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The state Board of Education met last week — you may have heard some of my stories on cellphone use in the classroom and changes to how the state classifies students who are English learners.
But I want to dive into some new state data on learning loss after the pandemic, unveiled at last week’s meeting. It highlights where educators are still struggling to get students back up to speed in the wake of the pandemic.
So what does the data show? Well, scores in most subjects are still below pre-pandemic levels. On the bright side, elementary school scores have been steadily improving since the pandemic. But middle school scores are lagging — with a few key exceptions.
Let’s look first at where there are positive signs — and it’s mostly in the early grades.
The N.C. Department of Public Instruction found that statewide reading scores in grades three and five, and math scores in grades three through six are still below pre-pandemic levels, but they’ve been increasing at a faster rate in 2022-2024 than in the years prior to the pandemic. Here’s a closer look at fourth-grade math trends, which have seen quite an acceleration since the pandemic:
The solid black line in the beginning shows the trend in scores between 2013-2019 — you can see it’s mostly flat. The little dot near the bottom in 2021 highlights how far scores fell during the pandemic.
But that solid black line at the end shows that since then, scores have increased more sharply between 2022-2024 than before the pandemic. The dotted black line shows where scores would have ended up had the pre-pandemic trend continued. So, looking at the chart, scores are on pace to get back to that level next year — and potentially surpass it in 2026.
To look at it from another perspective — this year, 37% of schools across the state are exceeding the fourth-grade math scores they would have had based on pre-pandemic trends. DPI predicts that number could rise to 55% by 2026.
The state Board of Education took that as an encouraging sign of progress. And you can see similar trends in those early-grade math and reading scores, with the exception of fourth-grade reading (more on that in a bit).
There’s also similar progress in the high school English II and Math 1 exam scores.
But now let’s look at some worrying trends. Take seventh-grade reading.
Not only did scores drop during the pandemic, but since 2022, seventh-grade reading scores have continued the downward trend that started before the pandemic. The same can be said for eighth-grade reading.
Perhaps more notably, fourth-grade reading is the only elementary grade level that’s not seeing steady reading improvements since the pandemic. That’s largely because of a decline in this year’s scores, which DPI officials said is a clear example of the pandemic’s impact. Current fourth-grade students would have been in kindergarten at the height of the pandemic. That means they would have been learning key reading skills and phonics at a time when they were wearing masks or learning through computer screens.
Seventh-grade math scores, meanwhile, are continuing at largely the same rate that they were before the pandemic — but that raises concern since they’re still well below pre-pandemic levels. There’s still a lot of work to do to get those back up to speed. And while eighth-grade math scores are ticking up, only 28% of eighth-grade students are proficient in math — by far the lowest percentage of all those included in the latest data presentation.
One last note: There’s been a bit of a concerning reversal in eighth-grade science scores, which were increasing steadily before the pandemic, but are showing signs of decline.
Jeni Corn, of UNC-Chapel Hill, who helped create the report when she was working at DPI, told the state board this was something to monitor — but she didn’t want it to cause too much alarm. About 70% of eighth-grade students are proficient in science, by far the highest proficiency rating of any group in the report.
“There is a negative trend right now, but a huge number of our students are ‘sciencing’ at grade level,” Corn said. “So we want to make sure we continue to support that. I don’t want to be alarmist with that negative trend — I know that our science teachers in middle school will help turn that around for our students.”
So what next? We can expect more data from DPI on this down the line. Officials say they plan to produce local-level data and also break down the data by student group.
