The district has six ‘A’ schools, eleven ‘B’s, fifteen ‘C’s, six ‘D’s, and one ‘F’ school. The General Assembly mandates this report card model — and it’s been debated for some time.
The report card is mainly based on end-of-year test achievement, which counts for 80% of the grade; the other 20% is a growth score calculated by SAS Software through a proprietary algorithm called EVAAS. It essentially measures teacher impact on 'growth' by comparing how students perform at the beginning of the year with how they perform at the end.
You can find individual school performance ratings here.
When asked if there has been further legislative movement on the report card grade model change, NHCS Superintendent Dr. Christopher Barnes said it’s in the “same place it's been for the past seven years they've talked about it.” He added that “schools are more than the score they're given.”
Barnes said schools “have a lot of things going on in them that help to build strong adults, and testing is one part of that. And we have to care about it, because, quite frankly, the state is set up so that we should, and we do. We want our kids to be academically-minded and ready for what's going to happen when they graduate.”
He said he is proud of the district’s improvements and that his main concern now is to “maintain what we have and build from there.”
Barnes reiterated that, with the new scores, the district’s proficiency rates are “the highest they’ve been in the last five or six years.”
Additionally, the district has achieved the highest graduation rate that they’ve seen in a decade — 89%.
Barnes said that’s due to “getting to the problem earlier, addressing [freshmen] students when they fail that class the first time, not waiting until later to repair that and fix it.”
While Ashley High School went from a ‘C’ school to a ‘B’ school, they technically didn’t meet their growth metrics. This follows a trend among high schools: Laney, Isaac Bear, and New Hanover High also didn’t meet growth expectations. SEA-Tech, though, ‘exceeded expectations,’ and Hoggard and Mosley ‘met’ their growth.
Barnes said this is mainly because high schools have more metrics included in their algorithm.
“They look at things like ACT [college readiness] scores. They look at the graduation rate. They look at the number of students who take and pass Math 3, and then they have their own measurements with Biology, English 2, CTE [career technical education], and Math 1. So many more variables feed into high school that makes it a little harder to read,” he said.
Barnes was also pleased with improvements in the metrics the district’s strategic plan measures: third-grade reading and Math 1.
An interesting note: while Math 1 is mostly taken in 9th grade, some advanced students take it in 8th grade. But the scores from those advanced 8th graders don’t count toward the district’s metrics.
“[For reading], that work that we've been doing with early literacy is now starting to show up in third grade, and continues into fourth grade. Our Math 1 ranking went from 65th in the state to 33rd. I want to focus this year on growth and replicability,” he said.
The district’s performance on third grade reading and Math 1 improved greatly, and the only score that dipped was Math 3, which Barnes said the district is working on.
However, he is still celebrating the improvements in those third-grade reading scores: “To have [those] increase nine percentage points is due to the work that the early learning facilitators have done, bringing kids along earlier and getting them to proficiency faster. There is a well-regarded study that says that kids who are reading independently by third grade will continue to grow and continue to learn.”
Focused improvement on five schools
Last year, the district had ten low-performing schools. It’s now down to five: Williston Middle School and Freeman, College Park, Alderman, and Snipes elementaries. The state says a school is low-performing when it makes an ‘F’ or a ‘D’ and either ‘doesn’t meet’ or ‘meets’ expectations.
While all NHCS students are improving, even among demographics like Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Economically Disadvantaged students, there still exist wide disparities between groups.
For example, across the district, White students are 78% proficient across all state tests and 59% ‘Career and College Ready’. Compare that to Black students, who are 33% proficient and 15% career and college ready. Their averages are below that of the state’s, too: Black students statewide are 44% proficient and 22% career and college ready.
Barnes said of these statistics, “Poverty is a much stronger indicator of concern than race is. [It’s] a universal problem for all students, regardless of their race or gender or anything else, and so I find more of that being how we build support for students who come to us in crisis on every level, emotional, social, physical, all these things, and academically.”
However, economically disadvantaged students are slightly outperforming Black students, with 46% being proficient versus 26% being career and college ready.
“It's just hard for parents who want what's best for their children, but are also combating having to work two or three jobs to make sure that the kids are fed. This is not just a New Hanover County issue; it's a systemic issue,” Barnes said.
While Barnes can only control what happens in the schools, he is sending additional support.
For example, Freeman, College Park, Williston, and Alderman all have an additional specialist position, funded by The Endowment. Snipes is in the process of hiring one.
Further, Williston has three assistant principals this year — and the school was added to the district’s 'advanced teaching roles’ group, where the state provides additional funds for veteran teachers to team teach with other educators.
Freeman got a new principal this year, Cyndy Bliss, who received an additional $30,000 to work at the school, funded by a state grant. This year, the school also added a full-time STEM position; Freeman is technically the School of Engineering.
Snipes Academy of Arts and Design got a full-time dance and art teacher, which they didn’t have previously.
