Bad legislation for education

The idea sounds good. If the state spends $50 million to 100 million to provide a tax credit of $3,500-a-year per child to parents who have children in Alabama public schools classified as failing so their children can attend private schools. we will eventually pull from the morass of uneducated bliss to the ranks of the enlightened.

I won’t get into the all the demographic and social aspects of this proposal, but suffice it to say that those left in these underperforming schools will be children of the poorest of the poor. And guess what: Tuition and other costs at a decent private school range from $8,000 to $12,000 a year. So what’s about to happen here?

First, the state doesn’t have 50 to 100 million dollars to spare. Second, most low to middle class families don’t have even $3,500 per child to pay for a private school. Third, no private school worth a toot can afford to charge less than five or six thousand-a-year for a single child.

But I believe you can safely wager that there will be hundreds of new private but underfunded schools springing up all over our state; schools that will have hired untrained teachers with questionable teaching credentials or even no degrees at all. It’s already happening in many locations. Believe me, this disaster isn’t yet upon us, but I’ve already experienced such with one of my grandchildren.

And what about the children left in these public schools? With partially vacant school buildings, we will see considerable consolidation with the children having to be transported miles farther to school by their parents or the state; and a massive teacher exit from Alabama.

Creating this unnecessary decrease to the state’s tax base by diverting these additional tax dollars from basic needs of the rest of state government will create larger problems with other public services. The state judicial system is already being forced to shut doors at the courthouses a day each week and reduce staff by up to 25 percent. The same is true for other departments of state government.

One potential problem pointed out by the State Department of Education is that the legislation would force school districts to pay to educate “special education” pupils in these new “private” schools. State school superintendents say that the family would get the tax credit but the credit wouldn’t go to offset the cost because withdrawing those students means the public schools lose federal dollars that help support those services. The family would get the tax break but it wouldn’t go to offset for those special education services.

I am also told that the impact of the lost revenue to the state would harm state colleges and universities, which also receive funding from state dollars.

This matter is headed to the Alabama Supreme Court after a bump in the road from Montgomery Circuit Judge Charles Price, who granted a temporary restraining order last week keeping the legislation from going into effect. It is expected that the high court will dissolve that order and Gov. Bentley will sign the legislation this week.

But in a recent development Sen. Quinton Ross of Montgomery is saying that the legislation he voted on in the Senate Committee is not the same bill that passed the full Senate and House. Ross says the bill before his committee was assigned a tracking number: 149517 – 7. But the bill that passed the Legislature a few hours later shows a different number: 149517 – 8.

I won’t get into a discussion about the somewhat strange shenanigans that took place to secure the passage of this bill, but I believe they will haunt Republican legislators into the next elections. It is important on most major public issues that if legislation will significantly affect major groups of stakeholders it becomes necessary to toss out a carrot to all and obtain their opinions and work with them on any differences. That didn’t happen here with educators in Alabama and that will cause its eventual, if not early, demise.

The closest, and perhaps the best example I can cite is the passage of statutory and constitutional reform of our court system from 1973 to 1975. The late Chief Justice and U.S. Senator Howell Heflin and his successor, state Senator and Chief Justice C. C. “Bo” Torbert, engineered this major reform effort and a great part of the success of the effort was to galvanize the support of the stakeholders in the court system and legal profession.    

You can’t really compare the enormity of the two efforts, but had the legislative sponsors of the tax credit bill reached out to the education professionals in Alabama to obtain their input, this effort could have been a success. Because they didn’t, it won’t be.

Bob Martin is editor and publisher of The Montgomery Independent. Email him at: [email protected]