Georgia: Whew, the 47th State!

Ok, I keep hearing that Georgia is next-to-last in education.  And the more I read the newspaper and the Georgia Code I tend to believe it.  But I had to check it out for myself.

After a few minutes of internet research it is clear that what you mean by “last” is up to debate.  I have chosen SAT scores because thousands of colleges can’t all be wrong at the same time.  Clearly according to the Department of Education we are NOT 49th in SAT scores.  The maximum score for SAT is 2400.  The US average score is 1511 and Georgia’s average is 1466.  http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables/dt08_144.asp.  That means that Georgia is 47th above South Carolina, Hawaii, and Maine (DC is last, but still not a state.)

The story I get all the time is that Georgia has more people take the SAT that in some other, higher-ranking states, and therefore Georgia numbers represent our school performance better.  There seems to be some truth to that argument.  Georgia (#47) had 70% of our graduating high school students take the test.  The “top” 24 states all had fewer than 25% take the SAT.  Of those States, Iowa (#1),  North Dakota (#5), South Dakota (#6), and Mississippo (#14) all had 3% of their graduating high school students take the test.  Seriously?  3%?  The average is 45% for the US.  So for the purposes of the Paul Ranking, if you don’t have at least 45% of your students take the test then you are a cheater-head and your scores don’t count.

So taking out the “cheaters,” how many states are really better than Georgia?  Well Georgia ranks 21st (out of the 25 remaining states).  Well now that I’ve done all that work, we did not really go up much in the rankings.

Ok, how about the argument that we don’t spend enough money?