Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse - Bibb Graves, the education governor

  Most states have one General Fund Budget. We are only one of five states that have two.

  Some of you have asked why we have two budgets – one for the General Fund and one for Education. Here is why.

  During the era of the Great Depression and even afterward, education in Alabama was woefully underfunded, and that is really being generous to simply say underfunded. Our schools were similar to those of a third-world country. We had two separate systems, one for white students and one for black students. Many rural schools were one-room shanties like folks used in the 1800s, like "blab" schools - no air conditioning and wood-burning stoves for heat. There were no buses to transport children, so they really did walk to school - barefoot - many times miles to and from. This was for the white schools. You can only imagine what an abysmal education was afforded to black kids. Many times teachers were not even being paid. They were given script notes in hopes of getting paid in the future.

A giveaway to the rich, disguised as school choice

  Our leaders call Alabama’s effective voucher program the CHOOSE Act. There’s some grim irony in that.

  Of course, you can choose to pay for private school tuition, whatever your reasons may be.

  But it’s not my choice. Or what the families of 730,000 Alabama students want. We pay taxes to support the teachers educating our children in public schools. And we want teachers and staff to have the resources they need to help students thrive.

  Yet our leaders plan to divert that money from classrooms into the pockets of wealthy families, in the form of $7,000 tax breaks. More if they have more than one kid enrolled in a private school.

Don’t cheer, Gov. Ivey: Killing the Department of Education will hurt Alabama students

  Gov. Kay Ivey is a sure-footed politician.

  She’s walked the narrow and dangerous path of Alabama politics all the way to summit. It requires focus, dedication, and balancing performative apathy and winking cruelty. And constant, emphatic declarations that you care more about your party than the people who live here.

  That may explain why Ivey said last week that she supports the efforts of President Donald Trump and effective President Elon Musk to destroy the U.S. Department of Education.

My doubts about changing Alabama’s school funding formula

  I want to believe that Alabama lawmakers want to help disadvantaged students.

  Really, I do.

  The vehicle for this would be a significant change to the state’s distribution of public school money. Instead of linking funding to daily attendance, the state would try to match resources with needs.

Managing Alabama’s school funding problems isn’t fixing them

  There’s a pamphlet in the Alabama Department of Archives and History written by Booker T. Washington. It’s called “How To Build Up A Good School in the South” and dates from the first decade of the 20th century.

  Washington was trying to address a practical problem for Black Alabamians: how to keep their schools open. Because Alabama’s Jim Crow government had segregated the system and was doing all it could to destroy Black education.

This isn’t how you improve Alabama schools

  My sister and I attended Catholic schools for 12 years.

  These were not elite institutions. None of my classmates, as far as I know, went to Ivy League universities. On balance, the education we got was on par with what the local public schools offered.

  But it was important to our parents that we pray in class and get Catholic religious instruction. Public schools couldn’t deliver that, and our non-Catholic neighbors wouldn’t want them to.

Alabama Pre-K thrived outside of politics. Then Kay Ivey dragged it in

  Living in Alabama means seeing our state rank high on lists we’d rather not be on. 

  Infant mortality. Heart attacks. Homicides. 

  And we’re used to seeing the state rank low on lists people value. 

Why GOP lawmakers fear ‘divisive concepts’

  As a kid, I consumed histories and biographies like my peers read comic books. It didn’t matter what era it was. If a story was well-told, I devoured it.

  One of many convictions I’ve developed from that reading: You can’t understand the South of today without understanding the history of this place.

Alabama charter schools: A slow roll-out

  When Alabama enacted its Charter School Law in 2015, did state legislators expect there to be only seven active charter schools statewide seven years later? 

  In 2015, SB45, more commonly known as the Alabama School Choice and Student Opportunity Act, passed both chambers on partisan lines, with zero Democrats voting in support of the bill. The Act created the Alabama Public Charter School Commission (APCSC), which intends to provide all children in the state with high-quality education outside of the traditional public school setting.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse - Bibb Graves, the education governor

  Most states have one General Fund Budget.  We are only one of five states that have two.

  Some of you have asked why we have two budgets – one for the General Fund and one for Education. Here is why.

  During the era of the Great Depression and even afterward, education in Alabama was woefully underfunded, and that is really being generous to simply say underfunded. Our schools were similar to those of a third-world country. We had two separate systems, one for white students and one for black students. Many rural schools were one-room shanties like folks used in the 1800s, like Blab schools - no air conditioning and wood-burning stoves for heat. There were no buses to transport children, so they really did walk to school - barefoot - many times miles to and from. This was for the white schools. You can only imagine what an abysmal education was afforded to black kids. Many times teachers were not even being paid. They were given script notes in hopes of getting paid in the future.

