NC accountability task force weighs first changes to school grades

North Carolina’s school accountability task force reached general agreement on the first changes to how public schools earn their grades, shifting from broad criticism of the current A-F grading rubric toward specific steps on how to remake it.

At a June 18 virtual meeting, members of the State Board of Education Task Force on Accountability for Public Schools floated the idea of replacing the state’s current “percent proficient” measure with a weighted “proficiency index.” The task force also voiced support for adding a five-year graduation rate alongside the existing four-year rate.

Although no formal votes were taken, both ideas are the first choices the task force has agreed on since it began meeting in February. Any changes to the current evaluation regime — including a revamp of the A-F grading system — would need to come through the General Assembly, since the grading approach is set in state law.

Under the current system, two schools with the same proficiency rate are treated as identical. A proficiency index would change that, operating on a sliding scale that awards students more points for scoring at higher achievement levels, rather than counting each student as simply proficient or not.

“If all of the students in one school were a level three and all of the students in another school were a level four, those schools would look different with that index,” said Curtis Sonneman, director of the Office of Accountability and Testing at the NC Department of Public Instruction (DPI).

The change opened a larger debate over whether schools should also get credit for moving students who remain below grade level.

“Some of the great work done by educators is to move a child from a one to a two,” said Alan Duncan, vice chair of the State Board of Education, who led the meeting. “It may not score on the proficiency scale, but it’s giving that child a much better chance to get to the proficiency scale.”

Duncan pressed the department to consider it, framing the question with a hypothetical.

“If you had a school that had 100% ones and moved all those kids to a two, and you had another school that had 100% threes and moved all those kids to a four, both of them did a phenomenally good job,” he said. “But I’m not sure that the ones to twos wasn’t a better job than the threes to a four, because that’s how hard that work is.”

Another DPI official urged caution about how the state defines proficiency. Geoff Coltrane, DPI’s senior director of government affairs and strategy, said that North Carolina already sets a higher bar than most states.

“North Carolina actually ranked as around No. 8 in terms of where we set the bar for proficiency compared to most other states,” Coltrane said. “And I’m not advocating for lowering that bar.”

Members also agreed to add a five-year graduation rate. It would be weighted less heavily than the four-year, but a former high school principal on the task force warned against the change creating the wrong incentive.

“I would have concerns about any model that incentivizes getting a kid across the stage in five years instead of four years, because it will change behavior in a way that lowers expectations,” she said.

John Hood — a task force member and board member of the John Locke Foundation, which publishes Carolina Journal — agreed the current formula is flawed but warned against replacing it with an elaborate, multi-measure system.

“There’s such a strong correlation between socioeconomic status and score that our current way we’re weighting proficiency versus growth is questionable,” Hood said. But he cautioned against stuffing the formula with measures beyond test scores, pointing to the systems in other states.

“I fear that the New York and California type models are so complicated that you’re just going to turn people off from even embracing this,” he said.

Robert Luebke, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation, was skeptical the proposed changes would help.

“Some of the actions mentioned, like five-year graduation and giving different values to proficiency, create a lot more noise than what they are worth,” Luebke said. “To the average parent, this looks like moving the goal posts.”

The aim, he said, should be “a new system that accurately reflects what is learned and is understandable to all. So far, we haven’t found that, and we need to keep looking.”

The task force is trying to land on recommendations through consensus rather than vote taking. Members plan to begin writing recommendations in December and present a model to the State Board in May 2027, with an anticipated vote in June 2027 and possible statewide rollout in October 2027. The task force next meets Aug. 20.

“NC accountability task force weighs first changes to school grades” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.