Georgia is attempting to do something it’s never done in 280 years — emerge a national leader in education quality.
The state faces daunting obstacles, including an historic disregard for the importance of education and a funding shortfall that’s forced nearly two-thirds of Georgia’s districts to reduce instructional days to fewer than the standard 180.
However, it’s not money that portends the greatest threat to Georgia’s goal of creating a world-class education system; it’s a lack of political will to stay the course and a wavering commitment to public education.
And now the two leaders most responsible for setting Georgia’s education agenda and vision — Gov. Nathan Deal and School Superintendent John Barge — are entrenched in a pitched political battle that could undermine both the reforms launched under Georgia’s Race to the Top grant and the promise of higher standards under the new Common Core State Standards.
Until Georgia understands that investing in its schools is essential to the state’s economic and civic well-being and until leaders can put aside special interest politics, we will never become an education standout.
Stung by Barge’s opposition to the state charter school amendment last year, Deal has been systematically marginalizing Barge and the Department of Education. The behind-the-scenes animus between the two GOP politicians exploded into public view this past week when Barge announced he was mulling a run for the governorship and Deal retorted that Barge endorses the status quo.
Their escalating feud threatens to paralyze a reform effort that was already slowing to a crawl.
For example, Georgia has bailed out of the effort to build a test based on the Common Core State Standards, a set of national standards initiated by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to bolster America’s global competitiveness. Gov. Sonny Perdue was a key proponent of this movement.
A selling point of Common Core was a related national assessment that would finally show how Georgia students compared with students in other states.
But Georgia will not offer the new test being written by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, a 22-state consortium that had included Georgia.
Citing the high price tag of the new test, Barge and Deal pulled out of PARCC — which may be the last time they act in unison — and announced that Georgia will create its own tests around the Common Core Standards.
But Georgia doesn’t have a reassuring record of setting a high proficiency bar on its own tests. In fact, a new study by two Harvard researchers found that Georgia ranks last among states in the strength of its proficiency standards and standards have actually fallen in the past few years.
“Current state testing in many states is, well, not very good,” said Jerry Eads, a professor at Georgia Gwinnett College and a former testing director for the state of Virginia. “Georgia standards reflect little more than rote memorization, and the tests require little more than rote recognition. Many low-performing, typically low-income kids don’t even try to pass the tests because they know they’re going to fail anyway. That’s the fatal flaw of minimum competency testing like the CRCT that states have been using since the mid-70’s. We – and teachers – learn virtually nothing about most kids using these tests. They’re such a waste of tax money. The really low-performing kids know there’s no hope; the high-performing typically high-income kids see it as a joke and sometimes answer only the number of questions they think will be enough to pass.”
Good enough may be all Georgia itself can hope for now given the politics surrounding Common Core and the state’s continued ambivalence about whether it truly wants to commit to education excellence or simply proffer rhetoric rather than results.
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