Theresa Opeka
Carolina Journal
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt told Council of State (COS) members Tuesday, including Gov. Roy Cooper, that she credits the Excellent Public Schools Act with helping North Carolina’s kindergarten through third-grade students outperform the national average on end-of-year literacy assessments for three years in a row.
The legislation, which Cooper signed into law in 2021, requires that literacy instruction in the state’s public schools be based on the science of reading, a term of art that describes a research-based consensus in favor of “phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics, and spelling, fluency, vocabulary, oral language, and comprehension.”
Truitt also presented the data at a recent State Board of Education meeting.
She explained to the COS that the legislation rewrote the previous third-grade literacy legislation, which was called Read to Achieve, passed in 2012.
“Researchers finally have been able to convince those who work in education and in policy and education that the way that we’ve been teaching reading for the past few decades in this country does not align with what the research tells us about how the brain learns to read,” Truitt said. “We are hardwired as humans to speak, we are not hardwired to learn to read, and it’s actually a very difficult task to learn how to read, and when you’re teaching it incorrectly to students, it becomes insurmountable for many students, leaving us with the startling statistic that prior to the pandemic, 67% of students in North Carolina were starting 9th grade not reading proficiently, which of course has a knock-on effect when they try to be successful after high school, and not just four-year degrees, but two-year degrees, or the military and so for quite consequently 49% of North Carolinians do not have training and education beyond high school.”
Truitt said the Excellent Public Schools Act mandated that her department seek a vendor to provide assessments for 468,000 kindergarten through third-grade students three times a year. At the same time, all pre-K through fifth-grade teachers engaged in a rigorous 18-month professional development called Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS, which is grounded in the science of reading or a phonics-based approach to early literacy instruction.
As of June, 44,000 pre-K through 5th grade teachers will have completed LETRS training, meaning this fall kindergarteners will be coming to school for the first time having a teacher who has completed their LETRS training.
Truitt also said that not only have North Carolina students outperformed the rest of the nation, but all of the student subgroups are also outperforming the rest of the nation.
“Our African American students have seen a 16 percentage point growth from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, our Hispanic students have seen a 17 percentage point growth, and our American Indian students have seen a 21 percentage point growth from beginning of year to end of year,” she said. “So, we are not going to be able to close those achievement gaps that have been so persistent for decades, not just in North Carolina, but in the country without seeing these kinds of gains. So, we’re incredibly proud of not just our students but our teachers who’ve worked so hard to do this.”
Truitt added that, as they await the release of their third-grade end-of-grade tests, last year, third grade was one of two subjects (the other being English 2, which is taken in high school) that saw gains putting them above pre-pandemic levels on state standardized test scores.
“I have participated in classes on the science of reading on the floor of elementary schools, and I’ve looked at the data, and I’m sold on the effectiveness of the science of reading,” Cooper told Truitt. “This is something that we all came together to do in a bipartisan way. I think we all agree this is the way to go.”
Yet, despite signing the legislation in 2021, Cooper previously vetoed similar legislation in 2019, also called the Excellence in Public Schools Act, one year before the pandemic. The inferior reading instruction methods caused students to lose a lot of ground in learning when schools were shut down and students were being taught virtually.
“Recent evaluations show that Read to Achieve is ineffective and costly,” Cooper said in 2019. “A contract dispute over the assessment tool adds to uncertainty for educators and parents. This legislation tries to put a Band-Aid on a program where implementation has clearly failed.”
Carolina Partnership for Reform, a public benefit organization, said Cooper vetoed it, most likely because he was angry about an unrelated budget standoff.
“So, the childhood reading curriculum that’s proving effective now wasn’t implemented when it should’ve been, in 2019,” they said in a press release. “Changes of heart are fine – desirable, even, especially for politicians who have served for decades. But pretending like this is one big example of collaboration seems designed to avoid answering for the two years’ worth of elementary schoolers who missed out on an effective reading curriculum.”
Truitt wrapped up her remarks at the COS meeting by saying that as her time in office winds down, she hopes her successor will continue to make sure that teachers are taught the correct way to teach children how to read.
She lost to Michelle Morrow in the March primary. Morrow will face Democrat Mo Green in the general election this fall.
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