North Carolina students are learning more -- and faster. With budget cuts looming, can it last?

North Carolina students have gained back about four months — 40% — of the learning they lost during pandemic school closures, new data shows. The turnaround follows intensive tutoring efforts and hundreds of new hires, and it’s in jeopardy as billions of federal dollars for those efforts are set to dry up.

An analysis of state and national test scores by Education Recovery Scorecard shows North Carolina’s gains are greater than the national average, although the Tar Heel State’s losses were worse to begin with. In some North Carolina districts, losses have been reversed entirely — meaning the average student is about where they could have expected to be, had no pandemic occurred at all.

“It's amazing, really, what teachers and principals all over the state have done,” said Rachel Wright Junio, director of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration.

Leaders are seeing success after more than two years of energetic focus on gaps in learning, buoyed by an unprecedented multibillion-dollar federal investment in the form of pandemic stimulus packages since 2020.

That one-time money is unlikely to last into the next school year. Leaders foresee cuts, either to the initiatives that helped with learning recovery or to other programming to allow the learning recovery initiatives to continue.

Wake County, for example, hired hundreds of employees using one-time money that it can’t replace on its own with current funding.

Learning is easily lost when children aren’t attending or engaged in schools. Regaining that knowledge can be challenging without adding school days or learning hours. As teachers press through the required curriculum, students who haven’t caught up can struggle.

But state schools have increased tutoring and hired hundreds of intervention teachers and learning coaches to combat learning loss since 2021.

“2023 really shows the power of investment in education, of everyone kind of being focused [and] headed in the right direction to help and target the students that need it the most,” Wright Junio said.

The progress so far is remarkable, given that test scores don’t tend to change much, up or down, in any given year.

But with funds poised to disappear, many North Carolina students are still behind, especially lower-income students. Gaps in test scores between different demographic groups are worse than they used to be.

Still a few months behind

Education Recovery Scorecard researchers — from Stanford University, Harvard University and Dartmouth College — focused on third through eighth grades. They estimated that from 2019 to 2022, U.S. students lost, on average, slightly more than five months of learning in math. And from 2022 to 2023, the students gained nearly two months of that back, the researchers found.

Students lost about three months of learning in reading and gained almost one month of that back.

U.S. students are still almost four months behind in math and more than two months behind in reading.

In North Carolina, students lost nearly seven months of learning in math and almost five months of learning in reading. In both subject areas, they gained about 40% of that back. So North Carolina students are still about four months behind in math and nearly three months behind in reading.

In and around the Triangle region, results vary quite a bit.

In Wake County, average learning loss has been reversed in reading and writing, but the recovery was higher for white students and students labeled by the states as “non-poor,”, leaving larger gaps than before between those students and students of color and low-income students.

The overall numbers are great news, said Elc Estrera, Wake Schools’ director of data strategy and analytics. But you have to look at the demographic groups, too.

Durham Public Schools’ results caught the eyes of researchers and other education experts nationally. Last year, Durham students posted their best test scores since 2016. They’re a little more than a month ahead of where they were pre-pandemic in math and almost two months ahead in reading.

Durham students also made gains across demographic groups, with Black and low-income students even making the biggest gains in math. In reading, white students made the biggest gains.

The school system hired dozens of temporary employees, including teachers, to help.

Johnston County students are doing better in reading and math than they were before the pandemic, although they had seen some drops in scores before the pandemic began.

Some districts, such as those in Vance and Person counties, struggled to make any gains.

Durham’s chief of schools, Stacy D. Stewart, says the county system required schools to do several things once they came back from remote learning in 2021. Those included setting realistic goals for every teacher and student and plans for teacher training and teamwork. They also hired more than 100 employees to address learning loss and set aside funds for learning incentives — such as pizza parties for classrooms that exceed goals.

Stewart and her team visited every school and graded principals on how well they were adhering to the plans each school had made for itself. They’d make recommendations for improvement and refer principals to resources that could help them do even better.

One elementary school principal met with every student individually and talked with them about their test scores and how they could improve them, even if the student was already doing well.

These efforts are ongoing, Stewart said, but system officials are already planning for what to do next year, when the federal funds are gone.

Officials will get together and talk about what they think really worked with students.

“We can’t take for granted or just assume that because we invested in a certain program or a certain strategy that yielded the desired outcome,” Stewart said.

They’ll need to weigh not just which programs they can keep but also the more than 100 new positions hired to address learning loss, too. Those employees provided intervention to students and counseling support, among other help.

“We want to keep all of our valuable human capital that’s supporting our students,” Stewart said.

The Wake County Public School System is digging into what might have made a difference for the system, Estrera said.

