This just hit my inbox:

Today Artur Davis laid out a plan to decrease dropouts by raising the age a student can legally drop out of high school. That is the same plan I have been advocating for over 4 years.

However, any substantive education plan must first address funding. Last week, Davis told teachers in Huntsville that money for education is not a big issue. He even published that on his website.

Try telling that to hard working Alabama families trying to put a child through college or to underpaid schoolteachers trying to educate some disinterested students with little or no hope for a future in higher education.

We are seeing tax revenues to the education trust fund at the lowest levels in two decades, while tuition costs for college continue to skyrocket.

That is why I have offered a substantive plan including the LifeStart Education Lottery that provides college scholarships or a technical education for our high school graduates and a plan which taxes the fastest growing industry in our state, gambling, to generate
revenue for the education trust fund.

Whether a child wants to be a pipe fitter or a Ph.D., my plan provides hope and incentive for them to graduate with a high school diploma or GED.

Davis proposed a $500 tax credit, however, with both the general fund and the education tax fund in proration, I’m not sure where Mr. Davis will take this money from or how he plans to pay it back. Remember, every year dropouts cost Alabama over $6.5 billion in lost earnings.

Without addressing real education funding first, we are putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound.

Sparks raises some valid points about Davis’s plan…but coming from a man who is putting all his eggs in the lottery basket, I’m not sure it comes off as very credible. And this idea that our teachers are underpaid is truly laughable…given the truly pitiful funding in other areas of our budget. I deeply value our teachers and school administrators, but don’t try and sell me a bill of goods on their pay scale….a teacher’s average salary in this state is approaching $50,000 and they receive very good benefits. In comparison to what we invest in other areas of our budget, education is not bad off (see my previous post). And the hard times this year are simply temporary, the real question comes with what we will do when revenues increase again, how will we invest those dollars wisely.

Meanwhile, Ron Sparks has an extremely tough road row to hoe in convincing Alabamians that we need a state lottery and that it can fund all of the things he says it can. And he’s now added fixing the dropout rate to the list of things a lottery can do. It’s the magic elixir!! Or not. He’s demonstrating with this naive thinking that he has never spent any time with someone who just dropped out of school. I think Artur’s plan has some good elements, but neither goes far enough in addressing what is really needed to deal with the full scope of the dropout problem in this state.

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