State board of education

Last year, Mark Johnson announced he would not seek re-election as superintendent of public instruction and instead would compete for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor. His loss in the…

Roy Cooper observed that “it doesn’t work too well.” John Hood noted that its policies “confuse the public and confound effective management.” Scott Mooneyham called it an “idiotic…

It is not difficult to understand why the editors of Business North Carolina and The Robesonian have asked the state to assist the Public Schools of Robeson County.

House Bill 514/Session Law 2018-3 would allow four Mecklenburg County municipalities – Cornelius, Huntersville, Matthews, and Mint Hill – to undertake the charter school application process and, if successful,…

The NC General Assembly should create two permanent commissions charged with raising the quality and rigor of state standards, curricula, and assessments. Each commission should employ a large and diverse group of stakeholders and should modify or replace the Common Core State Standards, specify content that aligns with the standards, recommend a testing program, and provide ongoing review.

RALEIGH – Smaller class sizes do not translate into better public-school performance. That’s the key finding in a new analysis from the John Locke Foundation. The idea behind the state’s…

In November, the State Board of Education released the final report of the High Priority Schools Initiative, a four-year, $23 million class-size reduction program targeting low-performing and low-income elementary schools. The report offered no statistical evidence that smaller class sizes raised student achievement. Between the first and final year of the program, fewer schools met their state ABC growth targets and even fewer made Adequate Yearly Progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Reduced class sizes failed to significantly increase student performance on state reading assessments. In the future, legislators and policymakers should not fund class-size initiatives because of their expediency or popularity but because they produce measurable gains in student achievement.