How are North Carolina students? About average
Published March 9, 2014
By John Hood
by John Hood, John Locke Foundation and NC SPIN panelist, published in Rocky Mount Telegram, March 9, 2014.
Fair warning: I may be about to bore you to distraction.Is there any more potent political issue in North Carolina than education?
Probably not. As allies of the teachers union, Democrats hope to ride the issue back into power in Raleigh, at least by 2016.
As advocates of performance pay and parental choice, Republicans hope to compete effectively with Democrats for the support of voters who value greater education opportunities for North Carolina children.
Depending on the circumstances, both sides can be guilty of rhetorical excess.
For example, both sides have sometimes made the claim that North Carolina’s public schools were among the worst in the nation. The claim served their rhetorical needs – as Democrats sought higher taxes to fund school improvement and Republicans sought structural reforms to improve the return on tax money already spent on schools.
But this claim has long been unfounded. So is the alternative claim, sometimes heard from the education establishment, that North Carolina’s schools are among the best in the nation. The truth is more pedestrian than that. You might even find it somnolent. By virtually every measure of student outcomes, North Carolina’s public schools are average.
According to the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, North Carolina eighth-graders had a mean score of 286 on the math exam and 265 on the reading exam. These scores are statistically indistinguishable from the national average. On the latest eighth-grade science exam, given in 2009, North Carolinians scored a 148, not statistically different from the national average of 149. The same was true for the latest writing exam: North Carolina’s average was 153 compared to the national average of 154.
If you look not at average scores but at the share of students demonstrating specific levels of competence, North Carolina still looks about average. On the 2013 reading exam, 33 percent of our eighth-graders were proficient or advanced, 43 percent showed only basic reading skills, and 24 percent lacked even basic skills. For the nation, 35 percent were proficient or advanced, 42 percent were at basic and 23 percent were below basic.
Still with me? The 2013 numbers weren’t much different for math. Some 36 percent of North Carolina eighth-graders were proficient or advanced, 39 percent were at basic level, and 25 percent were below basic. The national averages were 34 percent, 39 percent, and 27 percent, respectively. (Due to the sample size, differences of a percentage point or two are not statistically significant.)
Does the situation change when students reach high school? We don’t yet have good state-by-state comparisons of student performance as a whole, but for college-bound students taking the SAT, the answer to that question is no. In North Carolina, the mean score of public school students taking the SAT was 993 in 2013. For the nation as a whole, the mean score for public school students was 994.
Similarly, although North Carolina public schools have experienced substantial increases in high school graduation, so have other states. As best I can determine, our state’s high school graduation rate is within a point or two of the national average.
Perhaps you ought to find North Carolina’s mediocrity interesting. That’s because if it were 30 or 40 years ago, I would be telling you that our state ranked far below average in educational outcomes. According to standardized test scores, the average North Carolina student performs better today in reading, math, and science than ever before.
Careful about turning that fact into a political talking point, however. Some of these improvements reflect the effects of high-performing students moving to North Carolina with their families. And a large majority of the improvements in test scores occurred before the year 2000 – in other words, before Smart Start, More at Four, teacher pay hikes, charter schools or other much-debated reforms could have made much of a difference in the performance of eighth-graders or high school students.
Actually, I find these trends fascinating. But to the average reader, discovering that North Carolina is consistently average may not feel so rewarding. For that, I apologize.
March 9, 2014 at 12:00 pm
Martha Cherry says:
Thank you, Mr. Hood, for taking the time to do the research. Too often those who have the power to influence public opinion rely on "rhetorical excess" to further their agenda. These excesses then become accepted as fact around the water cooler. As a result, policy makers and voters are making decisions based on hearsay. The children of our state deserve better than that.
March 9, 2014 at 2:04 pm
Norm Kelly says:
Unfortunately, facts & figures often confuse or mystify too many people. Obviously the majority of the confused ones show up on the left end of the spectrum. This is shown to be obvious when they do things like re-elect the unnamed incompetent boob that currently occupies the white house; when they show support for an undefinable reason for that guy married to Bill Clinton, and continue to believe that K has NC's best interest in mind when doing things like promoting socialism through Obamacancer.
A few interesting tid-bits show up in John's post though. Some of the increase in public school outcomes is attributable to people moving here from elsewhere. It appears that almost all of the improvements can be shown to exist prior to lib programs like smart start and more at four. But libs refuse to recognize that either or both of these programs have virtually a statistically zero net effect on kids at or just after 3rd grade. Even though it can be proven to lib politicians that smart start does almost nothing good, they still pander to a specific demographic, insisting on not only continuing to waste money on the project, but always wanting to waste more on it. What stats are available for more at four? Will these stats show that this program is also a waste of money? I know that Gov Mike was a major proponent for it, pushed it through the NCGA as I recall, and he's therefore called the education governor, along with the stupid state lottery. But that does not change the question of how useful the program is. We know smart start isn't worth the money spent on it. We know that the state lottery hasn't been the be-all, end-all, God-send that Gov Mike told us it would be. Does anyone on the lib side have anything good to show about more at four? Is it having the same nebulous effect as smart start? Is it as useless as smart start? Are there true advantages to more at four? Or is this another program that should be eliminated and the money spent better on some other initiative? Instead of piling on smart start with more at four, how about we finally look at government programs to boost those that succeed and eliminate those that fail. Like smart start. How about more at four? More what? More money? How about more results?
March 10, 2014 at 10:17 am
Nora Carr says:
I read your recent article with great interest; thank you. Research repeatedly shows that the strongest predictors of educational outcomes in the United States and most developed nations are the socioeconomic status of the parents, followed by the educational level of the parents, particularly the reading level of the mother. (Every kindergarten teacher has stories to tell regarding the vast differences in school readiness children bring with them to school on their first day.) Of the factors that schools control, the quality of teachers and principals rank the highest. From my perspective, this doesn't mean we give up on parent education, early childhood education, efforts to improve teacher quality and principal leadership, and other initiatives to improve outcomes for all children.
