A majority of members on North Carolina's school accountability task force now favor doing away with the state's A-F letter grades for public schools, according to a meeting report from a gathering in Raleigh on October 15. The panel did not take a formal vote, and plenty of disagreement remains over what, if anything, should replace the grading system that has been written into state law since 2013.
The shift in sentiment comes as the task force, created in October 2025, works through an effort to redesign how North Carolina judges its public schools, as reported by Carolina Journal. Currently, schools are assigned letter grades based on student achievement scores weighted 80%, and on students' academic growth, weighted 20%, according to ednc.org. Any change to that formula would require approval from the General Assembly, and bills to revise the grading formula have failed in past legislative sessions, per the Carolina Journal report.
Facilitators from the Center for Assessment, the task force's technical partner, presented three options at the October meeting: keep A-F grades as they are, switch to alternative labels, or report scores without any public rating at all. Reactions split sharply along the table. John Hood, president of the John William Pope Foundation and a board member of the John Locke Foundation — which publishes Carolina Journal — argued the state should retain letter grades, predicting that someone could build an A-F system for every North Carolina school in about a week, maybe even a day. He ranked keeping A-F grades first among the three options and labeled the alternative-label approach the worst, calling it something that could appear evasive.
Students and Superintendents Push Back on Letters
Not everyone on the panel agrees with Hood. Ben Dombroski, a student member of the task force who also serves on the state superintendent's student advisory council, opposed keeping A-F grades altogether. Tanya Turner, superintendent of Perquimans County Schools, said plainly that A-F grading should end. Alan Duncan, vice chair of the State Board of Education, said the lettering system has been somewhat harmful to accountability reports.
Others see a middle ground. Paul Kinsey, director of testing and accountability at Dare County Schools, said he had no problem reporting a letter grade alongside other school numbers. The idea of combining everything into one tidy score is itself contested — task force members did not agree on whether measures should be combined into a single figure at all. A profile system, which would present multiple indicators of success rather than one overall grade, drew support among members, though some worried it could confuse parents and invite pushback, according to ednc.org.
Under one version of that approach described in the meeting report, preferred school reports would show results on each individual measure along with the state's weight for each one, providing no single overall rating. North Carolina already reports graduation rates as plain numbers rather than letters, a precedent some members have pointed to. Federal law separately requires the state to designate certain schools for extra support, regardless of what labeling system state leaders choose.
Fighting Over the Weights
Even setting aside the letter-grade question, the task force is wrestling with how much weight growth versus achievement should carry. Task force members generally agreed in September that growth should count for more, and elementary and middle school achievement weighting ranged from 40% to 55% in discussions, with growth weighting ranging from 35% to 50%. English Learner progress weighting ranged from 5% to 10% for elementary and middle schools.
An outside working group recommended at least 50% growth weighting for elementary and middle schools. Hood himself assigned a 70% weighting to growth, and two other task force members also weighted growth above achievement. Elena Ashburn, Governor Josh Stein's senior adviser for education, took the opposite position, favoring achievement over growth. The Department of Public Instruction will use the range of proposed weightings to run models for the State Board to review.
A Broader Debate the Task Force Discussed
The task force discussed eight potential indicators in earlier sessions: growth, achievement, postsecondary readiness, student engagement, school climate, nonacademic supports for students, English Learner progress, and cohort graduation rate, per ednc.org. Members have expressed concern that the current compensatory index reduces schools to a single grade, which can have a negative effect on schools, districts, teachers and students. The panel includes Board members, legislators, county commissioners, business leaders, district leaders, teachers, parents and students, reflecting the breadth of stakeholders the state is trying to satisfy.
North Carolina would not be alone in rethinking a single-letter approach. Six states currently use A-F ratings for school performance, according to the Education Commission of the States, while most states instead rely on descriptive ratings, index ratings or federal tiers of support. Some states skip an overall score entirely and report separate scores for each indicator, an approach the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment has noted can avoid the way school grades, like student grades, obscure more meaning than they convey, per nciea.org.
Timeline Toward a Decision
A draft report is expected to go to task force members by December 1, with the group scheduled to meet for the last time this year on December 17. From there, the task force's recommendations are set to go to the State Board of Education in early 2027, and ultimately to lawmakers, since any changes to school letter grades require General Assembly approval. Michael Maher, chief accountability officer at the Department of Public Instruction, has been among the officials tracking the process.
The debate arrives against a backdrop of improving numbers under the current system. Schools earning D or F grades accounted for 23% of schools in preliminary results this year, continuing a decline reported at 23%, down from 31% the previous year, according to Spectrum News 1. North Carolina's four-year graduation rate also hit a record 88.8%, and students posted broad gains across nearly all grades, subjects and student groups on 2026 state exams, with the share scoring at least level 4 out of 5 rising to 37.5% from 34.7%, per WUNC's reporting. Whether those gains will still be measured with a letter grade is now very much an open question in Raleigh.
