GUEST COLUMN: Time to tell truth about schools

Richard Anderson, the chief executive of Delta Air Lines, recently was quoted in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution explaining why many of the Northwest Airlines employees relocating to Georgia from Minnesota will look for private schools for their children: “I think the high school graduation rates and the quality of the graduates that we have coming out of the schools in Georgia need to be a lot higher.”

Mr. Anderson succinctly summarized our problems: Too few students are graduating and those who do are inadequately prepared. Parents often are very confused by the conflicting reports they hear about the quality of public education in Georgia.

Let’s start with Mr. Anderson’s first point —- the quantity of graduates. How many students are graduating from high school each year? One would think this question would be relatively easy to answer —- not so. Every state uses a different calculation to determine its graduation rate. Georgia’s official graduation rate from the state is 75 percent. It is difficult, if not impossible, to figure out how that percentage is reached if one actually looks at the numbers:

> The number of high school graduates reported in 2008 was 83,516.

> The eighth-grade enrollment in 2003-04 was 120,694.

> The ninth-grade enrollment in 2004-05 was 142,079.

> The tenth-grade enrollment in 2005-06 was 120,058.

One way of calculating a graduation rate is to compare the number of graduates (83,516) to the number of ninth-graders four years earlier (142,079). Using this method, the graduation rate for 2008 would be 59 percent, 16 points below the official average.

Now for Anderson’s second point —- the quality of graduates. It is difficult to get folks to agree on measures of quality, but the old standby, the SAT, is probably the best indicator we have. Why?

First, because of what it measures: how well a student is prepared for college. Not that all students plan to attend college, but it is a measure of academic preparation.

Second, because it’s a national assessment rather than a home-grown, potentially dumbed-down test taken only by students in Georgia’s schools.

How do Georgia students do on the SAT? Not particularly well. Georgia has ranked in the bottom five since the results have been reported.

Occasionally, Georgia ranks dead last, and a public relations nightmare ensues. (What happened to “Thank God for Mississippi”?) But seriously, there is little qualitative difference between 50th and 47th, our current position.

Before examining what Georgia’s SAT scores reveal, we need to examine the common excuse for our poor performance —- that too many students take the SAT.

Georgia does have a high participation rates, but even compared with other states with similarly high rates, Georgia ranks next to last. (Maine, which now requires 100 percent of its students to take the SAT, ranks last.) And if we compare the number of SAT takers in Georgia (51,591) with the number of 2008 high school graduates with a college preparatory diploma (62,950), one could argue that not enough students are taking the SAT.

After all, shouldn’t the college preparatory diploma be preparing students for college?

That is what the SAT results are telling us: Even our high school graduates with college preparatory diplomas are not adequately prepared. This point was driven home by the AJC’s recent front page article on the increasing number of incoming college freshman who require remedial work.

So where does that leave us? With too few adequately prepared students. For college, for work, for life. Thank you, Mr. Anderson, for being honest.