From the Athens paper. This could cause lots of problems for Purdue.

School funding suit will proceed

ATLANTA – A lawsuit charging the state with spending too little on education likely will go to trial after a judge rejected the state’s request to dismiss the case.

In a ruling released Tuesday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Long denied the state’s motion to dismiss the suit. The state argued the 50 school districts that filed the lawsuit couldn’t prove that spending more on education would increase student achievement.

Long didn’t rule on whether more money would increase test scores and graduation rates, but instead said that question should be answered at trial.

The trial is scheduled Oct. 21.

“This court is mindful of the expense involved in a trial of this magnitude, as well as the uncomfortable position of the judge in such a bench trial,” Long ruled. “But it is not the role of the court to tailor its ruling to avoid awkward situations or to let expediency and cost savings dictate legal outcomes, especially on issues of such importance.”

Long previously rebuffed another motion in which lawyers for state officials argued the Georgia General Assembly, not the courts, should make decisions about education funding. The Georgia Supreme Court later upheld her decision.

Pointing to sagging test scores, the school districts who formed the Consortium for Adequate School Funding in Georgia argued the state has not met its obligation to provide what the Georgia constitution terms an “adequate education.” The state rejects that argument and says, if the school districts win, Georgians may see a massive tax increase.

“It has been a long and difficult process, but we are close to the point where our attorneys will be able to explain in a court of law why the state of Georgia is not meeting its responsibility in the education of our students,” Oglethorpe County schools Superintendent Jeffery Welch, president of the consortium, said in news release the consortium issued.

“I expected the judge to rule in our favor and that (the case) would go on to trial,” Welch said in a telephone interview. “I’m not surprised. I have felt as most of us did that we had a very strong constitutional standing with regard to the applicability of the lawsuit. The funding is inadequate.”

A spokesman for Gov. Sonny Perdue said the governor still is confident the state will prevail at trial.

“It’s frustrating because taxpayers are paying both sides of this lawsuit,” Perdue press secretary Bert Brantley said. “They’re paying their local taxes to their school systems who are buying into this consortium, and they’re paying their state taxes for the state to defend a lawsuit when there is a public policy process that is in place to address school funding.”

The trial is expected to last several weeks, though Long’s final decision likely will be appealed.

Fifty school districts joined the consortium, including Clarke County, Commerce City, Elbert County, Madison County and Oglethorpe County.

From the VDT. Seems like we are blaming this on a certain group.

Three out of 10 Lowndes schools miss the AYP mark

By Johnna Pinholster

August 06, 2008 09:41 pm

VALDOSTA – Three out of 10 schools within the Lowndes County School system failed to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress standards.
Clyattville Elementary, Pinegrove Elementary and Lowndes High schools were the failing institutions.
The three schools did not meet the AYP standards because of two populations of students, Superintendent Dr. Steve Smith said.
“The most frequent reason was there was not enough student achievement in the areas of students with disabilities and the minority student area,” Smith said. “There was not enough gain with student achievement, specifically with some of the minority students at the high school.”
Clyattville Elementary School for both the Language Arts and Math CRCT tests scored below the 59.5 percent meets and exceeds range in each area.
The failing areas came from the students with disabilities, minority and economically disadvantaged sub-groups.
Pinegrove Elementary scored below the CRCT standards for the English Language Arts area in the students with disabilities sub-group.
The math CRCT scores had the minority and students with disabilities scoring below the 59.5 percent meets and exceeds standards.
The Georgia High School Graduation Test saw failing results for both the minority and students with disabilities sub-groups.
The minority sub-group scored 64.1 in both English Language Arts and Math and the students with disabilities score was 68.3, both below the meets and exceeds standards of 74.9 percent.
During the summer the schools scheduled day to day staff meetings that analyzed the test data and identified which sub-groups didn’t make AYP and why they did not, Smith said.
“We are in the process of formulating a school improvement plan and they are doing this on a school level and at a classroom level with personal enhancement plans,” Smith said.
The school improvement plan will help the schools address the overall deficiencies that exist with the institution.
This was the first year Pinegrove and Clyattville Elementary failed to make AYP. Lowndes High School had made AYP for the two years prior to this one, but had not made it before the previous consecutive years, Smith said.
The goal of AYP and No Child Left Behind is to get every child in school reading at grade level by 2014. Each year a school makes AYP the average a school is expected to meet is raised a little bit higher.
System wide, Smith said, he is happy with the AYP results, though he does expect improvement.
The AYP results for all schools in Georgia can be viewed at http://public.doe.k12.ga.us/ayp2008/search.asp.

