CCPS Board hears mixed academic news: Strong state rankings, but a third straight missed reading target

The Carroll County Board of Education heard mixed news on academic performance at its Aug. 12 meeting. The district posted some of the strongest scores in Maryland on last year's state assessment, even as the district's own data show it has missed its third-grade reading target for three years running and that the proficiency gap for students with disabilities has widened.

Superintendent Cynthia McCabe introduced the board's annual report on pillar one of the district's strategic plan, academic achievement, turning the floor over to Steve Wernick, director of curriculum and instruction, and his team: Dr. Kendra Hart, supervisor of Title I, testing and school performance, and Jennifer Youngworth, data management and reporting coordinator.

Hart told the board Carroll ranked second among Maryland's 24 school systems in combined English language arts proficiency on the 2025-26 Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program, at 67.5%, up 1 percentage point from the prior year and behind only Worcester County at 69.9%. In math, Carroll ranked third, at 41.9% proficient, up 1.4 points, behind Worcester County (48.8%) and Howard County (42.1%). Youngworth reported Carroll ranked second in combined grade 5 and grade 8 science proficiency, at 45.4%, behind Howard at 45.9%.

The margins over the state averages are wide. Statewide ELA proficiency was 51.7%, and math was 27.1%, according to a July 28 Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) release cited in the presentation. Both rose slightly from the year before, ELA from 50.8% and math from 26.5%. Carroll students outperformed the state average on every ELA and math assessment given.

ELA proficiency rose in five of seven grades tested, with the biggest gain in grade 8 (up 4 points to 68%) and the primary drop in grade 3 (down 3 points to 62%, alongside a 1-point dip in grade 6 to 67%).

Math was more mixed: Algebra I and grade 7 gained, while grades 3, 4 and 8 slipped slightly. Grade 8 math was the district's weakest result at 14% proficient, though only 985 students took it — most eighth graders now take Algebra I instead.

Science produced the year's largest gains. Grade 5 science rose 8 points to 44% and grade 8 rose 3 points to 47%, both three-year highs. Statewide, grade 8 science fell half a point over the same period. Carroll's high school life science assessment climbed to 70% proficient, up from 49% two years earlier, and government held at 71%.

Students qualifying for free and reduced-price meals outperformed the state average on every ELA, math and science assessment, and ranked second or third statewide on several. Black/African American students in Carroll ranked first in the state on all seven ELA assessments, with proficiency ranging from 55.3% to 79.6%, and first in four of seven math assessments.

The presentation also highlighted 16-point proficiency jumps for American Indian or Alaska Native students in math and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander students in ELA. Both groups had fewer than 40 test takers districtwide, meaning a handful of students can move those figures sharply, and the state suppressed their rankings as potentially identifiable.

Nicholas Shockney, assistant superintendent of instruction, walked the board through its own strategic plan scorecard, which tells a harder story than the state rankings.

The plan's first priority is third-grade reading. Carroll set out in 2023 to raise grade 3 ELA proficiency from a baseline of 62.8% to 80% by 2027. Three years in, the district has missed the target every year, and the number has gone down rather than up: 61% in year one, 65% in year two and 62% in 2025-26, against a year-three target of 75%.

The subgroup lines are further from their goals. None of the three — special education, multilingual learners or students experiencing economic disadvantage — has met a target since 2024, and multilingual learners are the only one of the three to have hit a target at all, briefly, in year one.

Algebra I has gone better: the district has met its overall target all three years, reaching 35% proficient last year against a 40%-by-2027 goal. But it missed the mark for every subgroup in years two and three.

The one figure far ahead of plan is college and career readiness (CCR), with 74% of students meeting the standard by the end of 10th grade, against a 35% target. Shockney flagged the caveat himself, and the district's own slide repeats it: MSDE has revised the CCR standard every year of the strategic plan, with eligibility criteria expanding over time, so the numbers are not comparable year to year. "Not a situation where you can necessarily compare one year to the other," he said.

Shockney said the district has adjusted elementary instruction to align with the science of reading and expects better results under the new assessment, arguing MCAP "arguably is not a science of reading-aligned assessment."

Carroll's strong overall standing does not extend to students with disabilities, and the district's own data show the gap widening.

In ELA, students with disabilities in Carroll were below the state average on four of seven assessments, and the district's statewide rank for that group ranged from sixth to 14th, compared with second overall. Proficiency fell year over year in six of the seven ELA assessments.

