State Superintendent Catherine Truitt reports ‘incredible’ gains in K-3 reading

North Carolina’s K-3 students have made “incredible gains” in reading and fewer of them require intensive intervention, State Superintendent Catherine Truitt said Thursday.

Truitt shared K-3 reading data with the State Board of Education on Wednesday that shows kindergartners making a 48% percentage jump from the beginning of the 2022-23 school year to the end on assessments that measure whether students read well enough to receive instruction in group settings.

First graders and third graders made gains of 22% and 13% respectively. Meanwhile, third graders posted a 6% gain.

Truitt said North Carolina’s students outpaced the rest of the nation on the Amplify assessments given at the beginning, middle and end of the school year. Amplify is the vendor with which the state contracts to assess reading skills. Its assessments were given to 437,498 students in North Carolina. Truitt shared that 11,809 students were assessed in Spanish.

“We can say with certainty that the post-pandemic rebound began last year for our kindergarten through third graders,” Truitt said. “North Carolina continues to close gaps. We continue to see improvement for all grade levels. We’re continuing to see improvement across all subgroups.”

Truitt said the improvements are “incredibly good news” for students and teachers who have worked hard since the roll out of the NC Department of Public Instruction’s “science of reading” initiative. The implementation of the phonics-based approach to teaching children to read has been controversial as the state shifted from a whole language approach that focused on teaching meaning and encouraging children to read more.

Truitt said the percentage of students needing intensive intervention decreased by 38% for kindergartners, 15% for first graders, 12% percent for second graders and 3% for third-graders.

The state showed improvement across nearly all subgroups, with Asian, Blacks and Native Americans outperforming their peers across the nation, Truitt said. Hispanics missed that mark by a single percentage point, she said.

“These are incredible gains for our subgroups,” Truitt said. “We’re also seeing incredible drops in the number of students requiring incredible intervention, including Black students who saw a 15% decline in the number needing intensive intervention, 20% for Hispanics and 20% for Native Americans students.”   

Stubborn learning gaps still exist between white students and students of color despite the gains, Truitt said.

“Even though our students of color saw incredible gains, our white students started way behind also and they saw incredible gains, which means when we look at this data we’re seeing the gap for our white and African American students, even though they made such incredible gains, there’s still a gap there that increased by six percentage points,” Truitt said.

The gap for Hispanics remained the same and increased three percentage points for Native Americans.

The superintendent said that when students aren’t taught to read using phonics instruction, they often require intensive intervention, which means they are placed in small group settings. If they are unable to read by 5th grade, she said, they are given Individualized Education Plans or IEPs.

But many students struggling to read do not have a learning disability, so they don’t need IEPs, Truitt said.

“And then we see disproportionality — we see our students of color referred more often for services that they do not need,” Truitt said. “They just needed to be taught how to read properly.”

State board member Jill Camnitz said she welcomes the opportunity to celebrate the reading gains and to congratulate teachers for their hard work.

“I hope this confirms to all of them that that work was worth it because these are students who are going to go forward into their educations with the kind of base that they have to have to be successful,” Camnitz said.