By By BETTY MITCHELL GRAY
Staff Writer
The Beaufort County Early College High School, a learn-and-earn high school, received the top designation in a N.C. Department of Public Instruction report on school-performance goals for the 2009-2010 school year.
Those goals are known as the ABCs of Public Education.
The school earned the Honor School of Excellence designation, meaning 90 percent or more of its students met or exceeded growth standards and made adequate yearly progress as measured by end-of-grade or end-of-course testing in the 2009-2010 school year, according to the report released Thursday.
In the 2008-2009 school year, no Beaufort County school earned the Honor School of Excellence Designation.
Two schools, Bath Elementary and Chocowinity Primary, earned School of Distinction designations in the 2009-2010 school year. That means that 80 percent or more of their students met or exceeded growth standards and made adequate yearly progress as measured by end-of-grade or end-of-course testing during that school year, according to the report.
In the 2008-2009 school year, only Chocowinity Primary School earned the School of Distinction designation.
The ABCs report, issued annually by the Department of Public Instruction, is based on several measures of performance. They include reading and mathematics end-of-grade tests in the third through eighth grades, science end-of-grade tests in the fifth and eighth grades and end-of-course tests in Algebra I, Algebra II, biology, civic and economics, English I, geometry, physical science and U.S. history.
The report also measures “growth” or the expectation that an individual student performs as well, or better, on end-of-grade tests as he or she did, on average, during the previous two years.
The ABCs program also includes reports on the adequate yearly progress of schools under the No Child Left Behind federal law.
Signed into law Jan. 2, 2002, No Child Left Behind requires states to annually administer standardized tests. School districts and individual schools that receive Title I federal funding must make “adequate yearly progress” in those test scores or face sanctions. Schools receive Title I funds based on the percentage of their student enrollment designated as low-income.
Educators generally agree that the ABCs report is a tool they use to get a quick snapshot of how a school district and individuals schools within that district are performing. By focusing on growth trends over time, the ABCs report also gives educators a valuable tool to track groups of students. That gives school leaders the chance to focus on problem areas within individual schools.
“We are excited about the test scores and our students’ performances in many areas,” said Beaufort County Schools Superintendent Don Phipps in a BCS news release. “However, we will utilize the data provided to chart a course of action to further enhance all student achievement.”
Twelve of Beaufort County’s 14 public schools met or exceeded growth targets for the 2009-2010 school year, according to the report.
Eight of those 14 schools received the School of Progress designation. Those schools met or exceeded growth marks and at least 60 percent of their students scored at or above an acceptable passing on end-of-grade or end-of-course tests. Those eight schools are Eastern Elementary, John C. Tayloe Elementary, John Small Elementary, Northeast Elementary, Northside High School, P.S. Jones Middle School, Southside High School and Washington High School.
Two Beaufort County schools, Chocowinity Middle School and the Beaufort County Ed Tech Center, received no-recognition designations. Those schools did not hit their growth marks, but at least 60 percent of their students scored at or above an acceptable passing grade.
In the 2008-2009 school year, four Beaufort County schools received no-recognition designations.
Because of its performance in the 2009-2010 school year, S.W. Snowden Elementary School was designated as a priority school, according to the report. The school met its growth marks but had less than 60 percent of its students scores at or above an acceptable passing grade. In the 2008-2009 report, the school was listed as a priority school.
In the latest ABCs report, no Beaufort County school was listed as a low-performing school.
After viewing the preliminary results, Beaufort County Schools is seeking to improve the number of students who participate in end-of-grade testing. When a school fails to test 95 percent or more of its students, that failure can keep a school from meeting AYP.
“This issue is a joint responsibility between faculty and parents to ensure student attendance and participation during the testing window,” Phipps said in a news release. “We will be working to improve our efforts at the school level, and part of that will be enhanced communication with parents.”
Based on the latest results, another area of focus for Beaufort County Schools will be mathematics at the elementary and middle grades in pockets throughout the county, Phipps said in the release.
A substantial improvement in Beaufort County Schools during the recently completed school year was the increase in science scores in the fifth and eighth grades, he said.
“We anticipate the improvement in scores to translate into better high-school level science scores in the coming years,” he said.
The ABCs of Public Education began in the 1996-1997 school year as North Carolina’s primary school-improvement program, providing the state’s first school-level accountability system and generating information that has allowed North Carolina to better target school-improvement efforts.
Those results, released last month by Beaufort County Schools, showed that students in fewer county schools passed end-of-grade exams in the 2009-2010 school year than the previous school year and that the system as a whole failed to meet its targets.
As a district, Beaufort County Schools did not make AYP goals for the 2009-2010 school year, with four of its 14 schools meeting 100 percent of the federal markers. That was a decrease from the 2008-2009 school year when eight of 14 schools met their goals.
The all-or-nothing approach to AYP goals has led some educators nationwide and members of President Barack Obama’s administration to consider broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing under No Child Left Behind, as well as the elimination of the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.