Citizen

Remember "the mother of all bad zoning cases" out at Falls Lake?

It's headed for court:

"The mother of bad zoning cases" is back! Wake commissioners sued over Falls Lake watershed development soc.li/uryNAKX
— Bob Geary (@rjgeary) February 6, 2013

When the quality of your drinking water supply is impaired, as it is at Falls Lake, zoning changes are supposed to restrict pollution, not invite more of it.

Is kind of a general principle we could all live by.

I think it's even the law — but the judge will tell us that.

This just in:

Wake County Board of Education Chairman Kevin Hill and Vice Chairman Keith Sutton will be available in the Board Room at 12:30 p.m. today to comment to the media.

The Board Room is located on the first floor of WCPSS Central Services, 5625 Dillard Drive, Cary.

I've been corresponding on Twitter with two friends this morning who are bemoaning the partisanship of the Wake County Board of Education in the aftermath of Tony Tata's dismissal. "We had five Republican a—holes in charge and now it's five Democrats," is the gist of what one said. (The other was more polite, but she made the same point.)

Everywhere in the press and online, the charge against the board is their partisanship.

My response? The five people who constitute the majority on the school board are, yes, Democrats by party registration. But they aren't partisans. Quite the opposite. And that's their problem.

In fact, for 10 months since their election their most serious failing has been their inability to explain themselves to the public — because of their political inexperience.

They fired Tata yesterday. They made no attempt to say why.

Partisans would've had a short, declarative statement for the world explaining why Tata needed to go. What they had was Kevin Hill, their chair, saying he couldn't say anything because it's a personnel matter, but he did express confidence in teachers and staff to carry on in a professional manner.

Meanwhile, the four Republicans — three of whom are running for other offices — blasted them from pillar to post with such digestible (and rehearsed) soundbites as John Tedesco's statement that he wouldn't trust them with his lunch money.

Now there's a partisan.

I would also chalk it up to the majority's political naiveté that they have not felt (understood?) the imperative of functioning as a team and reaching policy consensus among themselves. Instead, they looked to Tata and his staff to bring everyone at the board table together, including the four Republicans.

Didn't happen.

A tipoff as to why it didn't came when Tata, 30 minutes after the board meeting ended, read his farewell statement to the press. He listed his successes — his, and his staff's — and he included the fact that they'd put not one but two student assignment plans together, both of which advanced the goals of stability and proximity.

Only stability and proximity? Sounds like a neighborhood schools plan to me.

The assignment plans were supposed to advance the goals of stability, proximity and student achievement, the last of which was a proxy for the concept of diversity in schools — no failing schools, in other words.

Tata came to Raleigh espousing his belief in diversity, and citing the fact that in the Army, where he was a general, diversity is a source of strength. But maintaining diversity in the Wake schools is a tough job, and as Jim Martin noted at the school board meeting last week, it's a a job that's not getting done — diversity is slipping away from the school system.

I don't say Tata didn't believe in diversity. I would say he didn't know how to get it done.

Diversity isn't the only tough issue for the superintendent and school board; lack of money, lack of buildings, lack of buses, lack of teacher assistants and tutors all complicate their job of educating 150,000 kids with all their needs, issues, backgrounds and learning styles.

It ain't easy.

I'm not saying Tata needed to go. I'm not saying he didn't. I'm not on the board, I wasn't trying to work with him, I didn't experience him in the same way the board majority obviously did. As a general, I found Tata to be hard-working, a skilled politician, excellent at explaining himself and his maneuvers to the public ... up to a point. He also struck me as a little bull-headed where his busing plans were concerned, and — because of his educational inexperience — unaware of the many pitfalls in his and Michael Alves' choice plan for student assignment.

The choice plan fell apart so fast, Tata's head must've been spinning. And then he either fired Don Haydon or forced him to resign or made life so unpleasant for Haydon that he did resign (I've heard all three versions, none from Haydon — or Tata), but that had to be the final straw. Believe me, Don Haydon did not just up and retire, not with all the groundwork he was laying for a 2013 bond referendum. No way.

