Better, but a long way to go
The Georgia Department of Education and the state superintendent’s office have made no secret over the last couple of years that students, parents and educators should expect something of a shock when the Georgia Milestones standardized testing system was put into place. The Milestones standard would be a more demanding one, we were told, than the old Criterion Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) it was to replace.
(If nothing else, at least “Milestones” evokes a recognizable metaphor for progress, as opposed to words picked at random from the Bureaucrat’s Thesaurus.)
To get a sense of how things might go, last year’s Milestones tests were considered a kind of dress rehearsal. (There were also waivers on some of this year’s tests because of reported problems with online testing.) The 2016 results for the Muscogee County School District showed improvement in most of the test categories … enough to justify being gratified, but by no means satisfied.
The gratification comes from the fact that, according to scores released Tuesday by the state DOE, the district’s passing rate increased on more than two-thirds of the tests — 22 of 31— over last year. It held level in three, and fell in six others.
The district also saw a decrease in the category of “beginning learners” — defined as those students who need “substantial academic support” to advance to the next grade level — and significant increases in the numbers of “proficient” and “distinguished” learners in several categories.
Columbus public schools also came closer to the state average in 11 of the tests, but that’s a gain that, unfortunately, also highlights the school system’s struggles: MCSD remains below the state average — in some cases significantly below — in every category but one, and saw the gap hold or widen in two-thirds of the tests.
This is the kind of measured encouragement the system has encountered before: Performance is getting better, but it’s not getting better fast enough.
Mis-fortune
We’ve all heard accounts of people who won lotteries yet whose lives afterward were not exactly the proverbial dreams come true. But the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville reported on a Georgia man who won a fortune and still managed to be a loser on multiple levels.
Ronnie Music, 45, of Waycross won $3 million last year in the Georgia Lottery. Yes, that’s $3 million. Most of us would consider that a nest egg to make us comfortable for life.
Not Music, who now faces up to 25 years in the slammer.
“Defendant Music decided to test his luck by sinking millions of dollars of lottery winnings into the purchase and sale of crystal meth,’’ U.S. Attorney Edward Tarver said of Music, who already had a substantial criminal record before this golden opportunity to walk away from his past as an independently rich man. “As a result of his unsound investment strategy, Music now faces decades in a federal prison.”
Not only can stupid not be fixed; it obviously can’t be bought off, either.
This story was originally published July 27, 2016 at 5:50 PM with the headline "Better, but a long way to go."