First, a little perspective on the jumping up and down over CMS test scores.
This is Charlotte’s peer group in the study: Austin, Houston, New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, the District of Columbia, and Los Angeles. And that’s Atlanta city, a district of just 50,000, not the great burb belt of Greater Atlanta. In all honesty, Charlotte-Mecklenburg should come near the very top of that short list.
Second, these are fourth and eighth grade scores. CMS has some excellent elementaries and some pretty good middle schools. No one denies that or claimed to the contrary, except possibly some real estate agent trying to close a sale in Union or Cabarrus. The wheels really don’t start coming off until high school. That is where the “educational genocide” kicks in and why those state turnaround teams — remember those? — were in CMS high schools last month.
Plus, the study’s own results show that by eighth grade CMS starts to falter when compared to the nation as a whole. As one bullet point puts it with regard to reading skills, “Compared with performance in the nation…at grade 8, average scores for students in nine districts were lower, and average scores in Austin and Charlotte were not significantly different.” In other words, CMS 8th graders hit the national reading average. Strike up the band.
For math, CMS along with Austin did best the national average, so that’s something to build on.
All-in-all, the study surely has some interesting data worth mining to compare CMS to other districts. But here’s the big picture that the CMS rah-rah brigade at the Chamber and the local Knight Ridder outlet does not quite get. If this study shows that CMS is truly doing fine and is a model urban school district — and that is what the rah-rahs say — then the public was correct in rejecting $200 million in urban school spending as the price of getting $200 million in suburban school spending.
Contrary to what the local education activists say, all we need to do supply the basics like, oh, a seat in classroom and stand back watch CMS do its stuff. So this study proves that we should just build some schools in the high population growth areas of the county and declare victory. Right?
Right.
