ATLANTA — Georgia’s longtime Republican state school superintendent is touting his experience to fend off his Democratic challenger, who calls herself a change agent.
Lydia Powell, an assistant high school principal in Henry County, wants to unseat Richard Woods, saying test scores indicate that schools need new leadership.
Woods, a former high school history teacher, is in his twelfth year in office, having served three terms alongside two governors. He said he needs more time to improve student performance.
As leader of the Georgia Department of Education, the state superintendent monitors academic performance and ensures school districts follow the law while spending state and federal funding that passes through the agency.
Woods and Powell answered questions from an expert panel convened by the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education last week in Atlanta.
The urgent issues they discussed included the teacher workforce, state funding and literacy, the latter being a focus of state lawmakers.
This spring, Gov. Brian Kemp signed the Georgia Early Literacy Act into law. It requires new curricula and training with a focus on the phonics-based teaching methods that have been credited with accelerating reading skills in other Southern states.
The legislation also added $70 million to the formula that drives state education spending, enough to hire a classroom literacy coach in more than 1,300 schools serving kindergarten through third grade.
Woods took some of the credit, saying he had previously advised the Legislature to spend the money.
“Several years ago, I said, ‘We need reading coaches in the state of Georgia.’ The General Assembly decided to wait, and I’m glad they finally followed up with the plan,” Woods said, adding that he had already sent some literacy coaches to the lowest-performing schools using a limited fund controlled by the education department.
“I gave the General Assembly a number. They said, ‘That’s way too much,'” he said. “But lo and behold that’s about the number that they funded this year with coaches.”
Powell has been in education for a quarter century and is an adjunct professor in educational leadership at Thomas University, according to her biography on the website of Hampton High School, where she is assistant principal. She said she would improve third-grade literacy rates by expanding access to state-funded prekindergarten.
She pointed to English language arts scores from the 2024-25 Milestones tests that showed 35% of third-grade students scored at least proficient, meaning 65% did not. “We’re asking teachers to continue to remediate,” she said. “We can make some changes at that preschool level” to help them.
Georgia pre-K is not under the superintendent’s purview. Rather, it is administered by the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning, whose commissioner is appointed by the governor.
But superintendents can use their position to try to influence the governor and lawmakers on policy, such as expansion of pre-K.
Another area that requires collaboration across government is the recruitment and retention of skilled teachers.
Woods said at least three times during the event at The Gathering Spot that he would bolster teaching ranks by pushing to increase pay for veteran teachers. A cap on the automatic annual state-funded pay raises for teachers takes effect after their 21st year.
Rural schools tend to have more difficulty hiring teachers, so Powell said the state should help those rural communities pay for recruitment incentives, such as housing subsidies and childcare.
Powell also said she would push lawmakers to give more funding to schools with high concentrations of poverty, adding that she would make her presence known at the state Capitol.
“You have to be loud, you have to be obnoxious,” she said.
Woods said his lobbying style had already proven effective. He noted the numerous failed attempts over the years to overhaul the state’s education funding formula, largely unchanged since the 1980s. So, he said he advocated for smaller changes, working with lawmakers and the governor this year to increase funding for transportation.
The fiscal year 2027 budget includes $38.5 million for new school buses.
Woods said his longevity in office has allowed him to cultivate valuable relationships, including with former superintendents from other states who, he said, now work at the U.S. Department of Education and will pick up the phone when he calls.
Powell pointed to performance measures, including test scores.
“We talk about being the number one place to do business, but we’re ranked one of the lowest to educate children, and I want to be the change agent in that work. I’ve seen too many students be left behind, too many families continue to go through those cycles of poverty,” she said. “Our eighth-grade math scores have gone down once again, and I know that we can make changes to that.”
Woods said he had assembled a “great team” at the education department and that he wanted more time to build on that.
He said a strong foundation in math and reading is “not negotiable” but pushed back against critics who say Georgia is underperforming.
Woods said eighth-grade math scores “were down a little bit” but overall scores rose.
Indeed, scores on the math Milestones tests reached record highs last school year in fourth through sixth grades and in high school algebra. The increases came after the education department implemented new math standards during the 2023-24 school year.
Only eighth-grade students scored lower, with their proficiency rate falling by 1 percentage point to 46%.
But the gains came despite relatively low overall performance.
Students are placed in one of four categories based on their scores, from distinguished at the top to proficient, developing and beginning.
The highest percentage of students who scored proficient or distinguished in math was in fourth grade, at 50%. That means half were not proficient.
Woods said the percentage of third graders reading on grade level was higher than the 35% that lawmakers and others, including his opponent, have pointed to. The state education board adopted a more targeted score, called a Lexile measure, that is extracted from some Milestones test answers.
Based on that measure, 65% of third-grade students can read at or above grade level, he said.
“Yes, there does need to be change as you’ve heard today, but working together, we can make that — instead of just a dream — we can make that a reality,” he said.
In that way, both Powell and Woods are campaigning as change agents.