What I am saying is, if you're going to fire Tata, you needed to make the case for doing so, before and after the fact. Just springing it on us was bad, well, politics.

The dark side of politics is the self-promotion and self-dealing. It's ugly.

The good side — the point — of politics — is engaging the public in what are, finally, public policy decisions that people need to understand and support.

This school board majority has none of the dark side of politics in them.

Unfortunately, they don't have much of the good side either — not so far, anyway.

Update: 4:51: Tata's out, 5-4 vote. He receives a $253,625 severance.

Update, 4:24 p.m., Tuesday: The Wake County Board of Education is currently debating a motion to fire Superintendent Tony Tata.

click to enlarge

• File photo of Tony Tata by D.L. Anderson

Republican John Tedesco, who supports Tata and was among the board members who hired him, said, "This will cost $250,000 [to buy out Tata's contract], a waste of a quarter-million dollars when we're about to ask the public for money in the bond issue. This is an epic failure. I wouldn't trust this board with my lunch money."

Debra Goldman, a board member and Tata supporter: "We're losing our superintendent. He has led with a quiet strength and is being fired by a partisan school majority because they didn't pick him. It's that simple."

Some background:

Today's meeting is a follow up to yesterday's Wake County Board of Education meeting, during which they convened behind closed doors for a little over three hours on a "personnel issue" widely understood to be the status of Superintendent Tony Tata. When the session ended, the board met briefly in open session to debate whether to add an agenda item to a previously scheduled meeting tomorrow — a move that required two-thirds approval, or six votes out of nine, because it lacked the statutory 48 hours notice.

With the four Republicans voting no, the motion to add the item failed on a 5-4 vote.

Before the meeting started, a small group of women and men led by Donna Williams and Heather Losurdo, both of whom ran for the school board last year and lost, demonstrated in front of the Wake school headquarters in support of Tata. The two, both Republicans, warned that Tata's job was in jeopardy, a forecast that later seemed to come true.

Update, 4:24 p.m., Tuesday: The Wake County Board of Education is currently debating a motion to fire Superintendent Tony Tata.

The Wake County Board of Education met behind closed doors for a little over three hours this afternoon on a "personnel issue" widely understood to be the status of Superintendent Tony Tata. When the session ended, the board met briefly in open session to debate whether to add an agenda item to a previously scheduled meeting tomorrow — a move that required two-thirds approval, or six votes out of nine, because it lacked the statutory 48 hours notice.

With the four Republicans voting no, the motion to add the item failed on a 5-4 vote.

Members weren't talking about what the item was to be, except that Republican Chris Malone said he's "disgusted" by it. All were bound by a law barring disclosure of personnel matters decided in private sessions. But it was apparent that five members, all Democrats, were prepared to act on Tata's status tomorrow, and act on it in a way that the four Republicans who back Tata were very angry and upset about.

• photo by Bob Geary
• Donna Williams (in red) and Susan Bryant (to Williams' right), the Wake County Republican Party chair, were among the Tata supporters at the school board today

If no action is permitted tomorrow, Tata could be axed at next Tuesday's regularly scheduled meeting.

Tata, who was present when the closed-door session began, was absent when the board reconvened in public session afterward. Board Chair Kevin Hill departed through a back door to avoid taking reporters' questions.

Before the meeting started, a small group of women and men led by Donna Williams and Heather Losurdo, both of whom ran for the school board last year and lost, demonstrated in front of the Wake school headquarters in support of Tata. The two, both Republicans, warned that Tata's job was in jeopardy, a forecast that later seemed to come true.

[Update: And sure enough, while I was writing this, the board majority has reversed course and decided to publish the staff's list. Hope it works out for them.]

The original post —

Like most people, I think, who were listening to the discussion at the Wake school board Tuesday night, my first response to the question of whether parents should be able to look online for their base assignments starting Friday — tomorrow — was why not? It's always best, isn't it, to get information out sooner rather than later? And by the way, the public has a right to know, doesn't it?

But a right to know what?

