February 2008

Copyright
© 2008
Queue, Inc.

Quality Counts 2008

Edweek’s Editorial Projects in Education Research Center States awarded overall letter grades based on ratings across six areas of performance and policy: chance-for-success; K-12 achievement; standards, assessments, and accountability; transitions and alignment; the teaching profession; and school finance.

QUALITY COUNTS 2008 GRADING SUMMARY

OVERALL GRADE: B-

Full Georgia Report: http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/qc/2008/18shr.ga.h27.pdf

The national Report is here: http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/qc/2008/18shr.us.h27.pdf

State Reports are here: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/01/10/18shr.h27.html

Mapping Educational Progress 2008

Data on student achievement in reading and math, high school graduation rates, schools making adequate yearly progress, highly qualified teachers, parents taking advantage of tutoring and choice options, state participation in flexibility options, and more.

National Report:
http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/results/progress/nation.html

Georgia Report:
http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/results/progress/ga.html

SAIPE - 2005 School District Files Layout

The files in the data directory contain estimates of population and poverty. The school districts for which we have estimates were identified in the 2005 school district mapping project, which asked about all school districts as of January 1, 2006. The 2005 estimates reflect poverty in 2005 of the population in 2005 for school district boundaries in the 2005-2006 school year. There is one file for each of the states, the District of Columbia, and the entire United States. Each file contains the FIPS state code, Department of Education Common Core of Data (CCD) ID numbers, District names, the total population, population of school-age children, and estimated number of school-age children in poverty related to the head of the household.

The text files contain only data - no labels, no table headers, no titles. A description of the contents of the files can be found below or in the file "README" in the file directory.

School district file layout

Access school district data files for 2005 (GA):
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/saipe/downloads/sd05/sd05_GA.txt

Optical Networking Enables Georgia's Barrow County K-12 Schools to Transform Educational Opportunities

ADVA Optical Networking has enabled Barrow County Schools to implement a host of innovative services, including becoming the first K-12 school system in Georgia to connect to Internet2, the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium. Access to PeachNet is enabling Barrow County Schools to transform the education it provides students and to better attract, train and retain teachers.

“If we continue to do only education as usual, we’re not providing our students the education they need to be global leaders,” said Dr. Ron Saunders, superintendent of Barrow County Schools and the Georgia School Superintendents Association’s 2008 Superintendent of the Year. “By connecting to Internet2, we are providing our students with educational opportunities that were simply impossible to offer only a few years ago. With this technology, we are keeping our students excited about learning and we are giving quality teachers more reasons to come to and stay in Barrow County.”

Among the innovative projects that Barrow County Schools officials plan to implement thanks to the connection to PeachNet via ADVA Optical Networking’s equipment are:

• high-definition video links to the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, with cameras controlled remotely from Barrow County classrooms;
• a “global concert series” offered by the Philadelphia Orchestra via Internet2;
• interactive programs offered by Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts;
• environmental science programs where students can interact with researchers on the sea floor at Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary;
• calculus classes from Georgia Tech, utilizing a virtual-whiteboard application that fosters close interaction among students and teachers connected remotely; and
• a Georgia State University project in which education professors can observe student teachers in Barrow County classrooms as part of their teacher training and skills development programs.

PeachNet is a statewide communications network supporting more than 60 University System of Georgia sites, five private higher-education institutions and more than a half-dozen other government agencies, in addition to Barrow County Schools. With the ADVA FSP 3000RE providing backbone transport, PeachNet supports services of speeds up to 10Gbit/s across the full network distance of 2,400 miles.

With the ADVA FSP 3000RE’s Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) capability, data, voice, video and storage application traffic are transported along the same fiber-optic strands across the PeachNet infrastructure. In DWDM, different types of network application traffic are assigned different wavelengths of light in the color spectrum. The ADVA FSP 3000RE combines (“multiplexes”) the outgoing traffic from a node for transport across PeachNet and separates (“demultiplexes”) incoming traffic back to their respective devices. Because the different wavelengths of light are engineered to not interfere with one another, applications of different protocols can be transported simultaneously across optical fiber. Thanks to DWDM, additional bandwidth and services can be deployed without physical expansion of PeachNet.