Every spring, North Carolina public school students take end-of-grade or end-of-course exams that are designed to test how well they learned content in math, reading, English and science.
Educators and state education officials have been closely monitoring the data over the last three years since testing and reporting resumed after the pandemic to see when students have more or less "recovered."
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction released new databases this week that compile data on individual schools’ performance here, and on statewide grade-level proficiency here.
The data show students’ scores inching back up on most exams and nearly matching pre-pandemic levels in a few subject areas. In many subjects, the percentage of students who were considered "on grade-level" reached a three year high.
However, the number of students who are still not scoring on grade level is "startling," according to State Superintendent Catherine Truitt.
“They were startling before the pandemic, and they remain startling,” she said at the state board of education meeting Wednesday.
Truitt pointed especially to the low percentage of Black and Hispanic students who are considered grade-level proficient by eighth grade.
“The overwhelming majority of Black and Hispanic students are attending a failing school. This is unacceptable,” Truitt said.
School performance grades label schools from A to F
The A through F letter grades assigned to elementary and middle schools heavily weight the proportion of students who are considered grade-level proficient on state exams. Another 20% of a school’s score is based on student growth on state tests. The A through F grades for high schools consider other factors including graduation rates.
The state board’s chair Eric Davis cautioned against judging schools solely on their letter grades.
“Treating test scores as a single measure of school quality overlooks additional factors that provide a more complete, more accurate picture of how well our schools educate and serve our students,” Davis said. “Let's keep all this in mind and resist using test results to demean and punish public schools.”
Davis said other factors of school quality include a school's relationship to its community, the school’s climate, and the health and wellbeing of students and teachers.
Truitt noted that her administration has advocated for revising the school performance grades to consider more factors beyond what she has often called “high stakes one-and-done testing” and to weigh a school’s growth on those tests more heavily in its overall grade. As her term comes to a close this winter, Truitt said she hopes the state board will continue to advocate for those reforms.
Former Wake County Superintendent Catty Moore, who is a member of the state board, cast doubt on the validity of the exams.
“I don't think I can give platitudes or congratulations or 'woe is us' around what any of the results show, because that just sort of validates that the tests that we're using are the right ones to begin with,” Moore said. “They are what we have, and they tell us what they tell us, and we cannot ignore them.”
Calls for reforms
In her remarks to the state board, Moore called on state lawmakers to respond to educators' needs by passing education reforms the state board has proposed in the last few years. She said the state board has sent multiple proposals to the state legislature asking to revise the formula for school performance grades, to change the funding model for students with disabilities, and to support funding that would allow teachers to be paid to take on advanced mentorship roles.
“All of those sit in our legislature with no action,” Moore said.
Kimberly Jones, North Carolina’s Teacher of the Year in 2023, called for more support for teaching assistants and paraprofessionals who help students with disabilities or English language learners.
“We need bodies in buildings lowering the student-to-teacher ratio,” Jones said. “In our most effective schools, that's what we see happening every day.”
Truitt also noted that while state and federal law require schools to be designated as low-performing and supported when students do poorly on state tests, there’s no state funding for that work and some federal funding that doesn’t provide more positions at the Department of Public Instruction to support this work.
“If we do not find a way to fix these challenges, we are going to continue to repeat this cycle that we have seen for the last 20 years of our low-income and students of color continuing to receive substandard education,” Truitt said.
See the full slideshow of data presented to the state board of education here.
