These districts saw their schools rise off Georgia’s low-performing list

Sixty one Georgia schools, nearly half of them in metro Atlanta’s big school districts, improved enough to move off of the state’s “priority” and “focus” lists, the Georgia Department of Education announced Tuesday.

Priority Schools are those among the bottom 5 percent in achievement on standardized state tests that also have high concentrations of students in poverty and a consistently low graduation rate. Focus Schools are the lowest-performing 10 percent based on “achievement gap” data, which measure the testing gains made by each school’s students in the bottom quartile of performance.

Twenty eight of the improving schools were in metro Atlanta's big districts: nine in Atlanta, two in Clayton County, one in Cobb County, eight in DeKalb County and eight in Fulton County.