The district has hired more personnel to help, including instructional coaches and permanent substitute teachers.

The system also needs to share the data with educators, who also want to know about the effectiveness of what they’re doing, Estrera said.

“This is evidence of their efforts paying off, bearing fruit, so that's good,” Estrera said.

What’s worked

Zeroing in on just what made the difference for any school system isn’t easy.

Neither states nor the federal government have required school systems to report specifics about how they actually spent their stimulus funds. They are only required to report what they spent from broad buckets of money and whether it went toward vague spending categories, such as salary, supplies or services. They are required to report how much they plan to spend on learning loss but not how much they’ve actually spent.

“I understand that in the moment, asking districts to collect additional data was not something most states wanted to do,” said Thomas Kane, one of the Education Recovery Scorecard researchers and a professor of education and economics at Harvard University. “The result of that, though, is that we know a lot less now than we should or could, about which of the things that they did mattered.”

Some interventions have probably helped and some probably haven’t, he said. But he can’t say which and isn’t sure he’ll be able to.

“That's the frustrating thing,” Kane said. “And I think all taxpayers ought to be frustrated with it, because we blew an opportunity to learn something important.”

Researchers are looking into the effectiveness of interventions in North Carolina.

The North Carolina Collaboratory, a research group that includes DPI and university researchers, hasn’t released a final report yet. Last year, one of the researchers said the work is challenging in part because so many interventions were tried at the same time. That makes isolating each intervention’s impact difficult.

Early results from data collection so far suggest intensive tutoring is working for many students —something that’s been unsurprising because prior research had already found it could be successful if properly implemented.

Still, most students aren’t receiving tutoring, and recovery has happened for much bigger numbers of students.

“The magnitude of the recovery that we're seeing is bigger than we would have predicted just based on the number of kids getting tutoring, the number of kids attending summer school,” Kane said. “So clearly, there are other things going on.”

Another factor could be parents taking extra time to help their children at home, Kane said. Another could be improvements in schools’ curricula. Another factor could be hiring coaches for teachers, to help them improve their lessons and teaching methods.

While the pandemic relief dollars are still around, Kane and the other researchers recommend communicating with parents on whether their children are below grade level in math or reading. Then, they should use any funds they haven’t already set aside for summer programming.

Any federal money not spent, or promised in a contract, by Sept. 30, goes back to the federal government.

State data show school systems have spent 87% of the $6.3 billion so far, leaving $856.2 million left as of Dec. 31. In many cases, the leftover money is already accounted for in future spending plans.

Schools should also look at whether they can sign contracts to continue spending the money past the Sept. 30 date, he said. After that, they should look to local governments, employers and community leaders to help reduce student absenteeism. In North Carolina and beyond, kids are missing more school than before the pandemic.

Cuts coming

The Department of Public Instruction is giving school systems advice on what comes next: planning for and communicating program cuts.

“The reality is there are going to be some cuts that are made,” Wright Junio said.

Cuts may not be drastic, especially where people weren’t hired in high numbers, she said.

But school systems will need to have tough conversations internally and externally about what can be cut to keep the learning recovery programs.

Programs receiving non-pandemic federal funding could be most likely to face cuts, Wright Junio said. That’s because federal funding — even if it’s not pandemic money — can legally cover the learning recovery programs. State funding may not be able to, because state law often requires certain funds to be spent on a more narrow list of activities. Federal funding is largely targeted toward lower-income schools.

North Carolina schools received nearly $6 billion in federal stimulus funds. Compared to other states, North Carolina schools have spent less of their pandemic money on personnel. More than $1 billion of the funds have gone toward salary and benefits, excluding bonus and other extra pay for existing employees.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools hired 768 people using pandemic funds, costing $60 million each year, WFAE reported this week. The school system is calculating whether it can keep those employees by cutting vacant jobs, particularly county-funded roles that aren’t legally required but were set aside to help schools with more lower-income students. The Education Recovery Scorecard estimates the district was eight months behind in math and more than three months behind in reading, as of the spring 2023 tests.

Wake County school officials have asked the school board to support a request to county commissioners for permanent funding to keep some of the people they hired with stimulus funds — namely, permanent substitute teachers at every school and professionals with training in behavioral health, such as counselors and social workers.

That request doesn’t include the more than 300 intervention teachers the Wake system hired to accelerate the pace of student learning.

It also doesn’t include the four $1,250 retention bonuses for employees that stimulus funds paid for — influxes of money that the district credits with helping them retain employees.

District spokesman Matt Dees said the district would like to maintain the intervention teachers but is still working on how to go about doing so.

“The common thread in all our efforts has been an intentional investment in well-qualified staff to support students,” Dees said.