NC school leaders search for new way to measure school performance without socioeconomic bias

To that end, officials are examining new ways to rate schools, weighing whether to include a host of other metrics — everything from students attendance to electives — to determine what separates good schools from bad schools.

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For decades, regulations have emphasized test scores as the main metric for determining the best and worst schools. That focus has dictated what teachers teach and how much time schools spend on test preparation. The resulting school performance grades can have far-reaching ramifications. For instance, families often choose where to live — or whether to seek a school transfer — based on school performance grades.

Proponents say changes to how the state evaluates its roughly 3,000 schools could influence schools in other ways, by rewarding and encouraging efforts toward offering more electives, keeping students in school, teaching students critical thinking skills or preparing students for careers and college. It could also draw teachers to schools they might otherwise think of as academically struggling.

More performance metrics could also help school leaders better spot areas that need improvement.

“If that's supported by additional funds from the state for low-performing schools, then I think you have a chance to help create a system that does what we would like it to do, which is improve,” said Lance Fusarelli, professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at North Carolina State University.

Since the 2013-14 school year, federal law has required states to publicly grade their own schools. North Carolina schools are largely graded for how well their students do on state tests. The grade is comprised of 80% raw test score data and 20% “growth” data — a measurement of how well a school’s students did on the tests against how well an algorithm predicted they would do, then ranked against all other schools.

School performance grades capture the impact of a minority of the state’s teacher workforce — and sometimes very few of a school’s teachers at all — and very little of a school’s overall workforce, according to North Carolina Superintendent Catherine Truitt. Forty percent of teachers teach a course that ends in an end-of-course or end-of-grade exam. That percentage could be much lower at a school with more electives.

Truitt, other education leaders and thousands of people who responded to a recent survey think the current school performance grading system fails to reflect many of the things people actually want from their school.

“We value way more than just these test scores,” Truitt said.

There’s still debate on a few others: Innovation, school climate, extracurriculars, student health, and college and work preparation.

The group will not consider per-student spending, discipline data or college entrance exam scores. Discipline data, for example, is often considered unreliable and placing a greater emphasis on it might discourage reporting.

The group is pursuing a different model for each type of school: Elementary, middle or high school.

“In some ways, what we're trying to do is modernize the entire system of education, because it looks largely the same as it did at the turn of the last century,” Truitt said.

About 69% of respondents said the state should change the way it measures school performance. About 87% of respondents said they believed metrics should be different for elementary, middle and high schools, according to the survey, which was conducted last year.

Most want to add metrics, including elective and advanced classes, whether students are learning communication and thinking skills, high school graduation rate and school safety.

Respondents also thought per-student spending shouldn’t be included as a metric for grading schools.

North Carolina uses A-F letter grades, while other states have used numbers or descriptive ratings such as “excellent” or “unsatisfactory.” Federal law only requires that schools consider test scores, growth scores, graduation rates and English-language proficiency.

Test scores account for 80% of a North Carolina school’s performance grade. Those scores include reading, math, science and English learners’ progress on language proficiency tests. For high schools, they also include English, four-year graduation rate, and the ACT/Work Keys test.

The school performance grades have consequences in North Carolina. Once a school registers a D or an F and does not exceed growth expectations, it becomes a “low-performing” school. Then it must publicize and communicate a plan to improve. Schools that score in the “low-performing” range enough times in a row end up under higher scrutiny. In the past few years, they’ve also been eligible for North Carolina’s Restart Schools program, which provides extra funding and regulatory flexibility to make bigger changes.

For the next year, the Department of Public Instruction and stakeholders will be devising how to measure many of the workgroup’s newly proposed metrics for school assessment.

They may also change the weight given to raw test data and growth data; many favor providing more emphasis on growth.

That would be more fair, Fusarelli said. Test scores can be low one year, rise the next year and still be relatively low in comparison to other schools. But growth, he said, is a sign of something working.

“That should be attributable to at least in some significant measure to the actual quality of teaching and learning,” he said. But weighing test score data less than growth data would obscure achievement levels, which remain useful information, he added.

