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Carolina Journal's John Hood calls North Carolina a "laughingstock in national education-reform circles."* Doug

Amazing! I wonder what made John Hood a political educational expert, since he is not in the field as a teacher. I expect some in other think tanks feel that he is the laughing stock of the Republican Party.

In GCS, middle school = snoozefest.

That might explain some of low results.

Doug, things must have changed drastically in South Carolina since I left there 17 years ago for its schools' achievement targets to be so much higher than in North Carolina.

But it is not exactly flattering for North Carolina to be doing so much worse than its neighbor to the south in this regard. I remember when I lived in Charleston, a local elected official aroused considerable controversy when he referred to one of the local public schools as "brain dead". It was that bad.

Doug:

While there are many things to criticize about NC education, the state's performance on the only comparable national test (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) puts it squarely in the middle of the pack. You can find the statistics at http://nces.ed.gov/naep3/states/profile.asp.

Despite Mr. Hood's laudatory comments, NC outperforms her neighbor to the South on the NAEP in nearly every category. So, even if SC's testing regime is better, NC's performance on the NAEP continues to be better.

BTW, NC gets these results spending 8 percent less on its schools and keeping slightly larger class sizes than SC. NC also teaches more than twice the percentage of limited English proficiency students as SC.

NC should do even better by its students, but it should do so with better facilities and teaching resources and not by pouring scare resources into tests.

Doug:

The link that I cut and pasted doesn't work. For the statistics from the NAEP, go to http://nces.ed.gov/naep3/states/.

Thanks, Dave.

I think this rating is based on discrepancy between how well a state says it's doing and how well NAEP says it's doing.

With North Carolina's higher per capita income than South Carolina's --

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104652.html

-- we probably should be able to put more resources into our public schools.

Doug:

I'm not sure why one conservative think tank (the Locke Foundation) mirroring an ill-considered report from another conservative think tank (the Hoover Institute) should be news.

Hood is criticizing NC for not having rigorous "standards" for its accountability tests. Well, one "standard" that NC has that SC doesn't is that NC puts its money where its mouth is by rewarding schools that make sufficient academic progress. That is, NC has standards that mean something.

Again, the bottom line should be how much students actually learn. According to the NAEP, NC students come out of 4th and 8th grade knowing more than their SC counterparts. SC's "standards" may come closer to the NAEP than NC's. However, based on how incentives are structured and how students actually perform, SC's "standards" appear to be pretty toothless.

North Carolina provides rewards based on how well students do in meeting North Carolina standards, not NAEP scores, so that's not a high bar.

Again, as I understand what's being reported, the point here is how the states measure their own success. Take two students of equal ability: one flunks in South Carolina and the other passes in North Carolina. Hooray, North Carolina! Except, when that student gets to college, he has to go through remediation in basic courses and probably never graduates. But you're right: That's not really news.

Setting standards without any correlation to reality and getting a feather in your cap for it is let's-throw-everybody- and- their- grandmother- into-A-P classes-no-matter- their- ability- or- inclination GRIERISM.

Doug:

Students are not required to "pass" the 3rd-8th grade accountability tests (the EOG tests) in NC in order to graduate. Students in SC are also not required to pass the tests. In both states, the tests are used to assess the schools themselves. Both states use the tests to monitor progress toward NCLB and to provide school "report cards" to parents. NC additionally uses the tests in its merit pay scheme.

Students in NC are required to pass certain tests in the 8th grade and for certain high school courses to graduate. I believe that the current requirement is that they pass a computer competency test and five other end-of-course tests. Unlike the EOG tests, these "high school" tests have considerable bite. Interestingly though, Hood only criticizes the elementary tests, which again are only used to assess schools.

When it comes to the high school tests, independent researchers generally rank NC's tests as being more onerous than SC's.

Again, let's review Hood's mistakes.

He says "other states, most notably South Carolina, have posted far more impressive performances since the mid-1990s." This, however, is untrue. As I pointed out, the NAEP (the standard Hood says is "the touchstone of academic testing") shows that NC outperforms SC. SC's "impressive performance" is that it closing the gap with NC; however, it has not yet closed that gap.

He says that NC's spending "was all a colossal waste of time and money," yet NC spends less per pupil than SC (and still gets better NAEP scores!). If NC is spending less, yet getting more, what does this say about the efficacy of SC's policies?

He sums up by saying "North Carolina has little to teach the rest of the country about enacting good education policy. South Carolina does." Again, NC may have its problems, but to hold SC up as a model (a state that brags that it has moved into the top 30 states) is laughable.

Dave, unless the plain language means something completely different, this state policy ...

http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/promotionstandards/policy/faq.pdf

sayst students must achieve proficiency on eog's at 3rd, 5th and 8th grade to earn promotion.

I'm not going to quibble about whether North Carolina or South Carolina is doing a better job of educating kids. We should be concerned when we hear educators complain that kids are reaching high school without necessary reading skills, despite having been certified according to state tests as having grade-level "proficiency."

North Carolina says 88 percent of 8th-graders were "proficient" in reading in 2007.

(It's hard to dig out this info from the DPI Web site but you can glean it from an individual school's report card):

http://www.ncreportcard.org/src/servlet/srcICreatePDF?pSchCode=316&pLEACode=410&pYear=2006-2007

NAEP says 28 percent were "proficient"; 71 percent were "basic."

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/states/profile.asp

That's a big discrepancy, and unless the NAEP standards are too strict, the NC standards must be too lax. That's the point here.

Doug:

Thanks for the correction on the policy for EOGs for 3rd, 5th, and 8th grade.

The problem is that Hood holds SC up as a model. SC's policy essentially comes down to "standards only." If Hood had held MA up as a model, there would be no argument. But Hood won't do that because he would have to acknowledge the tremendous disparity in funding going to MA schools. MO would also also be a reasonable model (it spends 10 percent more than NC but gets much better results). Again, Hood won't go there because he doesn't want to spend the money.

Note, however, that even in places like MA, only a bare majority of 8th graders were proficient at reading on the NAEP, and only four out of nine were proficient at math. So that's still a big discrepancy, if MA is using NAEP-equivalent standards to pass students.

It seems unlikely any state would rigidly apply NAEP standards to advancement. No one could afford the massive remediation needed or the cost of retaining so many kids. It costs enough educating them for 13 years. Who's going to keep them for 15 or 16?

The waste is with the office of State Super of Schools. She taught for about 4 years then the rest of her career was in dpi then retired and became elected to a job that does nothing--has no authority and advocates for the status quo
The deputy super is a young punk political hack that the Gov moved out of his office because he was a pain in the rear.

DPi needs to be cleaned up and the FAT cut out.

The governor and the state board of education clearly have taken over education policy, with the elected secretary more or less a figurehead. But it remains a constitutional office. I agree that reorganization is overdue.