EDITORIAL: Barrow's math lag needs fixing

But if the area is to ever become a “Research Triangle” of Georgia, its weak links will have to be addressed. Currently, one of the weak links appears to be curriculum problems in the Barrow County School System.

This year’s CRCT results for Georgia’s elementary and middle school grades were recently released and Barrow’s results were embarrassingly low in math. In fact, Barrow’s math failure rate on the CRCT put it in the bottom half of Georgia’s school systems.

And some individual school results were much worse. Nearly half of third, fourth and fifth graders at County Line Elementary School failed the CRCT math test. At Winder-Barrow Middle School, sixth, seventh and eighth graders failed the CRCT math at a much higher rate than the state average. At WBMS, half of the eighth graders failed the test.

If these poor CRCT results had just been confined to one grade or one school, the situation might be different. But the across-the-board weakness in just about every grade level is an indication of a deeper, system-level problem. It appears the Barrow County School System’s math curriculum is lagging the changes being made at the state level to the math curriculum.

That indication becomes clear when Barrow is compared to two nearby school systems — Gwinnett and Jackson counties. While Barrow was in the bottom tier of Georgia schools, both Jackson and Gwinnett school systems were in the top 25 percent. There’s not enough difference in Barrow’s location or demographics to explain such an anomaly.

That has huge implications for Barrow County beyond just testing scores. One of the key things prospective industries look at is the quality of local school systems compared to other areas. In addition, the quality of residential growth is largely determined by the quality of local schools. Parents want to move to communities that have high-performing schools and will avoid weak school districts.

In other areas of the CRCT — reading, language arts and science — Barrow schools performed better than they did in math and were mostly within range of the state average. Even so, the results were not, overall, competitive with the surrounding school systems.

If the dream of Barrow County is to be on a high-tech pipeline from Atlanta to Athens, then Barrow will have to fix some of its educational weaknesses.

Of the infrastructure Barrow must have to attract high-quality industrial, commercial and residential growth, just having better roads, water and sewer won’t be enough.

The most important infrastructure Barrow can build is the intellectual capacity of its students.