]]> http://winnersville.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/3-of-10-lowndes-school-did-not-make-ayp/feed/ 0 winnersville http://winnersville.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/only-4-out-of-9-schools-in-valdosta-system-pass-ayp/ http://winnersville.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/only-4-out-of-9-schools-in-valdosta-system-pass-ayp/#comments Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:59:39 +0000 winnersville http://winnersville.wordpress.com/?p=53 ]]>

ok, help me with this. You are going to come up with a plan to address the issue….but some of these schools have failed for 4 years in a row!!!

What the heck was the old plan and why do they always have a plan that will soon be implemented?

We don’t need another education PLAN …….we need to EDUCATE!

Valdosta falls short of AYP

By JOHNNA PINHOLSTER

August 06, 2008 09:39 pm

VALDOSTA — Five of the nine schools within the Valdosta City School System failed to make AYP this year.

Valdosta High, Valdosta Middle, Newbern Middle, Southeast Elementary and J.L. Lomax Elementary schools all failed to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress standards that were released in late August.

Superintendent Dr. Bill Cason said he is not happy with the system’s results.

“We can do much better and we should do much better,” Cason said. “We are going to increase our focus on all the things that determine how we make AYP.”

While some of the failing scores can be accredited to the special population of students, that is not the only reason the system did not meet AYP, Cason said.

Attendance, graduation rates and math scores were also key factors and the sub-par scores.

Students with disabilities scored 31.7 percent overall while the economic disadvantaged sections for the CRCT math section of the AYP standards scored 55 percent. Both were below the 59.5 percent meets or exceeds rate.

For the math section of the Georgia High School Graduation Test the score for all students was 63.6 percent well below the 74.9 percent meets or exceeds bar.

“Five schools that did not make AYP this year is unacceptable,” Cason said. “We will be taking a stronger look at a lot of areas across the board academically.”

The process for improving the scores began earlier this summer, but the process will not be something that changes overnight, he said.
A balance score card will be implemented at all the schools that will help gauge the strengths and weakness in all academic areas.

“With this we will be able to identify individual needs of each student and provide concentrated help where it is needed most,” Cason said. “I firmly believe you have to accept the fact that you do have a problem and then find a way to fix it.”

The system will make improvement plans for all schools with input from both administrators and teachers but heavy focus will be on those that failed, Gayle Golden Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning said.

This was the first year J.L. Lomax has been placed in the needs improvement category, while Valdosta Middle School and Valdosta High School are in their second year of missing AYP.

Newbern Middle and Southeast Elementary are in their fourth year of missing AYP, Golden said.

Scores for all schools in Georgia can be found at http://public.doe.k12.ga.us/ayp2008/search.asp.

from the macon paper.

Education disconnect

There is a clear disconnect in Georgia between what our elected representatives say about education and what they do. As taxpayers, Georgians get confused, too, between rhetoric and reality. The tired, old rhetoric talks about our love for education. While it should be, it clearly isn’t.

According to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, our state ranks well in a number of areas. Out of 50 states our population was the fifth fastest growing. Some now say we are the fourth fastest growing state in the Union. Only seven states have less of a tax burden, as a percentage of income, than Georgia. We have a great business climate, the state ranked in the top five best states to do business by CNBC and the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.

