Source: WRAL
As many North Carolina children struggle with literacy, education officials have finished retraining 44,000 elementary school teachers on how to teach reading skills.
Literacy issues significantly worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic, and they’re still not back to pre-pandemic levels. State officials recently announced that during the 2023-24 school year, only 58% of third graders met reading benchmarks. The trend worsens as students get to high school, as only 33% of 9th graders in North Carolina can read proficiently.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt is hoping that the new approach to literacy training will help improve those numbers. State lawmakers passed a law in 2021 changing how reading is taught, centered around a new curriculum formally known as LETRS. Compared to North Carolina’s past approach, LETRS encourages educators to tailor reading plans to each student’s unique needs. LETRS training began in 2021 and ended this spring.
The most recent test scores have already shown schools narrowing the achievement gap between white students and students of color, with substantial testing gains among Black, Hispanic and Native American students.
The achievement gap still exists though, and more funding will be needed to continue closing it. Truitt has said she wants to expand training to more teachers at higher grade levels, but North Carolina legislators would need to provide greater budgetary support to do so.
In a show of bipartisan support, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper praised the program and Truitt’s implementation of it.
“I’ve sat on the floor of elementary schools,” Cooper said. “I have looked at the data. I’m sold on the effectiveness of the science of reading. This is something that we all came together to do in a bipartisan way. We all agree this is the way to go. I think now, the challenge is to make a real investment in teachers and teacher assistants to make sure we keep them and they are well trained.”
