For months, the Georgia Legislature has served as a key battleground for the charter schools debate. Now the fight goes to the voters who will ultimately decide the fate of a constitutional amendment to allow 'state-chartered" schools over the objection of local school boards.

The measure, which creates a state charter school commission to approve charters rejected by local school boards, became a major focal point of the legislative session. Wausau Daily Herald broke down the thousands of dollars that lobbyists spent on meals and gifts to woo state lawmakers to their side, which verge on the ridiculous. For instance, the American Federation for Children, advocating for the measure, "paid $75 for frames for photos of state lawmakers with former Braves pitcher John Smoltz." The House passed the measure in March, but it stalled in the Senate. It was only on Monday that four Democrats chose to support the measure, giving the measure more than the two-thirds it needed. Now advocates and opponents will try to convince voters to support them.

 

Voters can expect a complete bombardment. But like almost all the discussions about charter schools, the debate seems to center around two key questions—are charters inherently more innovative than traditional schools and where will the funding for them come from?

 

Funding became the central question in the legislative debate. The legislature created a similar commission in 2008, until the state Supreme Court knocked it down as unconstitutional last May, largely because the old measure withheld state aid to school districts and instead sent that money to charter schools to make up for the lack of local tax dollars (The Newnan Times-Herald has a nice recap of the situation).

 

This time around, to get the necessary support in both chambers, authors altered the measure to guarantee that the measure would not have an impact on local funding. The move got some Democrats behind the bill, but many opponents remain unconvinced. After all, the money has to come from somewhere, and these are lean times for state revenues. Some worry that despite the change to the bill, there's still enough wiggle room in the language to divert funds.

 

The concern about funding connects strongly to suspicions around charter schools more broadly. Senate Republicans killed an amendment that would have required the charters to be non-profits. That means for-profit schools will compete for state dollars—leaving skeptics worried that traditional public schools could lose out to those trying to make money. Meanwhile, local school boards have significantly less say in the fate of their districts.

 

For many advocates, though, the entire appeal of charters (and school choice) is the free market approach. From this point of view, regulations and teacher contracts are the things holding traditional schools back. As one senator told Georgia Public Broadcasting, "At the end of the day, we spend $9 billion on education so if we have to have some for-profits involved in order to improve our academic performance, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

 

The trouble is, there's an increasing lack of evidence that charter schools as a whole are really doing things any better than public schools. And ironically, that's particularly true in Georgia, where the state Department of Education came out with an in-depth report last week showing that "the general trend of Georgia charter school performance mirrors the trend of traditional public school performance."

 

Many expected the report's findings would cool down support for the charter measure. Instead, a week after its release, the Senate passed it. In November, we'll see if state voters follow suit.

Georgia is undergoing a population boom—the state’s population grew more than 18 percent from 2000 to 2010. Significant demographic shifts have accompanied this growth. In advance of Tuesday’s Republican primary in Georgia, here are some facts on how emerging communities of color are affecting Georgia’s economy and political electorate.

1. Georgia is at a demographic tipping point. It is 1 of 13 states where people of color make up more than 40 percent of the population. The state has 44.1 percent nonwhite residents, and the nonwhite share of the state has increased by 6.7 percent in the past decade. From 2000 to 2009 Georgia’s Hispanic population accounted for 23.2 percent of the state’s population growth.

2. People of color make up a substantial portion of Georgia’s population. African Americans make up 31.5 percent of the population, while 8.8 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino, and 3.8 percent is Asian American.

3. Georgia has a large racial generational gap. In 2010, 73.2 percent of Georgia residents over the age of 60 were non-Hispanic whites, 21.9 percent were African American, and a mere 2.2 percent were Hispanic. In the same year only 46.9 percent of Georgia children were non-Hispanic whites, while 34.4 percent were African American and 12.7 percent Hispanic. Also that year the median age of Hispanics in Georgia was only 25.2, while the median age of non-Hispanic whites was 40.4. These demographic gaps are consistent with nationwide trends: In 2010, 80 percent of American seniors were white, compared to only 54 percent of American youth.

4. This demographic change is reshaping the electorate. The share of Georgia’s electorate that is African American is more than double the national average. In 2008 blacks made up 30 percent of the state’s eligible voters, while nationally blacks were only 12.2 percent of all eligible voters. And the Hispanic share of Georgia’s vote is growing. From 2000 to 2010 the state’s Hispanic population increased by 66 percent, and the number of eligible Hispanic voters in the state increased by 181 percent. In 2010, 194,000 Hispanics were eligible to vote in Georgia. Also, as a group Latino eligible voters are younger than voters of other races and ethnicities in Georgia. Thirty-two percent of eligible Latino voters are between the ages of 18 and 29, while only 27 percent of eligible black voters and 20 percent of eligible white voters are within that age range.

