Bibb County Schools: The Graduation Mirage – 89% Graduate, 23% Proficient

Global Watchdog is reader-supported, with no advertisers and no government entity to answer to. If you enjoyed this article, you can help keep it coming with a one-time donation or monthly support: Support on PatreonDonate on Ko-fi

26 min read

Last updated October 27, 2026

Part 3 of 6

A records-based investigation into what Bibb County’s graduation rate actually measures, and what it doesn’t.

If diplomas were learning, Bibb County would be a model district. They aren’t, and it isn’t.

Eighty-nine percent of Bibb County’s high school seniors graduated last year. The district’s announcement stops there. Every spring brings the press release, leading with the graduation rate: another year above 87 percent.

Here is what the press release does not mention: of all the students tested in Bibb County last year, fewer than 23 percent scored Proficient Learner or above in English language arts. Fewer than 22 percent scored Proficient Learner or above in math.

That is not a typo. Nearly nine in ten seniors get a diploma. Fewer than one in four tested students reached proficiency in English language arts or in math.

Both numbers come from the state’s own files. They are not in dispute. The question is what they mean when you put them side by side, and why the second number never makes the announcement.

I taught in Bibb County schools for 11 years before retiring. I watched students walk across that graduation stage who could not write a coherent paragraph. I am not guessing about this. I lived it.

Nothing in this article accuses anyone of a crime. Graduation rates are calculated according to state rules, and Bibb follows those rules. But rules can produce numbers that mislead, and when they do, taxpayers deserve to know exactly what they are celebrating.

This is Part 3 of my six-part investigation into Bibb County Schools. Part 1 examined the budget gaps. Part 2 looked at what the district is buying. This installment asks the simplest question of all: what are taxpayers getting for their money?

Watch the video version of this investigation

This series is reader-supported. Nobody at a district office or an advertiser’s desk pays for it. If it earns it, you can buy me a coffee or back the work on Patreon.

The 89 Percent and the 23 Percent

Let us start with the numbers that frame everything else, because they come from the same state agency and they describe the same school system in the same school year.

The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement reports Bibb County’s four-year graduation rate for the Class of 2025 at 88.97 percent. That is 1,242 graduates out of a cohort of 1,396 students. It is a real number, calculated the way the state calculates it for every district.

For comparison, here are the Class of 2025 graduation rates for the five districts I have tracked throughout this series:

Source: Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, 2024-25 graduation rate file, “Grad Rate – ALL Students.”

Bibb is fifth of five. But 89 percent still sounds respectable in isolation, and the district presents it that way.

Now the other number. The Georgia Milestones assessment tests students in English language arts and mathematics. The state reports the percentage scoring at Proficient Learner or above. For 2024-25, all grades combined:

Source: Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, 2024-25 Georgia Milestones, computed from student counts.

Bibb is fifth of five in both subjects. In math, the bottom three districts cluster close together: Bibb at 21.7 percent, Newton at 23.8, Muscogee at 25.9, while Houston at 48.6 and Fayette at 67.3 are far ahead.

Put the two tables together and the mirage comes into focus. A district where 89 percent of seniors earn diplomas but only 23 percent of tested students scored proficient in English language arts is not necessarily lying about either number. It is telling you that the diploma and the proficiency test measure very different things, and that the diploma has become the easier of the two to obtain.

One honest caveat, stated before anyone raises it: the two figures do not count the same students. The 89 percent follows a single senior class through four years. The proficiency rates cover every student the state tested, in every grade. They are different measurements, and this article does not pretend otherwise. But they are measurements of the same system, taken at different points in the same pipeline, and the grade-by-grade scores below show Bibb trailing at every point in that pipeline. The diploma is supposed to certify what the pipeline produced. When the pipeline’s own numbers are this low from elementary school on up, an 89 percent diploma rate is not a rebuttal of the proficiency crisis. It is the mirage itself.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying. I am not saying Bibb inflates its graduation rate through fraud. The rate follows the state’s cohort methodology. What I am saying is that a graduation rate, standing alone, tells you almost nothing about whether students learned anything. Bibb’s own Milestones results tell you they largely did not.

