Raleigh, NC-- North Carolina parents digging into the latest data about their child's school may have found a disquieting surprise Thursday -- many of the state's 2,500 public schools failed to meet the grade for adequate yearly progress.
The state's 115 local school districts released information required by the decade-old federal No Child Left Behind law to measure the reading and mathematics abilities of students every year.
Statewide totals won't be available for two weeks, but the preliminary schoolhouse data show fewer than three of 10 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools met the targets set for them in the academic year that concluded in June. Fewer than one in seven Wake County schools met their mark. More than half of the state's 99 charter schools missed targets, double the number who failed to meet them last year. The reasons behind the failing grades have generated pressure for change in state capitols across the country. The Obama Administration has said that unless Congress acts soon, Education Secretary Arne Duncan would act to avert a "slow-motion train wreck" for U.S. schools. North Carolina's disappointing data was at least in part because last year saw a big jump in the target scores and because the federal law requires schools to meet all of their goals or they're deemed to have fallen short, state officials said.
All public school children are required to perform at grade level three years from now. "Every state had to set a stair of steps to get to 100 percent of students being proficient," said Lou Fabrizio, the chief testing director for the Department of Public Instruction. "Every three years that stair step got higher. This is the first year of a major bump up." Last school year's proficiency targets for students in grades 3-8 rose to 72 percent reading at grade level from 43 percent, and jumped to 89 percent to meet math standards from 77 percent . For 10th graders, 69 percent must be proficient in reading and 84 percent in mathematics. The 10th grade targets in the 2009-10 academic year were for a school to show 38 percent of students proficient in reading and 68 percent in math. Every school's performance also is tracked by the achievement of students grouped by race, family income, disability, and limited-English speakers. Proficiency targets must be met by each of the subgroups represented at the school, or the entire school is judged to have failed.
This all-or-nothing feature of the No Child Left Behind law guarantees fewer schools will earn the stamp of meeting all annual improvement targets, state schools superintendent June Atkinson said. "I continue to believe that this method of labeling schools is unfair and unrealistic because there is no recognition for schools that are making significant progress and performing well with nearly all of their students," she said in a statement.
Her complaints are not isolated. As the bar for reaching standards rose, Georgia reported Thursday that 63 percent of public schools met the federal benchmarks for adequate yearly progress, down from 71 percent the previous year. Just 10 percent of Florida's schools met adequate yearly progress goals in 2011. School officials in Idaho, Montana and South Dakota promise they will no longer raise the benchmarks that public schools have to meet, nor punish the schools that don't meet the higher testing goals.
Duncan said last month that unless Congress completes its overhaul of the federal law by September, his department will waive the law's requirements for states embracing the Education Department's reform efforts, which include performance pay for teachers and growth in charter schools.
"I think most people would agree that No Child Left Behind needs to be changed," said Terry Stoops, education studies director at the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank in Raleigh. "I think the Obama Administration is going to look more at student growth rather than static standards or benchmarks." But he doesn't accept that North Carolina schools shouldn't be expected to bring three-quarters of their students up to expectations for their grade. "North Carolina's AYP suggests that our schools are very good at meeting mediocre standards, but when those standards are raised they have a more difficult time and that should be cause for concern," Stoops said.
To look up your child's school on NC Public Schools.
AP