By Liana Zalutsky, Research Associate
A significant amount of discussion about North Carolina’s public school system these days is sharply negative. Newspaper headlines report declining test scores and (often sensationalized) accounts of bad student or staff behavior. More and more politicians build careers around tearing down public schools without much attention paid to what to replace them with. Paid activists – some of whom stand to profit personally from further school privatization – relentlessly promote misleading arguments and information insisting that public schools, as a whole, are “failing.”
But not only is this perception of North Carolina’s public schools missing important context – it’s also, in many ways, also factually wrong.
A closer look at state testing data reveals that, particularly when controlling for demographic factors, North Carolina’s public schools are actually much more successful than their reputation suggests. Moreover, with sufficient support, they have the potential to perform as well as any schools in the country.
Are NC’s schools “failing?”
Let us first consider the case against North Carolina’s public schools.
When most public school opponents accuse schools of “failing,” they generally refer to data from the “National Report Card” (or NAEP) system, a database run by the federal government that ranks how state schools perform in the critical subjects of 4th and 8th-grade math and reading. Between 2002 and 2013, NAEP data often ranked North Carolina’s schools as performing “significantly higher than national public,” except in 8th-grade reading, which NC has always struggled with.
But beginning in 2015, scores started to dip, and now mostly score as “not significantly different than the national public.” This means that NC is now scoring roughly average to the rest of the states according to NAEP data. This downward trend may seem alarming to many – if we were ranked among the top states for so long, why do we suddenly seem to be backsliding?
The reason is due to how NAEP data is collected and calculated. When the NAEP ranks testing performances between states, it does not take demographic differences between the states into account. North Carolina – a state ranked 6th in the country for economic diversity by the Hachman Index – is directly compared to wealthy states with very different demographics, like Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Compared to smaller, comparatively wealthier states like these, more North Carolina students are English language learners, are enrolled in special education, or come from lower-income backgrounds. Our students do not all start school on a level playing field, so to understand whether test scores can be attributed to poor education or a lack of opportunity, these factors have to be taken into account.
Fortunately, researchers at the Urban Institute think tank have already done this. They took NAEP data and control its results for demographic differences between states, taking into account race, ethnicity, special education status, reduced-price lunch eligibility, and English language learner status. Essentially, they even out the playing fields between the states. When we look at the adjusted 2019 results – the last year for which complete data is available – we see that 4th-grade math and reading are respectively ranked 7th and 6th in the country, and for 8th-grade math and reading, we are ranked 4th and 11th.
This suggests strongly that, if North Carolina were able to improve educational access to students disadvantaged by wealth and special learning needs, the state would perform even more strongly compared to its peers.
Though the Urban Institute’s rankings show that NC public schools aren’t in as bad shape as the media and politicians portray them to be, there is certainly room for improvement. And many of those opportunities for improvement are obvious: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools opened this school year with over 500 unfilled teacher positions, most of which were never filled, leaving many students with a full academic year of long-term substitutes rather than qualified teachers. This situation is even worse in many rural counties.
Who controls education policy?
Responsibility for teacher pay, per-student district funding, and, as a result, student outcomes, fall squarely on the state legislature. In North Carolina, as in all other states, the state legislature makes decisions about school funding and education policy in the public school system. To the extent voters have concerns about the condition of public schools, and their overall trajectory, it is the leaders of the North Carolina General Assembly that must be held accountable. What the data suggest today is that North Carolina’s schools are not in terrible shape overall, but that they are delivering highly unequal outcomes based on students’ geography and family characteristics.
Because our state ranks so highly on NAEP data when we adjust for demographics, we know that North Carolina has the potential to deliver a great education for every student – if that support can be extended to rural and lower-income communities, not just those in wealthy areas. But the answer isn’t to give up and let the children “eat cake” by shunting them to private schools or charters. For one thing, the research is clear that neither charter nor private schools actually improve educational outcomes over public schools. In fact, in the case of charters, there is good evidence to suggest that the opposite is true.
Rather, North Carolina’s leaders need to step up and expand educational access to every child through the time-tested, research-backed means we already have: public schools. North Carolina’s public school system, comprising over 2,500 schools and serving close to 1.5 million kids, is not perfect in every way. It can and should improve. Yet those areas for improvement are not “failures” of the system itself, but rather a result of the failure of those leaders who control the system – state lawmakers in Raleigh – to provide them with the support they need.
Our lawmakers should not try to re-invent the wheel on education, a task for which they are neither suited nor qualified. Instead, if we want North Carolina to be a top state for education, they need to put the necessary resources behind it.
