80 students signed up for the new high school

Annie,

So what you're saying is that kids that bring knives to school or drugs to school or that are affiliated with gangs should just get an old 3 day suspension?!? That would be great! A kid gets caught selling drugs on Monday but big deal, he'll be right back at it again on Thursday. NO wait, many just wanna kick them out of school permanently, thereby making it just about a guarantee that they will be a drain on society. Not to mention that each kid you boot out of school is a drop-out and therefore makes it harder to make AYP.

Annie I know a crap load more about education than you do, I assure you that. You make it sound like the Alt school is filled with kids that have been erroneousnessly booted from their home schools by teachers that just find them difficult. The ENTIRE Alt school (6-12 grade) is around 100 kids. Anyone that knows a teacher knows that every year they have a couple of kids they can't stand. So why isn't the Alt school bigger if what you say is true?
I'll tell you why, because a classroom teacher does not have the power to just send a kid there.

And just for your information the average kid at the Alt school is sent there for chronic referrals, as in a dozen or more from MULTIPLE teachers. The rest of the kids are sent there for 1 big incident such as drugs, weapons, or a sexual offense.

You obviously know NOTHING about the PLC because kids can't get sent there. They CHOOSE to go there for a variety of reasons but all have the same goal of graduating. Without the PLC the county would be even farther away from making the passing graduation rate for AYP because the kids that graduate from there will all tell you that they wouldn't have made it without the PLC.

I will give you credit for 1 thing though, teachers CAN use many of the same strategies as Sped teachers to work with problem regular education kids. The problem with that is twofold. 1st - most regular ed teachers lack the skill set for that. The Response to Intervention (RTI) process is working to remedy this, but training every teacher takes time and money BOTH of which are thin on the ground around here. 2nd - In a class with 25+ kids where the teacher is being asked to teach harder material each year coupled with the fact that the state and federal governments keep raising the bar that kids must pass, most teachers are naturally going to be more concerned with making sure that their efforts are going to be aimed at the non-difficult students. It's not that they don't want to see those kids be successful, it's just that the teachers can only do so much without help from parents, community, and the student themselves.

Lastly, I'm not sure what research you have done but go look up what the Official Code of Georgia Title 20 has to say about alternative schools.

http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/

They are in NO WAY meant to be schools for emotional issues.

For starters I told someone who claimed to have done research on Alt. Schools to look up what they are set up for in GA. They claimed that they were for severely emotional problematic students and I wanted that person to see that Alt schools are not for that type of student. The Rutland Centers are.

Our ranking - I've had this conversation so many times over the last 10 years I should just stick it on Youtube and post the link. The "National Rankings" are based on a wide variety of criteria. I wish it was just based on what was taught in the classroom, but it isn't, not even remotely. Because if it was based on what teachers were teaching, we would be in the top 10 because GA is damn near leading the pack on a rigorous curriculum. But the rankings are based on factors such as teacher pay, amount spent per child, graduation rate, reading proficiency just to name a few. Some people who read this next part are gonna crap themselves, but GA doesn't pay teachers very well when compared to the rest of the states, nor do we spend a lot on each student compared to other states. Vermont is frequently in the top 5 and they pay more than double what we pay in property taxes.

http://www.vermontrealestatetoday.com/newsletter/2011-Special-Report-on-Vermont-real%20estate-taxes.pdf

So as a state we can climb higher in the rankings by simply doubling or tripling our property taxes and throwing the money at education.

Now let's look at the graduation rates that we get dinged on. I'm proud to say that GA has the most extreme measure of what a HS graduate is. We base our graduation rate on the percentage of students that get through K-12 education in 13 years plus a summer. Most states DO NOT use this criteria. Many states base their graduation rate on the percentage of kids that complete HS in 4 years plus a summer. If we used this criteria our percentage rate would jump up dramatically and likewise if other states used our formula their's would drop. Good news on this, there will be federal criteria in the next few years and there will also be federal guidelines on curriculum so we will be ranked much higher in that as well.

We're always going to have a problem with the reading proficiency aspects because we as a state have a fairly large percentage of minority students who are not raised in homes where people speak the same language as they are going to be tested in. I'm ancient, we used to call it Ebonics, but now it's AAVE African American Vernacular English, anyway, the national tests are set up for the nation as a whole and do not take regional dialects into consideration - south GA county white boys do bad on these tests too. Study after study has shown that many kids (AAVE, county kids, inner city poor kids (I'm looking at you Boston people)) who fail the written english proficiency test can pass the exact test when it is given orally. In short, some of the tests we use to rank schools are prejudicial. Georgia State University has a phenomenal student peer tutoring set-up because many black freshman find that they need to learn how to write standard english better for collegiate work because they spent their whole life speaking one way but needing to write another.

I could go on but I really wouldn't put much stock in the national rankings. Our "bad ranking" sure has not stopped people wanting to move here has it? It also sure hasn't stopped GA Tech and UGA from climbing the ranks of colleges. Both of those schools are jam packed with GA publicly educated kids and they seem to be doing fine. In 10 or so years when federal government clearly defines the criteria and every state has to use the same measures, GA will not be in the bottom 10. I'm proud to be a southerner and I wouldn't change my sweet low tax rate for a better ranking any day. Would you? Because when you look critically at the rankings, you'll see it is a better measure of tax collection and expenditures than what is taught in the classroom.