By LEE N. HOWELL
Politically Speaking

It seems that every Georgia chief executive elected during the last quarter of a century has wanted to be remembered as “the education governor.”

The trend started with George Busbee in 1974 (who admittedly could not do a lot that cost money during his first term because his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, followed the great tradition of many past Georgia governors and basically spent up all the money in the state coffers, which forced Busbee to concentrate on rebuilding the state reserve accounts.

It continued through the administrations of Joe Frank Harris (who won near-unanimous legislative passage for his much-heralded Quality Basic Education program) and Zell Miller (who found a new way to pay for all his new education spending plans when he legalized gambling).

And, based on his campaign rhetoric, it was expected to continue into the one-year old term of Roy Barnes.

(It should be noted that Gov. (or President, if you prefer to use the title of the office he won after leaving Georgia with the reputation of not being electable to any office, even dogcatcher!) Carter did not concentrate on reforming education per se because he was interested in frying bigger fish: He championed a complex plan of total state government reorganization — which, of course, included the Department of Education.)

Now, the reason all these men have sought to become closely identified with educational reform (and presumably improvement) — and the reason that even President Bill Clinton is concentrating so much of his final budget proposal on assisting public education with teacher salaries and facilities improvement — is because education is something which affects almost all Georgians and Americans.

Thus, it was only a matter of time before Gov. Barnes moved beyond solving metro Atlanta's traffic congestion and pollution problems in order to concentrate on the public schools.

And, he followed the same path as his mentor, Gov. Harris (for whom he served as state Senate Floor Leader) when he named a blue-ribbon panel of business executives and community leaders to come up with the final plan.

That plan — now under consideration in the state House of Representatives — would seem to have only one feature in it — the abolition of teacher tenure — based on the amount of criticism levelled against it by the teacher unions.

While that is an emotional issue which raises some serious questions for folks on both of it, the teacher tenure question has served as a “smokescreen” to cloud the proposal from Gov. Barnes to totally revamp the funding formula for education.

This is the area of the plan — scattered in several places throughout that 250-page educational reform bill — which should be of utmost concern to all of us taxpayers.

It is certainly the section of the bill which concerns county school superintendents and county school boards who are responsible for writing budgets on which the schools operate.

In the richer counties like those in suburban Atlanta, the equalization formulas mean that their taxpayers will be picking up a larger share of the total cost for all those grandiose school reforms, like smaller classrooms and increased technology.

Unfortunately, the reverse is not necessarily true: While the poor systems may get marginally more funds, the stricter requirements of the bill — and the much-publicized annual promises of teacher raises — means that their total personnel costs will go up dramatically more than whatever increase in state funding they receive.

But, while funding formulas are important, the ultimate goal of this bill — and of all those previous educational reform efforts — is to improve the end-products of our educational system.

That is a goal we will never achieve completely but one toward which we must always be striving.

[Lee N. Howell is an award-winning writer who has been observing and commenting upon politics and society in the Southern Crescent, the state, and nation for more than a quarter of a century.]

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