Is North Carolina a leader or a follower in education?
Based on our politicians’ press releases, and some actual evidence, one would answer “leader” to this question. On the latter point, few states have posted as large a gain in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores over the past decade and a half as North Carolina has. While some of this measured improvement could be due to the state’s increasingly aggressive efforts during the period to exclude low-performing students from the test-taking population (by classifying them as learning disabled or having limited English proficiency), this cannot explain away the entire trend. North Carolina’s performance is high enough on the independent NAEP tests – 41 percent of 4th graders at or above the proficient level in math, for example, compared with the national average of 32 percent – to suggest that something educationally significant happened during the 1990s, though attempting to attribute this gain to a particular state policy or set of policies runs up against the fact that the upward trend began years before major reforms were enacted in the mid- to late-1990s.
But other evidence supports an answer of “follower.” Better-than-average performance in lower grades is obviously a welcome sign of improvement, but it doesn’t necessarily signify a significantly better outcome – since the outcome of schooling is a skilled, capable graduate. In North Carolina, as in other states, public schools often start to lose students as they go into the middle- and high-school grades. Our graduation rate, measured correctly, is only about 63 percent. While NAEP administers tests in the 12th grade, it does not break the scores out by state, so we don’t really know how the final outcome of our school system — those with high-school diplomas – compare on that measure.
The SAT serves as a sort of rough proxy for that, but only for college-bound students. On that measure, North Carolina has posted some sizable gains but still remains relatively low: 18th out of the 23 states where at least half of students take the SAT (assertions that North Carolina is “48th in education” based on national SAT comparisons are baseless, as many states in the Midwest and West have only top-flight students taking the SAT, with others taking the ACT, thus rendering comparisons of average scores useless).
A new report looking at educational attainment across the United States provides additional, troubling signs of how far North Carolina has to go. Even though the share of state taxpayers’ income devoted to K-12 education is at about the national average, and state spending on higher education is far higher than average, North Carolina remains near the bottom of the list in degree attainment. Indeed, it is particularly noteworthy that our state’s wrongheaded and counterproductive policy of low tuition at state schools has not resulted in more of our young people finishing college. Instead, it induces some high-school graduates to go to college even though they are not prepared to do well there, while heavily subsidizing the relatively affluent students who would have gotten a college degree anyway.
As I’ve argued previously in this space, those who either tout or decry North Carolina’s performance on tests are missing the point: the real issue is productivity. We don’t get the greatest possible return on our education dollars, because we don’t sufficiently permit them to be expended within competitive markets for teachers, students, and schools.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.