Old school with the education reforms passed the last several years, the state is on the right track for improvement in reading and math test scores.

• Author: Hood, John
• Position: Free & Clear

During the 1990s, North Carolina posted some of the largest gains in standardized-test scores in the nation. Politicians of both parties claimed credit for the good news. To some extent, they deserved it. In the early 1980s, Democratic legislators and Gov. Jim Hunt set minimum standards across the state's school districts for academic programs and state funding. Nearly a decade later, Republican Gov. Jim Martin and a coalition of Democratic and Republican lawmakers passed legislation to allow more local flexibility and control. A few years after that, in the mid-1990s, Hunt was back in office and cooperated with a Democratic Senate and Republican House to enact additional reforms, including a new testing program.

Many of these policies could plausibly have been the cause of North Carolina's significant increases in reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an independent set of exams for state samples of public-school students in the fourth and eighth grades. Because other states pursuing different school reforms also experienced gains during the '90s, you can't attribute all of North Carolina's improvements to public policies. No doubt the influx of new residents from high-performing states served to boost the average test scores. There were also policies put into effect during the mid- to late '90s--such as Smart Start, which offers care and education for qualifying children younger than 6-- that couldn't possibly have affected the trend, though politicians have continued to claim otherwise.

Here's the point: Around the turn of the 21st century, our state's educational progress began to flatten out. From 2003 to 2013, math scores for eighth-graders rose just four points while the national average rose seven. In eighth-grade reading, North Carolina made no statistically significant gain over the decade. In neither case did it rank anywhere close to the most-improved states. Some of those may surprise you, by the way. In math, the largest improvement in NAEP scores was the District of Columbia's 22-point gain, followed by Hawaii (16), New Jersey (15), Massachusetts (14), Arkansas (12), Rhode Island (12), Texas (11), Pennsylvania (11), Mississippi (10) and Nevada (10). In reading, Maryland (up 12 points), California (10), Nevada (nine), D.C. (nine), Hawaii (nine), New Jersey (nine), Florida (nine), Pennsylvania (eight), Washington (eight) and Tennessee (seven) were the top gainers.

There is no obvious...