Legislative malpractice
Aside from the cowardly and underhanded manner in which it was passed, why is the ridiculously misnamed “Alabama Accountability Act of 2013” bad for Alabama? Unfortunately, the reasons are many, starting with the fact that both of our equally misnamed “representatives” voted for it. Their actions of the past year indicate that the best interests of Alabama are far down their list of motivators.
Getting to specifics, however, the legislation fails on several accounts. To start with, the State Superintendent of Education and the Board of Education were kept in the dark about what was coming. Those we hired and elected to oversee our schools were not consulted, nor were they asked for their advice and input on the bill’s content. The legislature’s contempt for the superintendent and board was in evidence a day earlier with another bill before the House and Senate that would take control of curriculum standards from the State Board of Education, giving the legislature “final say over any statewide school standards.”
The legislative power grab continued when four members of a six-member committee took an 8-page bill that was to have allowed local school boards to apply for waivers from some state policies and substituted a 27-page bill that authorizes families to take their children out of public schools designated as “failing” and receive a tax credit for sending them to private schools.
Few know what the financial ramifications of this substitue bill will be, including those who voted for it. The Alabama State Department of Education is trying to figure this out after the fact, and has raised a number of concerns.
First, the bill lists four different criteria for what constitutes a failing school, none of which line up with the definitions under the State Board of Education’s Alabama Accountability Plan.
Currently students who attend schools identified as a School Improvement School have the option to transfer to another school in the system that is not needing school improvement. The new bill provides tax incentives for the students to leave the school system for a private school.
The word “accountability” in the bill’s name is just a word that means nothing, since the private or non-public schools for which tax credits are allowed are not required to have accountablity standards to go by to determine their status like the public schools do.
According to the Department of Education, Alabama’s public school transportation system is underfunded by $52-million less than what is needed to operate the system. Yet the bill would require local public school systems to incur added transportation costs to get students to their new schools.
The bill requires that the original public school system continue to be responsible for the costs of students needing special education services, even if that student no longer attends the school system. Federal funds would no longer be available to the local public school system for the special education needs of a student if that student was not at that school, however, requiring local revenue to support a student no longer in the local school system.
Those students who remain behind at a public school in need of improvement will see even less money available to provide programs in their school, since the number of students, and consequently state and federal funding, will be reduced.
In this slopppily drawn bill several of the references to testing criteria are outdated compared to current testing protocol. The Board of Education points out that should this bill become law public school students would be held to a much higher standard than those enrolled in non-public schools.
Neither the State Board of Education nor the power-drunk legislators who drew up this bill have an estimate of how much money will be lost to the Education Trust Fund due to the income tax credit being offered, but the board points out that colleges will suffer along with K-12 as the Trust Fund is diminished.
A Montgomery circuit judge yesterday halted the bill from going to the governor for his signature based on a lawsuit filed charging that the four committee members violated Alabama’s Open Meetings Law when they came up with this bill. The facts appear to support the lawsuit, so now maybe a full discussion by the full legislature with input from education and the public can take place and a better bill––or, better yet, none at all––will emerge.
It’s a shame it takes a lawsuit to make our legislators do the right thing. We’ve seen this before, though.
