The Professional Association of Georgia Educators is displeased with the direction the General Assembly is taking regarding reforms of the public school system.

PAGE, which represents 72,000 teachers statewide, takes particular aim at a recently approved Senate measure that provides "scholarships" for pupils in consistently underperforming schools to attend private schools. Last year, lawmakers gave such scholarships, up to $9,000, to pupils with disabilities.

PAGE spokesman Tim Callahan and other critics of reform see this as evidence that the GOP-led legislature is trying to bring about a voucher system in incremental steps.

And you know what? Callahan is right. That's exactly what lawmakers are trying to do. More importantly, it's the right thing to do.

GOP leaders make no secret that they are pushing legislation for more school choice to give parents opportunities to educate their children in a way to shake up a status quo that for decades has produced subpar test scores.

"I would argue that our ultimate intent is to strengthen public education," says Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, who sponsored the "scholarship" measure.

The House has also passed a laudatory measure to allow proposed charter schools to get their plans approved by a special state panel, thus bypassing the need to get an OK from often hostile local school boards.

Both the House and Senate bills deserve to pass before lawmakers adjourn because they widen school choice. Giving parents an option of enrolling their kids in better schools -- and forcing schools to be more competitive and effective in attracting pupils -- is the best possible reform for our state's ailing school system, which ranks among the bottom three in the nation.

Callahan charges that school choice is a way of dismantling and defunding public education, which is pure bunk. Why would legislators seek to weaken public education? It makes no sense.

And where has throwing money at public schools, as PAGE urges, gotten us? Not far at all. It just seems to strengthen the discredited status quo. It's time for something radical and different such as what Georgia's enlightened lawmakers are trying to provide -- a competitive, consumer-friendly school system akin to what is available in other consumer sectors of society.

If choice works well elsewhere, why shouldn't it work with schools? Public school establishmentarians, such as PAGE, just don't get it. What they've been doing isn't working. It's time for a change. The status quo must go.