North Carolina Plan Aims To Close Achievement Gap

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

Five North Carolina districts are gearing up to test what may become a new element in the state's widely recognized school accountability program: dividing students into various racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic subgroups and then rewarding schools if test scores for students from all those categories improve.

The five-district pilot program, loosely modeled on a feature of Texas' statewide accountability program, is aimed squarely at reducing the wide and persistent gap in academic achievement between most of the state's minority students and their white classmates. It will supplement, not replace, North Carolina's 3-year-old system of test-based rewards and sanctions for schools.

"The way the current accountability program works, schools can mask the performance of historically low-performing groups behind the performance of the dominant population in the school," said Eric Smith, the superintendent of the 100,000-student Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, the state's...