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Gaston County, NC (WNN) - The Gaston County Board of Education held its regular meeting on September 21, 2026. A large portion of the meeting focused on the Academic Growth Metrics released by the state in early September. You can see the full meeting where other topics are discussed at the bottom of the article.
Gaston County Schools recently received its state testing and accountability data for the 2025-2026 school year on September 2, 2026. In this, they outlined six goals to reach by 2030:
The 3rd through 8th-grade averages for math proficiency
Gaston County Schools
These growth targets are based on the North Carolina Accountability Model, which all public school systems in NC use. The state uses four scoring levels: NP (not proficient) and levels 3 through 5. 3 means students are proficient for their grade level, and high levels mean they are college or career-ready. In Kelly Cunningham's presentation as the system's Chief Accountability Officer, the focus was on GLP. Third through eighth grade proficiency increased by 3.7% to 53.5%. Math I can occur in either 8th or 9th grade, so these areas have been divided. Math I in middle school showed no change, with a proficiency rate over 95%, while those who took it in high school saw a 10.1% increase to 49% overall proficiency. Math 3, however, saw a small decline of 1.7% to 57.4%; over 95% of senior high school students pass the Math 3 proficiency.
It then moved on to science, which focuses on 5th and 8th-grade testing as well as high school biology. 5th graders' proficiency increased by 8.8% to 64.2%. There was a large rise among 8th graders, from 12.7% to 65.7%. Another large growth area was biology, which rose by 12.3% to 53.5% proficiency.
In reading, the grades 3-8 proficiency rose by 3.9% to 49.2%. The high schools rose by 5.2 percentage points for English II to 57%. This leaves many areas well on their way to the 60% target.
The meeting went on to discuss academic growth through EVAAS (Educational Value Added Assessment System). This measures a student's progress over time by comparing it with that of other students who have taken the same assessment. 47 of the 51 schools exceeded growth targets, representing a 21% increase from the prior year. This leads to school performance rates, which are measured by combining the last two areas. It is weighted 80% towards proficiency, with 20% allocated to EVAAS Growth. You can read more about this in the article here. However, schools rated D or F mean the school did not meet growth. There are only 9 D or F designations, which means another 6 Gaston County Schools are now meeting expected growth. With this, the countywide graduation rate rose to 90.1%, bringing it close to the 91% goal. The area still in need of major growth by these metrics is the English Learners percentage, which grew only 1.3% and now sits at 34.3% overall.
ACT and WorkKeys assessments were up last. ACT scores are considered proficient when students make a composite score of 17 or higher. This area shows a 0.8% growth rate to 46.6%. WorkKeys is a CTE assessment that awards students certificates based on the core tests: math, graphic literacy, and workplace documents. The model focuses on silver certificate students. In this area, there was 1.3% growth, resulting in a total proficiency of 57.2%. These two also get a combined score, which grew by 7.4% to 54.6%, leaving them 7.4% shy of their 62% goal. However, they did note that for this metric, the previous year's ACT score was set at 19 for proficiency, which may cause a slightly inflated number.
While many of the board members accepted these numbers as pure growth, Cherryville Representative Robbie Lovelace had questions over the metrics themselves. She fears that these numbers may reflect curated public relations for the system rather than data integrity. She feels that there has been a major structural intervention by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. She began by addressing the changes to EOG/EOC testing.
“Every student in NC (2025-26) started Stage 1 of their EOG answering a set of initial, baseline questions designated to evaluate general, grade-level knowledge.”
According to Lovelace, stage 2 of testing involved multiple targeted test forms with different difficulty blocks, and she would like to know how this affected the assessment. With this, she would like an explanation on the time of year that students are retested in the 25-26 school year, as compared to previous years. She also wanted to verify which school year the ACT metric changed from a 19 to a 17. Lastly she brought up that the NCDPI biology and science assessments received a new baseline this school year and would like to understand how and if this new baseline is being compared to previous years.
While she had asked these questions to the presenters, she was met with an almost immediate rebuttal from Dr. Morgen Houchard, the Gaston County Superintendent. He believes Lovelace’s information is inaccurate, untrue, and otherwise misinterpreted. Houchard claims the retests were before the end of the school year for the 24-25 and 25-26 school years. Furthermore, he claims the previous year lacked retests in science and biology due to the new standards and the new state assessment. He believes that Gaston County Schools, as a district, did better overall according to NCDPI metrics than the previous year. He also noted that the adaptive testing adjustments occur during the school year, not at the end, and are made by the NCDPI. This means NC EOGs are not adaptive within the testing process according to Houchard. Lastly he claimed that the change from 19 to 17 on the ACT was due to changes in college admissions requirements. It was also noted that the ACT-to-ACT comparison was calculated using 17 scores, while the combined ACT/WorkKeys comparison compared the 19 scores from the previous year to this year's 17 baseline scores.
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