NC retrains 44,000 teachers on how to teach reading, ahead of 2024-25 school year

Tens of thousands of North Carolina elementary school teachers have now been retrained in how to teach young children how to read, the state's top education official announced Tuesday.

Schools have long struggled with getting all children proficient at reading, in North Carolina and nationwide. Literacy issues significantly worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic. And while test scores have bounced back more recently, they're still not back to pre-pandemic levels, WRAL reported last year.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt said the state put 44,000 teachers through the new course as of June, revamping how they teach reading in grades K-5. She made the announcement Tuesday at the monthly Council of State meeting of all the state's top executive branch leaders.

By the time they get to high school, Truitt said, most students in North Carolina can't read proficiently. The new elementary-level tactics aim to fix that problem.

"The way that we've been teaching reading for the past few decades in this country does not align with how what the research tells us about how the brain learns to read," she said Tuesday. "We are hardwired, as humans, to speak. We are not hardwired to learn to read. It's actually a very difficult task to learn how to read, and when you're teaching it incorrectly to students, it becomes insurmountable for many students — leaving us with the startling statistic that prior to the pandemic, 67% of students in North Carolina were starting ninth grade not reading proficiently."

Truitt said the new techniques are expected to help improve those numbers. Republican state lawmakers passed a new law in 2021 revamping how reading is taught, and now the teachers charged with carrying out that new curriculum — officially called LETRS — know how to do it. Training started in 2021 and ended this spring.

"This fall, our kindergartners will be coming to school for the first time having a teacher who absolutely has completed their LETRS training," Truitt said.

She added that the most recent scores have already seen schools cutting down on the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, with substantial testing gains among Black, Hispanic and Native American students in particular.

"We're incredibly proud not just of our kids, but our teachers who worked so hard to do this," she said.

Third grade is widely regarded as a key benchmark for reading ability. State officials announced this month that in the 2023-24 school year, 58% of third graders met reading benchmarks.

Truitt has said she wants to expand training to more teachers at higher grade levels, but she would need legislative budgetary support to do so.

Truitt and the state lawmakers behind the new program are Republicans. But unlike some of the politically divisive culture-war issues that have focused on public schools recently, there is bipartisan agreement on the new reading approach. Also on Tuesday Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper praised the program and Truitt's implementation of it.

"I've sat on the floor of elementary schools," Cooper said. "I have looked at the data. I'm sold on the effectiveness of the science of reading. This is something that we all came together to do in a bipartisan way. We all agree this is the way to go. I think now, the challenge is to make a real investment in teachers and teacher assistants to make sure we keep them and they are well trained."

Year-round schools recently started the new 2024-25 school year, and traditional-calendar schools around the state will have their first day of class later this month.