The need for education reform didn’t die with the defeat of Amendment One

  When voters defeat a proposed state amendment, it is often thought that the matter is put to rest. That is often the case, but when Alabama’s voters went to the polls in March and shot down a proposal to replace the elected state board of education in favor of one appointed by the governor, they only answered the question of the board’s composition.

  They did not answer the deeper problem of the board’s accomplishment.

An Amendment One postmortem: Idealism trumps reality

  The failure of Amendment One is a story of idealism trumping reality.

  On Tuesday, residents of Alabama denied Amendment One. The constitutional amendment, which would have shifted the State Board of Education from popularly elected positions to ones appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the State Senate, received a “YES” vote from only 25% of voters.

  The question for today is simple: “Why did it fail?”

Craig Ford: Every school should have a mental health counselor

  In her State of the State Address, Gov. Kay Ivey said that mental health would be a priority for both education and our prison system. Then she set the goal of having a mental health counselor in every school system.

  While I applaud the governor for recognizing the challenges our schools are facing when it comes to students’ mental health, the reality is we need a mental health counselor in every school, not just one for each school system.

Craig Ford: You get what you pay for

  State lawmakers will return to Montgomery on Tuesday, February 4th, and education will be one of the primary issues they will be taking on.

  Lawmakers expect an increase in both the education and general fund budgets for the coming year, and that means more resources available to address the issues facing our public schools.

Craig Ford: Building new prisons is not the answer

  Alabama should be building better schools, not better prisons. It’s as simple as that. And the truth is if we had done that from the beginning we probably wouldn’t have the overcrowded prisons we have today.

  It’s a statistical fact that if a child can’t read at a third-grade level by the time they graduate the third grade, then they are far more likely to end up in prison. And here’s another statistical fact: A non-violent offender who completes some sort of education training (like a trade such as carpentry or welding) while they are in prison has only a 20 percent chance of going back to prison, while an offender who does not get that training has an 80 percent chance of going back to prison.

Craig Ford: Charter schools in Alabama continue national trend of waste, fraud and corruption

  One of the biggest arguments against charter schools is that they have been hotbeds of waste, fraud, and corruption. Nationally, charter schools have cost the taxpayers over $100 million in fraud and corruption.

  Now, Alabama has become the new victim of corruption and waste at the hands of charter schools.

  Nicole Ivey was the principal of LEAD Academy, the first charter school in Montgomery, until a few weeks ago. Ivey was fired after she raised questions about whether the school was following state laws that govern charter schools.

Craig Ford: Cities are only as strong as their local schools

  In the military, we have a saying: A platoon is only as strong as its weakest soldier. That concept applies to a lot of things in life and especially to how we as a society treat our public schools.

  Public schools are the backbone of any city or town. They train our future workers. They are usually one of, if not the, biggest employers in a county or city. They are one of the first things potential employers look at when deciding whether to build or expand a plant or factory in a community. And for those who go on to college, local schools are the pipeline that gets them there.

  Schools also play an important role in our quality of life. From Friday night football games to band competitions and everything in between, local schools play an important role in both children and adults’ social lives and add to our sense of community.

Teachers, retirees deserve better from state leaders

  The education budget passed by lawmakers in the final days of the legislative session is the largest in terms of dollars that the state has ever spent (though, when factoring in inflation, we still are not spending as much as we did before the 2008 recession).

  For the most part, the budget is a good one. Pre-K, school buses and transportation, K-12 classrooms and school libraries are all getting a boost in 2020. But educators and, particularly, retirees are still being left behind.

It’s time for an appointed state school board in Alabama

  A new plan by Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh and Gov. Kay Ivey seeks to replace a group of elected positions, those of the Alabama School Board members, to positions appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Alabama Senate. Though it will be first voted on by the legislature, it must ultimately be approved by the voters of Alabama as a constitutional amendment.

  Is this a good idea?

We should be building great schools, not great prisons

  Earlier this month, Gov. Kay Ivey announced her plan to spend almost a billion dollars of taxpayer money to build three new prisons for men (there will be no new prisons for women, even though it was the conditions at the women’s prison in Elmore County that started the whole prison debate).

  There’s no question that the hard-working men and women who staff and run our prison system deserve to have a safe and proper work environment (they also deserve to be paid a whole lot more than they are, and deserve some help in the form of more corrections officers and healthcare staff).

  But I question any state leader who would choose to spend a billion dollars on prisons instead of education.