The Class of 2026

A new class has now crossed the stage, and the pattern held. Bibb County announced a four-year graduation rate of 87.6 percent for the Class of 2026, just below the official statewide rate of 88.5 percent that the Georgia Department of Education released on September 28, 2026. One honest note on sourcing: the 88.5 percent is the state’s published figure, while the 87.6 percent is the district’s announced rate, published September 29. The state’s district-level data file has been posted, and this article will be reconciled to it.

What has not arrived is the other half of the mirage. The state has released no proficiency scores for the Class of 2026. Georgia is holding all of its 2025-26 English language arts results, including the American Literature exam, while it finishes standard setting under the state’s new ELA standards, and district statements put the release in November 2026. This article will be updated when those scores land.

Until then, whether the newest graduates can read and compute at the level their diplomas claim remains, officially, unmeasured. The diplomas are real. The learning behind them is, for now, a matter of faith.

The Most Money, the Worst Results

If Bibb were achieving these results on a shoestring budget, you could at least argue the district is underfunded. The records say the opposite.

For FY2025, Bibb County’s per-pupil expenditure was $14,805.61, according to the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement District Financial Efficiency and Spending Report. That was the highest among the five comparison districts:

Source: GOSA District FESR FY2025. District Single Score is the state’s composite measure.

Read that table carefully. Bibb spends the most per student and posts the lowest single score. Houston spends the least per student, nearly $1,200 less per pupil than Bibb, and outscores Bibb by more than 15 points while doubling Bibb’s proficiency rates.

One piece of context belongs on the table before anyone reaches for it as an excuse: Bibb’s is a hard context. Its students are, by and large, poor; a large majority qualify as economically disadvantaged, while Fayette County, at the top of these tables, is one of the most affluent districts in Georgia. Poverty depresses scores everywhere it is found, and no honest reading of these tables can ignore that. It still does not explain Bibb away. Houston County educates plenty of poor children, military families and working families around Warner Robins, and doubles Bibb’s proficiency on less money. Newton and Muscogee carry heavy poverty as well, and both finish ahead of Bibb on less spending. Poverty explains part of this gap. It does not explain why the highest-spending district in the room finishes last.

Money alone does not buy results. Nobody serious claims it does. But when the highest-spending district in your comparison set produces the worst academic outcomes by a wide margin, the burden shifts. The district owes taxpayers an explanation for what the extra spending purchased, and “we graduated 89 percent” is not an answer to that question when fewer than a quarter of students are proficient.

This is the pattern I have been documenting since Part 1. The budget gaps. The vendor payments. And now the results that do not justify any of it.

For example, Bibb paid FranklinCovey $2,151,523.69 for the Leader in Me program from FY2022 through FY2025, while no payments to FranklinCovey appear in Open Georgia for Houston County. That money could have hired more teachers or funded programs to raise student proficiency.

Where It Breaks Down, Grade by Grade

Districtwide averages can hide as much as they reveal. The state’s CCRPI Reporting System breaks performance into grade clusters, and the 2025 component scores show exactly where Bibb falls apart.

Content Mastery measures whether students actually learned the material. Here are the 2025 Content Mastery scores:

Source: GaDOE CCRPI Reporting System, report year 2025, district grade cluster view.

Notice the pattern for Bibb: 48.5 in elementary, 40.4 in middle, 38.3 in high school. These are different students at each level, not one cohort tracked over time, but Bibb is the only one of the five districts where Content Mastery declines at each level, and its high school score is the lowest of the five. That is the opposite of what a school district is supposed to do.

Houston’s scores, by contrast, are stable and high across all three levels. Fayette’s are higher still. Even Newton and Muscogee, neither of them stellar, keep their high school Content Mastery above 50. Bibb stands alone below 40.