But when it comes to taking care of its people, Georgia doesn’t rank so highly. In 2005 42 states were ranked higher than Georgia. We ranked no lower than 41 in all of the health categories, save one.

According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 43 states do a better job taking care of its children than Georgia. Thirty-six percent of our children live in poverty, 48 percent of our teenagers drop out of high school. Our teacher pupil ratio ranks 27th; teacher pay 18th, and our per-pupil expenditures rank is 21, according to the National Education Association.

Politician will tout adding more money to the education budget but forget to say the additional money is due to more students.

The state’s 180 school systems have been the first to bear the brunt of cutbacks, more than $1.5 billion to date. Now there is another 2 percent cut because of the state’s falling tax revenues. Our college and university system is trying to deal with a 3.5 percent to 5 percent cut. Our technical and adult education system will also be hit hard. And while college and university presidents openly rail against the cuts, the state k-12 school superintendent Kathy Cox has been almost silent. The state’s school superintendents want a strong advocate for public education, not someone afraid to buck the party line. Education is too important to be left to politics and politicians.

from the ajc.

The voucher diversion

Check out other states: Program is no magic passport to academic betterment

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/10/08

Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson advocates a destroy-the-town-to-save-it approach to public education in Georgia.

In his push for universal vouchers, the Savannah Republican maintains that diverting students from public classrooms into private ones — and diverting tax dollars in the same direction — will somehow mysteriously improve public schools.

Voucher experiments in other states don’t support that conclusion. To the contrary, research has found that vouchers improve neither the academic performance of the students who use them nor the public schools they leave behind.

But this isn’t about data, it’s about politics. Citing poll results that allegedly show Georgians want vouchers, Johnson is using the issue to drive his likely campaign to become the state’s next lieutenant governor. “We cannot afford to weaken the system anymore,” he said in a recent speech. “We cannot afford to wait any longer. We need to start from the beginning with a new vision.”

Johnson does paint a pretty picture of vouchers and what they can supposedly accomplish. For example, he contends that vouchers empower families to send their children to the private school of their choice.

That hasn’t been the experience elsewhere, and anyone familiar with the top private schools in metro Atlanta knows that it’s unlikely to be the case here. In reality, parents and students don’t choose the school they want; the schools choose the parents and children they want. Generally, they choose the children who are easiest to educate and leave the rest for the public schools to handle.

In addition, a voucher will never cover the full price of the best schools, which cost as much as $15,000 a year. Poorer children will be limited to second- and third-tier schools and will be worse off than now.

Under Johnson’s vision, parents could tap tax dollars to send their kids to religious schools. While some Georgians may accept tax dollars being spent on Christian schools, they’d also have to accept that tax dollars could end up going to schools operated by Muslim extremists or cult leaders such as polygamist Warren Jeffs.

Although vouchers have been proposed in various forms for decades, much of the public has remained skeptical because in most cases voucher-backed private schools have proved no better and in some cases worse than public schools.

For example, the U.S. Department of Education — which under Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has become openly pro-voucher — reluctantly conceded earlier this summer that a federal voucher initiative in Washington, D.C., has not resulted in significant improvement in student achievement. Released in June, the Education Department report stated that voucher students fared no better on standardized math and reading tests for the second year in a row than public school peers.

Those findings are not unique. In February, the School Choice Demonstration Project based at the University of Arkansas issued the first in a series of reports on Milwaukee’s longstanding voucher program, concluding that there was little difference in academic achievements between voucher recipients enrolled in private schools and their public school counterparts.

These studies and others impugning vouchers don’t deter Johnson and company, who are now touting a telephone poll of Georgia voters claiming that 68 percent believe all children in public schools should be able to obtain vouchers.

