By Jon Gillooly

jgillooly@mdjonline.com

MABLETON — Republican State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox and state Rep. Alisha Thomas Morgan (D-Austell) come from opposite sides of the political spectrum, but both agree that teacher quality needs improvement in Georgia.

About 150 people turned out to listen to Cox and Morgan talk about education during a town hall meeting Monday night at Lindley Middle School.

Parent Tyrone Williams told them his daughter was academically successful last year at McEachern High School, but now that she’s a sophomore, she has encountered a teacher with such low expectations and lack of interest that she is struggling.

Williams said it’s critical that ineffective, uncaring teachers be pulled from the classroom.

In response, Cox said the trouble was that a “disproportionate” number of such problem teachers could be found in high schools.

“It’s high schools that aren’t moving,” Cox said.

Cox said the No. 1 reason high schools missed achieving Adequate Yearly Progress in the last two years is because of the math scores of black and economically disadvantaged students.

The problem can be addressed in several ways. Students must be prevented from enrolling in “dumbed down” math classes as they have for years, she said.

Georgia is not handcuffed by a powerful teachers union as some states are. School principals can fire their employees, Cox said. But the problem is they have to have solid evidence of a teacher’s ineffectiveness or they become tied up in court for years.

“We’ve got to give our (high school) principals better tools to measure teacher effectiveness. Right now, a lot of it’s based on conjecture,” Cox said.

Principals need to use standardized tests to measure teacher performance. If a school is not making AYP for three years because of math, then the math department needs to be held accountable, Cox said.

The state’s education chief said she’s piloting a new teacher evaluation measurement that doesn’t simply mark the teacher “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” but links the evaluation to student progress.

“We’ve got to measure that and hold people accountable for that,” she said. “That data doesn’t lie, but sometimes we don’t want to face the reality of the data.”

Morgan said good teachers don’t mind being held accountable because they’re already doing their jobs. The good teachers resent the teacher down the hall who is showing movies to the class instead of teaching, Morgan said.

In October, Morgan’s husband, David Morgan, a member of the Cobb school board, presented a plan in which to improve the performance of existing teachers and lure new talent to the system through higher pay. But that plan remains to be approved by the school board.

Another questioner asked Cox why south Cobb schools received fewer financial resources than east Cobb schools. Cox said when it comes to funding, the state and local boards by law must equally fund each student. The confusion may come from the fact that east Cobb PTAs raise more dollars than others do, she said.

Kiddada Grey, co president of the South Cobb Council of PTAs, which represents 32 schools, spoke up on behalf of east Cobb schools, saying one of the reasons such schools are able to raise $60,000 to $70,000 is because parent involvement is close to 100 percent. For black and Hispanic students to be successful, their parents must also be involved, she said.

On high school achievement, Cox said it’s not all gloom and doom. When she took office in 2003, the graduation rate was 63.3 percent. The last school year it was 79.8 percent, she said.

However, “We can’t be afraid of the tough issues that have plagued us for a long time, and low math achievement in our state, that’s plagued us for 50 years,” she said.