Work to change North Carolina's school performance grade model is paused

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction released school performance data the first week of September.

The state saw a slight decrease in "D" and "F" school grades this year. But even in celebrating that trend, state education officials made a point to talk about the issues with how these grades are calculated. 

North Carolina uses two measures: 80% of a school’s grade is based on test scores, and 20% is based on how much growth students make. But for the last two years, NCDPI has been working to change that model. 

Deputy State Superintendent Andrew Smith says the current metrics only capture a moment in time in May and June when students take their end-of-course and end-of-grade exams. 

“So they do provide visibility into things like proficiency and understanding how many kids can read on grade level,” Smith said. “It also provides some visibility into how much we're growing kids." 

But Smith says he found that most people don’t think the current model does a great job of capturing everything that happens in schools. That’s according to a statewide survey with more than 25,000 responses. 

“And so we started to think about, ‘Well, if it's not doing a great job at measuring or capturing what high quality looks like, what might high quality be?’” said Smith.

Smith said he found there were all kinds of things that educators and parents cared about that the current model doesn’t take into account. Like school safety, and whether students go to college or find a job after graduating. 

It’s not possible to measure everything people suggested, so Smith convened a 45-person group to narrow the list down to eight indicators including graduation rate, chronic absenteeism and school climate.

From there, more advisory groups were created to study each one of them. They met for four hours every week from May to November of last year. They studied the research around these indicators, as well as feasibility, potential costs, validity and reliability. 

"Because, you know, once these go into a school accountability system, people begin to focus on them,” Smith said. “When you say proficiency is important, but chronic absenteeism is also important, and you put it in the model, people pay attention. And so we needed to deeply understand those before we start to change the game.”

NCDPI officials shared recommendations for changing the model with the House Select Committee on Education Reform in February of this year. They talked about adding measures for “readiness” and “opportunity,” which would include things like post-secondary preparation, school climate and extracurricular activities. 

Smith says legislators supported their efforts and introduced House Bill 1057. It calls for a School Performance Grade Update Pilot Program. In this model, 50% of the score is based on proficiency, 30% on growth and 20% on those other new factors. 

The bill passed on first reading but didn’t go anywhere after that. The General Assembly was having some pretty intense budget discussions back then. But Smith says NCDPI can’t change the school performance grade model without changing the law. 

“That bill essentially directs the agency to do that work,” Smith said. “And I think it also sends a very clear signal to stakeholders and to administrators and educators across our state that the General Assembly is serious about thinking differently around school accountability and school performance grades." 

He says he has hope that there is a desire in the legislature for the work to continue, but there’s another factor at play too. 

“We know that we will have a new state superintendent,” Smith said. “We want to make sure everything's aligned as we think through this recommendation.”

The work to redesign the school performance grade model started under State Superintendent Catherine Truitt. But after losing the primary, she’ll be replaced in the upcoming election. If the new superintendent has other ideas for the model, the course of the work could change. 

But Smith says he’s confident the bill will pass when the General Assembly convenes in January. If it does, there would be a two-year pilot process. First, with a small group of public school districts and charter schools. In the second year, it would expand statewide.

After that, Smith says, a new school performance grade model would be ready for implementation in the 2027-28 academic year.

Amy Diaz covers education for WFDD in partnership with Report For America. You can follow her on Twitter at @amydiaze.