Policy Update: Georgia: Time Will Tell

Vital Statistics
180	Public school districts
1,798	Public schools
1.4 million	K-12 enrollment
42.1%	Minority students
20%	Children in poverty
10.3%	Students with disabilities
$6.8 billion	Annual K-12 expenditures (all revenue sources)

But lawmakers, education leaders, and the public won't know whether most students are learning the material until the spring of 2000, when 3rd, 5th, and 8th graders will join 10th graders in taking tests tied to the curriculum.

So, while the state finishes building the assessment system, teachers will have at least a year to become comfortable with the new standards. Until the new "criterion-referenced competency test" is finished, the state is using the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills.

The revised curriculum is a more up-to-date, detailed document reflecting new courses that have been added or changed since the core curriculum was first adopted more than 10 years ago.

Across the state, training on the new curriculum dominated last summer's staff-development courses, and so far, the reaction from teachers has been mostly positive.

"One reason is that they felt they were very involved in the process," says Barbara Christmas, the executive vice president of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, a nonunion group representing 44,000 of the state's teachers.

Christmas says she is particularly enthusiastic about the access teachers and students will have to technology. "If they want to go on a field trip to some famous museum, they can just go," via the Internet, she says.

Improving teachers' skills--particularly among new teachers--was also a topic the Georgia board of regents took up last year.

Last summer, the board, which oversees the state university system, approved several principles that spell out how teachers should be trained. Included in the 10-point plan is a policy that "guarantees" teachers who graduate from the system's teacher education programs.

The guarantee says that the universities will retrain teachers for the classroom if the schools that hire them don't think they are doing an adequate job--as long as the teachers are teaching in the fields for which they were prepared.

Another recommendation is that students majoring in early-childhood education also minor in both reading and mathematics.

The next step for the board of regents will be to work with the 15 teacher education programs in the state to put those plans into action.

"We know that teachers don't know how to teach reading, but it's not because they don't want to know," says Nancy Verber, a consultant to the education department who is also a policy analyst for Southeastern Regional Vision for Education, one of the federal government's regional education laboratories.

Universities, which will have to implement the regents' teacher- preparation plan, also support the basic principles involved.

"What is a minor in reading? I don't know. There is no minor in reading," says Brenda Galina, the chairwoman of the department of early-childhood education at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Another question, Galina says, is whether the change will expand the length of a teacher education program from four years to five.

Linda C. Schrenko, the Republican state schools chief who was re-elected last fall, has also taken a strong interest in reading with the state's Reading First initiative, a K-3 phonics-based program. Reading First was piloted in eight schools during the 1997-98 school year. Last year, the legislature approved an additional $9.3 million for the program, which was enough to expand it to 351 of the state's 1,149 elementary schools.

In addition, the legislature approved $10.4 million to support after-school programs that provide remedial reading instruction. The programs, which began last fall, will target middle school students.

An evaluation of Reading First is being conducted, but with only one year's worth of data, there's not enough information to determine whether the program is making a difference.

Teachers won't be the only ones held accountable for whether students can read. Students should bear some of the responsibility as well, Schrenko says.

By the 1999-2000 school year, Schrenko wants all 3rd graders to read on grade level before being promoted.

Under the plan, the decision would be made by considering a number of factors, including test scores and teacher observations.

Another change approved by the legislature in 1998--one that allows private businesses and individuals to start charter schools--could have far-reaching effects.

Previously, the state, while one of the first to pass charter school legislation, was viewed by charter advocates as having a "weak" law because it allowed only existing public schools to convert to charter status.

Gary Ashley, the executive director of the Georgia School Boards Association, says he expects more charter applications now that the law has been changed.

His organization also played a leading role in shifting the responsibility for approving charters from the state board of education--as it was under the previous law--to local school boards.

"I really think that school boards are going to have a higher comfort level with the provisions of the charter school law now," Ashley says.

However, because the state board already approves waivers for a variety of local school innovations, charter applications are going to have to be "couched in a different way," he adds.

"The whole intent of a charter school is to develop a school that is different from what we already have," Ashley says.

But Jim Kelly, the executive director of the Georgia Community Foundation, which runs a project called the Charter School Resource Center of Georgia, thinks local boards are in no hurry to consider charter applications.

"I think boards have been negligent in their failure to promote this opportunity," he said.

Districts statewide were hoping to see some action in 1998 on the state's school funding formula, but most soon realized that nothing would happen until after last November's elections.

A committee headed by a state senator tossed around a few ideas, but no adjustments to the finance system were made during the legislative session, which ended last April.

Educators often complain that the formula has not been updated through the years, as it was originally meant to be, and that it no longer reflects the true costs of educating the state's children.

Teacher salaries provide one example. Throughout his just-completed second term, retiring Democratic Gov. Zell Miller was able to pass four consecutive 6 percent raises for teachers. But because most districts pay teachers above the state's base salary, districts were left to make up the difference.