What Do Charlotte School Ratings Mean?

Charlotte school ratings are a poor way to judge school quality. That’s not an opinion about testing. It’s a well-researched conclusion.

Yet these ratings still shape school choices, even for families who aren’t overly concerned with test scores or ratings. In my work in education policy and as a parent, I have seen how the way we think about which schools are “good” and “bad” can lead families to real heartache when it turns out to be inaccurate. That’s why we created RYSE, to give families meaningful indicators of school quality and ways to evaluate how well schools fit their priorities beyond academics.

Here’s a brief look at ratings and their problems.

A Real Charlotte Example

Take a look at this example of a real elementary school in Charlotte. It received the following ratings and accolades:

• An A on the North Carolina school report card
• An A+ and number 1 ranking among public K-8 schools in the Charlotte area from a widely used rating site
• Number 1 elementary school in North Carolina from another popular rating site

However, the state’s own student growth data (an approach to measuring school effectiveness that research has shown to be strong) told a different story. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, students at that school did not meet their growth expectations. That means students across North Carolina who started at an equally high academic level did progress academically, but students at this school, on average, did not. Put another way, they fell behind other NC students who started at a similar place academically. How could this be?

Want the 60-second version? Scroll through What Makes RYSE Unique to see this story side by side with the actual ratings.

What Charlotte School Ratings Actually Tell Us

In short, ratings tell us more about who enrolls than about how well a school teaches. Most ratings are built mainly on achievement, which shows how students score at one point in time. Those scores largely reflect family income, parents’ education, and other demographic factors.

That means:

• Schools that attract high-income families but aren’t effective at teaching students can receive high ratings (as in the example above).
• Schools serving more low-income families can get low ratings despite doing an excellent job of teaching.

I’ve found that most families don’t know they’re largely learning about the students in a school when they look at school ratings, not the school. What they typically think they’re getting and want to know is this: How effectively does this school support students academically?

Student growth can answer that question. It shows how much progress students make in a school year compared with students who started out the year in the same place academically. It is far less tied to family income.

North Carolina’s letter grades use both achievement and growth results but not equally. NC School Performance Grades are:

• 80 percent achievement test scores (mostly end-of-grade test results)
• 20 percent student growth results

So, a school can have years of weak student growth and still receive an A if its achievement is high, as the example above shows, because growth is such a small part of the formula.

This isn’t just a one-school issue. Comparing letter grades against growth results for every school in the Charlotte area, we found nearly 1 in 5 carried a grade that dramatically overstated or understated how much students were learning.

Using ratings to inform your school choice can cause real and increasing problems. Families may:

• Choose a school with high ratings, not knowing its growth is low until their child isn’t being challenged or well supported
• Overlook better-fit options because they narrowed down their list based on misleading ratings
• Switch schools after being dissatisfied with their school choice
• Overpay for homes in areas with highly rated schools or pay for private schools, mistakenly assuming these things lead to better learning outcomes

Even if you don’t have kids in public schools, you are impacted by misleading ratings because they tend to deepen economic and racial segregation, even among families who value diversity.

Do Ratings Tell Us What We Really Want to Know?

Stanford researcher Sean Reardon offers a clear way to think about whether ratings offer helpful information to families:

“It’s common to think of average test scores as a measure of school quality. After all, if students are scoring well on tests, they must be learning something, right?

To understand what is wrong with this assumption, consider a hospital. We shouldn’t assess a hospital based on the health of its patients; rather, we should ask how much a patient’s health improves as a result of his or her time in that hospital. Similarly, we shouldn’t evaluate a school based on the average scores of its students, but rather by how much students learn while in school.”

This makes me think about Johns Hopkins Hospital, a place where I received care when I lived in Baltimore years ago. If you knew this world-renowned hospital served many patients with complex medical needs or many patients with low incomes, would you conclude the hospital or its physicians weren’t capable? Knowing who walked through the door tells you little about the quality of the hospital.

To judge a hospital’s effectiveness, we would want to know how much patients’ health improves during their care, ideally compared with patients with similar challenges elsewhere. Thankfully, we have that information for schools.

That information is student growth. Growth helps families spot schools that support students in growing rapidly from any starting point. And it helps families identify schools with high achievement that aren’t moving students forward.

A Better Option

You can access a school’s growth results on the state’s NCDPI School Report Cards site. However, you should check out RYSE’s platform if you want to answer questions like these:

• Which high schools in Charlotte are best supporting students with special needs?
• Which elementary schools are most effectively supporting Black students (or students of another racial/ethnic identity group)?

RYSE is made to answer these questions and more. On our platform, you can see the following:

• A three-year growth pattern, so you can see whether a school consistently moves students forward and not just how it did last year
• Results by student group, so you can see whether a school is moving all of its students forward, not only some
• Growth next to your priorities, because no one indicator makes a school “good” or “bad.” What matters is whether it’s a fit for your family.

Conclusion

Charlotte school ratings can mislead families because they mostly tell you about the students in the building, not how well the school supports their learning. Student growth is a strong indicator of school effectiveness. RYSE gives you better information, like student growth, to make a strong choice for your child. Search any public school in North Carolina on RYSE to see its student growth pattern or join a RYSE Live Workshop to go deeper on what research says matters most when choosing a school.

Quick Answers for Charlotte Families

Are school ratings accurate?

They report test scores accurately, but average test scores don’t show how much students learn at a school. Student growth does. Check it alongside any rating you see.

What’s the difference between student growth and a letter grade?

Student growth measures how much progress students made. A North Carolina letter grade is 80 percent test scores and only 20 percent growth, so strong achievement can hide years of weak student growth.

Where can I find a school’s growth data?

The state publishes it on the NCDPI School Report Cards site. RYSE turns those results into a three-year patterns so you can understand the big picture.

Sources

• Angrist, J., Hull, P., Pathak, P., & Walters, C. (2017). Leveraging Lotteries for School Value-Added. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132(2).
• Hasan, S., & Kumar, A. (2018). Digitization and Divergence: Online School Ratings and Segregation in America. SSRN.
• NC Department of Public Instruction. Accountability Framework Background Brief.
• Nordstrom, K., & Tillitski, L. (2021). School Performance Grades: A Legislative Tool for Stigmatizing Non-White Schools. NC Justice Center.
• Paul, E. (2019). Yes, “A” Still Stands for Affluent in NC School Performance Grades. Public School Forum of North Carolina.
• Reardon, S. (2019). Affluent Schools Are Not Always the Best Schools. Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford.
• Stanford Report. (2017). Students’ early test scores do not predict academic growth over time.