Those numbers contradict the results of actual elections in other states, including some as conservative as Georgia. Voters have rebuffed vouchers in 11 states, and in Michigan, Colorado and California, they have done so twice. In 2000, both California and Michigan residents voted “no” to vouchers by a margin of more than two to one.

In 2007, the Utah Legislature enacted a statewide universal voucher program only to have voters repeal it nine months later by a margin of 62 percent to 38 percent. The Utah program would have given any family tax dollars to cover private tuition, regardless of household income or whether the public school was good or bad.

In his quest for vouchers, Johnson claims Georgia has tried everything to boost student achievement and nothing’s worked. That’s false. As a state, Georgia has either backed away from or never tried many reforms, including smaller class and school size, year-round classes and extended days.

Nor has the state tackled teacher quality. Yet repeated research suggests that teacher effectiveness is a far more important factor in student achievement than per-pupil expenditures, ethnic makeup or economic background.

Georgia also continues to waste money awarding sizable raises every time a teacher gets a master’s degree, even if the diploma has no relevance to the teacher’s content area. Because of this idiotic policy, Georgia teachers are obtaining an inordinate number of quickie degrees from diploma mills.

Georgia possesses a long and unfortunate history of undervaluing education, and the state and its people are belatedly recognizing that it can no longer entice industry with cheap labor and cheap land. That has left Georgia playing catch-up with states that understood earlier that an educated work force is the secret to 21st-century prosperity.

States with the highest levels of academic achievement — Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut and North Carolina, among others — aren’t doing it through vouchers. They’re bringing in better teachers, targeting resources and reforming schools as a whole.

Georgia could do those things as well, if there was the political will.

From the Athens paper and the effects of No Child Left Behind on their schools:

No Child Left Behind is untenable framework

Editorial

In a sad irony that should be lost on no one who cares about educating this country’s young people, the federal No Child Left Behind Act now is working to leave children behind.

The law requires that public school students be offered the opportunity to transfer out of schools where various performance benchmarks aren’t being met. At first glance, that appears to be a common sense way of ensuring that young people get at least a shot at an adequate education. However, the law doesn’t contemplate what happens when most, if not all, of the schools in a given jurisdiction fail to meet those benchmarks.

Sadly, in the Clarke County School District and elsewhere, that is exactly the circumstance in which public school administrators are finding themselves. According to a Friday story in this newspaper, all four Clarke County middle schools and both high schools now are in “needs improvement” status for failing to meet federal testing standards. Thus, there’s no place for any Clarke County middle school or high school student, at least within the county, to go in the hope of getting a better education than he or she currently is receiving.

As the Friday story noted, administrators have another option for getting students who request a transfer into a better-performing school. Administrators can ask their counterparts in nearby school districts to accommodate students who want to transfer out of their current school. Clarke administrators did just that, but were told by Barrow, Jackson and Oconee County school system officials that they didn’t have the space to accommodate Clarke students. The neighboring Madison County school system also was approached by Clarke administrators, but because Madison’s middle and high school also are in “needs improvement” status, it would make no sense for students to transfer across that county line.

But, even if a neighboring school system could accommodate students in underperforming schools, there’s no reason for those systems to offer up the space. Why should those systems be interested in taking in any students who, by virtue of having been in an underperforming school, might drag down that school system’s test scores and other performance measures?

Indeed, the transfer option presents problems, even when students can be accommodated at schools within their own district. A report last week in the Savannah Morning News noted that transfers to the three high schools in that community that are meeting performance standards “is rocking the boat … causing overcrowding, behavior problems and putting more students at academic risk.”

The No Child Left Behind Act tries to establish a mandate that students be placed in an environment conducive to learning, relying on a couple of dubious assumptions.

The first of those assumptions is there are no endemic problems within school systems. This assumption says there is no reason that, say, high schools serving demographically indistinguishable student bodies in the same community can’t produce radically different outcomes in student achievement, so that if one of those schools is substandard, the other won’t be substandard.