How the Mirage Happens

The numbers above raise an obvious question: if only 23 percent of students are proficient, how do 89 percent graduate? The answer is not fraud. It is something more ordinary and more depressing.

Grade inflation is rampant, and I watched it happen from inside the classroom. No spreadsheet documents what follows. This section is my testimony, eleven years of it, offered as a witness rather than a statistician.

In my experience, teachers are afraid to fail students because the paperwork is astronomical. Fail a kid and the administration buries you in documentation. Justify every grade. Attend the meetings. Fill out the forms. Most teachers learn quickly that it is easier to pass a struggling student than to survive the bureaucratic punishment for failing one.

Then the parents get involved. In my experience, they threaten to complain to the principal, threaten to call the superintendent, never mind that their child missed half the classes. The pressure to pass is relentless, and it comes from both directions.

Start with the empty chairs. You cannot teach a student who is not in the room. In 2022-23, Bibb’s own schools reported that 67 percent of Southwest High School’s students were chronically absent; Southwest still graduated 80 percent of its seniors. At Central High, 32.5 percent were chronically absent, and 96 percent graduated. Georgia’s statewide rate was still 19.5 percent in 2024-25. State Superintendent Richard Woods: “Put simply, students cannot learn when they are not in school.” A diploma earned in absentia certifies attendance at the ceremony, not an education.

The result is exactly what you would expect. Students graduate who cannot read. They walk across the stage with an inflated sense of what they have accomplished, because the system told them they earned it. And Bibb is the local edition of a national story: on the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, 45 percent of American twelfth graders scored below the Basic level in math and 32 percent below Basic in reading, the largest shares ever recorded.

I had students with 4.0 GPAs and straight-A transcripts who could not read at anywhere near the level those transcripts claimed, and the fault was not theirs. It is not an insult aimed at a student. It is an indictment of the adults and the system that handed a child a diploma without ever teaching him to read it. Those students were failed twice: first by a system that passed them without teaching them, and then by the colleges that accepted them.

ACT tracked 4.3 million students and found the average high school GPA rising from 3.17 in 2010 to 3.36 in 2021, while ACT scores fell. Grades went up. Measured learning went down. ACT’s chief executive, Janet Godwin, calls grade inflation “a persistent, systemic problem, common across classrooms, districts, and states.” A transcript is a currency: print enough A’s, and each one buys less than it did the year before.

Every year, toward the end of the school year, I would try to explain to my students how to calculate their final grade. The final exam counts as 20 percent. The rest of the year’s work counts as 80 percent. If you have a 75 going into the final, you need to figure out what score you need on that exam to pass for the year.

Almost every year, I would say nearly all of my students could not do that calculation. They could not figure out 80 percent of one number plus 20 percent of another. That is something most middle schoolers should be able to do. It still boggles my mind.

There is another misconception I saw constantly. Students would do very little work all year, then turn in a stack of missing assignments in the last week of school. Twenty-one missing assignments, complete garbage, mostly blank or plagiarized or generated by AI. And they genuinely believed that turning it all in meant they should pass.

They did not understand that you can turn in all of your work and still fail, because the work itself is failing quality. Turning in garbage does not earn a passing grade. But the system had taught them that compliance, just going through the motions, was enough.

In much of the country, that misconception is now policy. Under “no zeros” rules, a student who turns in nothing still receives a 50, on the theory that a zero is unrecoverable. The profession’s verdict is not close: in a 2025 national teacher survey conducted for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 81 percent of teachers called giving partial credit for assignments never turned in harmful to student engagement. The grade arrives whether the learning does or not.

Some of the damage is done before high school. In 2023, Georgia’s legislature passed the Early Literacy Act, an admission that children were not being taught to read with methods that work: state results showed 36.2 percent of third graders reading below grade level, and the law ordered every K-3 teacher in Georgia retrained in the science of reading by July 2025. A child who leaves third grade unable to read fluently is promoted, grade after grade, until a high school hands him a diploma he cannot read.

