Literacy or Promise Scholarships? Georgia Doesn’t Have to Choose

As Georgians debate education spending, a familiar argument against the Georgia Promise Scholarship has taken a new shape. 

Why, critics ask, should the state spend $100 million for students to leave public schools when it set aside only $70 million for literacy coaches in public schools? It sounds like a hard-nosed question about priorities. It assumes every dollar spent on a scholarship is a dollar taken from a reading program.

That assumption is wrong.

Not only is Georgia paying for both, but the two programs are aimed at the same group of students. And a child who can’t read needs every option available.

Consider what the state spends. This year Georgia appropriated $14.2 billion in state funds for the Department of Education, 39% of the entire state budget. The Promise Scholarship received $100 million, about 0.7% of that total, and state law caps the program at 1% of K-12 funding. Put another way, the state spends roughly $140 on its public schools for every dollar it spends on Promise.

Literacy did not lose out to Promise in that budget.

Lawmakers added $70.4 million to put a literacy coach in every school serving kindergarten through third grade, plus $18.4 million for regional coaches. Promise, meanwhile, was cut by $41 million.

Nor is Georgia starving its public schools to pay for Promise Scholarships. The state has fully funded its school funding formula in eight of the last nine years, including both years Promise has existed. When an Ohio appeals court struck down that state’s main voucher program this month, it leaned heavily on Ohio falling about $700 million short of its own formula. Georgia is not in that position – and should that happen in the future, the law provides for proportional cuts to Promise Scholarships.

The tradeoff framing misses who these programs serve. Every Promise Scholarship goes to a student who is zoned for a public school in the bottom 25% statewide. Those schools are where reading scores tend to be lowest. Starting this school year, every one of them that teaches kindergarten through third grade is due to get a literacy coach. In addition, about 3 in 4 Promise recipients come from lower-income households.

The literacy coaches and the Promise Scholarships both are aimed at helping struggling children learn to read.

The difference is time. Coaches work through teachers, and their gains build over years. When Georgia placed full-time coaches in 60 of its lowest-performing schools, it reported a 15% increase in student reading. That is encouraging. But only about 3 in 10 Georgia fourth graders read proficiently, and a third grader who is behind today has little time to spare. A Promise Scholarship gives that child’s parents another option: If the school isn’t working for their child, they don’t have to stay while it improves.

That other option doesn’t have to be a private school. The $6,500 can pay for tuition, but families can also build a home study program around a reading curriculum, a tutor or therapies, all purchased through approved vendors. For a child who is struggling to read, that flexibility matters.

Georgia’s new literacy law builds on lessons from Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee. It aims to improve the school a child already attends. The Promise Scholarship rests on a different lesson: When a school is not working for a child, the family should not be stuck there while the system improves. These ideas do not compete.

Parents understand this.

More than 15,000 eligible students applied for a Promise Scholarship this year. Those families are not choosing against literacy. They are choosing literacy for their own child, now.

Both programs should be judged by the same measure: whether students learn to read. That is a standard supporters of school choice should welcome. The question being asked is a fair one: What do we value? The answer should be children who can read, in whatever educational setting helps them get there.

That means keeping the commitment to literacy coaches and reading instruction grounded in the science of reading. It also means restoring the Promise Scholarship to full funding in next year’s budget, so families ready to act for their children are not told to wait. When Georgia’s leaders write that budget in January, they can do both. Georgia’s children shouldn’t have to settle for one option.