Understanding school data
School performance grades in North Carolina: growth versus achievement, explained
The letter grade you see on a North Carolina school report card is 80% test scores and 20% improvement. Here is why that ratio matters, where it goes wrong, and the numbers families should look at instead.
Every year, North Carolina assigns each public school a single letter grade: A, B, C, D, or F. Families look at those grades when they are deciding where to enroll, when they are choosing a neighborhood, when they are comparing options inside a magnet lottery. The grade feels official, simple, and final.
It is none of those things. It is a math problem, and the math is set up in a way that hides the most useful information.
What the grade actually measures
The North Carolina school performance grade is a weighted average of two numbers:
- Achievement (80%) is the share of students who scored proficient on state tests.
- Growth (20%) is whether students learned about a year's worth of material in a year, on average, compared to their prior performance.
The state combines those two scores into a single number from 0 to 100, then assigns a letter grade. An A means the school scored 85 or higher. An F means it scored below 40.
Why the 80/20 weighting can mislead
Achievement is mostly a measure of who attends the school, not what the school does. A school full of kids who arrived in kindergarten reading above grade level will post high proficiency numbers no matter how good or bad the teaching is. A school full of kids who arrived a year behind will struggle to hit proficiency even if the teaching is excellent.
That is not a controversial claim. It is the reason researchers who study school quality almost always lead with growth, not achievement. Growth tries to answer the question families actually care about: will my child learn more here this year than they would somewhere else?
When you weight achievement at 80% of the grade, you are mostly grading the families who already chose the school, not the school itself.
Growth is the more honest signal
A school's growth score is calculated by comparing each student's test scores to a prediction based on their own prior scores. If the school's students, on average, learned at least a year's worth of material in a year, the school meets growth. If they learned more than expected, the school exceeds growth. Less, and it does not meet growth.
Growth is not perfect. It still uses standardized tests as the yardstick, and it cannot capture everything a good school does. But it removes most of the demographic noise from the picture. Two schools serving very different families can both exceed growth, and that comparison is meaningful.
How to read both numbers together
You want both, in this order:
- Start with growth. A school that does not meet growth is one to ask hard questions about, regardless of its overall letter grade. A school that exceeds growth deserves a closer look, even if its letter grade is a C.
- Then look at achievement, but in context. Compare the school's proficiency rate to the average of schools serving similar families. The state publishes the demographic data alongside the test scores.
- Finally, look at the trend. One year is noise. Three years of meeting or exceeding growth is a signal.
A worked example
Imagine two elementary schools in the same district.
- School A has a school performance grade of B. Achievement is 78% proficient. Growth: did not meet.
- School B has a school performance grade of C. Achievement is 52% proficient. Growth: exceeded.
The state report card ranks School A higher. But School B is the school where students are learning more, year over year, than the prediction says they should. School A is coasting on a high-achieving student body while not adding much. School B is doing the actual work of teaching.
If both schools are open to your child, School B is, on the available evidence, the better academic choice. The letter grade points you the wrong way.
What we use at RYSE
We surface growth, achievement, and the trend across years on every school page, side by side, with plain-language captions for what each one means. We do that because the school performance grade is the single biggest piece of misleading information families get when they are making a school decision, and getting families past it is most of the work.
If you want to see your zoned school's growth score and how it compares to others in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, take our quiz and we will pull the numbers for you.
What is a North Carolina school performance grade?
- It is a single A to F letter the state assigns each school, calculated as 80 percent achievement (how students score on tests) and 20 percent growth (how much students improved). Because it leans so heavily on achievement, it often tracks family income more than school quality.
Why does growth matter more than the letter grade?
- Growth measures how much students learned in a year, regardless of where they started. A school serving lower-income families can post strong growth while still earning a middling letter grade, so growth is the fairer signal of what a school is doing for its students.
How can I see a school growth score instead of just its grade?
- RYSE surfaces growth alongside the letter grade for every Charlotte-Mecklenburg school, so you can compare schools on what they add rather than on the demographics they start with.
Last updated May 28, 2026.