But the county’s seventh-graders dramatically improved on a state writing test.

Teachers and principals learned Tuesday of how schools fared in writing tests taken in March and end-of-grade and end-of-course tests taken in May. Results for Kannapolis City Schools were not available.

Among Rowan County’s six high schools, East and Salisbury students were tops in proficiency in four courses each. East has the highest percentage of students mastering economic, legal and political systems; chemistry; physics; and physical science.

Salisbury had the highest percentage of mastery — or proficiency — for algebra I and II, biology and English.

South Rowan High School led in U.S. history and geometry.

Matthew Sullivan, who leads curriculum for the county’s six high schools, said students scored poorest overall in English and U.S. history. In coming weeks, he plans to organize time for teachers to improve how classes are taught in those subjects.

“We’ll have to be open to new ideas and open to sharing,” Sullivan said.

The end-of-course exams for sophomore English students are hard for teachers to emphasize because some students realize that they don’t count toward their own final grade. The percent considered proficient in the course dropped from 48 to 44 percent this year.

Michelle Rinehardt-Cline, who teaches three sophomore English courses at Salisbury High, said her school benefits from having smaller class sizes and six periods a day, rather than the block schedule at most of the county’s high schools. She had about 20 students per class last year.

“We have really small class sizes,” she said. “I can spend a lot more time individually with them. We have more time to do one-on-one conferences… Writing is so much more of a progression, and 90 days (in the block schedule) doesn’t seem like long enough to do it.”

Salisbury High also allows students to miss one elective course per week to spend more time on core curriculum, said Joanne Blackmun, another English teacher there. “Our emphasis on writing is really across the curriculum,” Blackmun said.

High school students throughout the county performed worst in U.S. history, results show. The percent proficient this year in the subject was just 38.5 percent.

Sullivan said U.S. history is difficult to teach because of the tremendous amount of information it covers. He said classes need to spend more time on the 20th century because it is a large part of the tests.

Jim Pope is a U.S. history teacher at South Rowan High School, where students scored highest among Rowan County’s high schools in that subject. Tuesday afternoon, he spent time at Henderson Independent, the county’s alternative high school, helping teachers there prepare for next year.

“You’ve got to shake them up,” Pope said. “You’ve got to bring it alive. You can’t just let it be a dead subject.”

“We’ve fought Bunker Hill in the bleachers. We might talk Emerson and Thoreau under a shade tree. You tap into their wealth, their tools.”

Seventh-graders dramatically improved on writing tests, performing far higher than the state average. “Their gains from last year were just tremendous,” said Sharon Deal, the curriculum coordinator for the county’s six middle schools.

But fourth-grade writing tests remained flat as the state improved.

“We’re going to align our resources and pull our teachers and teacher assistants together for some staff development, so we all have an understanding of what our goal is,” said Sarah Hensley, coordinator of elementary education. “That’s something that hasn’t been done before throughout the school system. We really haven’t spent time on writing like we should.”

The state will use the results to compile its ABCs of Public Education, the program that rates every school in the state. The program also determines which schools get teacher bonuses and recognition — and which get coaching and admonition. Those announcements come on Aug. 3.

Colby Cochran, who oversees testing throughout the school system, said the ABCs program puts enormous stress on schools and teachers to emphasize material in the end-of-grade and end-of-course tests.

“In one sense, it’s almost criminal,” he said. “You’ve got to let children be children.”

Cochran says the ABCs program also puts stress on him and other administrators. Gathering data from more than 20,000 students in the county’s 30 schools takes time. Rowan-Salisbury has the 13th largest student body among the state’s 117 school systems. And some tests come in three different versions — to better assess how thoroughly the curriculum is taught.