In science, where Carroll ranks second in the state overall, students with disabilities ranked 11th in grade 5 and 13th in grade 8, at 6.4% and 5.9% proficient, both below the state average and, in grade 8, down from the prior year. The presentation's own summary listed students with disabilities among the groups whose ELA proficiency decreased.

Asked by Board President Steve Whisler how the district compares with its pre-pandemic performance, Shockney said Carroll considers itself recovered and moving forward in most areas, but singled out students with disabilities. "There's some gaps emerging there," Shockney said, describing the response as individualized rather than uniform. "It's hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all approach in special education. They just don't exist. If they did, we'd all do it."

Whisler said he had compared Carroll's combined proficiency to 2021 using figures he looked up during the meeting, finding ELA up from about 56% to 68% and math from about 35% to 42%. He volunteered that he had used ChatGPT to do it, and Westminster Wire has not verified his numbers.

Hart said 2025-26 was the final year of MCAP. Maryland moves to the Maryland System of Testing Academic Readiness, or MSTAR, over a two-year transition beginning this school year: grades 3-8 ELA and math switch in 2026-27, with high school ELA and math, science and social studies following in 2027-28.

State materials describe MSTAR as a shorter, multi-stage adaptive test with improved precision and an enhanced parent portal. Hart said staff have been trained on the platform but not yet on the assessments themselves, and McCabe cautioned that results will arrive later than usual, given the range-finding process for a new test.

Board member Dr. Greg Malveaux asked whether switching away from MCAP put Carroll's strong relative performance at risk. Instructional leadership emphasized that the district welcomes a new assessment regardless, describing CCPS as "in the business of continuous improvement" and noting, "It's adaptive, but I don't know if it's adaptive in the best way for kids."

Board Vice President Dr. Patricia S. Dorsey asked what share of elementary teachers have completed Science of Reading training; staff didn't have a figure but said it's now tied to licensure renewal and reported to the state annually. Board member Kristen Zihmer asked whether the science gains could translate to ELA and math, and whether new instructional-time changes risk eroding science and social studies. Wernick said he didn't expect a decline, crediting the gains in part to teaching subjects explicitly rather than in a blended format. McCabe noted the statewide shift toward more ELA and math time originates with the state, not Carroll.

Staff outlined several changes for the coming year, including a new elementary schedule with a dedicated intervention block, a revised timeline for the Benchmark Advance reading curriculum, and a universal reading screener spanning prekindergarten through high school.

A focus on data and academic performance continued as a theme during the public comment period at Wednesday’s board meeting. Three of the four speakers are currently running for seats on the school board.

Sharon Wilhide, a parent of two CCPS students and a board candidate, said state data show a widening gap for students with disabilities: ELA proficiency for that group fell from 16.4% to 14.2% over three years, even as districtwide ELA proficiency rose to 67.5%, with a similar drop in math proficiency. (Westminster Wire could not verify her combined figures against the district's own assessment-by-assessment data, though the direction matches the district's data.) She also said special education staffing has held flat for three years and that the district doesn't publish the IEP service-hour data she said matters more than caseload counts. "If you look at the data, we are failing our special education population," she said. The board did not respond to her figures or characterizations during the meeting.

Shannon Hinkhaus, a former CCPS parent and a candidate for the Board of Education, urged the board to reassess its one-to-one device policy for grades 3 through 8, calling it "not intentional" but "thrust upon us under the duress of COVID." She said she emailed the board a year ago, suggesting a technology committee, and had not seen one formed. She criticized middle schoolers' reliance on the Schoology platform to track assignments, saying "these are basic life skills that we all developed as students and now are being automated," and noted Baltimore County does not use a one-to-one laptop model.

Timothy Redmond, returning from last month's meeting, told the board the plan to give elementary ELA and math more daily time at the expense of dedicated science and social studies periods is "like using a sledgehammer to carve a statue versus a chisel." He argued that the MCAP results the board had just heard undercut the rationale, since Carroll's scores were consistent across grades and above state averages, and noted that science and social studies will become MSTAR-tested subjects in 2027–28. He also pushed back on the staff's explanation of the science gains: "The staff said we can be explicit with our instruction to keep science and social studies scores up high, which my ears hear as teach to the test. But why can't we translate that to math and ELA?"

Lisa Maisano, an engineer, a parent of three CCPS students, and a board candidate, said her children write down less of their math work than she did at their age, get less practice, and that computerized testing makes it hard to learn from mistakes. She said the only way her family has been able to see what a child got wrong is to schedule time with a teacher, because tests are not sent home. "This presents a barrier to learning from your mistakes," she said, suggesting students work problems on paper before transferring answers for grading.