Fresh Loaf

Not the kind of a nickname you want tagged on your local high school.

According to data from John Hopkins University, Georgia’s fourth in the country with the highest percentage of “dropout factories” — schools where graduation rates are routinely below 60 percent. And while only 10 percent of the nation’s school boast the moniker, they produce the majority of the country’s dropouts.

In the Peach State, more than one-third of high schools are considered dropout factories.

The Alliance For Excellent Education, the national policy and advocacy organization that’s raising awareness about the problem, says it’s not just an inner-city problem.

(more…)

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Obamabucks! They don’t just pay for “comfort stations!”

Dave Williams of the Atlanta Business Chronicle reports:

Georgia will be on the receiving end of $665 million in federal stimulus funds to help educate students with disabilities or from low-income families.

The Georgia Board of Education unanimously approved the allocations on Tuesday in a special called meeting.

More than half of the federal aid — $351 million — will go to Georgia school districts through the federal Title I program, which provides funding for economically disadvantaged students. The rest of the money will come from a federal program dedicated to students with disabilities.

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By now you’ve surely seen the comments state Rep. Calvin Hill, R-ThisThatAndTheOther, made yesterday about how ENRAGED he was that taxpayer dollars were paying the salaries of Georgia State University profs considered scholars in the fields of oral sex, queer theory and male prostitution.

An enigmatic scribe at Pecanne Log reminds us of the hardships GSU has endured to become a group-sex friendly learning institution:

Georgia State has lagged behind other colleges in the state for decades in terms of student life due to its designation as a commuter school. The most flourishing and attractive part of any higher education institution’s campus life is, of course, its orgies. GSU has spent the last ten years playing an expensive catch-up in order to also be labeled an orgy-friendly research institution.

She goes on to carefully detail just how much the university has accomplished — occupying the Sodom and Gomorrah-esque Olympic Village, building group study rooms with viewing windows, etc. You can see why these women won our Best Local Blogger award, people!

Take note, Rep. Hill: This is bigger than budget shortfalls! Try and rob us of our oral sex experts and the erotic legacy GSU has struggled to build and you will see a protest on the statehouse steps unlike any you’ve ever seen before!

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BUDGET BUDDIES Richardson and Perdue at this morning's legislative breakfast.

Tuesday morning, Gov. Sonny Perdue, Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle and state House Speaker Glenn Richardson, speaking before a banquet room filled with business heavies, lobbyists and fellow lawmakers, outlined their legislative agendas for the session at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce’s annual “Eggs and Issues” breakfast at the Georgia World Congress Center.

There, over plates of eggs, sausage, and some hashbrown-stuffed tomato concoction, the elected officials said that, even with the state nearly $2 billion in the red, progress would take place.

After the jump, what Perdue, Cagle and Richardson said, in fancy bulletpoint style, about the upcoming legislative session.

(more…)

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It’s not the same accreditation recently stripped from the 58,000-student school system by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, but Clayton officials say the seal of approval from the Georgia Accrediting Commission may help students get accepted to public and private colleges and universities in the state.

Full release after the jump.

(more…)

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THE VISIBLE HAND: Smugness is growing abroad over the global free-market champion — especially under such an anti-regulation Republican administration — essentially nationalizing private corporations to combat its sputtering economy.

PAIN IN THE BANK: Top central banks of the world unite to infuse $247 billion into money markets in an attempt to stave off a global financial meltdown.

GOUGING: The state has subpoenaed at least nine gas stations for price-gouging after Hurricane Ike shut down oil production on the Texas coast.

EUGLENA: A big swath of slimy plant/animal goo is floating down the Oostanaula River toward Rome.

ZONE DEFENSE: Metro Atlanta communities are more often having to deal with abandoned clear-cut lots and subdivisions that developers couldn’t afford to finish, often doing so by revisiting zoning conditions.

CLAYTON: Corrective Superintendent John Thompson meets with SACS president, says he’ll soon unveil the school system’s plan to regain accreditation in the next 12 months.

THE HOOKY CRUMBLES: Nine DeKalb parents have been arrested for educational neglect based on their children’s truancy; police have arrest warrants for 59 people in all, some of whose kids have missed 40-50 days of school.

DOT: Auditors discover the department’s financial situation is even worse than previously thought.

DENNIS QUAID: Visits Falcons practice to promote a movie.

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BUSH: Secretly ordered the recent covert military strike in Pakistan, according to the NY Times, a major detachment from the usual U.S. tactic of using unmanned Predator spy planes to fire at suspected al-Qaeda targets in the country.