Because of course they get accepted. A 4.0 GPA opens doors. Then they arrive on campus unable to read a textbook or do basic math, and the colleges are forced to offer remedial courses. Remedial math. Remedial reading. At the university level. That is where we are. Federal estimates say roughly 42 percent of students starting college take at least one remedial course. The colleges are teaching the classes the high schools already certified as passed.

Many of these students might have been better served learning a trade or joining the military. Instead, the system gave them a diploma and a false sense of readiness, then sent them off to fail at the next level.

I want to be clear: this is not a few bad teachers gaming the system. This is the system working as designed, or at least as tolerated. When failing a student costs a teacher weeks of paperwork and a parent conference that ends with an administrator overriding the grade, the rational choice is to pass the kid. That pressure is not one teacher’s impression: in the Fordham survey, 84 percent of teachers said their supervisors would be concerned if they gave out too many low grades. Nobody has to order a teacher to inflate. The incentive does the ordering. Multiply that rational choice across hundreds of classrooms and, in my experience, you get 89 percent.

The mirage is not a lie. It is the predictable output of incentives that punish honesty.

The machinery has a name: credit recovery, compressed online courses that let a student “recover” a failed class in weeks. We know what that looks like when auditors check, because Washington, D.C. checked: a 2018 audit found 937 of its 2,758 graduates in 2017, 34 percent, received diplomas with the help of policy violations, including credit recovery handed to students who had not yet failed the original course. Fordham’s Michael Petrilli calls it what it is: “juking the stats is a disgusting abdication of responsibility.” Nobody has run that audit in Bibb County. It is past time somebody did.

The cheating was blatant. Students would cheat right in front of teachers because they knew nothing would happen. You report it, you call the parents, and the parents laugh. The administration does nothing. The tools have improved since: Pew Research reports the share of teenagers who say they have used ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled in one year, from 13 percent in 2023 to 26 percent in 2024.

The district has a no-phone policy, but no system to enforce it. Other districts I know of collect phones when students enter in the morning, using special bags or lockers the students cannot access all day. Bibb County just relies on teachers to enforce the policy. Students are addicted to their phones, and they are clever. You take one phone and they have two or three backups. You cannot leave this on teachers. It disrupts instruction and creates bad animosity between students and teachers. If the district wants a phone policy, the administration needs to figure out a system and enforce it. Do not make teachers collect the phones.

Georgia’s legislature has reached the same conclusion: its Distraction-Free Education Act, passed in 2025 for younger grades and expanded in 2026 to cover high schools, orders districts to keep devices out of students’ hands bell to bell and provide the storage to make it stick, lockers, locked pouches, a system, with every grade covered by July 2027. Phones, the state has ruled, are an administrative system to be built, not a burden to dump on teachers. Bibb should not wait for the deadline.

College for All, Careers for None

The district loves the phrase “college and career ready.” It appears in every strategic plan I have reviewed. In practice, the emphasis falls overwhelmingly on college, and that is a disservice to a large share of Bibb’s students.

Pushing college on students who should not go to college does not help them. It hurts them. They borrow money they cannot repay, enroll in programs they cannot complete, drop out, and end up worse off than if they had never gone. Miserable, in debt, and no closer to a career.

Meanwhile, the economy is screaming for skilled tradespeople. Hundreds of thousands of openings nationwide, with construction alone needing 439,000 net new workers in 2025, for electricians, plumbers, carpenters, welders, HVAC technicians. Jobs that pay well. Jobs that cannot be outsourced. Jobs that are hard to automate.

Mike Rowe, the former host of Dirty Jobs, has been making this argument for years. “We are lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist,” he told Congress. “That’s nuts.” He runs the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, which funds scholarships for trade school students, because he understands something Bibb County apparently does not: a plumber with no debt and a waiting list of customers is doing better than a college dropout with $40,000 in loans.

