Part eight

Then they amended it, and sent the elementary door through the gifted label

The 2018 law did not survive a year in its original form. On 28 June 2019 the General Assembly ratified Senate Bill 500, Session Law 2019-120, approved on 11 July and applying from 2019‑20. Its own title says what it is for: to make certain modifications to the implementation of advanced math courses offered when practicable for grades six and higher.

1

Elementary grades lost the course requirement

“Advanced courses in mathematics in all grades three six and higher.” Grades three through five were moved to advanced learning opportunities instead.

2

And those were defined as gifted services

The act added a definition: advanced learning opportunities are “those services and curricular modifications in mathematics for academically or intellectually gifted students approved as part of the local plan, as required by G.S. 115C-150.7.” So a fourth grader who scores at the highest level is entitled to a service the statute defines as being for gifted students, under a plan each district writes for itself.

Which means the entitlement now runs through the exact label Counted Out had taken apart the year before: 115 districts with 115 policies, awarded at one rate to low-income children and twice that rate to everyone else with the same scores, and handed to hundreds of students whose test scores were merely average while children with superior scores went without.

And it runs only one way. A district's gifted plan serves the students it has labelled, whatever they scored. So a child labelled gifted receives advanced learning opportunities without having to score at the highest level, while a child who scores at the highest level receives them only if the district has also labelled them. In practice the elementary entitlement is allocated by the label, not by the score the statute names.

3

“A level five” became “the highest level”

A sensible edit on its face, since it follows the scale wherever the scale goes. But it was made in the same summer the State Board was about to move the cut score, and it did nothing about the fact that the highest level was about to mean almost nobody.

The same act built the rest of the machinery: subsection (c) created the annual report to the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee, first due 15 December 2020. Removal now requires consent given after a parent has been adequately informed that the placement was earned on a test. And schools that had not offered Math 1 to 8th graders in 2018‑19 were excused for a year, on condition they filed a plan by January 2020 explaining their staffing, “including an indication of how adequate staffing will be accomplished and any anticipated shortages”, and a detailed rationale if they still judged it impracticable.

That staffing report already exists in statute. Section 3 of SL 2019-120 required every excused district to write down its teacher shortage, and Section 4 required the Superintendent to compile those plans into a summary for the legislature by 15 March 2020. It was a one-time exercise. Making it annual would answer, at a stroke, the question no current report touches: how many qualified students are turned away because there is no teacher for the class?

Why the gifted definition matters

Because the label and the test score do not agree, and they disagree in both directions at once. This is the whole grade 7 cohort for 2023‑24, sorted by whether the two things match.

4,327 seventh graders scored at the highest level in mathematics and are not identified as gifted. That is one in three of every top scorer in the state. Going the other way, 9,287 students who carry the label did not score at the highest level in the subject: 7,502 of them at Level 4 and 1,785 below it. That is more than half of everyone holding the label.

Neither of those groups is doing anything wrong. Gifted identification is not a mathematics test and was never meant to be one. That is exactly the problem with routing a mathematics entitlement through it.

Where the gifted label and the mathematics score disagree

Grade 7, 2023-24. The top bar is where they match; the other two are where they do not

Source: NC DPI School Assessment and Other Indicator Data, subject code MA07 (grade 7 mathematics), 2023‑24, statewide row, AIG subgroup against all students. 18,033 seventh graders were AIG-identified: 8,746 scored Level 5, 7,502 Level 4 and 1,785 below Level 4. 13,073 seventh graders in total scored Level 5, so 4,327 of them carried no AIG designation. Level 4 is published directly; Level 5 is derived as the college-and-career-ready percentage minus Level 4 where the source suppresses it. AIG identification is determined locally under each district's own plan, and there are 115 of those plans.

NCDPI's own 2019 slide said the same thing about an earlier cohort: of the 20,440 students who made Level 5 on the 7th grade math EOG in 2016‑17, 11,836, or 57.9%, had an AIG designation. The other 8,604 did not. Routing an entitlement through a label that misses four in ten of the students who earn it on the test is not a technical detail. It is the whole question.

So when districts told the legislature they were already meeting the elementary requirement, because only gifted students were allowed in advanced math anyway, that was not a defence. It was a description of the problem. One in three of the students who earn the top score in seventh grade math do not carry the label. Gifted identification is not a measurement of who can do the work; it is a local process, written 115 different ways, that the state's own testing data disagrees with in both directions. Building an entitlement on top of it does not open the door. It moves the door.

Is anyone accountable for the elementary half of this?

No. We looked, and the answer is a clean no.

Every annual report to the General Assembly opens by quoting the statute in full, including the words “shall offer advanced learning opportunities in mathematics in grades three through five”. Then every table in every report covers grades six and higher only. Not one of them reports how many third, fourth or fifth graders scored at the highest level, how many received an advanced learning opportunity, or what such an opportunity consisted of. The entitlement exists in the statute, is restated in each report, and is measured in none of them.

It has been attempted once, and the attempt is instructive. In 2019‑20 there were no end-of-grade tests, so eligibility could not be calculated at all. For that one year the Department fell back on asking districts, and the December 2020 report published a grades 3 to 5 participation table built from a survey that 121 districts answered. We would not lean on that number and neither should anyone else. It is self-reported, it is partial, it was collected in the most disrupted school year on record, and “advanced learning opportunity” means whatever each district says it means. But notice what it could not do even in principle. It counted who took part. It did not ask who was entitled, so it could not tell anyone whether the children the statute names were among the children being served. That is the actual question, and it has never been asked in any year.

Sources: NC DPI reports to the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee on Advanced Courses in Mathematics, G.S. 115C-81.36(c), the annual editions from December 2020 through December 2025. The grades 3 to 5 figures are from Table 2 of the December 2020 edition, headed “Number and percentages of students who participate in advanced learning opportunities (ALOs) by gender and race/ethnicity in Fall 2020, as reported in the survey”, based on 121 responding districts.

A further bill would extend the same structure to reading. Senate Bill 507 passed the Senate 46 to 0 in April 2025 and is sitting in House Rules; it is not law. It would rename the section “Advanced courses in mathematics and English Language Arts”, carry the gifted definition across to ELA, add socioeconomic status to the annual report, and add a new subsection (b1) making the 7th-to-8th grade rule conditional on the school offering a high school math course in 8th grade at all.