The College Board announced  on Oct. 8 that Georgia’s average SAT score dropped slightly in 2014. While this drop alone is not an indicator of Georgia’s underperforming education system, Georgia’s national ranking in terms of education is a mediocre 27th in the nation. That’s not great for the state that proclaims to be the best place to do business. If Georgia’s education statistics aren’t great, the Atlanta Public School System’s statistics are even worse. The APS average SAT score was 1343, more than 100 points below the Georgia’s average of 1445.

Now more than ever, Georgia needs to focus on its education. If it doesn’t, Georgia students and businesses will be left behind as the U.S. economy further advances. While a far cry Mississippi, the lowest ranked state, Georgia’s middle of the pack ranking simply isn’t good enough.

Improving Georgia’s educational system will not be easy, but improvements are possible. Education has emerged as a major issue in the governor’s race. Both mainstream gubernatorial candidates offer plans to improve it. Jason Carter’s plan has three main tenants: creating a separate education budget and increasing it, investing in Pre-K programs, and providing more support teachers. Nathan Deal’s plan includes increasing the budget, giving parents more flexibility in choosing the schools that their children attend and ensuring the HOPE scholarship’s fiscal stability. Both Deal and Carter’s views seem quite similar, and both have some merit.

Deal and Carter seem to both support increasing funding for education. Carter, however, proposes that education funding should be separated from the rest of the budget. This is a good proposition because it guarantees that politicians will have no political motives for voting on education.

Increasing education funding is important, and should be a priority but efficiency must also be increased. Instead of having a large central APS headquarters, power should transferred to the principals and teachers of a school. This reallocation of authority would save the system money because of lower administrative costs and would offer parents, students and teachers more control of their own schools. Nathan Deal emphasizes community involvement in education, but he takes this a step further and supports student choosing the school they attend. He may have good intentions, but school choice only works on a limited basis. The result of such a plan could be more inequity in education with bad schools getting even worse and good ones improving.

Pre-K is another education topic on which both candidates agree. Expanding preschool programs helps give all of Georgia students an equal footing when starting kindergarten. It also helps them succeed later in life.

Hopefully, whoever is elected will lobby for education reforms to help Georgia succeed in the future so that next year we will be celebrating a bump in SAT scores instead of lamenting another decline.