James Jan-Feb 2024 web - Flipbook - Page 63
2024 EDUCATION PRIORITIES
appy New Year and
welcome to 2024! For
the past 20 years, the
Georgia Partnership
for Excellence in Education (Partnership) has celebrated
the new year by releasing the Top
Ten Issues to Watch the Friday
before the start of the legislative
session. This annual report highlights emerging strategies and offers targeted recommendations for
how state and local stakeholders
can address perennial challenges
facing Georgia’s education and
workforce systems.
In the 2022 and 2023 editions
of Top Ten Issues, the Partnership recommended that state
policymakers, education leaders,
and the business sector commit
to a long-range plan to promote
individual well-being, support
greater community resilience, and
maintain the state’s position as
a leader in the global economy.
This year, the Partnership calls
on state policymakers, education
leaders, the business community
and other state and local stakeholders to unite around a common
North Star goal— ensuring that
65 percent of Georgians aged 25
to 64 have earned post-secondary
credentials of value by 2033.
To reach that North Star goal,
in August 2023 the Partnership
and a coalition of state agency
and nonprofit, business, and local
leaders launched EdQuest Georgia
to fulfill the vision of a 10-year
public agenda to ensure the Peach
State leads the nation in educational opportunity and economic
growth by 2033. The initiative
includes: 1) the EdQuest Georgia
Framework that serves as a 10-year
policy and practice blueprint for
how to move Georgia forward; and
2) the EdQuest Georgia State Policy
Plan that identifies eight priorities
that state and community leaders
could implement over the next
two years to accelerate progress
toward the North Star goal.
During the process of producing the EdQuest Georgia Framework and selecting policy priorities
to add to the EdQuest Georgia State
Policy Plan, it became obvious that
key to the success of the overall initiative was engaging local leaders
across the state to drive innovation
and progress. The 2024 edition
of the Top Ten Issues to Watch
ushers in a new vision for reform
and creativity in which state and
community leaders collaborate to
create the public education and
workforce development system
that Georgians need and deserve.
The Top Ten Issues to Watch
in 2024 is organized around the
premise that community leaders
drive innovation and state leaders
support local efforts to accelerate
progress. Through this framing,
local leaders identify problems of
practice and barriers to effective
implementation. State leaders,
using their funding authority
and the advantages of geographic
scale, can mitigate barriers and
support the spread of promising
practices across Georgia.
However, a barrier to strong
community-driven strategies is the
growing partisan divide and political polarization of issues related to
education. A new paradigm is needed in which comprehensive solutions to education and workforce
challenges are created through civil
discourse and collective action.
Although state leaders have a
pivotal role to play in resetting the
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