It will take students three to four years to get back on track following learning disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, North Carolina Department of Public Instruction officials said Monday.
DPI leaders told a state House select committee that they believe some literacy efforts are already resulting in positive outcomes and that lessons learned will eventually result in better outcomes beyond just the next few years.
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More than 1 million children whose learning was disrupted during 2020 and 2021 will remain in public schools this fall, where educators will continue to help them learn more and faster than ever before. For many of them, DPI data show, the disruptions slowed their pace of learning or stopped it altogether.
At the same time, they said they must work with colleges and other organizations to reach and help young people who have already left high school or who will do so soon.
“Essentially, we’ll lose most of high schoolers,” said Rep. John Torbett, R-Gaston. Torbett is chairman of the House Select Committee on an Education for North Carolina's Future.
For those still in school, State Superintendent Catherine Truitt is pushing a “competency-based” learning model and “accelerated” learning.
What that means is that in the next few years, or already in many places, schools will use tools that test students’ skills to identify what they’ve mastered and what they haven’t and suggest tailored approaches to helping each student. That will work better, Truitt said, than traditional remedial learning, such as having a student take an entire course over again. In higher education, colleges across the country have dropped remedial coursework requirements altogether, after research has failed to consistently prove that they help.
“If as a state we had already switched to this … then teachers would have known right away where they were, what gaps they have” last fall, as soon as some learning recovery efforts started, Truitt said. Unaddressed, gaps in learning compound and result in even worse performance as students get older, Truitt said.
Jenny Jones Coldren, a mother of three Durham Public Schools students and former teacher in the system worries that testing is not enough.
"I am concerned that we are not doing the things that would help us recover from it," she said, noting that in her years as teacher, she never once worked in a school that was fully staffed.
Coldren thinks having more hands on deck is more important now than ever, and she thinks state politicians need to allot more money to make that possible.
"We’re not keeping our teachers in the classroom, and we’re not hiring enough qualified teachers," she said.
The more than two dozen school systems WRAL News follows have committed about $350 million toward learning recovery through the fall of 2024 — just two years from now. That’s when federal pandemic relief funds for schools expire.
The state is studying, with University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill researchers, how schools are spending the funds and how well certain efforts are working.
Truitt started DPI’s new Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration, directed by Michael Maher, to study the pandemic’s impact on learning and devise a response. Maher and employees from that office have been meeting with school systems, explaining the concept of acceleration to them and encouraging them to use research-based approaches to learning recovery, office Deputy Director Lynne Barbour said.
In the meantime, the state is taking new approaches to deciding how to help students catch up and is in the early stages of implementing a new reading curriculum that they hope will improve literacy skills.
Truitt said Monday early test results show promise for increased literacy coaching and other approaches in reading.
According to DPI, those who were kindergartners in 2021-22 showed 67% reading proficiency, while first graders — whose kindergarten year would have been among those disrupted by in-person learning restrictions — showed 63% reading proficiency this spring. That's a stark increase from the fall for those same students. Then, just 27% of kindergartners and 38% of first graders demonstrated reading proficiency.
The state is also rolling out professional development for teachers on a more phonics-based approached to teaching children how to read. Not all schools have begun the training, which lasts two years and will take teachers dozens of hours to complete.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article cited a state report on reading proficiency for first graders and kindergarteners that has now been corrected. Students showed an improvement this spring, compared to last fall. Pre-pandemic proficiency data was not shared.