More Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students in kindergarten, first and second grade are meeting literacy benchmarks at the start of this school year than last year. But administrators say those improvements are still lagging behind the rates needed to meet the district’s early literacy goals.
Reading scores in the later grades have remained stagnant for the past couple of years, but CMS has pointed to gains in the early years as a reason for hope.
CMS assesses early literacy progress among K-2 students at the beginning, middle and end of each school year to show improvement over the course of the year. New data shows 52.1% of K-2 students met their benchmarks in the beginning-of-year tests administered this September. That’s 1.6 percentage points higher than last year’s beginning-of-year scores.
While it's only beginning-of-year data, if students improve at the same rate they did last year, then 72% of students will meet their benchmarks at the end of the year — shy of the district’s goal of 75%. CMS Superintendent Crystal Hill told the school board Tuesday night, the district will have to accelerate its rate of improvement.
“In this context when we talk about ‘accelerated’ we’re really talking about our, as adults, accelerated actions in making sure students get exactly what they need when they need it," Hill said.
That means honing in on specific skills students might be struggling with, without falling behind on learning new skills, Hill said.
There are some signs that some gaps between student groups are persisting. Hispanic K-2 students were the only group to see a decline in the percentage of students meeting the beginning-of-year benchmark compared to last year. Only 32.3% of Hispanic students were at or above the benchmark at the start of this school year, compared to Asian and white students, which led all groups with 76.5% and 68.1%, respectively.
The percentage of multilingual learners meeting the benchmark in beginning-of-year assessments ticked up an eighth of a percentage point this year, but remain the group lagging furthest behind, with 29.2% of those students meeting the benchmark.
Black students and students with disabilities saw the biggest gains, increasing by 4.1 and 10 percentage points, respectively.
Fewer kindergarteners met their benchmarks at the start of this year than last year, suggesting the district will have more ground to make up with that group. The district has a goal to increase the percentage of K-2 students meeting early literacy benchmarks from 67% as of 2023 to 91% by 2029.
