Photo: screenshot of Cobb school Superintendent Chris Ragsdale

By Rebecca Gaunt

Superintendent Chris Ragsdale did not mince words at Thursday’s school board work session, calling it a “fake list” when discussing the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement’s published list of schools that are eligible for $6,500 scholarships under Senate Bill 233.

SB 233 is also known as the Georgia Promise Scholarship Act.

GOSA released the list of schools deemed to be performing in the bottom 25% of the state last year. Eight schools in Cobb were included: Argyle, City View, Compton, Green Acres, Mableton, Riverside, and Russell Elementary Schools, and Osborne High School.

“I say ‘fake list’ because there is a score that was created that is not used for anything else,” he said.

Ragsdale described the federally identified low-performing schools list, a separate designation which included City View Elementary, as providing support with the intent to help, while the state’s Promise school list has “zero support and zero intent to help these schools in any way shape or form.”

He also said the program wouldn’t work as it was intended because the targeted recipients won’t be able to take advantage of it.

One of the major criticisms of the bill has been that $6,500 does not go very far with regard to private school tuition, and is therefore likely to benefit students who would have gone to private school anyway the most.

“If people would acknowledge exactly what vouchers are, instead of trying to mask it in some way as a performance issue directly related to schools, it would serve probably a better cause at least because people would know exactly what the target is,” Ragsdale said.

John Floresta, the district’s chief strategy and accountability officer, described GOSA’s method which used an average of the CCRPI single scores from 2023 and 2024. The Georgia DOE no longer uses CCRPI single scores.

“It is not an accountability measure, and it’s not in line with the Georgia Department of Education’s accountability system,” he said.

Five of the eight schools showed improvement from 2023 to 2024, according to those CCRPI single scores.

“It’s not an accurate list of failing schools,” Floresta said.

Catherine Mallanda, Cobb’s chief academic officer, presented the approach the district takes based on the federal improvement program. She pointed to the improved CCRPI single scores as evidence that the district’s layered supports were already working.

“You may remember in December we predicted that City View would be highlighted for making exceptional progress. They did get that distinction from the state, and you can see that in that Promise school calculation, going up 22.6 points in just one year,” she said.

Post 2 board member Becky Sayler also objected to GOSA’s methodology.

“There’s no number that we can get to that gets us off this list. There’s always going to be a bottom 25% of schools even if all schools are achieving on a high level,” she said. 

Two schools in her post are popular options for school choice despite being on the low-performing list. Students wishing to participate in the dual language immersion (DLI) program or the Cobb Innovation and Technology Academy request to attend Russell Elementary or Osborne High respectively.

While the $6,500 isn’t taken directly from district funds, a seat left empty as a result of the scholarship means a loss of FTE (full-time equivalent) funds for that student, which is roughly the same amount.

“It’s just disappointing that every year we seem to be talking about the negative impacts of legislation being dropped on public education, and that is certainly no different this year for academics,” Ragsdale said.