What the staff's work amounts to is, if the school board never establishes a policy about diversity in assignments, and if it just throws up its hands and says to us, you do it, then this is approximately the set of specific assignments we'd make under the framework we're proposing.

And even at that, the staff (and by staff I mean Superintendent Tony Tata and the folks who report to him) would be guessing what the board will decide about changes to the magnet schools, including the mix of base and application students at several of the existing magnets, as well as about transportation for students who use one of the transfer options offered in the framework. (And I wouldn't think, at this point, that Tata would want to be guessing about bus routes.)

I wouldn't want to be a board member debating policy after the staff has told 150,000 students and their parents what the outcome of my policy is going to be for every one of them.

Tata's staffers identified three specific policies that must be revised before the framework can be adopted. Two — Policy 6203 and Policy 6204 — set transfer rules and a process for capping (closing off) enrollment when a school is over capacity. Those two are significant, but their importance pales in comparison to the third, Policy 6200, which governs student assignments and how they're to be made.

The famous Policy 6200, as everyone knows who's followed the political debates over assignment, used to call for diversity in every Wake school's student body. Diversity in socioeconomic makeup. Diversity in levels of student achievement. It doesn't any more, thanks to the Republican school board majority elected in 2009 and un-elected in 2011.

The new school board majority, five Democrats, has yet to change what the Republicans did to Policy 6200, but Jim Martin was clear the other night that the majority intends to do so and — if Martin has his way — reverse the trend toward resegregation and high-poverty schools.

The point is, the rewrite of Policy 6200 should drive and govern the new student assignment plan, not the other way around.

The school board must decide whether it will continue to tolerate some schools with 70 percent and even 80 percent low-income student populations, and schools with half or more of their students failing to perform at grade level. Assuming the answer to both things is no, it must say so clearly by policy.

There's much talk, as Martin said, about using student achievement as the means of balancing school populations. But as he also said, there's no agreement even about how student achievement should be measured, let alone about the point at which low achievement in a given school would prompt different assignments to that school, added resources for the school, or both.

I'll borrow some paragraphs from the Wake Education Partnership's succinct summary of the problem:

A new approach to student assignment featuring base schools, school choices, capped enrollments and a "stay where you start" policy was generally well received this week by school board members.

But that agreement found its limits when the discussion turned to the role of student achievement in the new plan. At issue is whether the new assignment plan should try to create a targeted academic mix within schools, and if so, how that mix should be accomplished.

"To me, student achievement is the most important issue and it's the thing we have the least detail about," said board member Jim Martin.

Without that level of detail, the public can review the proposed rules governing the plan, but not the details such as where children would be assigned.

As I said in an earlier post, what the staff presented is a good framework within which to make the critical policy decisions. But without those decisions, a framework is all they have. Not a plan.

The only reason for putting a list of assignments out now, before Policy 6200 is addressed, would be if Tata wants to highjack the decision about diversity before the board majority can act. That is, dictate what the policy can or can't say by putting his own plan in first.

I don't know if that was Tata's intention. He didn't say much on Tuesday, and he's not holding his usual weekly press briefing tomorrow.

But it's clearly what Republican board members John Tedesco and Deborah Prickett intended when they pushed so hard for the staff's hypothetical assignments to be made public before Policy 6200 can be considered. They like Policy 6200 as is, with no diversity component. We know that because, of course, they voted to take it out.

On the way home from the meeting, I found myself thinking about the difference between decision-making in the private sector and in government — the public sector.

In business, it's not just standard but best practice to be very flexible, constantly updating your products and the markets you're selling in. Apple had a huge hit with the iPhone 4, but now people seem to want a little bigger screen so the iPhone 5 is a little bigger — and maybe the iPhone 6 will be bigger still. Or maybe not. Depends how the markets respond.

If Apple was in charge of student assignments, no doubt it would publish some tentative assignments, listen to the feedback, adjust accordingly, listen some more, adjust some more — but at the end of the day, Apple would feel no compunction to be fair to everyone, or even to assign every student. Businesses don't sell to everyone. They sell to market segments. Constantly shifting market segments.

