After months of work and disappointing results on its last round of goals, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board Tuesday voted 8-1 for literacy and math goals designed to shape the next six years of strategy.
“We are really setting our students up for a level of success that we haven’t seen in many years,” board Chair Elyse Dashew said.
Board members and Superintendent Crystal Hill say the goals need to be ambitious enough to make a difference but realistic enough that they don’t demoralize educators.
The last set of goals, which will end with the current school year, has proven hard to meet during a stretch that included the COVID-19 pandemic and churn in the superintendent’s office.
For instance, the current plan calls for 50% of Black and Hispanic third-graders to achieve 2024 reading scores that put them on track for college and career preparation. A report presented Tuesday says that with only 16.4% hitting that mark in 2023, there’s little chance of success by the end of this academic year.
The goals for 2029 are:
- Have 91% of K-2 students hitting benchmark scores on early literacy assessments, up from 67% in 2023.
- Have 50% of all students in grades 3-8 hitting the college-and-career reading mark, up from 30.5% in 2023.
- Have 50% of all students earning college-and-career track scores in Math I, up from 27.4% in 2023.
The board and Hill also plan to create a way to measure the percentage of seniors who are on track to be enrolled in higher education, employed or enlisted in the military. After that, they’ll set a goal for boosting that percentage.
Board members say things have changed since they created the first set of goals. They now have more experience with the process, have done more community engagement and have better data. The pandemic disrupted testing and sent student performance plunging, which made earlier baselines questionable. As board member Thelma Byers-Bailey put it, “we were just shooting in the dark.”
“This year we have done a better job of studying what is actually doable,” Byers-Bailey said. “And we’ve put the time into really diving deep into that and I think we’ve come up with some more realistic, achievable and yet laudable goals.”
Board member Jennifer De La Jara cast the only “no” vote. She said she supports the overall plan but thinks the reading goal is too low and would have preferred to set it at 65%.
Of course, the goals only matter if district leaders can help principals, teachers and families carry them out. The board and staff give public reports at least once a month on interim progress and strategies. For instance, on Tuesday Hill discussed several literacy strategies, including support for students who are learning English, working literacy into social studies and science lessons, and expanding tutoring.
Dashew said the new goals set clear expectations for the district, “which are going to start here tonight and then get cascaded into every schoolhouse and every classroom.” Community members and groups that provided feedback as the board prepared the goals will also help make them a reality, she said.
