The top reported proficiency rate is 55% in Science. The lowest is 44% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Carroll Middle
Carroll Middle is a regular public middle school serving grades six through eight in Raleigh, located on Six Forks Road in the northern part of the city. The school draws an enrollment of roughly nine hundred students, drawn from across Wake County's diverse student population.
About three in five students at Carroll qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting a working-class and lower-income student base. Racially and ethnically, the school is balanced: about a third of students are Black, another third are White, and about a quarter are Hispanic, with small shares of Asian students and students of multiple racial backgrounds. The school serves the neighborhoods feeding that boundary, not a magnet or choice program.
The most recent state testing data, from 2025, shows proficiency rates below the midpoint across math and English language arts. In math, roughly four in ten students scored at proficient or above; in ELA, the rate was similar. Science testing included only a subset of students, but proficiency there was notably higher, at about five in ten, though the state changed the science assessment in 2025 so that result sits on a different scale than prior years and trends cannot be read with certainty.
The gap between current performance and where many families would want to see it is real and worth naming plainly. A parent evaluating Carroll may want to look further into what supports the school has in place for students who are not yet proficient, whether any acceleration or intervention programs operate, and how the school identifies and serves advanced learners. Since neither special education enrollment rates nor English learner counts appear in the available data, a parent might also ask the school directly what share of students receive those services and how Carroll integrates them into regular classrooms and content instruction.
Carroll sits in Raleigh proper, not in a growing suburb. The city itself is in the midst of major new mixed-use development—downtown and Midtown (North Hills) are undergoing transformation with new residential and office construction, and the regional economy is anchored by NC State University, technology companies, healthcare systems like WakeMed, and the Research Triangle Park corridor. Housing values in the area are significant and have held steady; rents are moderate relative to the national benchmark. The broader economic context is stable, with low unemployment and a tech-informed job base.
Wake County Schools as a district is managing rapid growth through large-scale reassignments every year or two, opening new schools in high-growth areas, and operating both traditional and year-round calendars in different parts of the county. Carroll operates on a traditional calendar. The district has also made a district-wide shift to Science of Reading pedagogy in elementary grades and adopted a new cellphone policy requiring middle school students to store devices away all day—changes that shape the daily texture of school life. A major school construction bond passed in 2022, bringing new facilities and renovations to the county over the coming years, though Carroll itself does not appear among the named new or heavily renovated schools in that pipeline.
The school's setting is car-dependent suburban-to-urban Raleigh, not a walkable downtown or isolated rural area. For families considering Carroll, the key questions are usually whether the academic supports and pace fit their child's needs, whether the school's climate and peer group feel like the right fit, and whether reassignment risk over the next few years might move their child elsewhere—a real consideration given how frequently Wake reorganizes boundaries.
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