In government, however, policies must be established up-front, prior to implementation, and be as fair as possible to everyone before they are put in place for anyone. You can't just make up the rules as you go along the way you can - and should — in business.

Deborah Prickett, one of the Republican board members, was exactly right when she said that every parent will focus, once a student assignment plan is published, on what it means for his/her children. That's what parents care about. They may care some about whether the plan will be fair to others. But first and foremost, they care about their own family.

And that's as it should be — or even if it isn't how it should be, it's reality.

But the school board's job is to establish a plan that's the best possible for the community as a whole. The only way to do so is to establish fair governing rules up-front and then apply them in even-handed fashion to each of the 150,000 students in the system.

That's not to say that the rules can't allow for some adjustments on the basis of fairness to individual kids.

It is to say that unless the rules are fair to begin with, no amount of jury-rigging after the fact will make them fair.

In our first installment, a.k.a. the 2009 elections, the Republic came under attack by, er, Republicans, who soon overthrew the old regime of student assignments in Wake County's public schools. Diversity as a goal was out. Base assignments were out. Choice was in.

In the sequel, the 2011 elections, the Republic struck back, ousting the Republican majority on the Wake school board. Base assignments were again in favor. Diversity too. Choice? OK, but not so much.

So now it's time for Version 3 of student assignment, which according to the new school board majority's directive, is supposed to have base assignments but also retain the good parts of the Republicans' choice plan. Shades of the Jedi warriors. ("Trust your feelings, Luke.")

An obvious question, going in, is how every student in Wake can be assigned to a base school when there are already students attending schools by choice that aren't going to be their base schools going forward. Wake has 150,000 students. It has capacity in its schools for not much more than 150,000 seats. So if every student gets a base assignment, that will require just about every available seat — and won't that leave many students who are in a school by choice out of luck?

The answer, in the staff proposal presented to the school board last night, is no. If base bumps up against place, place comes first.

So it's possible (likely?) that some students will be assigned to a base school only to find that they can't get in it when the time comes because the school is over-capacity as the result of a lot of grandfathered students who chose to stay plus the newly assigned base contingent.

If that happens, the luckless base students be presented with a list of available "overflow" options.

The fundamental principle of v.3 — call it the New Base Plan — is that if you like the school you're in, you're guaranteed the right to stay in it until you graduate.

It will help a great deal, however, that grandfathering was also a feature of V.2, the Choice Plan. Many students, that is, stayed in their old base school this year when given a choice. So if the new base school is the same as the old base school, then no problem-o.

Putting place ahead of base is "absolutely logical," as board member Susan Evans said, because to do the opposite — kick some students out so newly assigned students can take their place — would make an awful lot of parents most unhappy.

Indeed, the framework set out by Superintendent Tony Tata's team last night was very logical: 1) base assignments are made; 2) students declare whether they want the base assignment or to stay where they are; 3) a choice process follows for magnet schools and leadership academies; 4) transfer applications are entertained, with students allowed to apply to any school in the county that has space available, though admission isn't guaranteed nor is transportation necessarily going to be provided.

All the while, school officials would be re-assessing school capacities, according to a flexible standard. That is, when a school is at 100 percent of capacity, it would be considered full, but not stuffed. Full (a "partial cap") would mean it's closed to all but base-assigned students. Stuffed (a "full cap") would mean it's closed to any more students, period.

So far, so good. It seems like a solid framework, one which such "diverse" board members as Jim Martin and Keith Sutton, on the majority side, and John Tedesco, Chris Malone and Debra Goldman, on the minority side, could all say they liked in general. In fact, every board member seemed to like it in general.

But if it's a good framework, it isn't — to this point anyway — a viable plan. Not yet.

For v.3 to be a plan, it needs a strong diversity element, which thus far it lacks. The staff proposal contains the germ of a diversity element, but it's only that — no details, no heft. Thus, we have the idea of base assignments, but we don't have a process for how we're going to make the base assignments.

Making the base assignments has always, always been the rub.

For that reason, the board majority — and in particular Evans, Martin and Christine Kushner — were right to stop the staff train before it raced into public hearings next week.