The second of those assumptions is that schools that do meet performance benchmarks will be willing, even if they are able, to take on students from lower-performing schools.

As the situation in Clarke County illustrates, those are dangerous assumptions, and they prove that the federal educational accountability initiative is deserving of a failing grade.

Wow, talk about dumb ideas…….

Ga. education officials looking at cutting $171M

Associated Press
Published on: 08/11/08

The Georgia Department of Education is trying to hammer out how to slash up to $171 million from the state’s K-12 budget.

The state school board is expected to take up the issue during its monthly meeting Wednesday and Thursday. Gov. Sonny Perdue announced the cuts Aug. 1 as part of a statewide strategy to deal with an expected $1.6 billion shortfall this fiscal year.

Other state departments are being cut 6 percent. The state also is withholding $428 million in homeowner tax cuts planned for this year to make ends meet.

State officials have said tax revenues are down nearly 1 percent for the fiscal year, which began July 1. That’s after a year of lagging revenues that forced Perdue to use $600 million in

From the ajc

Parents concerned with latest math curriculum

By LAURA DIAMOND
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/10/08

Georgia parents were outraged after thousands of students failed statewide math exams in May.

Now with the start of a new school year, parents fear for their children as the state expands the new math curriculum to high schools.

Fayette County parent Wendy Ashabranner worries how her son will handle this new math when he starts at Fayette County High on Monday. He was among the 38 percent of the state’s eighth-graders who failed the state’s new, redesigned math exam, which was based on harder material.

While parents and teachers expected some students to struggle with the new math, they were shocked by the high failure rates.

“It’s a trust factor, and I’m very leery of trusting the state,” she said. “I know they’re hoping these new standards will work, but what if it backfires? It’s our kids who will pay the price. Why are they using our kids as guinea pigs?”

New curriculum

After years of criticism that the state’s math curriculum was too weak, the Georgia Department of Education drastically changed the way students learn the subject. Officials adopted an “integrated” design, which weaves elements of algebra, geometry and statistics into a single math class, rather than teaching each separately. Elementary-school students use more hands-on activities to learn about numbers, geometry, multiplication and division. Middle school students learn some of the algebra previously taught in high school.

State schools Superintendent Kathy Cox said the new curriculum will better prepare students for college and jobs.

Some parents were so bothered by the changes they formed Georgia Parents for Math. They accuse the state of not providing enough training or classroom resources. They say more emphasis should be placed on math theory and basic concepts.

More parents joined the battle, anxious because failing math in high school would make it difficult for their children to graduate and almost impossible to get into a top college.

Meeting standards

The state began rewriting its curriculum for all subjects about five years ago after education groups, teachers and parents complained the old standards were too vague and broad and caused Georgia’s poor performance on national exams.

The new standards were developed by teachers, college professors and curriculum specialists. The math follows the integrated approach used in Japan and other countries. For example, Georgia’s high school freshmen will take “Mathematics I: Algebra/Geometry/Statistics” while they used to take just algebra or just geometry.

Martha Reichrath, deputy superintendent for the state Education Department, said the new lessons explain why students need math, whether to determine business profits or find the surface area of an object.

“We have not come up with some foreign math,” Reichrath said. “It is an enriched math. Our students will do better with this math. I do believe we will be the national leader in math.”

Georgia is the only state using a pure integrated math. The new standards have received high marks from different education and business groups.

But will it work?

“Is Georgia right? It’s too early to tell,” said Francis “Skip” Fennell, an education professor at McDaniel College in Maryland and a member of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.

Fennell said other states are struggling with how to teach math. Students must understand fractions, decimals and other prerequisites before they can master algebra, which is considered a gatekeeper to success in college and the work force, he said.

Georgia’s math does not provide enough of the basic concepts students need, said Tammy Lucas, a founding member of Georgia Parents for Math. The group has about 500 members from across the state.

