John,
Your new information will surprise no one who remembers the legislative presentation earlier this year from Kati Haycock of The Education Trust.
To summarize: Haycock 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.
