School district meets many goals, fails on achievement gap

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools district met nearly all of its federal and state achievement goals — but when it came to the achievement gap, the district fell short.

This year, schools were scored based on a new state standard, known as the Common Core State Standards. These standards are more aligned with national testing standards and allow students in the CHCCS district to be able to compare directly with students throughout the country.

The school district evaluated the results and concluded it had met 96.6 percent of the 560 federal goals. For the state’s 947 Common Core goals, the CHCCS district met 94.6 percent of them.

Jeff Nash, spokesman for CHCCS, said the scores met a large percentage of the goals but needed to continue improving in future years.

“When we are at a high level academically it becomes harder to make larger strides in improvement,” he said.

The school system’s scores were released last week. They showed that students collectively met or surpassed expectations in most areas during the 2012-13 school year. But 27 achievement goals were not met.

Looking forward, the district will focus on reducing the achievement gap — 20 of those 27 unmet goals were from the economically disadvantaged students group.

James Barrett, a CHCCS board member, said this statistic should be a focus of improvement for years to come.

“The gap was bigger than we expected but when you raise the testing standards you usually see a bigger gap,” he said.

Barrett also said there will be a focus on narrowing the achievement gap. He said the board will formally discuss ideas at its next meeting.

“There are 28 strategies in our new long-range plan that specifically targets the achievement gap,” Barrett said.

An important step in reducing the gap would be to ensure there is a presence of high-quality instruction in each classroom, he said.

And Michelle Brownstein, the chairwoman of the board, said the new standards will seem rigorous at first but they will better prepare the students for their respective futures.

The new standards will challenge students and teachers for the better, said Magda Parvey, assistant superintendent for instructional services.

“When it comes to teaching and learning, the Common Core has changed the way we do business,” she said in a statement.

“Students must meet more rigorous standards and demonstrate their understanding of concepts in more challenging ways. We are entirely focused on aligning our curriculum and teaching strategies to the new standards.”