RALEIGH — North Carolina’s school report cards just posted their strongest marks in years. The State Board of Education is still writing a plan to change how those grades are given.
Carolina Journal reported that preliminary results presented to the board on Sept. 2 show the share of schools earning a D or F fell from 31% to 23% this year. In 2021-22 that share was 42%. The state also counted 162 fewer low-performing schools than the year before, and the number of low-performing districts fell from 23 to 10.
Board Chairman Eric Davis opened the meeting by warning against reading the grades as the whole story.
“While these academic results are vital in understanding what students are learning, where we are making progress, and where we need to improve, these results tell only part of the story about the education that our students are receiving and the performance of their schools,” Davis said.
A board task force, he said, is building a new accountability system “that is less reliant on standardized tests and that will provide a more complete and accurate assessment of educating the whole child.”
Staff told the board the task force has been meeting since February and will deliver its final report in early 2027, sooner than the spring timeline discussed earlier this year.
Ideas on the table include giving schools credit when students score well above passing, replacing the state’s current growth measure with one that compares students to their own expected progress, and asking whether a school should get a single letter grade at all.
Michael Maher, chief accountability officer for the Department of Public Instruction, called the drop in low-performing schools “incredible” and “a testament to the work that teachers are doing, that school leaders are doing, and the way in which students are performing.”
He also named what he sees as the current system’s blind spot. State exams are scored on a five-point scale, and a 3 counts as passing. Schools get credit when a student passes. They get no extra credit when a student scores a 4 or a 5.
“Our current accountability system does not incentivize 4 and 5,” Maher said. “You either are proficient or not proficient.”
Vice Chairman Alan Duncan said that setup can pull attention toward students sitting just below the passing line.
“I also have a great deal of concern that there’s an undue focus on students in level two that are close to making level three, because that then creates better proficiency scores with respect to the way the system is set up right now,” Duncan said.
He said schools have no built-in reason “to push very hard on improving our level one students, those who probably need us the most.”
Board member Catty Moore answered the obvious question: why change a system that is improving?
“Confidence in these results, pride in these results, is not complacency,” Moore said. “We still have work to do.”
The A-F formula itself is state law. Since 2013, 80% of a school’s grade has come from test scores and 20% from student growth. Bills to change that weighting have failed. Former Superintendent Catherine Truitt pitched her own overhaul. It never became law.
The task force meets again this fall. If the state board accepts the recommendations in early 2027, the next stop is a General Assembly that has already turned down changes to the grading system.
In Catawba County, the same results already sit on the local page. Newton-Conover posted a 94% graduation rate and a third year with no D or F schools. Six Hickory schools met academic growth in the 2025-26 state results. Those local marks were earned under the formula the state board is now preparing to replace.
