Equitable Distribution: Georgia

Analysis of Georgia's policies

Providing comprehensive reporting may be the state's most important role for ensuring the equitable distribution of teachers among schools. Georgia reports little school-level data that can help support the equitable distribution of teacher talent.

Georgia does not collect or publicly report most of the data recommended by NCTQ. The state does not provide a school-level teacher quality index that demonstrates the academic backgrounds of a school's teachers and the ratio of new to veteran teachers. Georgia also does not report on teacher absenteeism or turnover rates.

The state reports on the percentage of teachers on emergency credentials, the average years of teacher experience and the percentage of highly qualified teachers. Commendably, these data are reported for each school, rather than aggregated by district. When reporting the percentage of highly qualified teachers, the state identifies schools with poverty levels in the high or low quartile.

Citation

GOSA 2009 Report Card Highly Qualified Teachers by School http://www.gadoe.org/ReportingFW.aspx?PageReq=102&StateId=ALL&T=1 Georgia School Report Cards 2009-2010 http://www.doe.k12.ga.us/ReportingFW.aspx?PageReq=102&SchoolId=22330&T=1&FY=2010

Recommendations for Georgia

Use a teacher quality index to report publicly about each school.
A teacher quality index, such as the one developed by the Illinois Education Research Council, with data including teachers' average SAT or ACT scores, the percentage of teachers failing basic skills licensure tests at least once, the selectivity of teachers' undergraduate colleges and the percentage of new teachers, can shine a light on how equitably teachers are distributed both across and within districts. Georgia should ensure that individual school report cards include such data in a manner that translates these factors into something easily understood by the public, such as a color-coded matrix indicating a school's high or low score.

Publish other data that facilitate comparisons across schools.
Georgia should collect and report other school-level data that reflect the stability of a school's faculty, including the rates of teacher absenteeism and turnover.

Provide comparative data based on school demographics.
As Georgia does for highly qualified teachers, the state should provide comparative data for schools with similar poverty and minority populations. This would yield a more comprehensive picture of gaps in the equitable distribution of teachers. 

State response to our analysis

Georgia asserted that it provides data in the form of indexes, reports, and tools to monitor and support school systems and local schools' status in not only achieving 100 percent highly qualified teachers, but also the equitable distribution of highly qualified, highly effective teachers.

The state's Equity Technical Assistance (ETA) website provides all public schools and systems with a detailed summary of their student and teacher populations with comparative data. School level, system level, and state level data are summarized by combining key variables from the Certified Personal Information (CPI), the Highly Qualified data system (HiQ2), the Full-Time Equivalent records (FTE), the Student Record (SR), the Student Course Profile (CR), the Annual Yearly Progress report (AYP) and the teacher certification records for both Georgia teacher certificates as well as National Board Certificate information and the Georgia Master Teacher records.

ETA compares and contrasts schools within a system and across the state, provides important indicators of teacher population; and provides longitudinal data on all schools. Included are comparative data by teacher degree level, experience level, retention rates, experience continuity ratio, and with student minority enrollment data and economically disadvantaged student data, all at the school, district, and state level.

In addition to the ETA data, the HiQ2 system provides immediate access by schools and systems to the highly qualified status of their teachers and paraprofessionals in Georgia. As another tool, the Mid-year School Personal Analysis (MySPA) is a new website made available to systems and schools that provides attrition data, certification level, experience level and other information, including specific data for teachers of special education. 

Project EQ is an electronic library of equity initiatives that allows school systems to publish their equity plans and other equity-related programs in a public forum so that they are accessible by other school systems, both in Georgia and other states. Visitors are also able to communicate with project publishers and other website visitors. This forum enables visitors to further refine and perfect existing programs to meet their system's equity plan.

The data resources mentioned above, excluding the new systems of MySPA and Project EQ, which will be updated each year, are compiled and released to school systems and schools for each school year from 2004 to the present, allowing for longitudinal comparisons. They also provide policy makers, administrators and state staff with the means to verify the effectiveness of local equity policies.

The state's Governor's Office of Student Achievement works in partnership with the state Department of Education to create a report card that provides information for accountability, state test performance, national test performance, student and school demographics and personnel and fiscal data at the state, district and school level.

Last word

This very long response provides no further evidence that Georgia is reporting more school-level data than indicated in the analysis. While it is clear that Georgia has developed sophisticated data systems that focus on equity issues, the state should consider expanding its efforts to provide the public with more data about teacher distribution at the district and school level.