North Carolina Publishes 2024-25 School Report Cards; Letter-Grade Formula Draws Renewed Dispute

The Grades Are In

North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction published its searchable, school-by-school report cards for the 2024-25 academic year on or around July 14-15, 2026, assigning every public school a letter grade from A to F and flagging a set of districts and schools as "low-performing," including in high school biology and NC Math 1 ^[1][4]. The report cards, required annually under state law, translate testing and accountability data that DPI and the State Board of Education had formally released back on September 3, 2025 ^[2][3]. State officials framed the release around genuine progress: roughly 55% of students passed state exams, up from 54.2% the year before, while the four-year graduation rate climbed to 87.7%, a 10-year high, and the number of schools labeled low-performing dropped by 49 ^[2][3]. State Superintendent Mo Green praised students and teachers for the gains while cautioning that "our students are more than test scores" ^[2].

What Isn't in Dispute

Several facts here are simply not contested by anyone. North Carolina grades every public school on a 15-point scale, where an A requires a composite score of 85 to 100 and an F falls at 39 or below, and that composite is calculated as 80% raw student achievement and 20% academic growth for most schools ^[3][5][6]. The legislature that built this formula in 2013 was Republican-led, and it remains the law today ^[6][8].

The 2024-25 numbers themselves are also agreed upon: about 55% of students passed state exams, still below the pre-pandemic rate of 58.8% recorded in 2018-19, and the graduation rate's climb to 87.7% is the highest in at least a decade ^[2][3][11]. The number of low-performing schools fell by 49 while low-performing districts held steady at 23 ^[2]. And there is a data-quality wrinkle nobody disputes: 2024-25 was the first year biology and grade 5/8 science tests were aligned to new state content standards, so DPI itself warns those results should not be compared to prior years — a caveat that complicates any read on whether flagged districts are sliding backward in science ^[1][11]. NC Math 1 was one of only three assessments, alongside third-grade reading and English II, to decline year over year ^[1].

The Formula Underneath the Fight

The recurring argument over these report cards traces back to a single design choice: because 80% of a school's grade rests on raw proficiency rather than growth, and proficiency tracks closely with family income, the letter grades will keep mirroring school poverty levels regardless of how much a school's students are actually improving — unless or until the legislature changes that weighting ^[6][7]. That mechanical link is not itself in dispute; historical data shows that in 2018-19, roughly 95% of D and F schools served high-poverty populations ^[7][8].

That structural fact matters because the grades are not just descriptive — they are leverage. Low grades supply the evidence base for school-choice, charter-expansion, and district-takeover policy debates, which means the formula's weighting is a genuine policy prize rather than a settled technical detail, and whoever controls that metric shapes those downstream fights ^[8][9]. Layered on top of that is this year's standards reset: because science and biology tests were rebuilt around new content standards, any story told about this year's biology numbers, whether it's decline or improvement, rests on a baseline that officially cannot be compared to the past, giving every side room to read the same numbers differently ^[1][11].

How Each Side Reads the Same Data

DPI and Superintendent Green, a Democrat overseeing a grading system built by Republican legislators, point to steady, multi-year recovery — higher scores on 12 of 15 tests, a record graduation rate, and 49 fewer low-performing schools — as evidence that instructional recovery is real, while urging the public not to reduce any school to a single letter ^[2][3]. That framing lets the agency claim credit for improvement under its watch while distancing itself from a grading formula its leadership has publicly criticized as too closely tied to poverty ^[2][6].

Republican legislators and conservative policy voices, including Carolina Journal and the John Locke Foundation, defend the current formula as honest, plain-language transparency that lets parents and taxpayers judge and hold schools accountable, pointing to remaining proficiency gaps, such as only about 54% of eighth-graders reading at grade level, as reasons the bar on raw achievement should not be lowered ^[11]. Having authored the 2013 law, Republicans have a direct stake in defending the system, and they generally favor accountability measures that support school choice and charter growth over formula changes that would soften low grades ^[8][9].

Educators, Democrats, and equity-focused advocacy groups, including the NC Justice Center, Public Schools First NC, and the Public School Forum, argue that the 80/20 weighting effectively turns the grade into a proxy for family income and race, since roughly 95% of D/F schools serve high-poverty student populations, and they favor raising the growth weighting to 50% or moving to a multi-measure dashboard instead of a single grade ^[7][8]. Their stated aim is to protect high-poverty and majority non-white schools from a label they say drives away families and staff and to shift the conversation toward funding and support rather than judgment ^[7][8]. Meanwhile, local parents, students, and school boards mostly want a clear, accurate read on their own school, including context like the science-standards reset, so they can make enrollment and advocacy decisions without over-reading a single subject's flagged status ^[1][4].

How the Coverage Split

DPI's own press release led exclusively with positive metrics and the superintendent's "more than test scores" framing, leaving the poverty-correlation critique and the Math 1 decline largely out of the foreground ^[3]. EducationNC took a neutral, explainer approach, laying out the numbers, the 80/20 formula, and the new-standards caveat side by side without rendering a verdict ^[2]. Carolina Journal, aligned with the John Locke Foundation, accepted the A-F grades as valid and useful, emphasizing absolute proficiency shortfalls like the 54% eighth-grade reading figure as justification for continued accountability, while not engaging the argument that the formula tracks poverty ^[5]. The NC Justice Center, by contrast, headlined its analysis as a "Legislative Tool for Stigmatizing Non-White Schools," language that recasts the data release itself as an act of harm and centers the poverty and race correlation as the real story ^[8]. WRAL's local coverage split the difference, framing its piece around school leaders searching for a way to measure performance "without socioeconomic bias," adopting critics' premise in the headline while still reporting multiple viewpoints in the body ^[6]. Local television outlets like WECT and WFMY News 2 mostly skipped the policy fight altogether, framing their coverage as a service to parents looking up how their own child's school performed ^[1][4].