ATLANTA – Georgia high school students earned an average ACT score of 21.6 this year, beating the national average of 19.8, according to new data from the state Department of Education.
This is the sixth year in a row that Georgia’s average ACT score has topped the national average. The ACT is a standardized college admissions test similar to the SAT.
Georgia students also beat the national average overall in each ACT subject: English, mathematics, reading, and science. The students also beat the national average for college readiness in each subject.
The state’s average ACT score of 21.6 is down by one point from last year’s average of 22.6.
The Georgia ACT results are similar to state SAT score trends. Georgia students beat the national average on the SAT this year, though the average score dipped slightly compared to the prior year.
About 35,000 Georgia students in the graduating class of 2022 took the ACT, while 57,000 or so took the SAT. Some Georgia students may have taken both.
“These students did not have an easy or typical high-school experience,” State School Superintendent Richard Woods said. “The pandemic began during their sophomore year.
“Despite that, they have continued to beat the odds and find success – beating the nation on the ACT and SAT and recording an all-time-high graduation rate.”
During the pandemic, many colleges and universities waived the standardized test requirements.
Last month, the University System of Georgia Board of Regents announced the system will continue to waive the tests for admissions at most state colleges for another year. Emory University, a private institution in Atlanta, does not require students to submit their scores, though students may.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker speaks to a supporter after his campaign stop in Carrollton on Tuesday (photo credit: Rebecca Grapevine).
CARROLLTON – Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker spoke to supporters at a campaign stop in Carrollton Tuesday but did not directly address recent unfavorable allegations about his payment for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion and violence against his ex-wife.
In the past few weeks, Walker has faced a string of troubling allegations. His son, Christian Walker, took to social media to criticize his father’s violence and parenting.
And the Republican’s staunch anti-abortion stance has been called into question by allegations from an ex-girlfriend who said Walker had paid for her abortion in 2009 and pressured her to get an abortion when she became pregnant a second time. Walker has denied the allegations.
But during Tuesday’s West Georgia campaign stop, fellow Republican Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Tom Cotton of Arkansas praised Walker before a cheering crowd of supporters in a local shopping center parking lot.
Walker did not directly address the recent allegations against him at the rally but suggested that the claims are political smears aimed at dividing his followers.
“They’ll do what it takes because they want this seat,” Walker said.
Walker also spoke about his core campaign themes: inflation, crime, drug trafficking, and what he termed “wokeness” in American society, which encompasses social themes such as transgender rights and racism.
“Have you seen that [Southern] border wide open?” Walker asked, saying his Democratic opponent Raphael Warnock had done nothing to help build a wall on the border in two years in office.
Walker also criticized a move to grant transgender rights within the U.S. military.
“These are wartimes. What happened to push-ups? Iran and Russia are not talking about pronouns,” Walker said to cheers from the crowd.
And Walker took aim at Warnock, who is seeking a full term in the Senate in November. Warnock is the longtime pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the former church of Martin Luther King Jr.
“All he [Warnock] talks about is the color of your skin,” Walker said. “Has he ever heard of forgiveness? Has he ever heard of redemption?
“They want to tell white kids, ‘You’re an oppressor.’ They want to tell Black kids, ‘You’re a victim.’ … Don’t let them separate you.”
Walker’s decision to campaign with Scott, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the GOP’s Senate campaign arm, drew criticism from Democrats.
“Walker’s embrace of Rick Scott – and his disastrous plan to slash Medicare and Social Security highlights just how much is at stake for Georgians in this U.S. Senate race,” said Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia.
“While Rev. Warnock fought to lower prescription drug costs for Georgia seniors and protect Social Security, Herschel Walker is campaigning with Rick Scott, who’s fighting to cut Social Security for more than 1.9 million Georgians who rely on it,” said Sarafina Chitika, press secretary for Warnock. “Georgia seniors deserve a senator who will stand up for them, not someone who sees a friend in a politician who wants to slash their benefits.”
With just one month to go in the nationally watched Senate race that could determine the party balance in Washington, both candidates are benefitting from an influx of cash.
During the third quarter, the Warnock campaign raised about $26 million, while Walker raised about $12 million.
