According to an article I read this morning, the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education announced yesterday that fifteen Georgia high schools graduated at least 85 percent of their students in 2008, improving their graduation rates by at least 10 percentage points over a five-year period. Georgia is known for its particularly low graduation rate so this is good news for Georgia educators.

Seven metro Atlanta schools were on the list including Grady, Mays and Redan high schools. I actually have a childhood friend who teaches at Grady and has nothing but good things to say about the school. He even went so far as to leave UGA, where he was working on his Ph.D., and transfer to GSU, so he could return to teaching at Grady, because he loved it so much.

As the graduate of a public high school, I’m always happy to hear public schools get good press. They tend to be the scapegoat for all that ails education in this state. While I did graduate some years ago, I never once thought I received a bad education. And I still don’t. But maybe I was one of the lucky ones given that I grew up in suburbia (Marietta). Either way, I think a public school education and diploma is nothing to scoff at and I commend these schools for their efforts.