Mind the Gap: Biases in Funding for Georgia's Public Schools

Abstract

As a future educator, I aimed to better understand how Georgia’s public schools were funded. In order to understand the allotment of funds, I conducted numerous interviews with superintendents and an employee of the GDOE. I also gathered secondary sources to understand the complex calculations that determine why smaller, poorer areas receive less money than affluent areas. Therefore, my research works to answer the question of how funding works, and how do the biases and inequalities affect the individual student and school community. Beginning in the 1990s, the field of school finance began to reflect the wider world of education policy by undergoing a conceptual shift from an equity perspective focused on the equalization of educational inputs toward an adequacy perspective focused on the performance of the educational system overall, measured by student performance on systematically aligned assessments. In Georgia, the Quality Basic Education Formula (QBE) was enacted in 1985 to help better fund public schools across the state. Whether or not the distribution of educational programs and resources are properly allocated in the districts with more needs, is the major concern of public-school officials in the current climate. My presentation will include a tangible text as well as a video that depicts the inequalities in the QBE. My tangible text symbolically represents Nathan Deal’s austerity tax cuts in 2003 that affected school funding directly, and my video focuses on the smallest school county in Georgia, and how their small population affects how much money they receive.