and the Georgia Economic
Developers Association.
Clash on Funding
Sen. Carter, the grandson of former
President Jimmy Carter-a
Democrat who also served as Georgia
governor-has pledged to drastically
increase spending on public
schools, and he has Ms. Wilson's
backing. But the issue isn't free of
complications for the senator when
it comes to how to foot the bill.
Since 2003, the state has underfunded
its Quality Basic Education
formula by $8.4 billion, and
Gov. Deal's tenure accounts for
just under half that gap. During
the past school year, according to
an analysis by the Atlanta-based
Georgia Budget and Policy Institute,
71 percent of districts cut
their school calendars below the
state's regular 180-day schedule,
and 80 percent furloughed teachers
as a result of budget constraints.
"State government has not been
doing its job, period," Sen. Carter
told a Sept. 15 forum of the Professional
Association of Georgia Educators,
or page, a nonunion group
representing 84,000 K-12 employees.
His proposal is to create a K-12
spending fund separate from the
rest of the state budget, which Sen.
Carter believes will better allow
the state to reach its "holy grail" of
properly funded schools.
Ms. Wilson, the Democratic candidate
for state chief, served as president
of the Georgia School Boards
Association and as board chairwoman
of the 4,200-student Decatur
city district. She said in an interview
that any new funding formula must
draw more on expertise from teachers
and local administrators and less
on people who have "never walked
into these buildings." She also said
that "it all comes back to resources."
However, Sen. Carter calls himself
a fiscal conservative and doesn't
want a state tax increase to reverse
K-12 cuts, and hasn't specified
where additional money for education
would come from. Gov. Deal
says that-combined with Sen.
Carter's votes supporting the governor's
education budgets, except the
one for fiscal 2015 that boosted K-12
funding by $535 million-shows the
senator is heavy on rhetoric but
short on clear solutions.
"I want to hear what the source of
the money is going to be," Gov. Deal
said after the page forum.
The sustainable solution to the
state's funding woes, the governor
said, is to revamp the state's funding
formula to reflect advances in
classroom instruction such as online
learning. And he stressed that
districts should continue to bear a
lot of fiscal responsibility. "Some
systems have managed their money
better than others."
Mr. Woods, the gop nominee for
state superintendent and a former
high school teacher and administrator,
wants a complete audit of
the state education department's
budget. But he hasn't specified any
programs he would cut out of the
department's budget. Like Gov.
Deal, he wants an overhaul of the
state's funding formula.
Flexible, Local Control
One of Gov. Deal's key policy prescriptions
is expanding the presence
of charter schools. But as with
Sen. Carter and school finance, the
topic presents rhetorical challenges
for the incumbent, this time regarding
the issue of district authority.
In early September, the governor
praised the Louisiana Recovery
School District, a state-run district
of charter schools that grew rapidly
after Hurricane Katrina devastated
New Orleans in 2005. But he subsequently
dismissed the idea that
he simply wants to copy Louisiana's
model, instead stressing that having
more charters will directly provide
better educational choices for
parents and flexibility for schools.
The state charter schools commission-the
subject of a controversial
ballot initiative in 2012-
has been very selective in the
charter schools it allows to open,
Gov. Deal noted, approving only
one of 16 proposals last year.
But Sen. Carter has said that the
governor's focus on charter schools
doesn't help relieve pressure on
schools short of cash, and he mocked
the idea of trying "to pay someone ...
with 'flexibility.' "
"We've become distracted by charRecent
High Court Dockets
Took Pass on School Cases
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just after the first Brown case,
overturning school segregation-
through the 2008-09 term, the
high court averaged about two
public school cases per term, and
about 11 per five-year block, with
the exception of the most recent
drought.
