INNOVATOR: News about high school innovation

North Carolina's innovative high schools posted notable gains in performance on the state's standardized exams in 2009-10, according to results released last week by the Department of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education.

Among the break-the-mold schools showing the greatest progress were a number of small schools that have been created during the last five years on the campuses of former large comprehensive high schools with high rates of poverty and low achievement. Even allowing for the change this year by the state in counting retests for the first time in passing rates, the combined gains by students in the small "redesigned" high schools outpaced average state gains on five of six key end-of-course tests.

Overall, the 27 redesigned high schools saw a combined increase of 13.5 points on the percentage of all tests passed -- from 58.7 percent to 72.2 percent -- compared to a gain of 9.5 percentage points in the passing rate of all the tests taken in the state -- from 71.4 percent in 2008-09 to 80.5 percent in 2009-10.

The same kind of progress was found also with specific exams, including Algebra I, English I, Civics and Economics, Biology and U.S. History. On all five exams, which students are required to pass for a diploma, gains by innovative high schools exceeded the state's gains.

Other highlights from the test results and the state's ABCs of Public Education accountability system included these:

Nearly two thirds all NCNSP innovative high schools (64 percent) met the academic growth projected by the state, while one in three (33 percent) exceeded their expected growth targets and were deemed to have achieved high growth. In 2007-08, 54.5 percent of NCNSP schools met their targets, with 20.2 percent exceeding them.
The median performance composite, which includes the results of all state End-of-Course exams, was 87.3 percent for NCNSP schools in 2009-10, up from 76.2 percent in 2008-09 and 72.1 percent in 2007-08. The median for traditional 9-12 schools was 80.3 percent, up from 71.2 percent in 2008-09.
About seven of every 10 innovative high schools (71.7 percent) had a performance composite greater than 80 percent, compared to 41.5 percent of comparison schools and 50.9 percent of all traditional 9-12 high schools.
Nine of 10 innovative high schools that were open in 2008-09 improved their performance composites in 2009-10, and two thirds of them (77.4 percent) exceeded the performance composites of their comparison schools.
Six of 106 innovative schools (5.7 percent) had performance composites less than 60 percent, down significantly from 22 percent of schools in 2008-09.
For the second consecutive year, the gains for redesigned high schools were among the most significant among North Carolina's innovative high schools. The percentage of the 27 schools open in 2009-10 and meeting their targets for expected student gains increased from 30 percent in 2008-09 to 66.7 percent in 2009-10. The median performance composite for the 27 schools increased from 62.5 percent in 2008-09 to 72.5 percent this past year. One third of the schools also met their targets for high growth, a significant increase from the 9.3 percent of the redesigned schools that did so in 2008-09.