(The Center Square) – Amid ongoing calls for more money for public education, including the governor’s unofficial state of emergency for public schools this year, there’s new data on North Carolina K-12 students’ rising performance.
Superintendent Catherine Truitt presented standardized test results and other data to the state Board of Education Wednesday. Students across most grades and subjects continue to recover from significant learning loss during the pandemic, loss many have acknowledged is attributed to government-forced shutdowns and remote learning plans that created disadvantages based on access to highspeed internet.
“We’ve now seen two consecutive years of gains that were greater than any of the several years preceding the pandemic losses, when year-to-year changes in average scores were generally flat, or in some cases, declining,” said Truitt, a first-term Republican. “Students and schools still have a way to go to catch up, but we have good reason to think that progress will continue.
“As more early-grades teachers adopt literacy instruction grounded in the science of reading, students will be stronger readers as they progress through elementary school and into middle school. We’re going to see continued improvement in those test scores and others.”
Pandemic school closures implemented by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, and former Health Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen, prevented students from attending in-person classes for months. Studies show some students fell more than a year behind in some grades and subjects, particularly in elementary and middle school math.
Cohen is now the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
State per-pupil expenditures have increased an average rate of 3% over the last decade, going from $5,361 in 2011-12 to $7,426 in 2021-22. Average daily membership in the state’s public schools has increased at an average rate of 0.37% between 2012 and 2022, according to the Fiscal Research Division.
The General Assembly appropriated a net $11.28 billion for the state’s public schools for 2022-23. North Carolina schools also received $5.8 billion in federal COVID-19 funds to help with learning recovery through September 2024.
Despite the significant investments, the Democratic governor declared an unofficial state of emergency in May saying “the Republican legislature is aiming to choke the life out of public education.”
The unprecedented declines in student test scores for the 2020-21 school year was followed by significant gains during the 2021-22 school year, and that trend continues, Truitt said.
Results for end-of-grade and end-of-course tests for 2022-23 showed significant improvements, especially in math, with pandemic losses in some grades cut by more than two-thirds. Reading also improved in all grades, with losses cut in half in some grades.
Metrics measuring grade level proficiency in reading for elementary and middle school students inched up to 50.2% from 48.4% in 2020-21, while grade level proficiency in math went from 49.8% in 2021-22 to 53% last year.
For high-schoolers, math 3 exam results exceeded prepandemic performance, while grade level proficiency for English II scores increased slightly.
The test results meant the number of low-performing schools decreased from 864 to 804 for 2022-23, though the figure remains well above the 488 low performing schools identified in 2018-19 – the last full year before COVID-19. Low-performing districts, meanwhile, decreased from 29 to 25 last year; the state has 115 total.
“We are continuing to experience some of the impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Tammy Howard, who leads the state’s public school accountability efforts. “As we look at the data, the school performance grades and other information from the 2022-23 school year, it’s very important to note that while it’s informative, it is limited, and it is discouraged to make comparisons to 2018-19, which is prior to the pandemic.”