They were also right to insist that the policy framework be fleshed out — and the diversity piece given form — before parents are told what their base assignments might be.

Letting the staff publish its online list of base schools by addresses — a list that would be preliminary at best, if only because no board member has even seen it yet, let alone thought about all the ways it needs to be changed — would've been a serious blunder.

That was Tata's intention, apparently, to let parents start looking up their assignments on Friday.

Talk about putting the cart before the horse.

I'll talk more about the missing elements of v.3 in a subsequent post — working title: "Where's the beef?"

[Update, August 3:

Returning to the subject of the good results announced yesterday (i.e., the "what"), let me see if I can add a bit about what they tell us about our school system (i.e., the "so what?"). And especially the so-what when it comes to student assignment and the ongoing "choice" vs. "base assignments" vs. "hybrid base-and-choice" debate.

1) I'm not a statistician, so I won't question the statistical significance of the relatively small gains overall. They are gains, no question about it as far as I know. And the gains were not small with regard to economically disadvantaged (ED) kids. The composite proficiency scores for ED elementary, middle and high school students were all much-improved, with ED elementary jumping from 61.9% proficient to 65.7%, and ED high school proficiency rising from 66.0% to 70.8%. (Composite proficiency combines the reading, math and science scores.)

Superintendent Tony Tata was properly modest in claiming credit. When you're blessed with good news, it's best to share the credit, and that's what he did, repeatedly. "Dedicated principals, teachers, teacher assistants and staff" are the reason the scores went up, Tata said. Put this in your memory bank. Tata said the Wake public school system is a "highly effective organization" and it was his privilege to lead it. (Remember that the next time you hear someone railing about our failing schools.)

2) So that was fun, but why did the scores — and especially the ED scores — improve? What special sauce was added? Answer: Resources.

Resources, meaning: additional money. Meaning: additional staff. Also: Staff reshuffling to put new (presumably better) principals and teachers into the schools that needed them most.

Thus, the four worst performing elementary school of two years ago were overhauled as "Renaissance Schools," complete with new principals (for three of the four) and two-thirds of the faculty also new. Plus new equipment. Plus added teachers, math and literacy tutors and after-school tutoring programs. How was all this paid for? With $9.5 million from the $10.2 million Wake received as part of the state's "Race to the Top" federal grant.

The four, Barwell Road ES, Brentwood Magnet ES, Creech Road ES and Wilburn ES, each have high ED student populations. Sharp improvements in their scores, especially at Barwell and Wilburn, led the way to the elementary ED gains for the system.

Add in Walnut Creek ES, a new school which enrolled a very high ED student population in year one. The Walnut Creek students had poor scores at their old schools. Their overall proficiency rate at Walnut Creek was 60.0%, up 4.7%. Their combined math and reading scores (leaving the science out) was 62.9%, an even more impressive 7.3% gain.

And how did we achieve this at Walnut Creek? Most who follow the school system know by now that the answer is, a hand-picked staff; a longer school day; extra staff as tutors, and a lot of additional money — $450,000 more in local (county) funds alone, Tata said.

3) I don't want to get too far into the weeds of the Wake schools budget here (or I'll get lost). Suffice it to say that the operating budget for the school system has been shrinking in recent years.

I'll attach a PDF that David Neter, the system's top budget guy, sent me a few weeks ago, and you can parse it for yourself. FY08_to_FY12_Operating_History_Budgets_by_Source_w_Per_Pupil_FINAL_in__WCPSS_Budget_format_-_Neter_copy.pdf

As I read it, the operating budget is down $800 per student from the 2008-09 school year to 2012-13 ($8,596 in the former year; $7,796 in the current year). Actual spending is down less, because school leaders were careful to carve out some savings from those past budgets, so that, e.g., actual spending in 2008-09 was just $8,153 — but even with that smaller number as the starting point, per-student funding for 2012-13 will be down a minimum of $357 per student compared to four years ago, and doubtless more than that when the 2011-13 "actual" number comes in.