MCCAIN: Leads Obama by 18 points in Georgia.

HURRICANE IKE: Barreling toward Houston and Galveston, expected to be a Category 3 when it hits Friday night. Thousands of coastal Texans are evacuating.

CAGLE: Will run for governor in 2010.

THE POACH STATE: Georgia is among the fast-growing states poaching teachers from more economically strapped states, such as Michigan.

EXCELLENCE DEFICIENCY: The Commission for School Board Excellence, formed at the request of the Georgia Board of Education, is recommending that Georgia should have more power to intervene in dysfunctional local school boards such as Clayton’s.

BOBBY COX: Will return next season.

TOUCH AND GO: A Fulton Superior Court judge dismisses a lawsuit by VOTER GA challenging the fraud-proofness of the state’s touch-screen voting machines. VOTER GA’s Garland Favorito says the group may appeal.

CUMBERLAND ISLAND: Will begin tours of its north end, which had previously only been accessible to visitors via a 17-mile hike.

UGA: Will face its first real test of the season as it enters SEC play against Spurrier’s Gamecocks in Columbia Saturday.

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If Clayton County Schools wants to regain its accreditation status, it’ll have to jump through a lot of hoops. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the accrediting agency that stripped the system of its status this morning, released several documents related to the decision. I’m posting them below. The first is a 20-page report outlining the events leading up to the unfortunate news. The second file is from a press conference held today by the agency.

Click here to download the 20-page report from SACS.

Click here to download the press conference fact sheet.

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UPDATE: We normally don’t correct quoted sources, but I’ve done such to the copy below because of Todd’s comment.

Says the AJC’s Megan Matteucci:

The 50,000-student school system is the first in the nation to lose accreditation since 1969, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools announced today.

…

Qualifying Clayton students will still be able to get their HOPE scholarships. Earlier this year, Gov. Sonny Perdue signed a bill allowing graduates of unaccredited schools to get HOPE.

Without accreditation, Clayton will also lose pre-kindergarten funding and some teacher benefits. The county also expects more students to flee. About 2,000 students have already left, superintendent John Thompson said.

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WELL-TO-DO: Former Loafer Alyssa Abkowitz writes in the WSJ how affluent Atlantans such as Tyler Perry and Tom Glavine are getting around watering restrictions by installing wells.

MATTER OF PRINCIPAL: Cobb County school board members say they hadn’t heard a middle school principal was under investigation for sexual harassment when they promoted him to principal of North Cobb High School last month.

TRIAL BY FIRE: Cherokee County firefighters are the latest in metro Atlanta to invest in thermal-imaging cameras that allow them to find hidden hot spots and victims through smoke.

CLAYTON: The school system hires 400 new teachers despite the looming accreditation crisis.

CHASE CLOSED: A North Carolina man leads police on a chase through several Atlanta and DeKalb County neighborhoods Wednesday morning, eventually being caught after trying to flee his car.

FIGHTING DOGFIGHTING: The Humane Society has been blitzing Georgia the last few months with ads promoting a $5,000 reward for information leading to dogfighting arrests and convictions.

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BARACK IN IRAQ: Obama visits Basra and meets with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad’s Green Zone today as part of a three-senator congressional delegation.

DON’T SHIVER ME TIMBERS: The Christian Science Monitor reports on former pirate community in South Florida and how it’s keeping out big development.

NEST EGGS: Researchers are cracking open sea-turtle eggs in South Georgia to glean genetic information, which they say doesn’t significantly affect the number of hatchlings since hatch success is only 60-80 percent anyway.

KINGS CRABBY: The recent lawsuit filed against Dexter King by his siblings highlights a growing rift among MLK’s kids.

LEFT BEHIND: Schools await evaluation results to see if they’re in compliance with No Child Left Behind.

UGA: Bracing for potential layoffs to accommodate state-mandated budget cuts.

LIL SCRAPPY: Arrested for lil scrapping.

HELLO, DOLLY: Tropical storm could become hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico Tuesday.

PINOCHLEHEADS: Meet in Riverdale for a tournament.

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NBA FINALS: Doc Rivers’ Celtics beat the Lakers in Game 6 of the Finals, demolishing L.A. by five more points than they demolished Atlanta in that first-round Game 7.

DROPPING OUT LIKE IT’S HOT: In Georgia, where the graduation rate is 12 percentage points below the national average, class of 2008 dropouts will cost the state economy about $15.5 billion during their lifetimes.