“In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished,” Rowe testified. “We’ve elevated the importance of ‘higher education’ to such a lofty perch, that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled ‘alternative.'”

He is right about the country. What I saw in 11 years in Bibb’s classrooms told the same story. Students sit in Spanish classes who have no interest in Spanish and no need for it, because the schedule says college-bound kids take foreign languages. They would be better served in a shop class learning a trade. But the traditional vocational trades have been sidelined in the standard high-school tracks, and the guidance counselor’s flowchart steers everyone toward a four-year degree rather than toward Hutchings, the district’s own vocational school.

The district is not preparing these kids for careers. It is preparing them for debt.

The state’s own data confirms what happens next. According to the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement High School Graduate Outcomes Report, which tracked Georgia’s graduating classes of 2008 through 2010 for five years after graduation, only 26.5 percent of those graduates completed a college degree within the five years. The middle half of high schools fell between 19.5 and 32.1 percent. For students who arrived at college needing remedial math or English, the completion rate dropped to 18.2 percent, compared to 45.0 percent for students who did not need remediation.

Pushing underprepared students toward four-year degrees is not opening doors. It is setting them up to fail.

There is another way to organize a high school, and other countries already run it: real academic schools for the college-bound and serious vocational schools for everyone else, treated as a first choice rather than a consolation prize. That alternative deserves an article of its own, and it will get one.

Professor Winston Wants to Know

Our resident watchdog is taking the temperature of the room.

Should Bibb County be required to publish proficiency results alongside every graduation rate announcement?

One tap, no account or email needed. Results are shown after you vote.

Should Bibb County be required to publish proficiency results alongside every graduation rate announcement?

Yes, both numbers every timeNo, the graduation rate is enoughOnly in the annual reportNot sure

Cast your voteSee results

Want to say more? The comments below are open.

What a Diploma Means Now

Let me return to where I started, because the 89 percent deserves a final look with everything else on the table.

A high school diploma is supposed to certify something. Employers treat it as a signal that the holder can read, write, and do basic math. Colleges use it as a baseline for admission.

When 89 percent of a district’s seniors graduate but only 22 percent of its students are proficient in math, the signal degrades. The diploma still opens doors, because institutions have not caught up to what the numbers plainly show. But the students walking through those doors are less prepared than the credential implies, and the ones who discover that first are the students themselves.

This is the mirage of the title. From a distance, an 89 percent graduation rate looks like a functioning school system. Up close, in the Milestones data and the CCRPI components, it looks like a system that has learned to produce graduates without producing educated students.

What follows is not a state statistic. It is my professional testimony from 11 years teaching in Bibb County classrooms, and I present it as such.

Even though we have a high graduation rate, unfortunately many of the students who graduate are reading at third, fourth, and fifth grade levels. They can’t do basic math, and when I say basic math, I’m talking about they can’t even calculate percentages or averages. So it’s really an embarrassing thing.

The state’s Milestones data, 22.7 percent proficient in English language arts and 21.7 percent in mathematics, is consistent with what I witnessed. But the specific reading levels I describe, and the inability to calculate a percentage or an average, are my observations as a classroom teacher. I offer them as a witness, not as a statistician. The verified numbers are in the tables above. What I am telling you now is what those numbers looked like from the front of the room.

The distinction matters for taxpayers most of all. Bibb County spends $14,805.61 per pupil, the most among its peers. If the product were educated graduates, that spending might be defensible. If the product is diplomas unmoored from proficiency, then taxpayers deserve to ask what exactly they are buying.

Part 4 will examine the bureaucracy: the central-office positions, the hiring patterns, and where the administrative dollars documented in Part 1 actually go, including why teachers keep leaving for Houston County. Part 5 will take you inside the classrooms, where I spent 11 years and where the consequences of every number in this article land on real students.