However, the Walker campaign said his fundraising amount was the largest quarterly total for any Republican U.S. Senate candidate in this election cycle.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
Republican incumbent Attorney General Chris Carr (left) and Democratic challenger Jen Jordan (right) launched new ads this week.
ATLANTA – With one month to go before Election Day, new ads from incumbent Republican Attorney General Chris Carr and state Sen. Jen Jordan, his Democratic challenger, address their positions on the economy, crime and abortion.
Carr’s ad focuses on the Georgia economy during COVID, while Jordan’s emphasizes abortion rights.
“We were the first to reopen our businesses,” Carr says in a voice-over video showing him talking to people in what appears to be a local café. “I stood with Governor Kemp and we stayed open. … I fought to keep our children in the classroom.”
“As attorney general, my job is to protect and defend our state. Some days, that’s prosecuting bad guys. Other days, it’s keeping our kids learning,” Carr concludes.
Jordan’s ad describes her background as a lawyer focusing on child assault and, before that, working in her mother’s beauty shop growing up in Eastman.
The ad weaves Jordan’s staunchly pro-choice position on abortion with her tough-on-crime stance.
“I’d listen to the women talk about their lives, their fears,” Jordan says of her time working at her mother’s beauty shop. “Today, they’d be worried that Chris Carr cares more about investigating miscarriages and putting doctors in jail than protecting our families from rising crime.”
“I fought to crack down on sexual assault and child predators,” Jordan continues, as the ad shows her talking to a police officer on the street of a small town. “I’ll be an attorney general who will keep our families safe.”
The Jordan ads will begin running on Tuesday in seven media markets: Atlanta, Macon, Savannah, Augusta, Albany, Columbus and Chattanooga.
The ad buys come on the heels of the latest Georgia campaign finance reporting deadline last week.
Jordan has $1.4 million in cash on hand four weeks out from Election Day. In total, the campaign has raised over $3.1 million.
Carr has about $1.1 million in cash on hand and has raised $4.3 million in total, according to the campaign’s latest filings with the Georgia Government Transparency & Campaign Finance Commission.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Georgia Secretary of State candidates Republican Brad Raffensperger and Democrat Bee Nguyen both claim to be strong defenders of voting rights for Georgians, though they hold starkly different visions about how to protect the state’s elections.
One of the Secretary of State’s main jobs is to administer elections. During his first term in office, Raffensperger, an engineer by profession, developed a reputation as a national defender of election integrity. Nguyen, who founded and ran a non-profit prior to entering politics, has staked her campaign on defending election accessibility and the voting rights of Georgians, especially Georgians of color.
The formerly low-profile role has become a key site of political contention in Georgia, where legislative reforms to state voting laws and election-results challenges have put a national spotlight on the basic machinery of the state’s democratic system.
Last year, Raffensperger cemented his reputation as a person of integrity and even a defender of democracy when he stood up to then-President Donald Trump’s attempt to persuade him to “find” additional votes to swing Georgia’s 2020 election results in Trump’s favor.
In nationally televised testimony, Raffensperger told a U.S House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the national capitol how he resisted Trump’s requests during a lengthy – and high-pressure – phone call in early 2021.
“There were no votes to find,” Raffensperger told the committee in June. “The numbers were the numbers and we could not recalculate because we made sure that we had checked every single allegation.”
Closer to home, Raffensperger defended a long list of Georgia election policies in a lawsuit filed by voting-rights group Fair Fight Action in 2018.
This week, a federal district court judge ruled Georgia is not required to change those policies. Fair Fight Action is likely to appeal the decision. Raffensperger called the ruling a victory and said the lawsuit was politically motivated.
Raffensperger has made a point of cleaning up Georgia’s voter rolls – sometimes too aggressively, voting-rights advocates like Nguyen contend.
Earlier this year, Raffensperger called for a state constitutional amendment banning non-citizens from voting, which is already prohibited under Georgia law. And he audited Georgia’s voting rolls for non-citizens who had registered and found around 1,600 cases, which he referred to other agencies for further investigation.
