ATLANTA - Roughly one out of every three schools chartered by the state scored better in Georgia's new ranking than the districts those schools are located in, the State Charter Schools Commission learned Wednesday.

That also means that two out of every three scored worse. One school matched the score of its home district.

The commission's executive director, Bonnie Holliday, presented a breakdown of the scores released earlier in the month by the Department of Education on its initial College and Career Readiness Performance Index for the 2011-12 school year. The department will take until October to compile the results from the school year that just ended.

"There's good news and bad news," Holliday told the seven-member commission. "The good news is we're doing well in the areas I think we should. The bad news is we're not doing well enough."

The CCRPI, which educators playfully pronounce as "crappy," is a 110-point scale for comparing schools. Most of the score comes from different aspects of students' performance, but 15 points come from progress made by students, with another 15 for reducing the gap between a school's weakest students and the state average. Schools can pick up an additional 10 points for innovation.

Among the subcategories for progress, achievement gap and innovation, the charter schools did even better than their overall scores, as Holliday said they should. In the progress subtotal, about half of the elementary and middle schools outperformed their districts while three-fourths of the high schools did the same. In reducing achievement gaps, 56 percent of the charter elementary schools exceeded their districts, and two-thirds of the middle and high schools did the same. In innovation, 44 percent of the elementary schools, 73 percent of the middle schools and 50 percent of the high schools bested their districts.

The commission has only granted charters to 14 schools, one of which wasn't in operation during the 2011-12 school year. Voters approved a constitutional amendment to allow it to authorize independent schools over the objections of the districts where they are located.

The charter-school scores were pretty good considering most of the schools had not been in operation long, meaning they would not have had much time to make an impact on students, said Commission Chairman Charles Knapp. Plus, he noted, they were all in turmoil over a decision by the Georgia Supreme Court that invalidated the law that created the schools, which was later addressed by the constitutional amendment.

Knapp said the index will be useful in holding schools accountable to the progress goals they had agreed to in exchange for their independence.

"I'm not exactly a no-excuses type person, but I'm close to it," said Knapp, a former University of Georgia president who was named interim dean of UGA's business school just hours after the commission meeting.

The commission also elected Paul Williams as vice chairman to preside during Knapp's absence, including next month when Knapp said he would be out of the country.