The receipts, as always, are above. Read them yourself. The announcement leads with the 89 percent and stops there.

Dr. Alan Wood taught Spanish in the Bibb County School District for 11 years before retiring in March 2026. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and an M.A. in Spanish Education. This is Part 3 of a six-part investigation. Part 1: The Money is published. Part 2: What Is Bibb Buying? is published.

References

All statistics in this article are drawn from the public records and published sources below. Where a table reports figures the author computed from state data files, the table’s source line names the file.

1. Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (now the Governor’s Office of Education and Workforce Strategy). Four Year Cohort Graduation Rates by District, Class of 2025 (data file: “Grad Rate, ALL Students”). 2025. https://goews.georgia.gov/
2. Governor’s Office of Student Achievement. District Financial Efficiency and Spending Report (FESR): Per Pupil Expenditure and District Single Score by District, Fiscal Year 2025. 2025. https://goews.georgia.gov/
3. Georgia Department of Education. Georgia Milestones Assessment System Results, 2024-25 (GaDOE Insights dashboard and downloadable summary data files). https://georgiainsights.gadoe.org/dashboards/georgia-milestones/
4. Georgia Department of Education. CCRPI Reporting System: Content Mastery Component Scores by District and Grade Cluster, report year 2025. https://ccrpireportspublic.gadoe.org/ccrpireportspublicweb/Views/Shared/_Layout.html
5. Governor’s Office of Student Achievement. High School Graduate Outcomes Report: An Analysis of Postsecondary Enrollment and Degree Completion of Georgia High School Graduates (graduating classes of 2008 to 2010, followed for five years after graduation). 2016. Archival copy, Digital Library of Georgia: https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_ggpd_s-ga-bg620-ps7-bm1-b2016-bg7-belec-p-btext
6. Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts. Open Georgia: State Expenditure and Vendor Payment Records (Bibb County Board of Education and Houston County Board of Education payments to FranklinCovey, fiscal years 2022 to 2025). https://open.ga.gov/
7. FranklinCovey Co. The Leader in Me (official program site). https://www.leaderinme.org/
8. Wood, Alan. “Bibb County Schools: Bigger Budgets, Fewer Students, More Questions.” Part 1 of the Bibb County Watchdog investigation. Global Watchdog, October 3, 2026. https://gwmac.com/bibb-county-schools-budget-2026/
9. Wood, Alan. “Bibb County Schools Spending: What Is Bibb Buying?” Part 2 of the Bibb County Watchdog investigation. Global Watchdog, October 8, 2026. https://gwmac.com/bibb-county-schools-spending-what-is-bibb-buying/
10. mikeroweWORKS Foundation. Work Ethic Scholarship Program (scholarships for students pursuing skilled trades training). https://mikeroweworks.org/
11. Rowe, Mike. Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, hearing on “Manufacturing Our Way to a Stronger Economy,” May 11, 2011 (testimony excerpts as delivered). https://www.neatorama.com/2011/05/13/mike-rowe-addresses-us-senate-committee/
12. Associated Builders and Contractors. Construction workforce model estimating 439,000 net new workers needed in 2025, as reported in “Construction Needs Over 439,000 New Workers in 2025, Says ABC.” Engineering News-Record, 2025. https://www.enr.com/articles/60213-construction-needs-over-439-000-new-workers-in-2025-says-abc
13. Georgia Department of Education. Georgia’s Graduation Rate Hits Another Historic High of 88.5% (press release announcing the statewide four-year graduation rate for the Class of 2026). September 28, 2026. https://gadoe.org/press-releases/georgias-graduation-rate-hits-another-historic-high-of-88-5/
