Get Schooled: GOP official: Party should have taken up Common Core but message was sent: Wrong standards for Georgia
By Maureen Downey
Judy Craft is a Gwinnett County resident who served on the State Resolutions Committee at the state GOP convention in Athens this past weekend representing the 7th Congressional District.
She wrote this piece in response to the failure of the GOP convention to take up a resolution opposing the Common Core State Standards. A standoff on the standards, which have the support of Republican Gov. Nathan Deal and state Superintendent John Barge, was deflected, according to my AJC colleague Jim Galloway, because of a political maneuver
By Judy Craft
On Friday and Saturday, Republican delegates descended on Athens like a herd of elephants. More than 1,600 voting delegates and several hundred guests came to meet candidates, to hear from elected officials, to vote on party leaders, and to do the work of the party concerning rules
Get Schooled: Reports of low pass rates at even top schools: Why was the state algebra test so hard?
I continue to hear from teachers about the difficulty of the state’s new End of Course Test in coordinate algebra. In its debut year, the test reflects the higher rigor infused into math by the state’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards.
I am hearing that the 2013 spring scores – which schools are now getting -- are dismal. Pass rates on the coordinate algebra EOCT at even powerhouse math high schools -- where students routinely score in the top tier in the SAT and the ACT math -- are only in the 70 percent range. Some teachers are telling me of pass rates of less than 10 percent.
The state Department of Education expected the scores to be low since this was the first adminisration of the test. DOE had a glimpse of just how low those scores might be based on the experiences of the block schedule students who took the test
