NC students are starting to recover some pandemic learning loss, new report says

North Carolina students aren’t as far behind academically as they were just after schools reopened to in-person instruction in 2021, a new report shows, though they are still behind their pre-pandemic pace.

In a statement, state Superintendent Catherine Truitt said the data back up what she and department officials have been hearing from educators and parents in the state.

“Our schools and districts have made incredible strides in helping so many of our students get back on track to their pre-pandemic performance,” Truitt said. “This data also tells us there is more work to be done, and fortunately we still have federal funding available to support interventions targeted at the students who need it most.”

North Carolina received more than $6 billion in federal pandemic stimulus funds, most of which has been spent.

Nearly all of the remaining funds have been set aside for particular projects. Those include continued bonuses amid staffing shortages but also salaries for learning coaches and support professionals, more testing and monitoring of student progress and varying summer learning and tutoring opportunities. Not every student has been eligible for summer learning or tutoring.

The more than 500-page report released Tuesday from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, using analysis from SAS Institute, showed the biggest gains in math, smaller gains in science and the smallest gains in reading. Math had the most ground to make up, however, as students were more than year behind in 2021.

Researchers projected student performance based on pre-pandemic tests scores against their actual performance after the pandemic began. That analysis is intended show how far off students fell from their expected academic progress, while in-person learning was closed or limited during the pandemic.

Then, the department and SAS Institute measured the difference and converted it into a rough estimate of “months” behind in learning.

The analysis using test scores from 2022, released in Tuesday’s report, show gaps ranging from two weeks behind (third grade reading) to nine months behind (Math 1).

The test scores from spring 2021 showed gaps as small as two months behind to gaps as much as 15 months behind, even though schools were closed to in-person learning for fewer than 15 months.

The progress to the 2022 test scores shows students still have learning to make up but not as much as they did last year. That means students in many cases learned more than a year’s worth of material in just one school year.

The data don’t include progress made this school year, as students haven’t yet completed springtime standardized testing.

The department used both state standardized tests and, for younger students, mClass reading tests taken before third grade, when standardized tests begin. Researchers struggled to reliably predict test performance in math and science from mClass data, so they did not calculate the months of learning lost for elementary math or science and only calculated it for elementary reading.

Department officials presented their findings to the North Carolina House of Representatives Education Committee on Tuesday.

Lawmakers said the analysis shows just how important in-person learning is and just how wrong closing schools and switching to remote learning was during the pandemic.

COVID-19 has killed more than 28,000 North Carolinians. Cases peaked in the winter of the 2021-22 school year.