the teachers should be blamed. if they could teach, the test scores would show it. now they are going to investigate it, and when they are done looking into it in 3-5 years from now, what about the kids that are left to suffer due to the Incompetence of the teachers and the school system? we need the answers now, not later. why did cox put aside parts of the test and not others? and why doesn't she respond to letters from parents about this issue?

we wrote her due to the scores of one of our kids only to get a "caned" response. we feel the problems with the schools system start from the top and goes right on down to the classroom. but the politicians don't want to upset the teachers union and make them accountable for the lack of education they have provided. in the real world if you do not produce the produce you were hired to produce you loose your job. why haven't they?

I am sorry to inform you that Georgia DOES NOT have a teacher's union. My mother is a Math teacher in the Liberty County School System, so I am not just talking off the top of my head. How can the teacher's teach the curriculum on the test when they were not given the resources to do so? Why would the state upgrade the curriculum and then not provide the necessary materials required to teach the students? For instance, they added algebraic concepts but the textbooks were inadequate forthem to teach those concepts.
My mother went out and purchased a book specifically for the CRCT (and asked her school's curriculum coordinator to order these books for her classroom), she made copies of the worksheets and keep the workbooks in the classroom and distributed them to her class - keep in mind this is not her job. Over 80% of her students passed the CRCT and will be moving on to the next grade. My mother is the exception because she took initiative to find out what was on the test and made sure her students had the resources they needed to learn it, but it got expensive. The state should have provided for these changes and absorbed all related costs.

then what do you call the "Georgia Association of Educators"

this is a clip from a news story from 2000... this is what the Georgia Association of Educators (teachers union) is all about. if you want to learn more about there self serving group go to their web site..

http://neageorgia.org/

Jul. 10--ATLANTA--The state's largest teacher's union is refusing to endorse incumbent legislators who supported the governor's education reform commission -- including union past president and state Sen. Faye Smith of Milledgeville.

"That is a reflection of our dissatisfaction with their voting record for teachers last year," said Ralph Noble, newly elected president of the 35,000-member Georgia Association of Educators (GAE).

Neecy,

First and foremost, thank you for your mother. I know there are many educators, my wife included, that often spend from their own pockets to accommodate budget shortfalls. One point however that concerns me is the inclination to teach to the test rather than the subject. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that are concerned that subjects just are not being sufficiently, and that the interest is in preparing the student just enough to pass a test and get by.

By the way, there are many teachers within the state that are union affiliated through the NEA.

I meant, not like in Florida (my sister is an educator in Tallahasse) where there is a STATE union that you are part of. Their union is mandated, the GA one isn't - so here you have the option to be or not to be in a union.

To some degree. Teachers are often pressured to join these unions by their administrators who get occasional kickbacks from union bigwigs for their percentage of participation.

well the Georgia Association of Educators has fought tooth and nail every attempt to make the teachers accountable. gov roy barnes did away with teacher tenures only to have the Georgia Association of Educators fight to have him voted out in the next election, then tenures were magically reinstated. that is one of the reasons the education system is beyond broken. whether teachers are in the "union" or not, they all benefit from it. you won't hear any teacher on tenure say it's the wrong way to run a school system. an example of just how bad it is. when our kids were in pre-k one of them on 2 separate occasions got up and walked out of the class and was found wondering the halls unattended (at 4 years old). the teacher should have been fired for it, but the school said the teacher was on "tenure" so they couldn't do anything about it.

i work in the school system and I agree that teachers should be held accountable but also the STUDENTS, PARENTS, & GUARDIANS should also be held accountable. MATH is the worst taught subject in LIBERTY county. The teachers teach to pass the CRCT or EOCTs but the students don't know anything afterwards. Also it is ridulous if a child passes the CRCT or EOCTs and fails the class. IN LIBERTY COUNTY it starts with the PERSONNEL DIRECTOR AND BOARD that hires these people that don't care, they just want a pay check and THE STATE SHOULD DO AWAY WITH TENURE!! TENURE, NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, AND CRCT/EOCT/GHSGT all suck big time and they all hurt our students in the long run. But let me say this we do have some great teachers out there, far and few in between but they are there.

As a parent of 2, I have always felt that too much time is spent on passing the CRCT and not learning the fundamentals. If the curriculum centered around actually learning the subject and what it entails, the test scores would take care of themselves.

the students are being held accountable for failing. the problem is in a lot of cases the students are being left to pay the price of accountability of the teachers. the student fails their grade and is left behind only to be made fun of by other kids in school, but the teacher still gets their paychecks and keep their jobs, and still have the nerve to ask for more money. as far as tests, the CRCT is a there for a good reason, there used to be a lot of students that would get promoted to high school only to fail and then later drop out because they didn't have the knowledge base needed to have a good start in high school. it is very important to have the knowledge base before getting to high school, and helps make sure that they have it. as far as the GHSGT, there were a lot of students that were floating through school and getting by, only to get out of school not really having the knowledge base they needed to find a successful path through life.

I have to agree with visc98fam that it is not only the teachers that need to be held responsible. Parents and guardians need to be more proactive in their childrens' educations. There is no way that a teacher can be the only responsible person for an education. Without the simplest amount of reinforcement on the home front teachers will fail to educate. The kids need to be motivated to learn and that is a family responsibility.

It is time to stop hurling blame at the educators and accept there are other factors. I suppose the next thing you'll say is there is crime because of bad police officers, there is evil because of ineffective preachers, and illness because of bad doctors.