Time of adjustment

The state’s new system requires math teachers to act more as facilitators, meaning they lecture less and use fewer drills. Students must demonstrate what they know and show how they reached their answers.

Teachers say the new method is an adjustment.

“These math standards are new to us, too,” said Annette Muhammad, a math teacher at Washington High in Atlanta. “There will be days when we all want to pull our hair out. But we’re going to work hard to make sure we get this right.”

Teachers have attended training sessions this summer to learn the new material. State officials say test scores will improve as teachers get used to it.

Those promises provide little consolation to the students who are the first to get the new curriculum.

“You can tell when your teachers are doing something new and they don’t like it or don’t understand it,” said Evan Champion, Ashabranner’s son. “I hope they spend more time explaining the units more carefully and take more time answering our questions instead of saying, ‘We don’t have time,’ and then moving on to the next unit.”

More for parents, too

The ninth-grade math course has six units, so teachers will have enough time to spend on each, said Janet Davis, the state’s program manager for math.

Schools can offer a math support course that students take in addition to the regular math class, Davis said. Students would take this class instead of an elective, such as band or art.

Some parents say all the changes mean they must pay closer attention to their child’s assignments.

“We’ll be talking about what she did in math every night, and I’m going to monitor everything she’s doing,” said Eddie Bruce, a Cartersville father whose daughter just started ninth grade. “If you’re a parent, you’re worried about math.”

From the Jacksonville Paper

Effective school boards don’t just happen, experts say

By Walter C. Jones,
The Times-Union

ATLANTA – The fact that a fifth of all local school boards have run into serious enough problems that their accreditation was endangered in the last 10 years demonstrates how dysfunctional governing boards can be.

And the problems could apply to any governing body, from a city council, airport commission or coliseum authority, to even legislative bodies.

A task force – appointed by the State Board of Education with the encouragement of business groups – has until September to come up with recommendations for improving the operation of local boards of education. Another group in Augusta is tackling a similar problem in trying to determine how to create an effective panel to oversee management of its Coliseum Authority.

Their findings could apply to other instances.

Until 1992 when the constitution changed, grand juries named the members of local school boards, and voters picked the local superintendent. Now, board members are elected, and they hire the superintendent.

That change was significant, according to attorney Phil Hartley, whose Gainesville firm represents 120 of the 181 Georgia school districts. For one thing, school boards only used to concern themselves with finances. Now, candidates run with the intention of making substantive changes in how schools operate.

Concerns with operational details, though, lead to one pitfall many boards stumble into, namely meddling, warns Mark Elgart, president of AdvancED, the parent organization of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

SACS grants accreditation after sending teams of educators to evaluate each local district. Meddling is one of their most frequent complaints.

Of course, these evaluators are teachers and principals from other districts who wouldn’t want intensive input from their own boards. But it’s not just their bias. As Elgart says, can you imagine a member of The Home Depot’s board dropping by a store and instructing a clerk to stack the 2-by-4s in another aisle from where the manager specified?

That’s the kind of interference he says his evaluators discovered in board after board. Elgart attributes part of it to the change to elected board members.

“Since that time, I don’t think that is coincidence,” he said.

He points to two trends that have emerged. First, the post has become viewed as a political stepping stone for some with higher ambitions. Second, many members of boards in big districts that provide pay and benefits see the position as employment.

When confronted about his contributions to a dysfunctional board, “one board member told me, ‘find me another job, and I’ll move on,’ ” Elgart recounted. Besides, what kind of worker can you attract for the amount that board members take home, he asks.

Elgart is equally critical of board members who have no connection to the organization they serve, but who may only be looking to cut spending to hold taxes down or push some other narrow agenda.

The first challenge is getting good people to run, he said, adding he doesn’t favor returning to appointed board members. Presumably, voters will be able to select the best candidate if solid, volunteer-oriented people put their names on the ballot.

Current law specifies few qualifications beyond the requirement for 12 hours of training upon election and six hours of continuing training annually. However, board members who don’t get their training face no consequences.