5. In the 2008 presidential election, African Americans voted heavily for then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and nearly caused an upset in a Senate seat. Although Sen. Obama lost the state to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) by more than 5 percent, African American voters in Georgia heavily supported Sen. Obama at the polls. Exit polls suggested that 98 percent of African American voters cast their ballots for Sen. Obama, while only 2 percent voted for Sen. McCain. The election energized African American voters in the state, whose turnout rate increased by 7.5 points between 2004 and 2008. High turnout and an enthusiastic Democratic electorate created an unexpectedly close race for Republican incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who faced a runoff election in December 2008.

6. Georgia copied Arizona’s deeply unpopular anti-immigrant bill by passing its own law, H.B. 87, in 2011. Among other things, H.B. 87 makes it a crime to harbor or transport undocumented immigrants and empowers law enforcement to ask for “papers please” from anyone they suspect to be in the country without status. While polling on H.B. 87 is unavailable, 74 percent of Latino voters nationwide oppose the bill that inspired it, Arizona’s S.B. 1070.

7. The state is currently feeling the effects of this anti-immigrant measure. Earlyestimates argue that the state could lose between $300 million and $1 billion in the 2011 growing season alone.

8. Individuals in communities of color face significant economic hurdles. The median incomes of African Americans and Hispanics in Georgia were just 61.5 percent and63.9 percent respectively of the median for non-Hispanic whites. And almost half of all Hispanics in Georgia and more than one-fifth of African Americans in the state lack health insurance, compared to only 14 percent of non-Hispanic whites.

9. Unemployment has also hit these communities harder than non-Hispanic whites. In 2010, 12 percent of African Americans, 8.2 percent of Hispanics, and 11.8 percent of mixed-race individuals in the labor force over the age of 16 in Georgia were unemployed, while only 6.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites were unemployed.

10. Nevertheless, communities of color contribute significantly to the state’s economy. In 2010 unauthorized immigrants paid $456.3 million in state and local taxes, and in 2009 the purchasing power of Georgia’s Latinos totaled $17 billion—an increase of more than 1,000 percent since 1990. Also the 32,500 Latino-owned businesses in Georgia brought in more than $6 billion and employed almost 36,000 people in 2007. Additionally, the number of Asian American-owned businesses in Georgia increased by 71.8 percentbetween 2002 and 2007, and Georgia is now the second-fastest growing state for Asian American-owned businesses.

With more than half a million students attending classes in rural schools, Georgia has the third largest absolute rural student enrollment estimates in the nation. According to the Why Rural Matters assessment, only six out of 10 rural students in the state are expected to graduate from high school.

For the last two years, Lisa Schnellinger has researched the demographics of the North Georgia area, while producing tutorials for the University of Georgia regarding techniques for covering and reporting on rural poverty. While covering Pickens County, Ga. – a county where more than 15 percent of the total juvenile populations lives under the poverty line – she noted a sharp contrast between the rural wealthy and rural impoverished.

“It has a very wealthy eastern half and a pretty impoverished western half,” she said. “It’s like two different worlds.”

She said that while the eastern half of Pickens County consists of fairly affluent neighborhoods, including a number of gated communities, she said the western landscape consists mostly of trailers and mobile homes.

“They’re basically fortunate that the weather isn’t worse here, because they don’t look like they would hold up,” she added. “They’re just kind of tucked into these smaller, rural roads, where if you’re traveling through the county on the main road, they really are kind of invisible.”

Schnellinger did a week of guest teaching at the local high school, and made several observances about the community and its demographics.

“What is striking to me is that there is a big divide between people who are locals, natives to the area in these rural counties, and people like me, who are outsiders, who came in later,” she said.

“It’s not that people are unfriendly. They’re great, they’re really nice up here, but they know I’m not from here, and it takes some time for them to trust somebody who maybe isn’t from here, because so often, they have been judged by people like me.”

Despite the pervasiveness of poverty in the area, Schnellinger said that the students she observed were reluctant to address their economic conditions.

Photo by Pam Simpson | activerain.com

“It’s very difficult as an outsider to be accepted in that way, to have someone take you into their confidence in terms of talking about how difficult their lives are,” she said. “They don’t like to talk about it, especially the kids at the age group I knew. They just want to fit in, the last thing they want is to let anybody know they’re family’s not doing very well.”

Mahaffey likewise said one of the largest issues surrounding rural poverty pertains to public perceptions.

“If you poll the public, and this has been consistent over the years, and you ask them to give a sense of what they think rural America is, there are really two predominant themes that emerge,” Mahaffey said. He then described two divergent, stereotypical views of rural America, one of them an idyllic, “Norman Rockwellian” burgh and the other a wasteland of abject poverty, ill health and illiteracy.

