Part nine

Then the state moved the line

Here is the sequence, and it is worth reading slowly. The law applied beginning with the 2018‑19 school year. In August 2019 the State Board of Education adopted new cut scores and applied them to the 2018‑19 results. The first cohort the law was written for was scored on a bar that moved after they sat the test. The share of high school Math 1 students at Level 5 fell from 11.2% to 1.7% in that one year.

Students walking through the Honors door each year

High school students scoring Level 5 on Math 1, statewide count

Source: NC DPI School Assessment and Other Indicator Data, subject code M1. Only the 2017‑18 figure comes from a published Level 5 percentage. From 2018‑19 on, the state suppresses any value below 5%, so the rate is recovered as CCR minus Level 4 and multiplied by the number tested. Differencing two figures each rounded to a tenth of a point leaves roughly ±90 students on each of these counts. No exams were administered in 2019‑20, and the 2020‑21 file leaves the number tested blank, so no count can be built for either year. One caution about the 2017‑18 figure. That was the last year in which a ninth grader's Math 1 score from middle school was banked into the high school's results. DPI's rules for that year state that “the NC Math 1 EOC scores of grade 9 students who took the NC Math 1 EOC in middle school in 2016‑17 or earlier are banked to the students' current high school”. The practice ended the following year, and the number tested in high school Math 1 falls with it, from 118,905 to 85,383. So part of the fall shown here is students leaving this count rather than leaving Level 5. How much cannot be recovered, because banked scores are not reported separately.

The second door the legislation opened, the one that was supposed to keep the gate from locking, now qualifies about 1,450 students a year statewide. In 2017‑18, the last year scored on the old bar, 13,317 students cleared it. Nobody voted to narrow the door. A scoring decision did it.

Nobody was surprised. The arithmetic was on the table.

This was not an accident discovered later. From 8 to 11 July 2019, fifty-nine North Carolina educators met with the state's testing contractor to set the new cut scores, using the Bookmark procedure. The technical report of that workshop contains a table headed “Cut Scores and Associated Impact Data”, and impact data is defined in the report itself as “the percentages of students who would be classified in each achievement level on the Spring 2019 administration of the assessments if the recommended cut scores were implemented.”

What the new cut scores were projected to do, before they were adopted

Share of students in each level, Spring 2019 administration, under the recommended cuts

Source: North Carolina General Education Mathematics Assessments Standard Setting 2019, Final Technical Report, Data Recognition Corporation for NC DPI, Table 1. Grade 8 sums to 73% because roughly 27% of 8th graders take the NC Math 1 assessment instead and are counted there. Achievement standards were approved by the State Board of Education on 8 August 2019.

So the number was known. On the NC Math 1 assessment, the recommended cut scores put 8% of students at Level 5, and on the grade 7 test, 13%. The document was prepared for the Department, the workshop was run with the Department, and the State Board approved the standards on 8 August 2019.

Now put the dates side by side. The General Assembly ratified Senate Bill 500 on 28 June 2019, amending the advanced math statute and changing “a level five” to “the highest level”. The bill was approved by the Governor on 11 July 2019, the final day of the standard setting workshop. Five weeks later the State Board adopted the cut scores that shrank the highest level to a small fraction of what it had been. The legislature was editing the entitlement in the same fortnight the Department was resizing the group entitled to it, and the edit made the entitlement track the new number automatically. Nobody had to decide that fewer students should be in advanced math. It happened as a side effect of two correct-looking decisions made three weeks and one building apart.

Why almost nobody noticed

A statewide entitlement shrank by 89% and there was no argument about it. Not in the press, not from districts, not from the schools whose students lost the guarantee. Asked directly whether they were aware that the definition of Level 5 had changed underneath them, school administrators say they were not.

They are not being careless. Level 5 is not on the page they read.

The school report card reports no Level 5 figure at all. Not at Athens Drive High, not at Apex Middle, not at Carnage Middle. Schools are reported in two bands: Grade Level Proficient, meaning Levels 3 through 5, and Career and College Ready, meaning Levels 4 and 5. Level 5 sits inside both of those and is separable from neither. The words appear once on each school's page, in the help text that defines what the achievement levels mean, and nowhere in anything the page reports.

Middle schools do not report Math 1 at all. The grade the entitlement turns on, and the course it entitles a student to, are folded into a single figure headed “Math Performance”. The page does link out to the Math 1 achievement level descriptors, so a reader can learn exactly what Level 5 means, and then find no Level 5 anywhere on the page.

Only the district view breaks the levels out, and there Level 5 has its own colour in the key and no bar beside it.

And this is not a question of looking at the wrong year. Ask the same school's report card for 2018 or 2019, the years either side of the change, and it renders exactly as this year does: no Level 5, no Level 4, the same two bands. Whatever those pages showed at the time, what they show now is what every other year shows. Carnage Middle, on the state's own site, either side of the change and today: 2017‑18 (opens in new tab), 2018‑19 (opens in new tab), 2024‑25 (opens in new tab).

And in the data files, any figure below 5% is suppressed. From 2018‑19 onward the Level 5 rate has to be recovered by subtracting Level 4 from the combined college-and-career-ready figure, one year and one file at a time. That is how every Level 5 count on this site after 2017‑18 was produced.

Each of those decisions is defensible on its own. Two bands are easier for a parent to read than five categories. Suppression protects small groups. Middle schools do mostly teach grade-level mathematics. Together they mean that the single number now deciding which North Carolina children are entitled to advanced mathematics does not appear on any page a parent, a teacher or a principal would ever open.

Source: NC School Report Cards, retrieved 14 August 2026 from ncreports.ondemand.sas.com, the host these captures were printed from. The report card's current home, linked from NC DPI, is ncfvapublicprod.ondemand.sas.com (opens in new tab), where any school and year can be looked up. Archived copies of all four pages are in the document archive: Apex Middle (opens in new tab), Carnage Middle (opens in new tab), Athens Drive High (opens in new tab) and Wake County Schools (opens in new tab). The report card is a live dashboard and is rebuilt each year, so the archived copies are printed captures of what it showed on that date.