These Triangle districts have recovered from — or even exceeded — pandemic losses

North Carolina’s public schools still haven’t fully recovered from the pandemic, but some school districts have managed to reverse the learning losses from the past few years.

A recently released national study shows several North Carolina districts are now academically performing as well as — if not better than — they did before the pandemic in 2019. The “Education Recovery Scorecard” puts those districts, which include Wake County, ahead of the state as a whole in rebounding from pandemic learning losses.

“The striking thing I see is there are three larger districts in the state that are either at or above their 2019 achievement levels: Wake County, Johnston County and Durham,” Tom Kane, a co-author of the report, said in an interview with The News & Observer. “Yet there are some districts that remain far behind their 2019 levels.”

Kane is faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, which created the scorecard in collaboration with The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.

Kane says the report shows the urgency for school districts to use their remaining federal COVID relief dollars to help students get caught up before the money expires in September. The state’s public schools still have $1.1 billion left unspent of the $5.6 billion in COVID aid.

“The school closures, whether we agree with them or not, they were public health measures taken on all our behalves,” Kane said. “As things stand now, the people who are going to be paying for those public health measures are children and that seems unjust.”

North Carolina sees gains

Test scores dropped sharply nationwide after schools switched to remote instruction during the pandemic. The scorecard uses national and state test data to determine how states and school districts are doing now compared to 2019.

Between 2019 and 2022, North Carolina lost the equivalent of two-thirds of a typical year’s learning in math and nearly half of a year in reading. But between 2022 and 2023, the state made up 40% of the losses in both subjects.

Of the 30 states in the analysis, Kane said only four saw faster growth in math than North Carolina.

“Students have made more progress than was initially anticipated, so students are actually doing fairly well in our state in terms of catching up in math,” Deputy State Superintendent Michael Maher told a state legislative committee last week. “But again, we’re not where we need to be.”

The state Department of Public Instruction has adopted its own measures for assessing learning recovery.

Even with the gains, the scorecard shows North Carolina is about 40% of a year behind in math and a quarter of a year behind in reading.

How did Triangle schools do

A red flag for Kane is the school districts that are a half year or more behind in getting students caught up. But that’s not the case for most Triangle school districts.

According to the scorecard:

▪ Wake County is now back to pre-pandemic levels in reading and math.

▪ Durham Public Schools is a month ahead of pre-pandemic achievement levels in math and reading.

▪ Johnston County is a half year ahead of 2019 achievement levels in reading and nearly a half year ahead in math.

▪ Chapel Hill-Carrboro is slightly ahead of pre-pandemic levels in reading but is around 60% of a year behind in math.

▪ Orange County is more than a a third of a year behind in reading and more than a quarter of a year behind in math.

▪ Chatham County is back at pre-pandemic levels in reading but is about a month behind in math.

The return to 2019 pre-pandemic levels still leaves lots of room for improvement. For instance, the proficiency rate on state exams last school year was 63.4% in Wake, 55.2% in Johnston and 47.9% in Durham.

But Kane said it’ still a cause for celebration for districts that have returned to pre-pandemic levels.

“We’ve at least made students whole,” Kane said. “Of course there’s room for improvement. The job is not done yet.”

‘Great news’ in Wake

Wake County has been celebrating the study’s findings.

“Math and reading overall scores for grades three through eight have essentially returned to pre-pandemic levels in Wake County,” Wake Superintendent Robert Taylor said at a school board meeting this month. “This puts us well ahead of the state of North Carolina as a whole. I think this is great news.”

But at the same time, Wake is acknowledging that test scores for Black, Hispanic and low-income students remain below pre-pandemic levels.

Taylor credited Wake’s overall progress on “intentional investment in our staff.” This includes giving employees up to $5,000 in retention bonuses and hiring more intervention teachers, school counselors, psychologists, social workers and a full-time substitute teacher for each school.

Many of the new positions were funded from the one-time COVID aid.

“Our staff is our greatest strength and our most critical asset when it comes to student achievement,” Taylor said. “The study shows how important it will be to maintain and strategically grow our staff even when COVID relief funds expire.

“That is why we want to be explicit about the importance of supporting our staff and how we need to compensate them appropriately.”

Durham seeing ‘fruit’ of its labor

Durham was one of the last school districts in the state to return to full-time, in-person instruction in 2021. But when it did, the district adopted a plan called “Operation 55” to help get students caught up, according to Stacy Stewart, Durham’s chief of schools.

The plan had “six non-negotiables,” including setting goals, creating intervention plans for students, increasing parental involvement and offering incentives for meeting goals. Stewart said schools did things such as hold pizza parties and movie days when students met goals.

“Everyone rolled up their sleeves to do the hard work, and it’s heart work as well,” Stewart said in an interview. “I’m so appreciative of being in a position to be able to see the fruit of the labor from all of us.”

Like many other school districts, Durham used the COVID aid to hire additional staff to help students with academic and social and emotional needs. Now it has to decide what will stay when the federal aid goes away.

“We have to ask ourselves, of all the these additional human resources and capital that we acquired ... what gave us the highest return on the investment?” Stewart said. “With the funds that we will have, what can we afford to maintain?”

Achieving a complete academic recovery

The time is now for the state and school districts to get as many struggling students as possible into summer learning programs this year before the COVID aid is gone, according to Kane.

”Poll after poll has shown that parents don’t realize how far students are behind,” Kane said. “They see students are back in school and learning again. But in order to make up for the lost ground, they need to be learning much more than they’d be learning in a typical school year.”

DPI has developed a “funding cliff toolkit” to help schools decide how to deal with spending after the relief funds are gone.

Kane says North Carolina has done a better job than many other states in documenting how schools spent their money. He’s hoping that information will lead to schools funding programs that will make a difference getting students caught up.

”It’s pretty clear by now that the districts that remain more than half a year behind in spring of 2023 are more likely to remain behind when the federal dollars run out in September,” Kane said. “It would be worth thinking about is there anything the state is going to do after September 2024 to ensure the recovery is completed in those districts?”