14. Georgia Department of Education. Georgia Milestones Scores Continue to Show Improvement, with Some All-Time Highs in Math (press release; notes that 2025-26 English language arts results are withheld pending standard setting). August 6, 2026. https://gadoe.org/press-releases/georgia-milestones-scores-continue-to-show-improvement-with-some-all-time-highs-in-math/
15. Georgia Charter Schools Association. Georgia Charter Schools Exceed State Graduation Rate (newsletter publishing district-announced Class of 2026 graduation rates, including Bibb County at 87.6 percent). September 29, 2026. https://gacharters.org/newsletter/georgia-charter-schools-exceed-state-graduation-rate/
16. ACT. Grade Inflation Continues to Grow in the Past Decade (Sanchez and Moore; adjusted average high school GPA and ACT Composite trends, 2010 to 2021). May 2022. https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/2022/R2134-Grade-Inflation-Continues-to-Grow-in-the-Past-Decade-Final-Accessible.pdf
17. Sparks, Sarah D. “Pace of Grade Inflation Picked Up During the Pandemic, Study Says.” Education Week. June 1, 2022. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/pace-of-grade-inflation-picked-up-during-the-pandemic-study-says/2022/05
18. Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “Equitable” Grading Through the Eyes of Teachers (national survey of K-12 teachers via the RAND American Teacher Panel). August 2025. https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/equitable-grading-through-eyes-teachers
19. Office of the State Superintendent of Education, District of Columbia. DCPS Graduation Review, School Year 2016-2017 (Alvarez & Marsal audit and investigation final report). January 29, 2018. https://osse.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/osse/release_content/attachments/Report%20on%20DCPS%20Graduation%20and%20Attendance%20Outcomes%20-%20Alvarez%26Marsal.pdf
20. NPR. School Graduation Rates Are Deceiving. Here Are 7 Things That Would Help (includes Fordham Institute president Michael Petrilli on credit recovery). January 12, 2017. https://www.nprillinois.org/education-desk/2017-01-12/school-graduation-rates-are-deceiving-here-are-7-things-that-would-help
21. Georgia Department of Education. Chronic Absenteeism Reaches Lowest Levels Since Pre-Pandemic, as State Continues Efforts to Reduce Absence Rates (press release; Georgia chronic absenteeism 19.5 percent in 2024-25). 2025. https://gadoe.org/press-releases/chronic-absenteeism-reaches-lowest-levels-since-pre-pandemic-as-state-continues-efforts-to-reduce-absence-rates/
22. Corley, Laura. Bibb County Public Schools’ Graduation Rate Is the Highest in a Decade (reports 2022-23 chronic absenteeism and graduation rates by Bibb high school). The Macon Newsroom. 2023. https://macon-newsroom.com/19078/news/local/bibb-county-public-schools-graduation-rate-is-the-highest-in-a-decade/
23. National Assessment Governing Board. Nation’s Report Card Shows Declines in 8th-Grade Science and 12th-Grade Math and Reading (2024 NAEP results for grade 12). September 9, 2025. https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2025/declines-in-8th-grade-science-and-12th-grade-math-and-reading.html
24. Capitol Beat News Service. General Assembly Passes Two Bills Aimed at Improving Georgia’s Reading Rates (passage of the Georgia Early Literacy Act, HB 538). March 2023. https://capitol-beat.org/2023/03/general-assembly-passes-two-bills-aimed-at-improving-georgias-reading-rates/
25. Pew Research Center. About a Quarter of U.S. Teens Have Used ChatGPT for Schoolwork, Double the Share in 2023. January 15, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/15/about-a-quarter-of-us-teens-have-used-chatgpt-for-schoolwork-double-the-share-in-2023/
26. Georgia Department of Education. Guidance to Support the Distraction-Free Education Act (O.C.G.A. 20-2-324.8; enacted 2025 for grades K-8, expanded 2026 to grades 9-12). Summer 2026. https://lor2.gadoe.org/gadoe/file/3c5c6aed-976c-41e0-93ba-282ca403478c/1/Distraction-Free%20Education%20Act%282%29.pdf