Just wrote my syndicated column for the week (a day early, due to sudden and inexplicable bout of severe weather) about the North Carolina Education Alliance’s new report examining school choice across the state’s 117 school districts. Look out for it in your local paper, and on the CJ.com site, in the coming days.
Here’s a little nugget that I couldn’t fit into the piece, but that some might find interesting. I took a look at the average performance of all the school districts on North Carolina’s end-of-grade and end-of-course tests since 1999. I found that the seven school districts where at least half the students are in a school of choice (public or private) posted somewhat higher gains in test scores over the past four years than the rest of the state’s students did.
It would be precipitous to draw too many conclusions. For one thing, as the NCEA paper notes, it proved impossible to get the choice data back in time, so we don’t know how the districts’ choices stacked up in 1999. Second, the difference was small and could evaporate (or widen, of course) if we were doing a serious model and introducing other variables.
One last thing: consistenly, the districts making the largest gains in performance during this period (as contrasted with those ranking highest in absolute scores) were almost invariably the opposite of what you might expect. They were rural, mostly in the far east and far west of the state, and mostly higher-poverty districts. Plus Durham.