Raffensperger has also defended the state’s controversial 2021 election reform law – Senate Bill 202. That law added an ID requirement to absentee ballot requests, restricted the location of ballot drop boxes and prohibited non-poll workers from handing out food and drinks near voters standing in line.
It also drew national criticism and led Major League Baseball to move the 2021 All-Star game from Atlanta to Denver in protest.
Raffensperger and other Republican leaders in Georgia have defended the law as essential to protecting Georgia’s elections.
“As Secretary of State I worked to pass SB 202 known as the Election Integrity Act, making Georgia one of the top states in the nation for election security,” Raffensperger said this week. “I am the only candidate with a proven record of protecting all Georgia voters, regardless of political pressures.”
Like Raffensperger, Nguyen got her start in politics representing an Atlanta district in the state House of Representatives after winning her seat in a 2017 special election. But Nguyen differs from Raffensperger on what the basic stance of Georgia’s election laws should be: She argues that the laws should be pitted in favor of registering people to vote rather than overly focused on administrative requirements that might disenfranchise people.
One of her proudest accomplishments as a state representative was getting an “exact match” voter registration law changed, which helped restore 50,000 voters to the voter rolls, Nguyen said. She also co-sponsored legislation to allow some former felons to vote in Georgia.
And she says that despite Raffensperger’s national reputation, he has undermined voting rights in Georgia.
“Here’s the thing about Brad Raffensperger. He wants to present himself to Georgia voters as a person who stood up against Donald Trump,” Nguyen said. “But the reality is following the law is the bare minimum and expected out of any elected official who took the oath of office.”
A recent series of ads supporting Nguyen paid for by the state Democratic Party criticizes Raffensperger’s defense of the 2021 Georgia election law, calling it “one of the most restrictive new voting laws in the country.”
The ads, which are running in five large Georgia media markets, also criticize Raffensperger’s stance on abortion, which became a lighting-rod campaign issue after a Georgia law banning most abortions took effect this summer.
“You may think you know Brad Raffensperger, but you don’t know the whole story,” says the ad’s narrator. “Raffensperger wanted to outlaw abortion at the moment of fertilization.”
While he was a state representative, Raffensperger sponsored an unsuccessful 2016 state House resolution proposing a constitutional amendment to “recognize the paramount right to life of all human beings at any stage of development.”
Abortion is irrelevant to the Secretary of State’s role, said Jordan Fuchs, a spokeswoman for the Raffensperger campaign.
“Job one is to know what the Secretary of State’s office actually does,” Fuchs. “It’s clear that Bee [Nguyen] doesn’t understand that this office has nothing to do with this topic.”
Nguyen’s campaign released details about third-quarter campaign fundraising this week. Nguyen raised over $1 million over the last three months. All told, the campaign has raised a total of $3.2 million and currently has about $1.2 million in cash on hand, a press release noted.
The Raffensperger campaign is expected to post its latest campaign fundraising numbers within the next few days.
Ted Metz, a Libertarian candidate, is also running for the post.
The three candidates will debate Oct. 18 as part of the Atlanta Press Club Loudermilk-Young debate series.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – The state Department of Revenue collected almost $3.1 billion in taxes in September, an increase of $279.2 million – or 9.9% – over the same month a year ago.
State tax receipts during the first quarter of fiscal 2023 were up 7.2% for the same period last year.
Individual income tax revenues rose by 9.2% last month compared to September 2021, resulting from a large increase in tax payments. Net sales taxes were up 14.6%.
Corporate income tax collections for September rose to $603.9 million, compared to $398.4 million during the same month a year ago. Corporate tax payments for the month increased, while refunds issued dropped 14%.
Tax receipts from gasoline and other motor fuels were off 103.7% in September, as the state continued to suspend collecting the tax on order from Gov. Brian Kemp.
Georgia tax revenues have been on the rise for more than a year, as the state built a record budget surplus coming out of the coronavirus pandemic.
Kemp said in August he would use part of the surplus to fund a proposed a $2 billion income and property tax rebate to Georgia taxpayers next year if he wins reelection in November. That would be in addition the $1.6 billion election-year rebate taxpayers received this year.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
