NC Students make significant strides recovering from pandemic learning loss

North Carolina’s school children made “significant strides” during the 2021-22 school year in recovering from lost instructional time that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new N.C. Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) report released Tuesday.

On average, students showed signs of academic recovery in every subject, Jeni Corn, NCDPI’s director of research and evaluation in the Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration told members of the House K-12 Education Committee.

Corn said the greatest gains were in middle school and high school math. Notable gains were also made in third- and fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade science and high school biology, she said. Only high school English remained unchanged from the 2020-21 school year.

The new report shows that in some grades and subjects measured in 2020-22, recovery time was cut by almost half. The 15 months needed for recovery in Math 1 after 2020-21, for example, was cut to nine months after 2021-22.

Meanwhile, the 10 months needed in sixth-grade math was reduced to less than five months after 2021-22; the 14.5 months of recovery time needed in biology was cut to 8.25 months.

In a statement, State Superintendent Catherine Truitt said the results from the 2021-22 school confirm what teachers and principals and parents around the state have been saying.

“Our schools and districts have made incredible strides in helping so many of our students get back on track to their pre-pandemic performance,” Truitt said. “This data also tells us there is more work to be done and fortunately we still have federal funding available to support interventions targeted at the students who need it most.”

Here are the report’s five key takeaways:

— In 2021-22, on average, students identified as economically disadvantaged underperformed projected scores compared to the general student population for all tested subjects except reading in Grade 8. However, the magnitude of recovery for students identified as economically disadvantaged was greater for reading in Grades 3, 4, and 5 compared to the general student population.

— On average, students with disabilities’ actual scores for 2022 were closer to predicted than the general student population.

— On average, multilingual learners’ actual scores for 2022 were closer to predicted than the general student population.

—On average, students identified as chronically absent (22.6% of the tested student population in 2020- 21 and 28.5% in 2021-22) showed academic recovery from the pandemic in reading Grades 3, 4 and 5. But they fell further behind the general student population in 2021-22, especially in science Grade 8 and biology; and math in Grades 5, 6, 7, 8, and NC Math 1 and 3.

— On average, at the state level, students across all races/ethnicity (American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, Two or More, White) showed signs of academic recovery for every subject, with the exception of Asian students in reading Grades 3, 4, and 5; Black students in reading Grades 6 and 7 and English II; Hispanic students in reading Grade 7; and white students in English II.