Part ten
The students did not get worse. The scale did.
If the collapse in Level 5 reflected a real decline in what students know, it should show up somewhere else. It does not. Below, the share of high school Math 1 students scoring Level 5 sits alongside the share of 11th graders meeting the ACT mathematics benchmark, an outside test the State Board does not set.
One line falls off a cliff in a single year. The other drifts inside a five-point band for seven years and ends up near where it started. Pick any district or school to see the same comparison locally.
State of North Carolina
Statewide
Sources: NC DPI School Assessment and Other Indicator Data, subject codes M1
(high school Math 1) and ACTMA (ACT mathematics benchmark). The picker covers 115 districts and
709 schools; 31 of those have no Math 1 figure in any year and 38 have no ACT figure, and small schools
will show gaps wherever counts fall under the suppression threshold. From 2018‑19 on the Level 5
rate is almost always suppressed and recovered as CCR minus Level 4; seven school-year cells came out
slightly below zero from rounding and are shown as 0.0%.
The 2017‑18 end of that comparison is not on quite the same basis as the rest. It was the last year a ninth grader's Math 1 score from middle school was banked into the high school's results, a practice that ended in 2018‑19 and took 33,522 students out of the high school Math 1 count with it. Part of the 89% therefore reflects students leaving this count rather than leaving Level 5. The share cannot be separated out, because banked scores are not reported on their own. The cut score chart carries the fuller note.