Our Schools Stopped Being One School District

What the issue is

Look at the sixth district's school numbers as a whole and they look fine. Go school by school and you find something else entirely.

We have some of the strongest schools in Georgia here. We also have some of the weakest ones in the state — and they are a short drive apart. Two families paying into the same system, living in the same district, get very different outcomes depending on which side of a line their house sits on.

"This is a critical mass area that we are seeing in the sixth district where we do have tremendous education programs, but at the same time, we also have lowest performing school programs within the state." — Kevin Martin

That gap is the first domino in the problem Kevin talks about most. Young families don't move somewhere the schools are struggling, so they don't move in. Kids who grow up here finish school and leave. The tax base ages and shrinks, and the people who stay carry more of the bill every year.

What Congress actually controls

Washington does not run your child's school, and it shouldn't. What Congress does control is the money and the conditions attached to it — federal education dollars, the mandates that ride along with them, and the reporting and compliance requirements that come out of the Department of Education.

That is the whole federal footprint: money in, strings attached. And those strings are written by people who have never been inside the school they're writing rules for.

Every hour a principal in Cobb County spends satisfying a federal requirement is an hour not spent on the actual problem in their building.

What needs to change

Send the money back without the strings. Congress can pass education funding through to states and localities without dictating how it gets used. The people who live in a community understand what their children need better than a federal office does, and they answer to the families they affect.

"All funding for education should be maintained and kept at the state and local levels where they are better apt to serve our children in our own community." — Kevin Martin

Stop writing curriculum from Washington. Congress and the Department of Education should not be determining what gets taught in a Georgia classroom. That authority belongs to the state and the local district.

Shrink the federal education bureaucracy. Kevin's position is that the Department of Education has grown into an expense that produces compliance work rather than better outcomes. The dollars currently consumed administering federal requirements would do more good in the classrooms themselves.

Then let this district solve its own problem. Once the money and the authority are back here, the work is local: find out what's actually wrong in the schools that are struggling, fix it, and bring in the community, churches, local businesses, and families to help. The goal is to raise the bottom, not lower the top.

"We have got to work together to lift those up, not bring the top performers down, but to lift the levels of the lower performing." — Kevin Martin

Why it matters

Better schools are how a community grows again. Businesses look at school performance before they decide where to build. Young families look at it before they decide where to live.

Right now we have families a few miles apart getting completely different shots at a decent life, while the federal response is another set of requirements written a thousand miles away. Kevin's view is that the money is the useful part and the instructions are not.