Now, the education task force intends to concoct a better recipe for a good board.

Elgart has a few suggestions, such as no low-turnout special elections, no partisan labels and no meddling.

Professionalism, vision and ethics would be desirable but harder to attain, Hartley said.

“Some of that is very difficult to mandate in statue,” he said.

However, he would demand boards do strategic planning, calling it one thing he’s found in common among the best school boards he’s worked with. Such a plan would have specific objectives that voters could judge board members by when re-election time rolls around.

It’s not just government boards that break down. Federal regulators and Congress enacted new strictures for corporate boards following the collapse of Enron, and the business people on the task force are likely to borrow some ideas.

Phil Jacobs, who retired as AT&T’s top executive in Georgia, has served on 20 corporate and volunteer boards, including the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. He’s co-chairing the task force along with John Rice, vice chairman of GE, and Gary Price, managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers, two men who are on pace to serve on the same number of boards as Jacobs did by the time they retire.

Their results are due in three months, in time to be crafted into legislation by the two lawmakers on the task force, the chairmen of the House and Senate education committees, but too late for this year’s elections.

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Local parents here are hearing bad numbers and that a lot of students are going to be in summer school this year.

Statewide 40% of eight graders are being held back because of math? Only 20- 30% of students passed social studies?

Our schools are not failing, they have failed.

Students miss mark on key test
Failure rates for CRCT prompt state response

By Laura Diamond
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/20/08

Georgia public school leaders were so shocked by dismal scores on state math and social studies tests, the state superintendent released a statement Monday to prepare parents and others for the results.

According to the unofficial results, only 20 to 30 percent of Georgia’s sixth- and seventh-graders passed the state social studies exam. In math, about 40 percent of eighth-graders could be held back because they failed the test.

The state will release official scores from the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests next month.

Parents whose children failed the math test will be notified by local schools. The state requires eighth-graders to pass the reading and math exams to move to high school.

Students who failed math exams —- as well as those who might have failed reading —- can retake the exam this summer. Schools will provide optional free classes to get them ready. Students who failed the social studies exam don’t face any consequences under Georgia law.

State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox said test scores in both subjects dropped because students took harder tests to match the state’s tougher and more rigorous curriculum.

“When you raise standards and expectations, it is not unusual to see a temporary dip in the percent of students who are meeting those expectations,” Cox wrote in a statement released Monday afternoon. “We have seen this in other grades and other areas of the curriculum.”

Cox was puzzled by the drastic drop in social studies, calling it “cause for concern.” Last year, about 83 percent of the sixth-graders passed the social studies test, as did about 86 percent of the seventh-graders, according to state figures.

She wondered whether the new social studies standards were clear and if some of the detailed test questions caught students off guard. Cox will ask a group of teachers and curriculum specialists to determine what may have happened.

“We have to do better with this,” Cox said.

Changes could be made to the test and to the material teachers teach, said Dana Tofig, spokesman for the state education department.

Parent Stephanie Kratofil said her daughter described the seventh-grade exams as some of the hardest tests she’s ever taken. The straight-A student told her mother the social studies exam included material never taught in class.

“There’s got to be something wrong with that test,” Kratofil said. “This is showing some horrible numbers for the state. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

While a failed math test carries more consequences than the social studies test, state education leaders had predicted only about 60 percent of students would pass the tougher exam, Tofig said. About 81 percent of eighth-graders passed the math CRCT last year.

Cox described the decline as a “temporary dip” because of the higher expectations placed on all students. This year every eighth-grader took algebra, while before only a small number took the class in middle school, she said.

The math scores are used to determine whether schools meet the testing goals required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Schools that fail face increasingly severe sanctions, up to a possible takeover by the state.

Cox previously said she expected more middle schools to miss testing goals this year because of math scores. A report showing specifically how many middle schools missed the mark will be released in July.

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