GOLDEN RETRIEVEE: A Gainesville family’s golden retriever is returned to them after going missing five years ago, when they lived in Powder Springs.

A ROUNDABOUT SOLUTION: Roundabouts like the one at North Decatur and Lullwater keep traffic moving at busy intersections, resulting in less wasted gas from idling and saving drivers time.

ATLANTA TRAFFIC NO. 10: But we were just told we’re the worst.

TAKING SURCHARGE: Atlanta City Council passes a resolution, similar to one recently passed in Holly Springs, that would allow a $10-$15 gas surcharge to traffic ticket fines and could help offset the budget shortfall.

JIMMY WILLIAMS: Cut by the Falcons.

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SACS ED: Although Clayton County has garnered the most publicity, enough other Georgia school systems have had accreditation-threatening SACS encounters in recent years that the state BoE requested the creation of a task force to educate school boards around the state about appropriate behavior.

SMOLTZ: Shoulder surgery is successful; doesn’t answer any questions on return to pitching, though.

GLAVINE: I don’t even want to say it.

HOT PANTS: Some “blue jean bandits” may have been caught in Dawsonville after a lengthy police chase and manhunt.

FARE ENOUGH? Atlanta cabbies say gas prices are making their trade unprofitable at current rates, ask City Council to raise them.

BRAIN PLANE: Wings Air will begin offering a 20-minute, $49 Athens-Atlanta flight Monday, with another carrier awaiting airport contracts to follow suit.

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TEACHING TO THE TESTAMENT: Bible-as-literature classes clear legal hurdles in Tennessee and Georgia.

FLOCK ENROLL: Atlanta is the No. 1 major metropolitan area in the nation for college enrollment growth over the last 17 years and No. 2 in number of degrees awarded.

OVERRIDE: City Council takes Mayor Franklin down a notch by overriding three of her recent vetoes.

TESLER TRIAL: Jury deadlocked.

LANIER: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers takes heavy fire for its water-releasin’ ways at the Lake Lanier Association’s annual meeting Monday; the association is so fed up it’s funding its own scientific study on how much water the downstream mussels need to live.

GRADY CURVE: Grady Health System is officially taken over by Grady Memorial Hospital Corp. today, and also receives the first $50 million installment of the $200 million the Robert M. Woodruff Foundation pledged.

FOOT (AND MOUTH) IN THE DOOR: The U.S. farm bill includes a provision allowing the incurable foot-and-mouth disease to be studied in a mainland U.S. facility, clearing the way for the National Bio- and Agro-defense Facility, for which Athens is one of six candidates.

COMING TO BLOWS: Sustained wind gusts of 20 to 30 mph expected today.

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A report published April 1 by Editorial Projects In Education Research Center says Atlanta high school graduation rate is just 46 percent. Beverly Hall, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, faults the report for using old data.

“Atlanta public schools was the only urban system that since 2003 has shown progress in every grade and every subject tested.”

-Hall, speaking to Public Broadcasting Atlanta on April 1. She says the 2007 graduation rate was 68.3 percent.

“In the lower grades, our schools continue to place all students, from the genious to the borderline retard, in a single classroom and then commence to teach to the lowest commom denominator.

Bottom line, if you want to fix the high dropout percentage, you have to fix the elementary schools.”

-“Lee”, commenting April 2 on the AJC.com education blog, Get Schooled.

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A former student at American Intercontinental University, or AIU, a for-profit school that operates numerous campuses in the United States and London, filed a class-action lawsuit last week against the school. In the suit, Tajuansar Diallo claims that the school and its parent company, Delaware-based Career Education Company, or CEC, operated a “fraudulent scheme” by marketing itself as a selective school that boasted after-college careers for graduates and resources to help students find jobs. The suit claims that “these representations were materially false and/or misleading.”

AIU operates two campuses in the metro Atlanta region — one in Buckhead near Lenox Square Mall and another in Dunwoody. A CEC spokesperson was not available for comment.

Former CL staff writer Alyssa Abkowitz excellently profiled AIU in the July 2007 article, “The Student Trap.” Click here to read the piece and the 100-plus comments it continues to generate.

Click here to read the class-action lawsuit filed against AIU.

