Another Black Eye for Georgia Education

Between one of the state’s largest school districts temporarily losing its accreditation, to our inability to implement an evaluation system that actually works, to our inability to keep track of the students that we spend so much effort and energy trying to evaluate, to a financial crunch that will leave many teachers, administrators, and other staffers out of the job, Georgia could certainly do without yet another education scandal.

From the AJC:

State education officials are investigating whether students, teachers or someone else changed answers on more than 100 standardized tests at four different Georgia elementary schools.

Officials said Wednesday that the schools’ test scores were improved significantly by the changes, which meant the schools made “adequate yearly progress” under federal standards. If the answers had not been changed, the four schools would not have met No Child Left Behind standards and would have faced penalties under the federal law.

The schools had high numbers of erasures on a fifth-grade math Criterion-Referenced Competency Test taken last summer, Kathleen Mathers from the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement told the state Board of Education.

The four schools in question belong to the Atlanta, Fulton County, DeKalb County, and Glynn County school districts.

I honestly think that the bigger issue here is the No Child Left Behind legislation itself and its overemphasis on test scores and numbers, but I digress.

I’d love to see education reform and improvement in Georgia addressed in a serious manner, but in the meantime, the discourse doesn’t seem to have improved much since Miller. Maybe I’m missing something, but it just seems that the let’s-make-our-schools-a-priority meme has fallen off the radar, meanwhile we’re greeted with cringeworthy news stories reminding us of our inadequacies. And while we’re on the subject, is it too early of a stage in this new Congress and presidential administration to ask our legislators to aggressively push for radical education reform?