The latest news about N.C. reading scores reminds me of a previous discussion in this forum about North Carolina’s historical unwillingness to raise abnormally low achievement standards.
To summarize: [Kati] Haycock [of the Education Trust] says North Carolina established a
“bend-but-not-break” standard when it set up the ABCs Accountability
program in the mid-1990s. What she meant was that the original
standards raised the bar for North Carolina students, but not very
high.Haycock says that would have been a fine strategy, if North Carolina
had continued to raise the bar as students improved. Instead North
Carolina maintained its relatively lax original standards and continued
to use them to reward schools and award teacher bonuses.The end result is that more students (and more schools) tend to meet
North Carolina’s standards each year, but those standards don’t give
parents an accurate assessment of how well N.C. students stack up
against peers across the country.Haycock used a graph to demonstrate her point; on that graph, only
one state demonstrated a larger gap than North Carolina between average
results of student performance on the state’s internal tests and
average performance on a nationally normed test.
Listen to a Carolina Journal Radio segment on this topic here.
Listen to Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand’s description of the problem here.
