A version of this story first appeared in WFAE Education Reporter James Farrell's weekly newsletter. Sign up here to get newsletters from WFAE straight to your inbox.
I’ve spent a lot of time in these newsletters writing about literacy scores. That’s because literacy has been a huge focus — both across the state and at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
Literacy accounts for two of the CMS board’s four goals. Goal 1 focuses on improving K-2 reading scores, while Goal 2 aims to boost reading scores in grades 3-8.
But this week, I’m going to focus on Goal 3, which calls for increasing the percentage of students scoring career- and college-ready (CCR) on state Math I exams. The goal: Increase that percentage from 27% in June 2023 to 57% by June 2029.
That’s because Math I was the focus of last week’s CMS school board meeting, giving us the latest look at progress toward the goal.
And CMS has an uphill climb ahead. Take a look at this chart.
The first takeaway? The percentage of students scoring CCR on Math I has been largely stagnant, increasing just two percentage points in the last two years (the blue bars). That line going up above the bars represents the annual targets CMS has to hit in order to stay on pace toward hitting the goal. Last year, the gap between the scores and the target grew to an 8-point gulf.
Put simply, CMS is falling behind on its goal.
That gray bar all the way to the right represents how students performed on this year’s first round of Mastery View Predictive Assessment (MVPA) tests. This is a test given multiple times a year that aims to give insight into how students may perform on their end-of-course Math I exams.
Based on that first round of tests, CMS is expecting to see a five-point increase in the percentage of middle and high school students scoring career- and college-ready. That would be no small feat. But even with that jump, CMS would still be eight percentage points shy of the target for this year.
And MVPA scores are just a prediction. Take a look at this report from last June. When students took their second MVPA assessments last school year, it had predicted an 8-point jump on the state exams that would have left the district just one percentage point shy of last year’s target. Instead, the percentage of students scoring CCR increased by just one point.
The numbers are more alarming when we look just at high school students, who make up the bulk of those taking the test – a smaller number of middle schoolers take the exam as advanced students. At the high school level last year, just 9% were scoring career- and college-ready, and it’s been stuck at that number for the past three years. This year’s MVPA results show it could jump up to 14%. But even then, it’d be well short of the 24% target for high schoolers this year.
CMS middle schoolers taking the exam tend to fare better – last year, 74% of middle schoolers scored career-and-college ready, just one point shy of the district’s target. But notably, the first round of MVPA scores predicts that number will decrease this year to 73%.
'Herculean' effort
Superintendent Crystal Hill acknowledged this week that it would be a “Herculean” effort to meet the goal — a term she often uses to describe the CMS Board Goals, which she argues are quite ambitious.
Hill told the board this week that the district has tried to trim the number of official benchmark exams that CMS administers in order to decrease assessment time and increase instructional time. But she also outlined a challenge that relates to what I wrote about last week: Finding qualified teachers.
“Specific to Math I, the schools that were having the most success are the schools that we have the experienced teachers who have taught Math I,” Hill said. “The content is hard to teach, and so the schools that have the experienced teachers are the schools that are seeing more success.”
To that point, Hill said that when she started, 51% of teachers who started at CMS did not go to college to be a teacher — meaning they entered the profession without that education training. That number has grown to 60%, which echoes the trends we’re seeing statewide about teachers falling out of the Educator Preparation Program pipeline. Similarly, last year, just 35% of teachers entering the profession statewide received training and a qualifying license through a state EPP. More and more teachers are coming from out of state, out of the country or entering on emergency licenses.
Hill said that has some pros — professionals bringing in different life experiences, for instance. But it’s also a challenge that requires increased support from principals, high-quality specialists and master teachers.
“We also know that there’s a huge body of knowledge that we have to coach into,” Hill said.
Final notes
First, remember we’re dealing with career- and college-ready scores here. So to be clear, that’s not the same as saying students not reaching that level are not at grade level. Career- and college-ready represents the scores at the next tier above the grade level benchmarks. CMS has chosen CCR as its goal measure in order to set more ambitious goals.
But that said, still, Math I and third-grade reading scores were the only two areas where CMS saw drops in the percentage of grade-level students in last year’s otherwise historic test results. Just 29% of 9-12 students were proficient on Math I, down from 30% the year before.
Second, CMS is not alone in Math I challenges. Statewide, Math I scores dropped last year, falling from 37% to 35%.
