After a year of triumphs, we shouldn’t call NC schools and students failures | Opinion
As another school year wraps up, North Carolina classrooms are full of student victories that will never show up on a spreadsheet. I remember an English-language learner in my own classroom a few years ago who arrived reading years below grade level. He was painfully quiet at first, but as he felt success and support, he gradually came out of his shell. By the end of the year, he was confidently volunteering to read aloud in class. By any meaningful human standard, his year was an incredible triumph.
But my student didn’t hit an arbitrary target on the Reading End of Grade exam in June. Because of that, the state officially labeled his year a failure, and his score pulled our school performance grade downward.
Trying to force a student to show all of their learning on a single end-of-year assessment is unrealistic. No single letter grade can capture the complex work that happens under a school’s roof. Yet our school performance grading formula is designed to ensure many of our communities get stigmatized with low grades.
North Carolina weights a school’s grade at 80% proficiency and only 20% student growth. This flawed model actively obscures actual learning progress. Decades of research prove that proficiency scores strongly correlate with family income. Analysis from the Public School Forum of North Carolina shows that of the schools receiving a D or F grade, roughly 95% are high-poverty schools. By design, this framework measures poverty far more accurately than student learning, serving less as an accountability tool and more as a mechanism that systematically brands low-income schools as failures.
None of this is accidental. These metrics are weaponized to manufacture a crisis of confidence in public education. The A through F grading system was introduced as part of the Excellent Public Schools Act of 2013, arriving on the heels of lawmakers lifting the state’s cap on charter schools and launching a taxpayer-funded private school voucher program.
This narrative of the “failing public school” is driving our state’s aggressive push toward privatization, giving families the false impression that they must look elsewhere. First, you starve public schools of funding. Then you design a grading system that guarantees low marks for under-resourced communities. Finally, you point to those artificially low grades as proof that public education is broken so you can justify pouring hundreds of millions of public tax dollars into unaccountable charter schools and private vouchers.
The damage is made worse when local school administrators internalize this outside political pressure. When district and building leaders treat a state letter grade as a definitive verdict on their staff’s worth, they do educators a disservice. This intense focus on standardized testing scores leads to increased screen time and student groan-inducing programs like iReady. Desperate to boost metrics, school systems pour millions into these automated software systems, trading a teacher’s human insight for a screen. But local families and students are increasingly pushing back against this heavy reliance on tech. Their frustration mounts even as independent analysis shows no real evidence that these digital programs actually improve reading.
These classroom struggles are the direct result of a testing culture driven entirely by a broken formula. Fortunately, educators are no longer the only ones pointing out these structural failures. Right now, a state task force operating under the State Board of Education, in partnership with Department of Public Instruction staff, is actively working to develop a broader, multi-measure accountability system. This model aims to look beyond a single test score to capture a school’s true impact. Whether the state legislature will have the political will to adopt these common-sense improvements remains to be seen.
Our students are more than data points, and our schools are more than revenue streams for private corporations. It is time to demand a fair system of evaluation that honestly reflects the incredible dedication and real learning taking place inside our public school classrooms.
Justin Parmenter, a regular contributor to the opinion pages, is a seventh-grade language arts teacher at Waddell Language Academy in Charlotte.