“The vast majority of rural America is much more diverse, much more culturally rich, much more engaged in building community and where people are deeply committed to the success of their family,” he said. “We work very hard to break down some of those stereotypes, [because] those stereotypes influence public policy.”

The Why Rural Matters report also notes that rural education enrollment figures have increased since the organization’s 2008-2009 findings. Mahaffey said that the rural classrooms are also becoming increasingly multicultural due to immigration and migration from urban areas.

“Children are becoming more and more diverse,” Mahaffey commented. “There is a significant increase in the number of children of color that are going to schools in rural places, as well as a wide range of ethnic groups and migrant groups.”

According to research findings, minority pupils now make up more than a quarter of the rural student body. The Rural School and Community Trust findings indicate that the number of Hispanic students in the nation’s rural schools have increased more than 150 percent since 2009.

Mahaffey said that effects of the ongoing recession are almost impossible to overstate in terms of influence on the state of contemporary rural education.

“With respect to the recession across America in education, [it has] been critical to the point of devastating on certain levels,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the stimulus package and the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, hundreds of thousands of teachers would have been let go. State budgets across the country are in real difficult shape around education, and so are support services and professional development.”

Mahaffey said that school funding system reforms are essential in curbing “inequities” in how resources and support are allocated to rural areas.

“Basically, we fund schools based on your ZIP code, and that is inherently unfair for kids who live in high poverty places,” he said. “It’s a critically important issue, so when the recession hit, with the drop in property value and others things that have impacted those revenue streams for schools, it’s been a real challenge.” Mahaffey noted that the three states that have seen the most vocal opposition from teachers to public employee collective bargaining agreements – Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin – are all states with high percentages of students attending classes in schools classified as rural.

Mahaffey said that Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which implements a funding stream that provides resources to schools based on a per-people-spending formula, is unfair to students living in rural areas.

“This is a top public policy issue for us,” he said. If you’re a poor kid in a low population place, there’s less per-people-spending for kids there [than there is] in a higher concentration poverty place.”

Mahaffey said that he supports a “community school model” for rural school districts, with “wraparound, integrated” incentives such as health care and legal services provided for teachers that work in rural communities.

“We focus on initiatives, broadly speaking, to grow your own,” Mahaffey stated. He said that programs that develop and train former rural students, with additional “point of delivery” services included, could help teacher retention rates in impoverished areas.

“A lot of rural schools are already living that model,” he said. “Many of them, interestingly enough, go back and teach at schools they went to as children.”

Mahaffey concluded by criticizing politicians that may consider education budgets as potential targets heading into the 2012 election cycle.

“It’s a bit disingenuous on the part of public officials, and I don’t care if they’re local, state or federal, that they make a grandstanding point about the fact that our children are our future,” he stated. “And then, not fund education programs.”

“There’s a real disconnect in my mind about how people can make those public statements and then not carry on with their support for investing in education.”

A federal appeals court Tuesday sided with Georgia in its 20-year-old water war with Alabama and Florida.

In a 95-page ruling, the Atlanta-based U.S. 11th District Court of Appeals overturned a lower court decision handed down nearly two years ago that had threatened to cut off Lake Lanier as metro Atlanta’s primary water source just one year from now.

“The injunction is gone,” said Patricia Barmeyer, a lawyer with King & Spalding LLP who represented Georgia in the case. “There is no more 2012 deadline.”

The appellate court held that U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson was wrong when he declared in July 2009 that water supply was not an authorized purpose of the federally managed reservoir when Buford Dam was built during the 1950s.

Tuesday’s decision remanded the tri-state water dispute back to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, giving the agency one year to make a final determination of its authority to operate the dam.

Magnuson had given the three states three years to work out a water allocation agreement. Absent a settlement, under his order, water withdrawals from Lake Lanier were to be reduced in July 2012 to levels not seen since the mid-1970s.

Georgia has long argued that the reservoir was intended as a water supply.

“This means that the lake will continue to be available to meet Georgia’s needs,” said Brian Robinson, spokesman for Gov. Nathan Deal. “At first glance, it appears that the state of Georgia has won a great victory.”

Lawyers for Florida and Alabama had sought to limit the quantity of water Georgia could retain above Buford Dam, arguing that the two states needed an adequate flow of water down the Chattahoochee River system to protect endangered aquatic species in Florida and for power production purposes in Alabama.

Barmeyer said Tuesday’s ruling means the Corps will now go back and review a water supply request Georgia submitted more than a decade ago. The agency rejected the application at the time, citing its position that water supply was not among the reservoir’s intended purposes.

“[Now], water supply is on a par with hydropower, flood control and navigation,” she said.