North Carolina lawmakers are interested in funding more teacher leadership roles, improving math skills among young students and continuing to monitor the impacts of stricter cellphone policies on students.
A legislative education oversight committee heard presentations Tuesday from several education leaders in the state.
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Math standards: The joint legislative education oversight committee heard from state Department of Public Instruction leaders about their proposed changes to math standards — changes that emphasize real-world application of math and that would replace Math 3 and Math 4 with a suite of classes that students could choose from. The State Board of Education is responsible for approving the standards.
The changes are part of a national movement to revise standards in a similar way, as education leaders say too many students remain uninterested in and disconnected from math.
“Standards are only the starting point,” Dr. Kristi Day, the director of DPI’S Office of Academic Standards, told lawmakers Tuesday. “… They matter when they translate into meaningful learning experiences for students,”
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, state data shows students’ math performance has improved gradually across grades 3 through high school. Education leaders say more acceleration is needed.
“We are not where we want to be, but progress is happening,” Day said.
Lawmakers pressed education leaders about what procedures need to be in place for education leaders to meet their goals more quickly.
“We're working on having … more consistency of materials, so that there's a good blend of technology instructional materials that may be actually things in your hands as well, and so trying to create that balance,” Stacy Wilson, North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s chief academic officer, told lawmakers.
DPI issued its first draft of the standards in late 2025, after surveying and meeting with hundreds of educators and researchers across the state. The department plans to present an outline of ideas for a second draft of the standards — out of three planned drafts — on Wednesday.
Teacher leadership: The committee also heard from BEST NC, a private, nonprofit education policy group, about teacher leadership initiatives. Several favored the idea of increasing funding for the advanced teaching roles program.
Advanced teaching roles, piloted by the General Assembly years ago, remains a popular way for schools to promote teachers and pay them more, but keeping them in the classroom and involved in instruction. The teachers coach fellow teachers, co-teach in every classroom they oversee, and work on improving school instruction. When the program is fully implemented, they earn $21,000 in addition to their scheduled salary.
“I can't think of a better way to improve teacher experience, but also student outcomes,” BEST NC Chief Executive Brenda Berg told lawmakers. Her group has found higher-than-average academic gains at schools that have at least some form of the program, with far higher gains at schools that have fully implemented it. Teachers at those schools feel better trained to teach and better supported, Berg said.
Full implementation of the program, in which 20% of a school’s teachers are in the advanced role, would cost $200 million more per year. Simply clearing the current waitlist and paying teacher leaders the extra salary would cost $43.3 million.
“I would like to see us move toward fully funding this,” said Sen. Kevin Corbin, R-Macon, who called the program a “win-win” for its academic gains and benefits to teachers. Corbin is chairman of the Senate’s Education/Higher Education and Appropriations on Education/Higher Education committees.
The legislature now provides about $10.9 million for the program, but far less than school district interest. BEST NC has long supported the program, contending teachers lack career opportunities and professional support. Some research out of North Carolina State University's Friday Institute has found positive effects of the program on student achievement.
The program is also seen as a teacher retention and training tool as schools struggle to hire teachers, average North Carolina teacher pay ranks toward the bottom nationally, and more teachers are coming from nontraditional pathways, without education degrees.
Rep. Heather Rhyne, R-Lincoln, said the program has been important in her local school district, where she served on the board. She favored considering funding the program to fix a “flawed system” and fundamentally change it.
In schools that don’t have assistant principals, employees frequently report directly to the principal. That means a principal oversees dozens of direct reports. But advanced teaching roles allow teachers to directly report to teacher leaders, shifting some responsibility away from principals and making schools’ organizational structures more like those of a typical organization, Berg said.
Cellphone use: Lawmakers also heard from a researcher who recently co-published a study showing how often students were using their cellphones in school before renewed efforts to keep the devices out of students' hands during class. They were on their phones for about a third of the day, researchers found.
On Tuesday, Kaitlyn Burnell, director of research at the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development, presented the study and noted some issues with firewalls and other devices, as well.
Students have found ways around schools’ firewalls banning access to certain websites, Burnell said. They’re also reporting that school-issued devices — namely, laptops — are distracting, particularly when being used in a distracting way by another student in eyesight.
Some lawmakers on Tuesday cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from a small sample size but expressed interest in the findings.
Corbin, the senator from Macon, said he’s heard from school leaders who want even stricter cellphone policies than what lawmakers outlined in the legislation last year. They think schools are making too many exceptions to the rules, such as allowing students to access their phones during homeroom or lunchtime.
“That’s very difficult to police when you start that,” Corbin said.
The new state law requiring school boards to impose wireless device restrictions allows some exceptions for teacher-permitted academic use or for use during lunch or passing periods in high schools. Policies don’t have to allow for use during passing periods or lunch.
WRAL reported last year that the vast majority of schools have for years reported having rules restricting cellphone use but that some approaches were more effective than others.
In the team’s second wave of research, they’ll dive more into how cellphone restrictions affect bullying. Other research indicates a drop in cyberbullying, though not a complete elimination of it, Burnell said.
Credentials: The committee also received an update on the state's progress toward more residents earning some kind of career or college credential. The state is about at its 2030 goal of 85% of residents having a credential that’s aligned with workforce needs, with 84% having them in myFutureNC’s 2026 report. But there’s progress to be made in other areas, the report notes. Those include improving standardized test scores, ACT scores and the percentage of high school students completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, to help make college more affordable.