More Schools in Georgia Making Progress

Standardized testing shows more schools in Georgia are making progress year to year. Annual Yearly Progress is the standard indicator of school performance. This year, seventy nine percent of public schools in Georgia made AYP-- that’s a ten percent jump from this time last year.

The State Department of Education partly attributes the leap to better math scores on standardized tests.

“We saw a lot of improvement in CRCT scores in mathematics, especially in elementary and middle schools,” said Spokesperson Dana Tofig, “and we think that’s what played into more schools making AYP this year.”

Math is a subject many schools struggle with across the state, including Radloff Middle School in Gwinnett County north of Atlanta. It’s had a needs improvement status for the past 3 years. But this year it shed that label. Principal Patty Hietmuller shares how.

“We provided 40 minutes of extra math instruction everyday," said Hietmuller. She also touts goal setting as key to their success.

Schools that under perform in any given for two years in a row get a needs improvement status. Then they have to work with the state to make a plan to get better. This year, 334 schools are on the needs improvement list; that’s 6 fewer than last year.

Parents at those schools must be notified so they can choose whether to send their children to a different school.

Fewer Meetings Means Savings

The state Board of Education is condensing its monthly meeting to one day this month to save money amid the worst economic picture in decades. The DOE says it will save up to $2,500 by meeting just once. Each of the 13 board members get a $105 per diem rate for meetings plus any hotel expenses. Like most state departments and agencies, the Georgia Department of Education is set to lose millions in state funding this year as state lawmakers struggle to fill a $2.6 billion budget hole.

(Associated Press)

DoE testing educator rating system

Georgia’s Department of Education is piloting a statewide program to professionally rate teacher educational skills.

The field study will include some 190 elementary, middle and high schools, and is meant to improve teaching performance standards.

A Department of Education official says the training program was developed over the past two years, in part, by the Board of Regents.

The training will enable administrators to rate teachers’ professional skills according to established criteria, rather than according to a supervisor’ subjective impressions.

Sessions will bring school principals and administrators together with a cross-section of teachers with varying experience, and in various subjects, including music, art and physical education.

The field testing will continue until April 2009, after which it may be implemented statewide.

Click here for more GPB News coverage of education issues.

Over 75,000 homeless in Georgia: report

More than 75,000 people are homeless in Georgia at some time during the year, according to a first-ever statewide study of the problem released on Wednesday.

The report estimates that on any one day, 20,000 people are homeless in the state, with more than half living on the street.

The totals are likely much higher because the study uses the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development definition of homeless, which excludes people who are living with family or friends, those living in motels and migrant workers in dilapidated, unfit housing.

State officials say they hope to use the data gathered by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs to appeal to lawmakers and private donors for funding for shelters and agencies that help homeless find jobs and places to live. The state's homeless shelters and other agencies don't have enough beds to put a roof over everyone's head, with 7,400 beds for individuals and 5,100 for families.

"This gives us the reality of where we are in this issue," Mike Beatty, commissioner of the state Department of Community Affairs, said during a news conference at Genesis House shelter in Atlanta. "It gives us the basis of where we're headed."

The state plans to conduct the study every year, he said.

The estimates are from surveys and street counts done in 23 counties across the state last year and this year. Kennesaw State University researchers plugged the numbers into a formula designed with U.S. Census data that predicts how many homeless people are in each county.

The numbers are similar to what HUD has estimated for Georgia, Kennesaw State researcher Jennifer Priestley said.

Not all states do such studies, making it difficult to get a national picture or how the Georgia numbers rank. About 750,000 homeless are in the U.S., according to the most recent national estimate from HUD released in 2007.

The study found that the vast majority of the homeless in Georgia are under the age of 54 and hundreds of them are children. According to the Georgia Department of Education, more than 22,000 children in the state's public schools were homeless last school year. That number includes children living on relatives' couches and in motels.

The Georgia study also found that homelessness affects communities of all sizes across the state and not just major metropolitan areas.

"There are homeless people in rural areas of Georgia, it just may look different," said Lindsey Stillman, the lead author on the report. "It's less likely you would see a homeless person on the corner in a rural area than in an urban area. They are living in cars or hidden in the woods."

Click here for more GPB News coverage of homelessness in Georgia.

(With The Associated Press)

Schools May Come Under State Control

When the state Department Of Education’s AYP or Adequate Yearly Progress report is issued later this month, it’s estimated nearly 70 schools will be designated as needs improvement.

Under a pilot program sponsored by the federal government, those schools will be allowed to participate in an alternative accountability plan.

The new plan calls for Georgia schools faced with more than five years of needs improvement status to come under direct supervision of the state.

The federal Differentiated Accountability Plan allows schools to design alternative plans to the highly structured No Child Left Behind Act.

Previously, the state waited to intervene until a school was in needs improvement status for seven consecutive years.

Dana Tofig is with the Georgia Department of Education.

“The school and state enter into a contract. And, the contract says the school is going do these things to try to improve and the state is going to do these things to try to help them. We’re just there to provide assistance. Also try to provide some level of accountability. We are now a party to a contract that says ‘we’re going to improve this school.’

The state will pay for a full-time school improvement specialist at each of the more than 60 schools expected to be deemed needs improvement.

The plan will not abolish local school board or eliminate school administrators.

Education Dept. anticipated CRCT failures

According to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, state education officials knew as early as July 2007 that Georgia sixth and seventh grade students would perform poorly on this year’s mandatory state social studies test.

Results from a pilot test given by the Department of Education indicated many students would likely not pass. However, officials allowed the CRCT test to proceed, apparently assuming students would score higher this year.

State education officials released preliminary results of the test this week, saying that 70 to 80 percent of middle-schoolers failed the social studies test this spring. Complete results are set to be released next month.

(The Atlanta-Journal Constitution)

Cox voids some CRCT scores

State superintendent Kathy Cox has decided to throw out the social studies scores of 6th and 7th graders on the CRCT.

Parents and educators were alarmed this week to find that pass rates on that portion of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests plunged to unexpected lows.

Only 20-30% of sixth and seventh graders passed the social studies test this year, compared to more than 80% last year. Dana Tofig, spokesperson for the Department of Education, says the state expected lower numbers because it was a new curriculum and a new test, but the dip was more dramatic than expected.

"After we looked at the standard and we looked at the assessment, we came to the conclusion that the scores were not a trustworthy measure of the student achievement in social studies," Tofig said.

Several parents say their children reported that the exam tested topics that they had never covered in class. Tofig says it's more likely that the test delved more deeply into topics they did cover, but without that level of detail.

The Education Department is impaneling a committee to look at the curriculum, the test, and teacher training.

Test results show state curriculum is working

Georgia education officials say new national test results show that the states’ curriculum revisions are working.
Georgia's fourth and eighth graders have almost caught up with the national average in reading but they still lag in mathematics.
Georgia students performed better than they ever have on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The federal test is considered the best state-to-state measure of classroom progress.
The Department of Education credits the new reading curriculum which has bee in place for two years. The new math curriculum however had not started until this school year. Georgia's fourth graders scored an average of 219 on the reading
test, just one point below the national average. In math they were four point below the average. Eighth graders scored two points below the average in reading and six points below for math.

More students passing state tests

Georgia students are doing better on state-mandated reading and math tests. The Department of Education released statewide numbers today … saying thousands more students are passing the Criterion Referenced Competency Tests. All students up through eighth grade take the tests. Third-, fifth- and eighth graders must pass them to move to the next grade.