IT’S PRETTY AMAZING, given what has dominated state debates about public education in the past, to learn that Georgia now leads the United States in the sum of year-to-year improvement on all major national tests. Those are the SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement (AP), and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Math, Reading and Science. Not only that but the state is the only one in the country to be moving upward on all those exams.

That’s quite a feather in the cap of Dr. John Barge of Floyd County, who has been the state school superintendent for only the past two years. He didn’t claim credit for what a whole lot of in-the-trenches educators have apparently achieved, and with steadily diminishing budgetary support as well.

Alas, one fears that other politicians may not be that shy.

Yes, to some extent this may be the result of “no place to go but up” given the state’s past underachievement on many of these gauges. However, Barge put it well in saying:

“The progress Georgia’s students have made on these national tests is something of which we should all be very proud. I get very frustrated hearing people say Georgia’s education system is so bad. We certainly have a lot of room to grow and improvements to make, but these results show that we’re moving in the right direction.”

And that is sure a lot better than the direction in which big chunks of public education had been moving.