Education
Education

More complaints about using Georgia standardized test scores

By Ty Tagami
June 14, 2016

Problems with online testing have prompted one Georgia school district to cry foul over the state’s grading system for schools.

The Clarke County Board of Education is calling on the state to waive results from this spring's Milestones tests for use in the College and Career Ready Performance Index, the state's report card on school performance, according to the Athens Banner-Herald.

The Georgia Department of Education is already waiving a mandate that the results be used to determine student promotion from certain grade levels, acknowledging the effect of computer glitches on the tests for younger students. "My question here is, if you can't use it for student performance, why would you use it for school performance?," Clarke Superintendent Philip Lanoue reportedly said at a school board meeting last week.

Georgia's waiver so far does not affect high school students, whose results on the tests count for a fifth of their course grades. But Fulton County Schools decided in May to ask the state to consider waiving the scores for high school students, too. The district was seeking a blanket waiver and not just one for those who experienced technical problems.

About the Author

Ty Tagami is a staff writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Since joining the newspaper in 2002, he has written about everything from hurricanes to homelessness. He has deep experience covering local government and education, and can often be found under the Gold Dome when lawmakers meet or in a school somewhere in the state.

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