The pandemic took a toll on metro Atlanta’s core school districts, pushing dozens of their schools to the bottom on state performance lists, new data show.
Just over two dozen area schools were removed from the needs improvement lists, but more than three dozen were added, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution review found.
Atlanta Public Schools has a dozen more schools that are performing so poorly they will now be targeted for extra state help.
The schools are identified on lists produced by the Georgia Department of Education. The reports are required by federal law, but the U.S. Department of Education waived the mandate while COVID-19 was upending schools. The last report was for the 2019-20 school year, so these new lists offer the first look at the shifts that resulted from the upheaval.
Most of the listed schools have a high concentration of students living in poverty. The new data is the latest evidence pointing to the effect of household income on learning. Nationally, the pandemic widened gaps between the wealthy and poor.
“The pain in the pandemic was not evenly felt,” said Ken Zeff, a former interim superintendent of Fulton County Schools at a recent event hosted by the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.
“If you were a high-performing kid before the pandemic, you actually fared OK,” said Zeff, who now leads Learn4Life, an organization that helps metro Atlanta schools. “But if you were a kid at the bottom, you really felt it.”
Scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress show Georgia students who qualify for the free lunch program have consistently scored below their wealthier peers.
The new lists released by the Georgia education department this week mainly use Georgia Milestones test scores to identify the high-poverty schools that performed at the bottom. High schools also made the list if they had a low graduation rate. So did schools with underperforming “subgroups,” such as students with disabilities.
Then-Gov. Nathan Deal tried to pass a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state to take over what he referred to as “chronically failing” schools.
Voters rejected the idea, so he pushed for an alternative law. It allocates training and other state resources to schools on one of two lists: Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) or Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI).
State Superintendent Richard Woods said in a statement accompanying the new data that the state will ensure listed schools “have the resources and support necessary for academic recovery.”
Fulton County has 11 schools listed, five more than in 2019. The district points to inconsistencies in the data, noting that one listed school has closed and that another has no students.
Neighboring DeKalb County had nine schools exit the lists and seven added to them. The district has 13 listed schools, two fewer than in 2019 but still more than any other in the Atlanta region except the city itself.
Atlanta Public Schools had by far the most listed schools. Nine came off the 2019 lists (three by closure) but three of those rejoined them this year, just in different categories. Eight others remained and 18 others were added.
All told, the city’s total of 29 listed schools is a dozen more than in 2019.
Roughly three quarters of the students in Atlanta and DeKalb qualify for the nation’s free or reduced-price lunch program, as do nearly half of Fulton’s.
Mason Goodwin, an APS graduate who attends Georgia State University, told lawmakers this summer why household income matters.
“Students that came from wealthier families were the ones that had resources to go into college-ready classes and to achieve academically,” said Goodwin, who was 19 when he testified at the August hearing about school funding. He thinks schools with more low-income students should get more state money.
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