The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board took a first stab Tuesday at new five-year academic goals designed to prepare more students for success in school and adult life.
Members spent almost five hours agonizing over the tension between setting modest goals and making bigger demands, knowing that bolder goals will require tough budget choices.
“I grapple with the capabilities of exponential increases to being realistic with the increases,” said Vice Chair Stephanie Sneed.
“It’s so hard to pick that number that’s a stretch but that isn’t just ridiculous,” agreed Chair Elyse Dashew.
The board ended up revising three of the four proposed goals introduced at the meeting which were created after an all-day board work session in August and months of community discussions. Members said it was clear that the public’s top priority is strengthening literacy skills.
The board’s consultant, A.J. Crabill, repeatedly told them that bolder goals will require bigger financial commitments, such as cutting high school staff in order to hire more literacy specialists for elementary schools.
“I am all in for radical shifts in budgeting in order to fund the things that our community says matter most,” said Crabill, a former Kansas City, Missouri, school board president. But, he said, “Don’t be fake about it. The moment you say we want to accelerate growth, you must be willing to pair that with an acceleration of resources.”
The discussion came as success on the current goals proves elusive and a new district leadership team steps up.
The current goals run through the end of this school year, and the 2023 test score report shows CMS is not on track to meet any of them. The proposed new goals would highlight the same challenges — getting more students on track for success in reading and math and ensuring that graduates are prepared for their next steps in life — but come at them from different angles.
For instance, the current goals target reading scores for Black and Hispanic third-graders, who trail white and Asian counterparts on tests that are viewed as a gateway for future success. The new ones would look at early literacy and reading performance for all students in grades K-8.
Here’s what the board agreed on:
Early literacy and reading
One goal calls for increasing the percentage of K-2 students who are meeting benchmarks for early literacy skills to approximately 90% by 2029. Currently those levels range from 73% in kindergarten to 62% in second grade.
Another goal calls for raising the percentage of students in grades 3-8 who earn “college and career ready” reading scores from 30.5% to 65%. That label requires a higher score than grade-level proficiency and is not directly comparable to the children meeting benchmarks in younger grades.
CMS strategy chief Beth Thompson and board member Melissa Easley cautioned that even if the board budgets money to hire more reading specialists, staff shortages could pose a challenge.
“The situation we found ourselves in a little bit this year, is that even if we had all the money in the world, if we don’t have people to hire, and we’re talking about our youngest learners who need small-group instruction, will we have the people to do that?” Thompson said.
“I don’t want to set a goal too high, that we can’t meet it because of (not having) a teacher in every classroom,” Easley said. “And honestly, early literacy teachers are some of our highest needs right now.”
Math
The current math goal targets scores for students who take Math I, formerly known as algebra, in high school. The proposal introduced Tuesday called for shifting the focus to “college and career ready” scores in whatever math class eighth-graders take. For some that’s eighth-grade math, but for more advanced students that’s Math I.
Instead, the board decided to center the new goal on Math I scores for all students, regardless of when they take the course. In 2023 only 9.3% of high school Math I students hit the college-career mark, compared with 64.7% of those taking it in middle school. The combined college-career rate was 27.4%, and the new goal calls for raising that by about four percentage points a year for the coming five years.
Life after graduation
Board members agreed the community wants to ensure that students who graduate from CMS are ready for a successful adult life. But they grappled with how to measure that. A high school diploma alone isn’t necessarily enough, some said. The current goal looks at state “diploma endorsements” for academic and/or career-prep work that goes beyond minimum requirements. But Superintendent Crystal Hill has questioned whether the endorsements are meaningful.
The board finally agreed to direct Hill to come up with a way of measuring the percentage of seniors who are on track to graduate with a job, enrollment in college or enlistment in the military. Because there’s no baseline data, there’s also no target yet for five-year improvement.
“To be honest, this goal is the most daunting,” chief strategy officer Thompson told the board. She said it will demand a whole new system of tracking data and significant community support. “But for these very reasons that are in some ways daunting, I think they also make this goal the most exciting.”
The current goals and the ones in progress are part of the board’s ongoing effort to focus their own work on student outcomes, rather than being distracted by other issues that demand their time and attention. The first set was developed during a time of churn in the superintendent’s office, with the job changing hands three times in the five-year window the goals cover.
Hill, who was named interim superintendent in January, was hired for the top job in May. She has brought in new people for many of the top administrative jobs. And the nine-member school board has five newcomers elected last November, with this year’s election set to bring in at least two more.
