By Benita Dodd

Atlanta (April 30, 2007) - The 2007 Report Card for Parents, a searchable database of statistics on Georgia’s public schools, is now available and posted on the Web site of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation at www.gppf.org.

The Report Card, which has been produced and published by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation since 1996, allows comparative searches as parents work to understand and assess the quality of the state’s public school system.

“To judge the quality of their children’s schools, parents must have quality information about academic performance,” said Dr. Holly Robinson, the Foundation’s education expert.

“For the vast majority of parents, assessing the quality of a school can be a daunting task with unfamiliar terms and voluminous data. This report card, divided into sections on elementary, middle and high schools, offers parents the simple facts to aid in the assessment of their children’s education, whether they’re in a district or relocating.”

The report cards numerically rank 1,176 public elementary schools, 476 middle schools and 369 high schools in the state by achievement score and the percentage of students exceeding standards. Because there is a strong link between poverty and test scores (the higher the poverty rate, the lower the test scores), the report includes two other criteria for information purposes only. The first is the poverty rate – the percentage of students in each school who qualify for the federal free/reduced-price lunch program. The second is a poverty index that measures how well a school is performing relative to its poverty rate.

“The Foundation’s efforts to ensure that the data can be efficiently utilized will help raise the involvement level of those who want to influence Georgia’s most important conversation – the one about the future of education,” said Rogers Wade, president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation.

The data were provided by the Georgia Office of Student Achievement and the Georgia Department of Education.

The Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a think tank formed in 1991, is a nonpartisan, member-supported research and education foundation that promotes free markets, limited government and individual responsibility.

Media: For more information on the Report Card or a school in your area, please contact Dr. Robinson at 404-256-4050 or hrobinson@gppf.org.