Another challenge officials will face is how to widen the scope of how schools can be assessed without opening the opportunity for the assessment itself to be gamed for higher scores.

Changing the methodology is ultimately up to the North Carolina General Assembly. Many lawmakers are open to the idea.

House Bill 26, filed by Rep. John Torbett, R-Gaston, would require a study by April 15 and recommendations on a new grading system by February 2024. The bill passed through the House Education Committee Tuesday and is now before the House Rules Committee.

Members of the North Carolina State Board of Education, which often makes recommendations to lawmakers on behalf of DPI, have favored a change, as well.

Board Member John Blackburn worries teachers often migrate to schools with higher performance grades. He worries too many good teachers fill those schools and not enough want to work at schools with lower grades, which need extra help.

“We’re going to be growing the gap instead of closing it if we’re not able to get really talented teachers to go to low-performing schools,” Blackburn said at a recent board meeting.

A new performance grade could showcase other aspects of a school than the test scores that might entice teachers to work there, Maher said, such as a good school climate or coursework opportunities.

Since World War II, U.S. schools have faced constantly shifting federal regulations, increasingly concerned with achievement and accountability.

While public schooling has been mandatory for more than 100 years in the United States and North Carolina, academic achievement on tests has only more recently become a foremost goal of schools.

Before that, schools were tools for assimilating and learning some basic skills, such as literacy and arithmetic, said Patricia Graham, an education History professor at Harvard University. Proficiency mattered but wasn’t measured by tests. Fewer students graduated from high school decades ago because a diploma wasn’t needed for many to earn a living, and attending college was far less common. Schooling was an economic or governmental tool to a lesser extent than it is now.

The beginning of federal investment in education after World War II, when the federal government wanted to compete against Russia’s power and education system, played a key role in expanding public education, according to Maher, who is also an education historian. The National Defense Education Act infused money into science education and started a federal student loan program for students who needed financial assistance.

Between the war and the 1980s, the federal government made investments in school lunch, funding for schools serving lower-income students and regulations and some funding for students with disabilities.

Then in 1983, the Reagan Administration published “A Nation at Risk.” The 48-page report argued United States children were far behind their global counterparts academically, threatening the country’s comparative political strength and economic competitiveness.

Skeptics wondered which students were taking tests in other countries used for comparison, Graham said.

“Academic achievement for everybody, for all students, is a relatively new idea that began to emerge in the 1980s and ’90s,” Graham said. That happened after the report, “when we came to grips with the fact that many students were not achieving academically in schools. They graduated from high school, often we had higher high school graduation rates than ever, but many of these high school graduates were not academically competent.”

Reforms under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations focused on academic accountability, largely through students’ performance on standardized tests. Those reforms have included targeted funding for certain students, schools or grant programs, though not broad-based increases in school funding.

The state Department of Public Instruction’s assistance teams then work with schools that qualify and school systems with more than half of their low-performing schools. Low-performing schools haven’t directly received more funding. But starting during the 2017-18 school year, the North Carolina General Assembly began funding significant efforts at chronically low-performing schools that applied to be in the state’s Restart Program. That program allows schools to have administrative or regulatory flexibility not offered to other schools to aid turnaround efforts.

School performance grades are an official version of what exists on numerous data-savvy special-interest websites. School leaders can tout their ratings on those websites or push parents to write online reviews that boost their scores. Real estate agents can use them — and even the school performance grades — as selling points.

The power of performance grades is partly why Maher and others want to change how they’re calculated. He wants to give schools more of an incentive to enhance educational opportunities beyond test scores.

He uses the example of his daughter, now a horticulture major in college. She took two horticulture classes in high school, helping her start college more smoothly. But her high school receives no credit for making her better prepared for college in that way, he said.

“Schools will dedicate time, energy and resources to the things that they're held to account for,” Maher said. “What gets measured gets done.”

When schools can have more data, they can better target their resources to what needs the most attention, Maher said.