The Georgia House this week took another step toward exiling last spring’s state Supreme Court decision prohibiting the state approval of charter schools to the history books, where it belongs. If the Georgia Senate follows suit, voters will have an opportunity in November to test whether Chief Justice Carol Hunstein was correct in her assertion that Georgia citizens are happy to secure “the now 134-year-old status quo.”
In May, Georgia’s highest court disbanded the state’s charter school authorizing commission, ruling that no publicly funded educational enterprise is permissible unless first engineered or christened by a local school board. A resolution that passed a supermajority vote in the House on Wednesday would ask voters to reinstate the commission by amending the constitution. This is significant, as Hunstein proclaimed that the constitution limits authority over public education “to that level of government closest and most responsive to the taxpayers and parents of the children being educated.”
This resolution puts authority squarely in the hands of the taxpayer.
This resolution puts authority squarely in the hands of the taxpayer and recognizes that nothing is more responsive or consequential to a child’s education than the choice the parent makes on his behalf. The commission created 16 charter schools before the court ruled it did so in violation of the constitution, but the commission merely provided families the lever to make the educational decision themselves.
It’s true, as Hunstein notes, that Georgia voters last approved the constitution in 1983 – nine years before the nation saw the first charter school open in Minnesota and 10 years before the Georgia Legislature established its first charter law. It is nonsense to assume these same voters would have forever favored a scheme limiting their public education options only to those hatched by local government.
You don’t have to be a libertarian to see the value of an independent commission that authorizes more school choices for parents to consider. But a 4-3 majority of the Georgia Supreme Court believed that the commission is only an attempt by the state to compete with the principal of local control. That’s an antiquated constitutional test that would likely vanquish many 21st-century attempts to meet the individual needs of students.