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From zero to 100, Georgia’s overall state grade for public education: 80.2

Mississippi’s overall state grade for public education: 68.9

National average grade for public education: 75.9

Average dollars spent annually on each student in Georgia: 8,658

Rank of Georgia in United States for per-pupil spending: 27

Georgia’s grade for K-12 achievement: 68.1

K-12 achievement grade for Massachusetts: 85

Percentage of Georgia high school students who graduate: 56.1

Number of states with higher high school graduation rates than Georgia: 48

Source: EPE Research Center 2008 Quality Counts public education survey

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Education Week, a trade publication for teachers, released a report card today for Georgia’s public schools.

The Peach State scored a “B -” overall, even though it only earned a lousy “D +” in the possibly somewhat sorta important “K-12 Achievement” category.

Georgia’s report card average was boosted by an “A -” in a category called “Standards, assessments, and accountability.”

The “B -” is like giving a restaurant three stars for serving lousy food and knowing it.

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According to the 2007 “Kids Count” data book, the number of states ranked lower than Georgia in childhood well-being … 9

Of the 10 major categories, the number in which Georgia fared better than the national average … 0

Number of Georgia high school dropouts … 49,000

Number of Georgia children without health insurance … 285,000

Number of Georgia children living in poverty … 469,000

Total Personal Income (TPI) of Georgia … $282,321,951

Georgia’s rank in TPI among U.S. states … 11

Georgia’s rank among U.S. states in providing for children … 41

If children are the future, the number of states with a brighter future than Georgia … 40

Sources: “Kids Count” Data Book (www.kidscount.org) Bureau of Economic Analysis U.S. Department of Commerce (www.bea.gov), AJC

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Percentage increase in the number of African-American Georgians who enrolled in college from 1995 to 2005, according to a June 2007 study: 63

Percentage increase in the number of whites who did: 16

Total number of Georgians who enrolled in college in 2005: 426,650

Of those, the percentage that was African-American: 31

Percentage of Georgia’s overall population that’s African-American: 31

Out of 16 Southern states, the number with a higher percentage of African-American college enrollment than Georgia: 1

Of those states, the number that exceed Georgia in the percentage of African-Americans who hold bachelor’s degrees: 1

Percentage of African-American Georgians who enrolled in historically black colleges in 1995: 28

Percentage who enrolled in historically black colleges in 2005: 15

Sources: Southern Regional Education Board Fact Book on Higher Education, U.S. Census Bureau

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From the Southern Regional Education Board’s June 2007 Fact Book on Higher Education:

“The enrollment of black students in the region rose 52 percent to a total of 1.1 million. This means that, for the first time, black individuals represented as high a percentage of college students (21 percent) as of the total population (19 percent).”

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This morning I participated in Career Day at John Wesley Dobbs Elementary School. I spoke to four classes.

Some highlights:

When I told Mr. Ramsey’s second-grade class how much I enjoy reading in my free time, he interrupted me.

“Will you say that again, please?”

“I enjoy reading in my free time.”

“Can you repeat that one more time?”

“I enjoy reading.”

“Did you hear that class? He likes to read in his free time.”

The highlight in each class was the Q&A.

Ms. Sevier’s fifth-grade class offered the most surprising questions.

One girl asked, “If you had to choose between traveling and taking pictures, which would you choose?”

A boy then asked if I’ve ever gone into the woods to take pictures of deer.

“No, but I bet our newspaper’s photographer Joeff Davis has.”

The boy cringed.

“Isn’t he scared that the deer will attack him?”

A girl in Ms. Madavo’s class asked me if I would write an article about Dobbs. I promised that I would write about the school on Creative Loafing’s website and include a photograph.

So here it is:

The kids were welcoming, attentive and enthusiastic. I had lots of fun. I hope the kids did, too.

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An NBC “Dateline” story on the experiences of a rookie teacher in an Atlanta middle school just won a Peabody Award.

The Grady Foster Peabody Awards contest, which happens to be administered by the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism, is sort of like the Pulitzers, except they’re for broadcast journalists.

“The Education of Ms. Groves” aired on WXIA-TV and other NBC affiliates in August. It chronicles Monica Groves in her first year at Jean Childs Young Middle School in Cascade Heights (southwest Atlanta).

“Inspiring but not schmaltzy, this program tracks the learning curve of a wide-eyed, first-year middle-school teacher in Atlanta who discovers her job demands skills and resources as well as idealism,” according to the Peabody announcement.

“Dateline” correspondent Hoda Kotb and producer Izhar Harpaz are based in New York. As far as I could tell from the announcement, no local news organizations or journalists won any Peabodys this year.

Though the award’s given by UGA, the ceremony’s traditionally under the bright lights of the big city. Sportscaster Bob Costas will preside over the event June 4 in New York City.

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