Myra Blackmon, veteran journalist, writes that people from all backgrounds in Georgia joined to defeat Amendment 1, the governor’s plan to change the state constitution to allow the state to take over low-scoring schools and turn them into charter schools. Whatever their race or their place, Georgians didn’t want to give up local control of their public schools.
Now that the ALEC plan for state takeover has gone down to defeat, Blackmon has some positive ideas for helping the 127 schools that were picked for state takeover.
First, we can use the same techniques to insist the Legislature fully fund the Quality Basic Education formula that promises equitable and sufficient funding for all schools. Changing the formula will do no good if we don’t know what would happen if we actually funded the one we have had in place for decades. We must also insist that money that would have been spent on the Opportunity School District be used to help those 127 schools on the original target list.
Second, we must advocate for allowing the state Department of Education to do its job. As state School Superintendent Richard Woods outlined in a recent piece, the state DOE has the knowledge and expertise to help struggling schools improve their performance. In recent years, however, the governor and the Legislature have regularly bypassed the DOE and its elected head, imposing new rules and ignoring any input from the one department of state government that has the personnel, experience and reach most likely to help solve our problems.
Third, we must insist on appropriate assessment of school performance. The College and Career Ready Performance Index is being misused to “grade schools” as passing or failing when it was designed to simply measure growth. Further, the CCRPI wrongly relies almost entirely on the results of the Georgia Milestones standardized tests.
Throwing money at schools doesn’t help them, but neither does starving them of resources they need. New funding should be used wisely to reduce class sizes, to hire experienced teachers, give them the supplies and support they need, and retain them, and to make sure that children have a full and rich curriculum, including the arts.
Getting the politicians out of the way of educators is a swell idea. For some reason, state legislators think they should tell educators how to do their job; they are wise enough not to do that to any other profession.
Blackmon points out that the Georgia tests have changed frequently and have never been useful for teachers or students.
Despite the hundreds of millions of our tax dollars invested in the Georgia Milestones, the tests have never been validated as reliable measures of education. That is, they have never been put through the statistical process that guarantees that the questions actually measure what they are intended to. For the last two years, at least portions of the test results have been completely unusable; the tests themselves have changed annually and the results provide no diagnostic information to help teachers zero in on what students need. The test is used punitively when a more effective use would be to provide individual data that would allow schools to tailor instruction to student needs.
Last, she suggests that all the energy that went into defeating Amendment 1 should now be channeled to help the schools and school boards do a better job for the children.
Such common sense is rare these days and much needed.
