RALEIGH —North Carolina State Superintendent Catherine Truitt said she will continue to focus on helping students overcome pandemic learning loss and is concerned with the N.C. State Board of Education’s recent end-run around the new law shifting powers to the Charter School Review Board, she said in an interview with North State Journal.
Student testing and school accountability data for the previous school year were released at the September meeting of the state Board of Education, and the data showed students were still seeing achievement and grade-level proficiency gains but had not yet reached pre-pandemic levels.
“My biggest concerns are middle grades math and middle grades literacy,” Truitt said, noting there were gains in every subject in every subgroup of students except for English II. “We saw no backward movement, and we saw a 3.8% gain in fourth-grade literacy, which is — that’s an incredible gain.”
“But here’s what needs to happen — we’re talking about gains that are not even getting us back to pre-pandemic levels,” she added. “We’re almost there but not quite. And we’re talking about numbers that weren’t even great to begin with, right? We’re still talking about proficiency rates less than 50%. Even so, gains are good, and certainly we want to see forward progress and not moving backward.”
Before the pandemic, 67% of eighth graders in North Carolina prior to beginning ninth grade were not reading proficiently. She also emphasized that just 14% of African American eighth graders were reading proficiently when they started ninth grade, and that math scores looked similar.
“We have already gotten the state on the right trajectory with literacy, but we cannot ignore our middle grades teachers with [literacy] professional development,” said Truitt.
Truitt told North State Journal her agency will be augmenting literacy professional development for teachers by bringing “a statewide initiative to the legislature in the short session that will provide professional development for all middle grades content area teachers.”
When it comes to improving math achievement, Truitt said that, like reading, math issues predate the pandemic and there has to be a shift in thinking about math as a subject.
“In order to tackle math, we have to shed some legacy thinking around the importance of math,” Truitt said. “I would never say to you as an adult, ‘I’m not a very good reader,’ but it’s perfectly acceptable for someone to say, ‘I’m not I’m not good at math.’ That has to change.”
“We are living in a society where we have normalized deficits in basic math skills. And we’re living in a society where jobs by 2030 are going to require a significant amount of computer science, A.I. — all kinds of skills that involve being proficient in math.”
To solve the problem, Truitt proposes that there needs to be a comprehensive goal of algebra I readiness due to the course being a “gateway course” to higher math classes as well as being predictive of post-secondary success.
She also believes the state needs to mandate an early screener for elementary math similar to what already exists for reading.
Providing teachers with professional development in how to teach math is another key element, along with moving to a competency-based approach.
“So, the cumulative nature of math and the idea that the time is fixed and the learning is variable is very problematic in school in general, but especially in math,” she said. “The learning needs to be fixed and the time needs to be variable. We need to move toward a competency-based approach to math instruction. Kids should not move on in math until they are proficient in skills.”
Turning to the recent charter school policy approved by the state Board of Education, Truitt said the board so far “has not shown a willingness to revise this policy.”
The now-approved policy, CHTR-022, does an end-run around the new law establishing the Charter School Review Board (CSRB), which gives that board definitive powers over the charter school process including approving or denying charter applications, granting renewals and issuing revocations.
The policy effectively circumvents the law by giving the board the power to withhold or deny funding to a charter school regardless of the CSRB’s determinations.
Prior to the new law being enacted, the state Board of Education could reject any application for a school regardless of the former Charter School Advisory Board’s (CSAB) recommendation. At least a half-dozen schools that received unanimous support from the CSAB were later rejected by the state board, many of which had vague or questionable justifications.
Truitt said she only saw the policy a few days ahead of time and no one in her department had any input into crafting it.
Truitt said the policy didn’t need to be rushed through as Chairman Eric Davis had claimed, saying if the board had involved the person in her agency who handles funding topics it “would have learned that there was no rush to get this through because charter schools don’t get funding until they have a certificate of occupancy.”
“Even if the charter review board were to approve a school yesterday, there’s no funding until July,” Truitt said. “And to suggest that the North Carolina Constitution gives the board power to withhold funding from public schools. That’s not correct.”
She also said she thinks the legislature might clarify what triggers the funding, and legislators will likely lay out the criteria that would allow the State Board to appeal the charter review board’s decision.
In a Sept. 18 leaked edition of the state budget, lawmakers took aim at the board’s policy move by including a section to “limit discretion to withhold or reduce charter funding to the review board and superintendent of public instruction.”
