NC gets its annual school report card

RALEIGH, NC (AP) - Report cards for North Carolina's public schools released Thursday show they are meeting expectations in some categories but must show improvement in others.

Graduation rates improved in the 2010-11 academic year, with 78 percent of students completing high school four years after they start, a level school officials said was the highest ever reported in North Carolina. That's up from 74 percent the previous year, according to the annual ABCs of Public Education report, which shows how students performed on end-of-the year and end-of-course tests taken in grades 3 through 12.

But the schools meeting or beating expected academic growth fell to 81 percent last year from 88 percent in 2009-10.

The reasons for the drop are unclear, state schools superintendent June Atkinson said, but may be a result of several years of budget cutbacks forcing staff cuts that result in fewer educators working with students.

"I do believe that these drops reflect the continued education cuts that we have had to make over the past three years," she said. "It is absolutely no secret that when state resources for teachers and students shrink, it becomes more and more challenging to provide every student with the specialized attention that he or she may need to learn at the highest level."

Nearly one-third of the tested North Carolina students in grades 3 through 8 were are not reading and calculating math at grade level, the state Department of Public Instruction said.

Scores show about 203,000 students in those grades out of about 688,000 who were tested are not reading in step with expectations and about 121,000 were behind in math.

The state's public schools have about 1.5 million students.

Part of the annual public schools progress report includes data for the state's 115 local school districts required by the decade-old federal No Child Left Behind law to measure the reading and mathematics abilities of students every year.

The results show that of the state's nearly 2,500 public schools, fewer than three of 10 met the targets set for them in the academic year that concluded in June. That's down from 58 percent the previous year.

North Carolina's disappointing data was at least in part because last year saw a big jump in the target scores and because the federal law requires schools to meet all of their goals or they're deemed to have fallen short, state officials said.

The federal requirements are usually all-or-nothing. Missing just one of the benchmarks for a subgroup of students can mean the school doesn't make adequate yearly progress.