When families move into a new neighborhood or research schools to choose where to send their child, one of the first things they might learn about their local school is its letter grade. For more than a decade, North Carolina public schools have been rated with an A through F score.
North Carolina's State Superintendent Maurice "Mo" Green wants to re-evaluate that system to give families more context around the grade.
WUNC host Will Michaels interviewed Education Reporter Liz Schlemmer to explain what goes into a school's report card, and what education officials have doubts about.
Let's start with the latest. Superintendent Green recently rolled out his strategic plan. What does it have to say about how the state should judge schools and hold them accountable?
There are actually more than 100 action items in Green's strategic plan, to put this in context. One of those items is to form a task force to develop a new school accountability system and another action is to create profiles for schools based on that new system.
How is that different from what we have now?
That's not totally clear just from reading Green's strategic plan, but here's what we know.
We have a school accountability system that's been around for more than 20 years, and it all gets boiled down into the North Carolina school report cards.
That's not the report cards students get. This is a public, online report for every public school that gives families data on that school. Since about 2013, that report card has included an A through F letter grade for the school.
Those grades - and how they're calculated - are laid out in state law, and can't be changed without changing the law.
So it sounds like what Superintendent Green wants to do is recommend changes lawmakers could make to school report cards, or create more measures and new school profiles to help parents better interpret those grades.
Why would he want to change them?
The main criticism I hear about school letter grades is that they put a lot of weight, some say too much weight, on how students do on a few exams they take one week out of the year.
For elementary and middle schools, that letter grade is based 80% on how well students did on their state exams at the end of the year, and 20% on how much they improved year-over-year on those tests. That improvement is referred to as growth. I asked Green about his concerns.
"I'm not a big fan of the current school report cards," Green said. "Many of our schools are doing really amazing things in growing our students, but it doesn't show up necessarily in that type of report card. So I would do away actually with our current system altogether, and say, 'Let's start anew.' "
This isn't a new criticism, and it's not necessarily partisan. Green is a Democrat and our last state superintendent Catherine Truitt is a Republican. She also spoke publicly on many occasions about wanting to revise school letter grades to give more weight to growth, or to other measures not based on test scores.
So basically, school letter grades are based only on state standardized test scores?
Well, I have to qualify that a little bit, because the grades for high schools take in a few other factors like graduation rates and the rigor of math courses students are taking. Green would like more measures like that factored into letter grades.
But by and large, yes, school letter grades are based primarily on test scores. Not to say that scores on these exams aren't meaningful, or something that parents care about. After all, these exams are specifically designed to check if students mastered the content that the state expects them to learn in their classes.
But you can imagine there are many other things parents might care about when evaluating a school...
Sure, like how safe is it? You know, how many students are arrested or expelled each year? Are the teachers highly qualified and experienced? What's the average class size? Does the school offer art and music?
Those are all data points you can find in a North Carolina school report card, but none of them are factored into the school's letter grade.
Any advice to parents on how to read a school report card?
Go to the NC school report card website and open the school's report. Look for those things that tell you more beyond the letter grade. Did the school meet or exceed growth? That's a really good sign that the educators are helping students learn and improve no matter their starting point.
See WUNC's guide on how to read a school report card.
If you have questions about the letter grade for the school your child attends, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction recommends reaching out to your student's teacher or principal to ask for more context.
