RALEIGH – For all the attention paid to education issues in North Carolina – by parents, educators, politicians, the news media, business executives, and the general public – there is a surprising lack of useful, comparable data about school performance. As a result, we often talk past each other, or about the wrong things, or in wrongheaded fashion about the right things.

It’s not that educational statistics aren’t plentiful. There are gobs of them. Unfortunately, some of them derive from flawed measurements such as the state’s EOG and EOC tests. Some are patently absurd, such as the state’s previous exaggerations of its graduation rate. Still others, such as North Carolina’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, are highly useful but not available annually or for all grades.

At a more basic level, there is little effort to put together the statistics that do exist in a way that parents and taxpayers can use and analyze. That’s the goal of John Locke Foundation education analyst Terry Stoops’ new report ranking the “parent-friendliness” of North Carolina school districts.

Stoops combined 11 different measurements grouped within four categories: administration, teachers, safety, and student outcomes. He assigned letter grades to districts in each category and an overall parent-friendliness grade.

When he was a classroom teacher, Stoops was probably not known as an easy grader. In his new report card on North Carolina school districts, the results would only curve so far. No school systems received an overall grade of A. Nineteen districts received Bs. Most got the average grade of C. There were 27 Ds and five Fs.

There were several interesting trends in the grades. Of the 19 highest-ranking districts, 11 had more than half of their students eligible for free or reduced lunch (FRL). Affluence, in other words, does not explain the rankings. About 56 percent of Cherokee County’s enrollment is FRL, for example, but it ranked second in the state, with As in safety and administration and Bs in teachers and student outcomes. Alleghany County, with nearly two-thirds of its students in FRL, tied for the 11th ranking.

What was common to most of the highest-ranked districts was small size. Cherokee enrolled about 3,600 students last year, Alleghany nearly 1,600. Only Catawba, at a little over 17,000 students, could be considered of substantial size. Most of the B-districts were in the Western part of the state, as well. Among North Carolina’s five mega-districts – Charlotte-Mecklenburg (127,639), Wake (127,460), Guilford (69,677), Cumberland (52,346), and Forsyth (50,206) – Wake’s C grade ranked the highest, a tie for 41st. Charlotte-Meck’s D+ grade ranked the lowest, a tie for 88th.

North Carolina needs better testing, better measurements of student safety and parental satisfaction, and an education system that provides feedback “from the ground up” in the form of enhanced choice and competition. In the meantime, however, Terry Stoops has provided a useful compilation of the available data on state public schools.

I’d recommend it highly even if he didn’t toil stoically in the JLF underworld.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.