Moreover, it was increased federal funding (stimulus funding; Race to the Top) that was propping up Wake's school budgets over the past three years. But that money is going away in future years. Meanwhile, state and county funding has been dropping.

In that vein, Tata made a point of underlining the importance of the $21 million a year that Wake's been getting in federal Title I funds — Title I being money for low-income kids. Wake spends all of its Title I funding in the elementary schools. (It's a long-standing policy, he said.) It's hugely helpful to the job of teaching kids to read and do basic arithmetic if they're struggling with same — and especially if they don't have effective parental assistance. But the $21 million is threatened as part of the budget/tax fight in Washington.

Tata's message to Congress and, for that matter, the General Assembly and the Wake Board of Commissioners: "This is working [and the test scores show it]. We need the money. Let's have a hard conversation about the funding of public education."

So, now —

4) In the face of declining budgets, Tata & Co. allocated additional funds to low-performing schools, and the schools got better. Somewhat better. They're still pretty far down the list when you compare them with the many other schools with fewer — and in some cases, few — ED kids.

While the four Renaissance Schools and Walnut Creek were gaining, though, a couple of other schools slipped below the 60% level for proficiency, and many more are stuck in the 60-70% range, which is below the 70% minimum that choice-plan guru Michael Alves said was required to avoid having schools fail under a choice plan for student attendance.

In a choice scheme, parents do indeed choose where they want their kids to go. They won't choose a low-performing school. Not if they're paying attention. Not if they're really given a choice, and not getting stuck with a school that was their fourth or fifth "choice" but they get it because the other, better schools were already full.

The one big advantage of a base-assignment plan is that school officials can fill every school to capacity and balance student populations so that no school is overwhelmed with ...

... and here, the problem isn't ED kids per se, it's kids who aren't scoring well on the tests, but the two things are correlated.

At the end of year one of the choice-plan experiment, some Wake schools were over-chosen and some were under-chosen — meaning that for whatever reason parents didn't want the latter, and consequently, those schools will open in 2012-13 with fewer students than they can hold. Which means the over-chosen schools are more crowded than they need to be.

Which is expensive. (Why? Because you need more schools if you don't fill the ones you have.)

And, as we've seen, fixing under-chosen, under-performing schools is expensive.

If Wake County had a better track record of providing funds for our school system, maybe those two facts wouldn't matter as much as they do. But Wake County's performance when it comes to putting money into our schools is — you know.

What does this mean for student assignment? I leave that to you.

What follows is the original post from 8/2 on the test results themselves —

Wake school officials will be talking with reporters this afternoon about what they think it all means — and why the test results are improved. No doubt, people will be pawing through these scores for weeks trying to discern their meaning for the big decisions the school board has ahead, including a new student assignment scheme for 2013-14 and another school construction bond referendum, probably next year and probably large ($1 billion-plus?).

So I'l come back to this subject later. For now, here's what the school system released this morning about the 2011-12 school year and how our kids did on the various reading, math and science tests:

Academic gains continue in the Wake County Public School System

Wake County students at every grade span made steady academic gains in 2011-12, according to newly released results from the N.C. Department of Public Instruction. In addition to district-wide increases in proficiency, Economically Disadvantaged students in Wake County demonstrated the highest levels of proficiency in math and reading that they have achieved under the state's current testing model. Non-Economically Disadvantaged students showed impressive gains, as well.

Thursday's results are part of a comprehensive report that uses End-of-Course (EOC) and End-of-Grade (EOG) tests and other information to measure school performance under the N.C. ABCs of Public Education and the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The results show that in 2011-12:

WCPSS elementary students demonstrated an overall proficiency rate of 82.1 percent, a gain of 1.9 points from the previous year.

WCPSS middle-school students demonstrated an overall proficiency rate of 82.1 percent, a gain of .9 points from the previous year.

WCPSS high-school students demonstrated an overall proficiency rate of 85.8 percent, an increase of 2.5 points from the previous year.

“We thank all of our dedicated principals, teachers, school-based and central office staff for their superb accomplishments and hard work,” Superintendent Tony Tata said.

