NC school grades come out Wednesday. Can CMS build on last year’s progress?
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction will release its yearly school performance reports Wednesday. It remains to be seen whether Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools will have built upon its dramatic gains in last year’s results.
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NCDPI releases a massive data set early each September based upon students’ performance in end-of-grade assessments in May. Each school and district is given an overall grade-level proficiency score, corresponding with the proportion of students scoring as “proficient” or better on state tests.
CMS saw marked improvements in student performance last school year, outpacing the state as a whole.
About 56% of CMS students were proficient on statewide exams last year — 3 percentage points better than the previous year. That surpassed the state average of 55%, which was up almost a point from the previous year.
However, CMS still had not reached its pre-pandemic level of student proficiency, which sat at 59.8%.
Last year, the number of CMS schools receiving an A or B grade from the state increased by 7 percentage points over the previous year. The number of schools receiving D or F grades decreased by 11 percentage points.
CMS leaders have not revealed what outcomes they expect in this week’s data, but Superintendent Crystal Hill told reporters Aug. 18 that there will be “a lot of excellent news to share,” regarding this year’s results.
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There were widespread technical issues in CMS this spring when state tests were administered, which could impact scores. North Carolina state tests have been administered entirely online since the 2022-23 school year.
Problems persisted for two days that stopped some CMS students from finishing end-of-grade state testing due to “platform and/or server disruptions,” CMS told teachers. Technical glitches caused screens to freeze or abruptly kick students out of the system.
“Imagine being a child trying to concentrate on a long, difficult test while the broken technology is constantly disrupting their thinking,” Justin Parmenter, a long-time teacher at CMS’ South Academy of International Languages, told the Observer in May.
NCDPI previously told The Charlotte Observer the issues were unique to CMS and did not impact other districts in the state.
This year’s results will come out Wednesday morning, when they’re presented to the State Board of Education.
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