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Building Administrators Making a Difference in Georgia Education - Richard Green     The role of the building Principal in providing an effective and meaningful educational experience for students has long been recognized as a key to school success.  Great schools do not happen by accident, and are always the result of the vision, planning, hiring effectiveness and leadership skills of the building Principal.  One such leader is Richard Green, Principal of Aaron Cohn Middle School in Columbus, a new addition to the Muscogee County School District.  ACMS is in its second year of operation, and Richard was appointed its educational leader by the MCSD Board before the building was finished.  The building is located on Garrett Road in Midland, and is within the boundaries of Muscogee County.  ACMS has 34 teachers, 2 administrators, a total staff of 63 and 546 students grades 6-8.  About 36% of the students are FRL (free or reduced lunch...

    There’s a wolf in the closet.  He’ll stay there until after the elections, but somebody will open the door for him once the votes are in.  Count on it.  Both candidates for Governor of the state of Georgia have expressed an interest in letting this wolf out, and once out he won’t go back in again.  The lure of $59 billion dollars, regardless of the source of those funds and especially in the ethically challenged Georgia system of politics, is just too much for politicians to ignore.  Both candidates might hem and haw and say they would only use the money “with the backing of teachers and the TRS board of directors,” but that’s Georgia politics at its finest.  Tell the voters what you think they want to hear before the election, and forget you ever said it once you’re in office.  If that doesn’t work, blame someone else for following through on what you really wanted in the first place.     The Georgia...

The Option Game     Supporters of the accountability movement in public education have had 13 years of test driven “reform” to prove their point.  It should be obvious now that 13 years of accountibalism have produced no positive results. If you believe that test scores accurately reflect teaching and learning in our public schools then you also must accept those scores have not shown a positive effect.  If you believe the SAT is reflective of student achievement then 13 years of test and retest and test again have been an abysmal failure in serving as anything other than a reliable predictor of family income.  In spite of the continued demand for “choice” by the professional accountabullies - those that insist that standardized testing is the only way to hold public education accountable - the only success stories they can point to are the gigantic growth of the educational testing industry and draining millions of tax dollars fr...

Governor Deal’s suggestion that Georgia “look at” a recovery school district modeled after the one in New Orleans has raised more than a few eyebrows in our state.  Louisiana, where Advanced Placement exam results for 2013 are ahead of only Mississippi, is known more for LSU football and Duck Dynasty than public education..  Higher National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in 2013 still leave the state at the bottom of the national scorecard, and the US Chamber of Commerce report in 2014 graded the state educational system with an A for choice but a D or F in academic achievement, international competitiveness and workforce preparation.  Less than 20% of Louisiana students met Programme for International Student Assessment requirements for reading and math standards, and recent gains in LEAP (Louisiana Educational Assessment Program) and iLEAP (integrated Louisiana Educational Assessment Program) state tests were due to Louisiana Department of Education manipula...

Truth and Consequences      There were 1,615,066 students in Georgia public schools k-12 and 120,660 teachers to teach them in 2009.  In 2013 the GADOE reported 1,657,506 students and 111,401 public school teachers k-12.  Anyway you count it, public education has lost 9,000 teachers and class sizes have increased in Georgia public schools.  Add to that issue six years with no raises, layoffs or RIF's in many systems, furloughs that actually take money out of teachers’ pockets to help systems cope with decreased state funds, higher property taxes, loss of planning time, the elimination of professional development funds, the lack of instructional funds, the elimination of band, chorus, orchestra, art and elective classes, the destruction of motivation and creativity through the institution of phony reforms, a continuation of the “blame the teacher” mindset, an insistence on teaching to the test, by the test and for the test, the growing numbers of ch...

It’s Time to Reform the Reformers Jim Arnold & Peter Smagorinsky Jim Arnold recently retired from the superintendent’s position of the Pelham City, GA Schools and blogs at http://www.drjamesarnold.com/ . Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor of English Education at The University of Georgia whose public essays are archived at http://smago.coe.uga.edu/vita/vitaweb.htm#OpEd “The failure of public education” has become a de rigueur assumption in the public forum on public education, particularly among those who claim to possess the silver bullet for “reform.” The definition of reform signals the need to improve something for the better by removing faults, abuses, and evil ways. For there to be a need for reformers, then, those they wish to reform must be found to be as defective as possible. When the target of reform lacks sufficient dereliction, and a reformer still needs to advance his or her agenda, ideally with consulting fees, then the flaws must be ma...