Is learning recovery happening in NC? Experts find reasons for optimism -- and room for improvement -- in new test data
A small rebound in standardized test scores in North Carolina public schools is a sign of progress, but students are still behind where they were before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted learning.
"We are not post-COVID yet, we are still into it," State Board of Education Member Jill Camnitz said Wednesday, after board members were presented with the latest test scores.
Superintendent Catherine Truitt agreed. About one-third of students are "chronically absent" from school, missing weeks out of a given year and making it harder for them to learn.
Schools are implementing proven methods to accelerate student learning. But those practices need to be even more intense to catch students up to pre-pandemic achievement levels within the next year — before federal funding meant to help is gone, education experts told WRAL News.
That means more tutoring, extra math periods or longer school years, said Thomas Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard.
“What's been missing is any appreciation of just the magnitude, the share of students who would have to attend summer school, or receive tutors, in order to make up for a whole year's worth of lost learning,” Kane said.
Kane has studied learning loss and recovery across the nation since 2020. He is among the researchers trying to raise the alarm that more needs to be done to overcome the effects of the pandemic.
Parents should keep an eye on what their children’s schools are doing, Kane said. Seeing your child’s grades is only part of the story, he said, because students’ lessons could be behind what previous classes were doing at that same time of year.
North Carolina schools have invested in tutoring, although not for every student and only at scale for early grades reading. The state hasn’t lengthened the school year, which is limited by statute. It required public school systems to offer summer school in 2021, which had middling attendance compared to a typical school semester.
Months of in-person school closures in 2020 and 2021 contributed to a slowed pace of learning among students in North Carolina and beyond. Schools that had more remote learning or worse community impacts of COVID-19, such as death rates, were more negatively affected by learning loss, Kane said.
School closures were quickly followed by illness-prompted absences and then employee turnover and waning interest among many students to even attend school. Early test results suggested students were months behind where they could have been had the pandemic never occurred.
“It's just worth acknowledging that the pandemic was just an enormous setback for schools,” said Thurston Domina, an education professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “What it did to kids’ achievement and test scores is, in some ways, just the tip of the iceberg. Huge problems with staffing, with student mental health, with attendance and engagement.”
North Carolina schools have been nimble in addressing challenges as they’ve come up, such as staffing issues, Domina said.“The real mistake is to think that this thing, this one thing, is the magic trick that's going to solve all our problems,” Domina said. “There are no magic tricks. It's all just a kind of accumulation of different efforts that contribute in different ways.”
Domina is among the public university faculty across the state helping to advise school systems on how to use their federal pandemic relief funds and study the effectiveness of some practices. That study is a difficult task, when a number of efforts are being taken, all at once.
Beyond that, a variety of factors are complicating learning recovery. At the same time schools are trying to ramp up learning, data show students are missing record amounts of school. Teacher turnover has risen. Anecdotally, teachers say student behavior is worsening. And for more than a decade, rates of depression and anxiety have been rising among young people, potentially preventing them from focusing on schoolwork.
North Carolina schools received more than $6 billion in federal pandemic relief dollars total beginning in 2020, with the last of the funds expiring Sept. 30, 2024. Most of that has been spent so far and nearly all of it is already spoken for in budgets for the current school year.
“We've invested enormous resources in recovery; arguably not sufficient resources,” Domina said.
When area schools applied for the third stimulus package, the schools promised hundreds of millions of dollars toward personnel and testing to help with learning recovery.
If the pattern held statewide, more than $1 billion of the about $6 billion schools received would go toward learning recovery.
That money has gone toward tutors, learning and instructional coaches for teachers and students, voluntary summer school and software to test kids intermittently on progress.
Schools have also hired or contracted with counselors, social workers and other support professionals to help students who are struggling because of factors outside of the classroom.
The efforts are temporary and will end when the funds expire, unless the state or counties choose to increase funding to maintain these services.
The consensus among experts is that the fallout of the pandemic won’t be over by then.
In 2022, North Carolina Department of Public Instruction leaders said schools would need three to four years to get test scores back to 2018 levels.
According to Kane, even the most intensive and effective learning interventions require a lot of time to yield results.
After all, schools would be doing everything they normally do and then some.
Based on Kane’s analysis of research, making up for about half of a school year’s learning loss would require year-long intensive tutoring to 10% of students, an extra math period for 30% of students, mandatory summer school for 75% of students and two-and-a-half weeks tacked on to the end of the school year.
Those can be tough sells, he said. They require more staff and a willingness among families and politicians to buy into mandatory learning during summer months. Longer school days, when teachers and students are tired, he said, aren’t as effective as longer school years.
In Richmond, Va., where learning loss was greater than in most of the nation, leaders only just managed to add days to the school year, Kane said, and only two schools will end up getting the extra days.
Voluntary summer school just doesn’t work well, Domina said.
“It's hard to get students in over the summer. It's hard to staff,” Domina said. “So it's a strategy that works [well] in theory, and is difficult to implement in practice.”