EOC and EOG results

District wide gains:

The percentage of students showing proficiency in reading, math and science increased in every grade level and subject tested, except for one—7th-grade math.

Third graders showed the most improvement, gaining 2.4 points in math and 2.2 points in reading.

Proficiency rates for Algebra I, Biology and English I End-of-Course tests also increased.

Gains for Economically Disadvantaged (ED) students:
Economically Disadvantaged students are defined as those who qualify for free and reduced lunch.

The percentage of ED students demonstrating proficiency in reading, math and science increased in every grade level and subject tested, except for 7th-grade math.

At the elementary level, the proficiency rate of ED students increased four points to 66 percent

At the middle-school level, the proficiency rate of ED students increased two points to 64 percent

At the high-school level, the proficiency rate of ED students increased five points to 71 percent

Additionally, economically disadvantaged students in grades 3 through 8 demonstrated the highest levels of proficiency in math and reading tests since test standards were raised in those subject areas (Math was reset in 2006, reading was reset in 2008)

Economically Disadvantaged high-school students also demonstrated the highest level of proficiency since the school system began reporting on this subgroup 10 years ago.

Some of the most significant gains occurred in some of the school system’s most challenged schools. The school system’s Renaissance elementary schools saw remarkable gains in overall proficiency. Barwell Road students achieved a 9.7-point gain and Wilburn students achieved a 7.7-point gain. These schools benefited in 2011-12 from staffing changes, technology upgrades and schedule flexibility.

Recognition under the ABCs of Public Education

The ABCs of Public Education are state measures of the performance of individual schools across North Carolina.

The ABCs use year-end test results and other information to measure student performance and determine whether a school is improving each year.

71 percent of WCPSS schools showed proficiency gains overall in 2011-12, compared to 63 percent the previous year.

93 percent of WCPSS schools achieved Expected Growth or High Growth.

110 schools made High Growth

An additional 42 schools made Expected Growth

The state named 23 schools as Honor Schools of Excellence or Schools of Excellence, the highest recognitions possible under the ABCs; This is an increase from 17 schools the previous year.

Honor Schools of Excellence include Alston Ridge, Briarcliff, Cedar Fork, Davis Drive, Highcroft Drive, Jones Dairy, Mills Park, Morrisville, Olive Chapel, Sycamore Creek and Willow Springs elementary schools; Apex, Davis Drive, Heritage, Lufkin Road, Mills Park and Salem middle schools; and Panther Creek High and Wake Early College of Health and Science. The state recognizes Honor Schools of Excellence for having at least 90 percent of students performed at or above grade level, meeting Expected Growth, and meeting all of their federal Annual Measurable Objectives requirements for subgroups.

Schools of Excellence include Green Hope Elementary, as well as Green Hope and Holly Springs high schools and the Wake NC State STEM Early College High School. The state recognizes Schools of Excellence for having at least 90 percent of students performed at or above grade level and meeting at least Expected Growth. The state rates other schools as Schools of Distinction, Schools of Progress, Priority Schools, or No Recognition Schools based on student testing results.

Performance under No Child Left Behind

Federal standards under No Child Left Behind measure end-of-year proficiency for selected subgroups of students at schools. For the first time this year, the performance of those subgroups is measured with Annual Measurable Objectives (AMO), replacing what was known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).

Instead of meeting or failing to meet AYP, schools will now be evaluated based on the number of Annual Measurable Objectives students meet in each measurable subgroup.

According to the newly released 2011-12 results, 84 of 164 schools met all of their Annual Measurable Objectives. An additional 41 schools missed reaching 100 percent of their Annual Measurable Objectives by one or two targets.

Graduation Rates

According to data released Thursday, 80.8 percent of WCPSS students who entered high school as part of the Class of 2012 graduated within four years. This figure is likely to fluctuate after a standard correction period, and could change when the state issues a final report later this year.

The WCPSS graduation rate for the Class of 2011 was 80.4, and was adjusted to 80.9 after the standard correction period.

Statewide, 80.2 percent of students who entered high school as part of the Class of 2012 graduated within four years, according to the data released Thursday.