North Carolina has a broad spectrum of resources and tools to measure the performance of both students and educators.
School Performance Measures are primarily based on two measures – Achievement and Growth. Other measures include graduation rates, NAEP scores, and teacher/principal evaluations.
Achievement
Academic achievement is exactly as it sounds – have students learned what they are supposed to have learned at the time they are tested?
On North Carolina’s End-of-Grade and End-of-Course assessments, students are considered Proficient if they score a 3 or higher, and Career & College Ready if they score a 4 or 5. North Carolina requires a total of XX statewide achievement tests for all traditional and charter public school students:
- End-of-Grade (EOG) Tests
- End-of-Course (EOC) Tests
- Career and Technical Education (CTE) State Assessments
- NC Final Exams
- Analysis of Student Work
- K-3 Reading Checkpoints
Growth
Student growth is the amount of academic progress that students make over a grade or class, relative to expected progress. These data are used to measure an individual student’s growth. Rather, they are used in the aggregate to help determine the extent to which a teacher, school, or district has had an outsized impact on their students.
Watch the brief video to the right to learn more about the importance of achievement and growth, and the importance of tracking these complicated yet necessary data points.
School & District "Report Cards"
In North Carolina, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NC DPI) provides information about each school in the state through a school- and district-level report card. In addition to both achievement and growth data, these report cards include “School Performance Grades” in the form of letter grades. These grades are based primarily on a composite of achievement and growth data, English Learner progress toward language proficiency, plus four-year graduation rates for high schools.
