For Susie Johnson, a Youngsville resident and stay-at-home mother of four special-needs children, paying the bills each month is struggle enough. But watching her sons languish in the public schools was far worse.
“Unfortunately, we’ve been in a district that has failed my four boys,” she said. “One of my sons, who is in the ninth grade, has a reading level of fourth grade. I have witnessed it myself. They’ve come home with great grades, and all [the teacher] has done is slide him right through the system.”
Living on a limited income and facing a barrage of medical bills, Johnson and her husband could not afford a better educational option. One of her sons is in terminal condition, and another suffers from severe neural problems. The other two have learning disabilities.
“The only reason we live and the only reason that we wake up in the morning is because of the grace of God and the faith we have in the family,” she said.
Some of Johnson’s burden was lessened when Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, a nonprofit school choice advocacy group, gave her a $2,500 scholarship. Now, she can send two of her boys to Friendship Christian School in Raleigh.
“Joshua is getting the consistency that he needs,” Johnson said. “His scores have risen by 90 percent since he has been at the new school.” Brandon, another of her sons, now has the confidence and determination to seek a college education, she said.
Johnson received the grant Oct. 28, shortly before the N.C. Department of Public Instruction released the latest results of the state’s ABCs of Public Education testing and accountability program. Because of more rigorous reading standards adopted by the State Board of Education, student performance dropped dramatically this year compared with last year. Between 53 percent and 61 percent of elementary and middle-school students scored at or above “proficient” on the reading test, down from between 84 percent and 92 percent last year.
The new scores show that many students remain in schools that fail to meet their needs, said Terry Stoops, education policy analyst of the John Locke Foundation. “These new numbers reinforce the need for more school choice in North Carolina,” he said.
The scores mean that just over half of students are passing the end-of-grade tests for both reading and mathematics, reports The News & Observer of Raleigh. In the latest results, DPI also gauged whether schools met adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Sixty-nine percent of schools did not make adequate yearly progress, compared with 31 percent that did.
DPI officials have cast the lower scores in a positive light. “What is important in North Carolina is that we have new goals and new levels of support to help our schools move students forward,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction June Atkinson.
“We have to keep raising the bar and demanding more of our students,” Gov. Mike Easley said in a press release. “When they all start scoring 90 percent, the standards have to be raised. That is how you make improvement.”
But Stoops said the heightened standards are too little, too late. “This is the first comprehensive change in the ABCs testing program since it was first created in 1996,” Stoops said. “The requirements should have been raised years ago. In the past, students could literally guess their way to the ‘proficient’ rating.”
According to the results provided by DPI, more than 100 schools failed to meet their expected growth standards and had less than 50 percent of student scores at or above Level III, considered the mastery level. Thirteen of the schools were in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and nine in Guilford County Schools, the state’s second and third largest districts. Wake County Schools had two schools in the low-performing category. They were Barwell Road Elementary and East Wake School of Integrated Technology.
Most schools were classified either as “schools of progress,” meaning they met expected growth and had at least 60 percent of student scores at Level III, or “priority schools,” meaning they failed to meet the 60 percent benchmark but were not considered low-performing schools.
Thirty-three schools earned top rank as schools of excellence or honor schools of excellence. Quest Academy Charter School in north Raleigh had the highest performance composite, followed by Metrolina Regional Scholars’ Academy, a charter school in Charlotte.
The overall results were a mixed bag for charter schools. Charters averaged 63 percent on the performance composite. Several had composite scores under 30 percent and failed to make adequate yearly progress — among them Kennedy Charter School and Crossroads Charter High School in Charlotte and Healthy Start Academy in Durham, all three schools for at-risk students.
Others earned scores that put them at the front of the pack. In addition to Quest and Metrolina, five other charter schools scored above 90 percent on the performance composite: Magellan Charter School, Raleigh Charter High School, Greensboro Academy, Gray Stone Day School, and Exploris Middle School.
Some parents don’t put much stock in the test results. One father with two students in CMS is “cynical” of the scores. “I am not surprised that the test grades went down because they made the tests harder,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous. “It kind of reinforces what we already thought. For those of us who know where the challenges are in the school system, it’s not surprising at all.”
David N. Bass is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.