How much of a role should Central Office play in math placement single-subject acceleration decisions at Wake County middle schools?

As Wake's documentation shows, the recommendations from each school-based committee for gifted education are reviewed by Central Office for approval. That drew complaints from the parents of academically gifted parents who are speaking out on the issue of single-subject acceleration.

An example the parents have cited is how Carnage Middle School, one of the GT/AG Basic magnet schools, is no longer being allowed to give its own math exam for placement of sixth-grade students.

UPDATE

According to the parent group, they've been told that Davis Drive Middle School and Martin Middle School also gave school-level math placement exams.

A pair of education bills that passed the state House on Thursday could lead to changes for the Wake County school system and the rest of the state's public schools.

The House unanimously passed H146, which would require all North Carolina elementary school students to learn cursive handwriting and to memorize multiplication tables. The bill goes to the state Senate.

Wake school officials have said they recommend that teachers continue to teach both manuscript and cursive. The expectation in Wake is that students will be able to read cursive handwriting, write in cursive and use technology to produce and publish writing.

Former Wake County Schools Superintendent Tony Tata is saying his goodbyes in this op-ed piece that will appear in Friday's paper.

In the piece, Tata writes about the "progress" and "great strides" that were made during his 20-month tenure as superintendent. He also briefly addresses his firing, noting he wasn't fired with cause and wanted to stay.

"In a relatively short period of time, we significantly raised expectations and proved that all students, regardless of their socioeconomic status or where they attend school, can have strong academic performance," Tata writes. "With the hope that the impact we made will continue for the benefit of our students and with the belief that our community can best proceed with an accounting of progress, I want to share some parting observations."

UPDATE

Click here to view the letter to the editor from board chairman Kevin Hill that will appear in Tuesday's paper in response to Tata's point of view column.

Wake County Schools Superintendent Tony Tata came out with a three-point message at his State of the Schools address on Thursday.

As noted in today's article by Thomas Goldsmith, Tata talked enthusiastically about the gains that Wake made on state exams. But he warned that the results could drop as Wake and the rest of the state switches to the new common core curriculum and tests this school year.

The third prong of Tata's speech was the need "to make a compelling case" for the passage of a school bond issue in 2013.

Former Wake County school board chairman Ron Margiotta is being praised for showing "what conservatives accomplished for Wake schools" in the latest issue of Civitas Review.

The magazine article published by the conservative Civitas Institute praises Margiotta and the former Republican school board majority for various accomplishments in their two-year tenure. The list includes raising the graduation rate, passing the new choice-based student assignment plan, increasing minority placement in Algebra I, lowering student suspensions and not laying off teachers.

"Liberals and their allies like to stereotype conservatives as penny-pinchers who don’t care about students," writes Civitas President Francis DeLuca, the author of the article. "But Ron Margiotta and his conservative allies showed how false that image is."

Wake County Schools Superintendent Tony Tata is touting the efforts that have increased Algebra I enrollment in middle schools.

During a press conference last week, Tata pointed to how 7,232 middle school students took Algebra I in the 2011-12 school year, up 44 percent from 5,027 students the prior year. At the same time, he pointed to how Wake's passing rate on the Algebra I EOC exam (including the scores of high school students) rose 1.1 percentage points to 86.1 percent.

"That’s good news all around," Tata said. "We added 2,000 students. We used the predictive tool (EVAAS) and we increased proficiency. My hat is hat off to our algebra teachers and to our middle and high school principals who really made this a focused effort going forward.”

The SAS EVAAS system that has drawn both praise and criticism in the Wake County school system is about to get an expanded role in the state's education system.

In this press release today, SAS says it's been chosen by the state Department of Public Instruction to help measure students' progress and the effectiveness of teachers, principals and schools. The state will use EVAAS to measure student growth, one of several standards for evaluating many of the nearly 97,000 teachers and more than 5,300 school administrators in North Carolina.

DPI will add the student growth standard to the five currently used to evaluate teachers and seven for principals. Public reports on all standards will be available at school and district levels. But DPI will not publicly release results for individual teachers.

It took eight months, but the Wake County school board was finally able to agree on passing a middle school math placement policy.

As noted in today's article, the policy got over the hump when staff proposed a number of changes to both the policy and the placement criteria to win over the support of Democratic board members Christine Kushner and Keith Sutton to form a majority with Republicans on the issue. Click here for the adopted policy and here for the revised placement criteria.

"We raised our concerns and staff came up with some good suggestions to them that it was enough for me to support the policy," Kushner said.

The Wake County school board may make it possible for teachers to recommend that students be placed in a lower math class than recommended by the data.

During today's school board work session, board member Jim Martin said he's still not a fan of the new middle school math placement policy. But Martin said that if they're going to do it they should modify the wording so that a teacher can recommend a lower placement and not just the parent.

The board didn't object to including that wording. This is an example where school board member John Tedesco's absence today could impact the result.

UPDATE

The revised version of the math placement policy was approved 5-3 with board chairman Kevin Hill and board members Susan Evans and Jim Martin voting no.

Bell schedules, the math placement policy, the school budget and student assignment are some of the items that could draw a lot of attention at today's Wake County school board meeting.

The school board will discuss the bell schedules during the work session and vote during the regular meeting. We'll see today whether any changes are made by staff or the board to what's in the board packet.

Based on past meetings, you can expect people to make one more pitch to change the bell schedules for the schools that would see the sharpest shifts this fall.