COVID-19 disruptions negatively impacted all of North Carolina’s schoolchildren

All of North Carolina’s schoolchildren were negatively impacted by pandemic-related school disruptions, according to a new state report released on Wednesday.

The N.C. Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) report showed that “learning progress” slowed across all grades and subjects due to COVID-19 disruptions.

Michael Maher, executive director of the NCDPI Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration, said learning disruptions could not have been prevented.

“This is not on the backs of teachers, principals, superintendents,” Maher said. “There is nothing any of them could have done in the height of the pandemic to change these results. We need to be clear about what we’re looking at here.”

The study was conducted by the N.C. Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) and SAS Institute Inc. Last spring, the N.C. General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee (JLEOC) ordered NCDPI to collect, analyze and report data showing how COVID-19 impacted children and schools.  The report measures the difference between where students were expected to perform and how they actually performed.

More specifically, the report compared students’ projected 2020-21 school year scores on state End-of-Grade and End-of-Course exams with their actual scores for the 2020-21 school year.

Here are a few of the preliminary findings:

• On average, students made less progress during the pandemic than they did in previous years.
• Results show that there was a negative impact for all students, for all grades, for almost every subject (except English II), and especially for Math (5th-9th); Science (8th).
• Students who returned to the classroom for face-to-face learning and where specific and targeted resources and supports were immediately put in place, did better than the students whose instruction was purely remote and who were physically disengaged from their school community.

Students of all races and ethnicities were negatively impacted by the pandemic, said Jeni Corn, director of research and evaluation at the Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration.

“Pre-existing disparities have increased,” Corn said. “However, the extent to which these disparities have changed varies by tests.”

The difference between Black and white academic growth was on average larger in 2021 than in 2018 but not for all subjects, Corn said.

Early in the pandemic, Corn said males were expected to fall further behind academically than females. The conventional wisdom said that unsupervised male students would have difficulty focusing while learning from home.

That did not happen, Corn said. And because female students outperform males in a typical year, they’re actually further behind than what would have been expected in a typical year, she said.

“As districts, and as our state, and as our charters think about interventions targeting recovery and acceleration, don’t forget about our girls,” Corn said.

The state’s academically gifted students were expected to weather the COVID-19 disruptions better than most students, but that didn’t happen either, Corn said. Those students struggled as well, particularly in grade 6-8 reading and 8th-grade math, she said.

She said district leaders can use data for their districts to target interventions for students most negatively impacted by disrupted learning.

Students with access to reliable broadband internet also fared better during the pandemic, according to the report.

“Students in school that report a higher percentage of students with broadband internet access at home were less negatively impacted for most tested subjects,” Corn said.

State Superintendent Catherine Truitt said that while the report findings are not surprising given the challenges that students and teachers faced last year, they are invaluable to education leaders.

“These findings are critical to understanding how we continue to work towards recovery and acceleration statewide,” Truitt said in a statement. “This preliminary report will help us pinpoint which North Carolina students need additional supports and allows us to better target resources to specific grades and content areas.”

State Board of Education Chairman Eric Davis said the report “confirms what we know our students need.”

Before the pandemic, Davis said, the state’s Public Education Strategic Plan called for eliminating opportunity gaps, targeting resources and supports, and increasing the number of adults in our classrooms to increase the personal interactions with students.

“While all students have been impacted by COVID, our students who were most challenged pre-pandemic are the most negatively impacted by COVID,” Davis said. “This preliminary report reinforces the urgency for our state to take bold and aggressive steps to accelerate our students’ academic achievement.”

The finding will be presented to JLEOC later this month.