There are, inevitably, creative attempts by ABSS school officials to divert attention away from their own failures by blaming others for the school system’s shortcomings. One of the most surprising (discussed above) is by blaming the county commissioners for ABSS’ abysmal academic performance.
We reported last week that the state’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI), determined that the school system is one of the 20 worst-performing school systems in the state – with 20 of 36 schools having Ds and Fs, as determined by DPI.
But there seems to be no limit to the creative excuses that some ABSS teachers and school system defenders put forward to justify the school system’s poor grades, compared to other school systems across the state.
Here are some of our favorites.
The first is that the end-of-grade and end-of-course tests are not a “fair measure” of student knowledge or accomplishment.
The trouble with this excuse is about the same as with most other rationalizations deployed by school system defenders: it attempts to avoid the fact that all other of the 115 school systems across the state have to meet the same criteria.
School officials in those school districts may not like the “standardized testing” approach to assessing individual school (or school system) performance, but they are all measured by the same standard. It allows, as the old saying goes, an apples to apples comparison from county to county and among all 115 of the state’s school systems.
ABSS has too many Hispanic students, whose lack of English skills pull down ABSS grades. This is often quietly uttered, but it has traditionally been one of the standard and yet most inadequate excuses for ABSS’ low testing results.
Trouble is: as with most other attempts at rationalizing poor performance, it avoids the fact that Alamance County is not the only school district in the state with a large, and growing proportion, of Hispanic students.
It also does not explain why Hispanic performance even within ABSS historically varies considerably from school to school. (We haven’t yet delved into the results based on race, but over the years, this has been the situation.)
We also think blaming Hispanic students is a poor excuse inasmuch as part of the school system’s challenge is to teach them English such that they can understand the language, both for purposes of taking the tests and for day-to-day use.
ABSS has so many multi-lingual students, don’t you know, that the school system can’t be expected to compensate for their poor English comprehension. Similar to blaming Hispanic students, school board members have cited recently that there are 53 languages represented among 3,690 “multi-lingual” students in the school system (as of June 2025).
Again, part of the ABSS responsibility is to teach them English.
Also, ABSS is certainly not the only school system in the state where a broad variety of international students are enrolled. It’s not as though Alamance County, alone, is somehow a magnet for students with international backgrounds. We’re quite sure that there are numerous school systems, almost all of whom scored higher than ABSS, with at least as many (or at least as high a proportion of) students whose first language is not English.
How do other school systems with these same kinds of students perform so much better than ABSS?
You just can’t expect students from households in poverty to do well. We’ve seen no information that suggests that the proportion of ABSS students from poverty households is significantly different from other school systems across the state. This is yet another in the long list of feeble pretenses used to camouflage failure.
We had high hopes for the “No Child Left Behind” philosophy of about two decades ago that said neither ethnicity, language barriers, nor economics was to be tolerated as an excuse for accepting poor academic performance in the nation’s public schools.
Now, however, in ABSS these are among the favorite yet wholly unsatisfactory attempts to explain away poor academic performance.
A somewhat related, and newer, excuse is that the state’s recent voucher program is rewarding parents for allowing their students to leave public schools altogether, taking all of the area’s “best students” to private schools. Or that public charter schools are siphoning off some of the best students.
Here once again, we have no reason to expect that the “raid” on public schools, or their attendance at public charter schools, is having any disproportionately greater impact in Alamance County than in any of the other 99 counties across the state, or the other 114 school systems examined by DPI.
Simply put, none of these excuses explains why ABSS had such low performance ratings compared to other school systems across the state.
There are no unique economic, racial, or other demographic factors that would account for ABSS’ very poor performance.
Just by way of illustration, a paper published by the National Institutes of Health in 2023 concluded that the following factors are correlated with K-12 academic performance: strong leadership; effective teaching practices; positive school culture; and parental involvement. Three of those four (all except parental involvement) are squarely within the domain of school systems, including ABSS.
Yet another problem with the recently-released figures: ABSS looks bad even compared to itself. There was only one school in the county (Hawfields Middle) that improved from the previous school year, but nine where performance declined; those nine schools represent a quarter of the entire school system. Four of the nine went from Ds to Fs.
This should be unacceptable; it certainly is to taxpayers, parents, and, most importantly, the students adversely affected by these scores. It should also be to school officials, school board members, and those loudly touting their support for public education.
Why should the public accept lower performance from public education in Alamance County than in most other counties and school systems across the state?
