This story first appeared in WFAE Education Reporter James Farrell's weekly education newsletter. Sign up here to get it to your inbox first.
In the days leading up to last Tuesday’s testing data release, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials had been hinting it would be a “historic” day. And the results didn’t disappoint.
CMS set some new high-water marks this year in terms of growth and school performance grades – and in many cases, the results were dramatic. Overall, it paints a picture of a district that saw widespread improvements across most of its schools and brought a record number of struggling schools back onto solid ground.
How do we measure school performance? You might be familiar with North Carolina’s school report cards, which give schools a letter grade of A-F. That letter grade each year is based in large part on the percentage of students who are deemed grade-level proficient (GLP) on state exams, and in smaller part on how much the school improved its GLP rates — a metric we refer to as “growth.”
The nifty state website that allows you to look up your school’s report card hasn’t been updated to reflect the data that was released last week just yet. But you can see how your school did using this data explorer. And if you want to learn more about how school report cards work (and why some state leaders don’t like them), I highly recommend reading this handy explainer from Liz Schlemmer over at our sister station WUNC.
So with that context, here are some of those standout stats (but you can see all of the CMS-specific data here):
- Around 89% of schools met or exceeded their growth expectations this year — a new district record that’s good for 10th place in growth statewide, which is the highest growth ranking CMS has ever had.
- 123 CMS schools now have a ranking of an A, B or C — an increase of 21 schools, which is another district record.
- The district removed a whopping 31 schools from the state’s “low-performing schools” list — the most in a single year. It added only seven new ones to the list.
- With that net reduction of 24 schools, the percentage of low-performing schools across the district dropped from 32% last year to just 18% this year — it’s now below what it was even before the pandemic.
If we look at just the overall test data, there are other positive signs, as well as areas for improvement. CMS outperformed the state on overall GLP across all subjects, with 56% of students scoring grade-level proficient compared to the state’s 55%. Reading GLP went up 5.2% and math went up 4.6%. The only areas where CMS saw declines were in third-grade reading and high-school Math I, which was consistent with statewide trends.
But now that we have these test scores, we can get a better sense of where the district is in achieving the goals it has set for itself. So let’s take a deeper look.
CMS board goals
The CMS Board of Education has set four long-term goals that focus on literacy, math and post-grad readiness. And a note of caution here — the district doesn’t use GLP, that grade-level proficiency, as the benchmark in its state testing goals. Instead, it’s trying to increase the number of students who score at the “college- and career-ready” (CCR) level on these tests. That’s the score above GLP.
Here’s the good news: In every goal, CMS is moving in the right direction. Put simply, the numbers are going up, not down. The flip side to that is that, in most cases, the numbers are not going up fast enough for the district to be on pace to hit its goal numbers by 2029.
If you’ve followed this newsletter or tuned in regularly to the CMS Board meetings, this is probably not surprising to you — Superintendent Crystal Hill regularly provides the board with updates on where the district is at throughout the school year, and you’ll often hear her talk about the need to “accelerate” the rate of growth.
Goal 1: K-2 literacy and reading
CMS wants to increase the percentage of K-2 students scoring at or above benchmark on the early literacy DIBELS assessment from 67% as of June 2023 to 91% by June 2029.
This goal was not touched on in this latest data release. The test results out last week cover the state end-of-grade and end-of-course exams. The K-2 literacy test has a really jargony name: Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS. It’s a diagnostic test that’s administered across the country multiple times a year to help gauge where kids are in learning to read.
Still, CMS dove into its DIBELS scores from last school year at its last board of education meeting — you can read my story on that here.
Last school year, 72% of K-2 students hit their benchmarks on their end-of-year DIBELS exams. That was a 2% increase, and marked the second straight year of growth — but it fell short of the 75% target that administrators said was needed to stay on pace to hit the 2029 goal.
The target for this school year is 79% — so to get back on track next year, administrators will be shooting for a seven percentage point increase. That’d be a larger increase than the last two years combined.
Goal 2: Grades 3-8 literacy and reading
CMS wants to increase the percentage of students scoring CCR in reading grades 3-8 on state tests from 31% as of June 2023 to 50% by June 2029.
The data last week showed 33% of CMS students scored CCR on last year’s exams. That was an increase of 3% from the year before.
(These numbers might seem low, but remember we’re not dealing with grade-level proficiency — that number was 53%. We’re dealing with students who scored at the level higher than grade-level proficiency.)
At 33%, that was four percentage points shy of this year’s target of 37%. Next year, CMS will have to boost that by seven percentage points to hit its 40% target. On the bright side, this year’s increase reverses a downward trend from the year before, when CCR scores slipped slightly.
We heard more about this at this week’s school board meeting. Superintendent Crystal Hill noted that the challenge might be – at least in part – reflected in how challenging the goal is.
“These are Herculean goals,” Hill said. “Typically three percentage point growth year over year would be a really big deal.”
But she also pointed toward a potential area for growth, and that’s third-grade reading, where CMS saw a decrease in performance that was also reflected in the statewide scores.
“If we would have seen the same amount of growth in 3rd grade that we saw in 4th and 5th, we would have well surpassed the target,” Hill told the board.
One thing to watch for: The state has invested a lot of money into training teachers on how to implement the science of reading into their lessons. State leaders said this week they expect this year’s test results will better reflect the impact of that investment. Hill touched on that, too.
CMS was in the first cohort to go through that LETRS training, she noted, but she also noted there’s been “little to no” discussion about listening comprehension – an area where many reading experts have been trying to place more resources.
Sometimes in earlier grades, there’s an overemphasis on decoding, Hill said – having kids learn reading skills and understanding the sounds words make. But sometimes that comes at the expense of comprehension, she argued.
“We really have to focus on doing both at the same time,” she said.
Goal 3: 6-12 math
CMS wants to increase the percentage of students scoring CCR in grades 6-12 on the state Math I exam from 27% as of June 2023 to 57% by June 2029.
For both GLP and CCR, high school Math I scores dipped slightly this year for CMS — that was consistent throughout the state. The state does not release data on the middle and high school results combined, but CMS reported last week that its middle schoolers taking the test saw increases (and more than 95% were grade-level proficient).
All that combined for a 29.1% CCR rate for Math I in grades 6-12 — a slight increase from last year’s 28.4% but short of the district goal of 37%.
Goal 4: Post-Grad readiness
CMS wants to increase the percentage of graduating high school students who are on track to be enrolled in higher education, enlisted in the military or employed from 72% as of June 2023 to 85% by June 2029.
This is the newest goal of the four — the board finalized it just ahead of last school year.
This goal isn’t reflected in the state data, and the last time we’ve gotten an update on it was in February — but that update had some good signs, showing that 76% of students who graduated in ’23-24 met at least one of seven different indicators the district says puts them on track to have one of those “three Es.”
That exceeded last year’s goal of 74%, which means CMS is working steadily toward that 2029 goal.
One potential warning sign in this year’s state data — potentially the most significant blemish in CMS’ accountability data this year was that its graduation rate dipped a tenth of a percentage point to 84.3%. That came as the rest of the state saw an increase to 87.7% – the highest in state history.
This goal doesn’t deal directly with graduation rates — all the students assessed under this goal are presumed to graduate on time. But we’ll see if the data sparks any new initiatives to boost graduation rates, which is a priority for state Superintendent Mo Green.
