How we grade NC schools must change, legislative group says
A North Carolina House committee recommends overhauling the state’s system for grading schools — a system that publicly assesses a letter grade to every school and makes additional requirements of the lowest-performing schools.
The grades, required by federal law, are intended to help the public know how well a school is doing and to hold schools accountable for their students’ performance. State education leadership and the group of lawmakers want more criteria to be used to determine school quality, similar to what most states do.
The House Select Committee on Education Reform on Monday held off on making recommendations to curb rising absences among students and numerous other issues brought to the committee in recent months.
The committee voted Monday to submit recommendations to General Assembly leadership for the upcoming short session. It will meet again before the 2025 long legislative session to make additional recommendations.
The biggest change recommended in the committee’s 2024 report is to school performance grades.
Under the recommendation, schools would still be given a letter grade, but it would reflect more than just test scores. It would reflect four areas: How many students are proficient on standardized tests, average student test score growth, career or college readiness, and opportunity. “Opportunity” would be a wide-ranging category, including surveys, how many students are “chronically” absent from school, and intra/extracurricular activities. A student is chronically absent if they’ve missed more than 10% of school days. A rising share of children meet that definition nationwide, including hundreds of thousands of North Carolina students.
The committee didn’t discuss the recommendation much Monday before voting on it. Some members said they’d wished the committee had made recommendations to reduce chronic absenteeism.
During the 2022-23 school year, about a quarter of North Carolina public school students missed at least 10% of school days. That was down from about a third the year before but up from about 15% before the Covid-19 pandemic.
“That’s very high and very concerning,” said Rep. Maria Cervania, D-Wake.
Committee Co-Chairman Rep. Brian Biggs, R-Randolph, said the committee’s inclusion of chronic absenteeism in the school performance grade recommendation meant that the statistic would be more closely scrutinized. He said it would also be a helpful metric when assessing teacher performance and test scores, because teachers and schools can’t educate children who aren’t in school.
Committee members discussed the idea of making changes to school performance grades during a Feb. 26 committee meeting.
The report approved Monday draws a few conclusions.
“The Committee recognizes the importance of communicating school performance to parents, students, and other stakeholders,” the report states. “However, the Committee finds that the State's current A-F school performance grades do not provide a balanced assessment of a school and do not effectively communicate school quality.”
Most states use more metrics in their performance grades, such as graduation rates, attendance rates or extracurricular activities. The committee noted that North Carolina has comparable or better national standardized test scores than many other southern states but labels far more schools as D or F schools than those states do.
How the grades are calculated is set in state law. Years ago, lawmakers decide the grade would be calculated by 80% test score proficiency and 20% test score growth. Federal education law requires every state to come up with its own grading system.
In North Carolina, a school is low-performing if it has either a D or F grade for proficiency and doesn’t show expected growth in test scores.
North Carolina schools receive a letter grade every year. People can use those grades to see how well their child’s school is doing or to decide if they want to buy a home in a certain area. Schools can use those grades to determine how well they’re accomplishing their goals or whether they need to make improvements.
The state uses the grades to determine which schools are low-performing and need to make changes.
But State Superintendent Catherine Truitt said those uses are undercut by how the grades were calculated. They’re so narrowly focused on test scores that they don’t provide other information that can affect those test scores or information that many people also value in a school, such as opportunities for their children.
She also said the system creates so many low-performing schools that the handful of employees the General Assembly has designated for helping them isn’t sufficient toward actually helping them.
“Currently, there is no meaningful accountability for low-performing schools,” Truitt said in February. “Currently very little is happening at the state level to support low-performing schools.”
Truitt, who lost her primary re-election earlier this month and won’t serve as superintendent next year, recommended four different letters grades for schools based on the same metrics the committee landed on Monday. Truitt recommended against summarizing the four grades into just one, but the committee ultimately preferred that after members said in February they thought that would make more sense to people.
Truitt’s proposal came from a working group of stakeholders in and out of schools, including business leaders. A group of 50 superintendents worked on the final revision Truitt proposed in February.
Outside of the recommended changes to school performance grades, the committee is largely recommending further study of many issues brought up in its most recent round of meetings. In the process of recommending studies, however, the committee acknowledges several problems that exist in North Carolina: That teachers are insufficiently paid to attract and retain talent; that principal pay is in consistent year-to-year; and that many students don’t have access to wireless Internet or a computer at home.
The committee also noted some successes in schools, including ongoing reversal of “learning loss” that was prompted by pandemic remote learning and increased enrollment in advanced math classes.
