The question no one in Georgia wants answered: How much does it cost to educate students to excellence?
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Here is a question repeatedly asked under the Gold Dome and never answered: How much does it cost to educate a child in Georgia to excellence?
And here’s why the answer continues to evade us: No one really wants to know.
A true estimate of the cost of excellence would force Georgia to invest far more in education than it’s willing to do, especially in rural Georgia districts that lack the property tax base to compensate for ongoing state cuts and have eliminated programs, electives and teachers at higher rates than metro Atlanta.
Without an honest examination of the real costs of quality education and recognition that we can’t starve schools yet demand robust achievement, the state’s students and economy will languish.
We also have to be frank about what constitutes excellence. Everyone understands that schools can no longer focus on state capitals, spelling words and the periodic table — information students can elicit in seconds on smart phones. As Harvard’s Tony Wagner says, “What the world cares about is not what you know, but what you can do with what you know.”
To replace rote learning, memorization and drills with innovation, critical thinking and problem-solving, Georgia’s classrooms require new models, which is why former Gov. Sonny Perdue created a task force in 2004 to define the best practices in education and put a price tag on them.
“Today, basic doesn’t cut it. Georgians expect more. They expect excellence for their children,” he said at the time.
After more than three years, 75 public meetings and discussions with 105 school systems, the task force came back empty-handed on the cost issue, likely because it discovered excellence