GROWTH FOCUSES ON INDIVIDUAL, NOT JUST SCHOOL

Smartest students don't always pay, for teachers

State's formula for determining bonuses looks at year's learning

By Ann Doss Helms (Staff Writer)

    At Davidson IB Middle School, where 98.9 percent of students passed end-of-grade tests last year, teachers will earn no ABC bonuses.

    At West Charlotte High School, where the pass rate was 25.5 percent, teachers will get $1,500 for making high growth.

    Welcome to the quirky world of school accountibility.  This year, the confusion level is ratcheting up as new federal standards merge with North Carolina's system of ratings and rewards.

    Officials urge parents and citizens not to agonize over any one label.

    "There's a lot of data for you," said Susan Agruso, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg assistant superintendent in charge of testing.  "All of it has some value.  None of it tells the whole story."

    N.C. schools are judged partly on the percentage of students who pass the state exams-reading and math tests in elementary and middle school, exams on 10 core subjects in high school.

    But state officials didn't want to penalize teachers who work with disadvantaged students, or reward schools just because they have lots of students who arrive as high performers.  So they based bonuses on a formula that measures how much students learned that year.

    Contrary to popular belief, "growth" doesn't mean comparing the school's pass rate with the previous year.  The state formula looks at students who attended the school in 2003 and compares their scores for the current and previous year.  Thus, a student who moved up from Level 1, "well below grade level", to Level 2, "below grade level" might have demonstrated more than one year's growth, even though that student still fell short of grade level.

    That's why teachers at schools such as West Charlotte High and Marie G. Davis and Spaugh middle schools earned "high growth" bonuses although their school pass rates fell.  A new student assignment plan brought major changes to those schools in 2002-03.  Students who took the tests in spring 2003 didn't do as well as those who attended the previous year, but they made more than a year's progress.

    On the other hand, a student who earned a Level 4-"above grade level"- two years in a row could fail to show a year's growth.  That was the case with some students at Davidson IB, a magnet school attracting high-achieving students willing to tackle demanding courses, Agruso said.

    "It's not impossible for schools to maintain high pass rates and growth", Agruso said.  Villa Heights Elementary, a center city magnet school for academically gifted children, made high growth in 2003 with 100 percent of students at or above grade level, just like the year before.

    That's the ABC program in a nutshell.  But this year the federal government added a new twist with No Child Left Behind, a law designed to push all schools to have all students performing on grade level by 2013-14.

    The details of that act could fill a textbook, but the process boils down to setting pass-rate targets, which will keep moving up until they hit 100 percent.  The targets apply to schools and all groups of students attending them, including racial groups, low-income students, students with disabilities and immigrant students.  To make the federal grade, schools had to hit the target for each group.  Larger and more diverse schools had more targets to hit.

    Only 39 percent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools made the federal standard in 2003.  Northwest School of the Arts, a racially and economically diverse magnet that combines middle and high school, was one of those.

    But Northwest was also one of eight schools in the district where teachers earned no growth bonus from the state.  When the state ran its formula, the school fell 0.01 point short.

    "I did the math myself; I got exactly the same thing," Principal Charles LaBorde said Wednesday.  "It's one of the best years academically and then not to meet the goal, it's really frustrating."