Those figures are based on Education
Week's own analysis and
focus on cases involving school
districts or local public school
officials. The analysis excludes
cases involving higher education,
those exclusively involving
private schools, and those about
RUNNING TALLY
Before the May 17, 1954, decision
in Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court
had decided only a few cases
involving local school districts in its
history. This chart covers cases with
a K-12 school district or local school
officials as parties, by term and fiveyear
periods, beginning with the term
after Brown was decided. The figures
do not include higher education
cases, private school cases, or
most of those involving state support
for private religious schools and
students.
Total number of public school
cases by five-year span
Number of public school cases by term
SOURCE: Education Week
20 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 1, 2014 | www.edweek.org
state aid to religious schools. It
also excludes cases in other areas
of the law, including some during
the past five years, that hold
significance for schools, such as
the public-employee-speech case
Garcetti v. Ceballos, decided in
2006.
"It's remarkable," Perry A.
Zirkel, a professor of educational
leadership at Lehigh University
in Bethlehem, Pa., and a longtime
observer of the Supreme Court's
handling of school cases, said of
the absence of such cases. "I think
the court has realized its own
limits" in the area of education
law, he said.
The court issues Brown II,
allowing school systems to
move "with all deliberate
speed" to desegregate;
renders its historic decision
rejecting state defiance to
integration in Little Rock, Ark.;
and, in a sign of the times,
upholds the dismissal of a
teacher for refusing to answer
questions about Communist
affiliations.
The recent drought may be an
anomaly, but there is evidence to suggest
that the justices have, indeed,
perceived limits to the court's capability
to serve as the nation's school
board.
From Schoolhouse to Courthouse
Shortly after the court decided the
Safford case on strip-searches in
schools, Chief Justice John G. Roberts
Jr. was asked at a judicial conference
about that decision, and another from
two years earlier, Morse v. Frederick.
In the Morse case, the justices had
upheld the discipline of a student for
unfurling a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner
at a school event.
The questioner asked what guidance
school administrators were
expected to take from the decisions,
which he perceived as conflicting.
Chief Justice Roberts used the
question to make the point that in
education and "across the board,"
local administrators should look
first to get policy guidance from their
local governmental bodies, such as
school boards.
"If you're going to get all your
guidance of that type from the Supreme
Court, you're going to have a
lot of difficulties," the chief justice
said. "It's only when bodies [that]
have the on-the-ground responsibility
for laying down the rules
haven't done so that the courts
have to get involved."
And education is no different from
other areas of the law, he said.
"You can't expect to get a whole
list of regulations from the Supreme
Court," Chief Justice Roberts continued.
"That would be bad, because we
wouldn't do a good job at it."
Such views are not limited to the
court's conservative members.
In a concurrence in the 2007 Morse
decision, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, a
member of the liberal bloc, expressed
a similar desire for the high court and
courts in general to avoid refereeing
every school dispute.
"The more detailed the [Supreme]
Court's supervision becomes, the
more likely its law will engender
further disputes among teachers
and students," Justice Breyer wrote.
"Consequently, larger numbers of
those disputes will likely make
their way from the schoolhouse to
the courthouse. Yet no one wishes to
substitute courts for school boards,
or to turn the judge's chambers into
the principal's office."
Whether those two justices' views
played any role in the dearth of school
cases the high court has accepted during
the past five years is known only
to the court's members.
Since its 2008-09 term, the court
The court begins to get serious about forcing schools to
desegregate. Separately, in one of its most lasting decisions on
school speech, the court upholds the right of students to wear
black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.
The court gives students procedural
due-process rights in school
discipline, but decides that corporal
punishment in schools does not
violate the Constitution.
The court's landmark decisions barring
state-sponsored prayers in public
schools engender sharp reactions in
the country.
In this period, the court upholds
busing for desegregation but finds
no federal constitutional violation
in an inequitable state-funding
system for education.
4
2 0 0 1 1
6
0 0 2 2 2
9
0 1 1 4 3
17
3 4 1 5 4
22
3 4 8 2 5
ELECTION
2014
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Education Week - October 1, 2014

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