One of North Carolina schools Superintendent Catherine Truitt’s major accomplishments during her four-year term was the 2021 General Assembly vote mandating changes in the way students are taught to read.
In 2021, a few months after Truitt took office, lawmakers ordered all elementary and preschool teachers to undergo extensive Training on literacyThe course, called LETRS, helps teachers make sure children learn the sounds of letters, how they fit together to form words, what those words mean and how to read fluently. This step-by-step instruction wasn’t always part of the curriculum and Truitt was keen to see it.
“That’s the only reason I applied for this role, our reading scores,” Truitt said in a recent interview with WFAE.
Truitt proudly reported on significant profits on North Carolina’s lower-grade reading tests. But when state test results for older students are released next week, Truitt says the state will still be far from its overall reading proficiency goal.
“We are at least five years away from that,” she said.
Looking back on her term in office
Truitt was defeated in the Republican primary in March. She has four months left in her term. But as I neared the end of my 22-year tenure as North Carolina’s education commissioner, Truitt sat down for a 45-minute “final interview.”
We talked about why it’s so hard to overcome racial divides and teach children to read, whether North Carolina’s public education system stifles innovation, and how Truitt’s style as a moderate Republican affected her political survival.
“A lot of people just wanted to write me off because I had an R next to my name, and a lot of people who work in education have a D next to their name,” she said. “And I worked very hard to allay those fears by talking to left-leaning groups, not right-leaning ones. I hired people who probably didn’t vote the way I did. … I think that cost me the election.”
Truitt is a former high school English teacher and served as education adviser to Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. She was chancellor of North Carolina’s private Western Governors University when she ran for state superintendent in 2020. When she won, she became only the second Republican to hold the post, following her predecessor, Mark Johnson.
The General Assembly has most political power over public education, and Republicans have controlled both houses during Truitt’s tenure. Still, she has encountered many obstacles in her efforts to restructure the system. But the LETRS training was an easy sell, as politicians across America examines how reading should be taught.
Why so little progress?
Truitt took office in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she says her first order of business was getting students back in classrooms. The disruption to distance learning has set students back here and across the country.
And the literacy training for teachers, which 160 hours of workhas been phased in over the past three years, so Truitt hopes the combination of pandemic recovery and better-trained teachers will lead to significant gains in the coming years.
“This is the first year that all kindergarten, first, second and third grade students will come to school with a teacher who has completed the LETRS professional development,” she said.
Office of the Superintendent, NCDPI
In January “Testimony of the Nation“ Fourth grade reading scores are released, providing national context for North Carolina’s work.
“I think they will improve a little bit,” Truitt said. “But the big ‘Aha!’ moment won’t happen until the next round, which is two years from now.”
But the state and individual school districts have raised their hopes before, only to find that reading scores remained relatively unchanged. Since 2012, North Carolina’s Read to Achieve program has provided additional reading support and made it more difficult to get to fourth grade without passing the third-grade reading exam. Even before the pandemic, there were little progressespecially for black, Latino and low-income students.
Mississippi, the first state to implement LETRS nationwide, has significant profits in elementary school reading scores. But achievement levels remain similar to those in North Carolina in elementary school – and worse than those in North Carolina in middle school.
Importance of school principals
Truitt says a key to overcoming persistent racial and economic disparities across the country is teaching all students to read.
“The other solution is the leadership of our schools,” she said. “And you’ve introduced one of our best and brightest leaders that I’ve met over the last four years, and that’s the Southwest Region’s Principal of the Year for Charlotte, Dwight Thompson.”
I reported extensively on Thompson’s work last year, with an ambitious Public-private partnership is trying to break the cycle of poverty in West Charlotte. At Renaissance West STEAM Academy, Thompson strong teachers hired and saw significant improvements in test scores, so that the school from the state’s F-list for the first time in 2023.
Truitt noted that he also reduced the number of suspensions and improved discipline.
“And when you do those things, you provide the impetus that communities of color or poverty-stricken communities need to escape poverty through education,” Truitt said.
The state provides training for current and future principals, as well as financial incentives to bring good principals to high-need schools, but good principals often receive offers from other districts, as well as from private companies working on education reform.
When I told Truitt that I had often jokingly asked Thompson when he was going, Truitt said she understood that pattern, but “I told him I was coming this fall to visit his school. And I don’t think I’m going to do very many school visits this fall.”
But less than 12 hours after that exchange, CMS announced a new director for Renaissance West STEAM. Thompson has accepted a new job out of state.
Not designed for innovation?
Truitt says she is proud of another achievement: the creation of the Portrait of a graduatea framework for reorienting schools towards career preparation, including the development of skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking and empathy.
The goal, she said, is to “get districts to help our teachers, students and their parents to think differently about the purpose of K-12 school, that passing the graduation stage is not an end, but a beginning. The goal should be to graduate And be employed, recruited or enrolled.”
But she never succeeded in convincing the state legislators revise the state’s school grades to incorporate these elements. And she spent much of her tenure developing a “Paths to excellence“Plan to redesign the way Teachers are licensed and paidIt met with resistance from teachers and received a lukewarm reaction by the State Education Committee and has so far no action inspired by the General Assembly.
Truitt said she believes she could have made progress on grading and teacher certification in another term, both complex concepts that require building trust with various groups, including lawmakers who may have competing priorities.
“One of the things I’ve realized since losing the primary is that the Department of Education is not really designed to be a place of innovation. And that’s what I’ve tried to do,” she said.
No confirmation of successor
Truitt was defeated in the primary by Michele Morrow, a MAGA Republican who homeschooled her children, had never won elected office, and had not raised as much money as Truitt. During the campaign, Morrow portrayed Truitt as not conservative enough and a poor steward of public funds.
“I’m not an anomaly. There were a lot of moderate Republicans who lost,” Truitt said. “I could have moved further to the right during the primaries, but that wasn’t my style.”
Maurice “Mo” Green is the Democratic candidate. He served as deputy superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and superintendent of Guilford County Schools before taking a position with the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
Truitt says none of the candidates have asked for her support and she has no plans to offer it.
“I have not seen a sufficient program from any of the candidates to say they will do what needs to be done,” she said.
Truitt says she isn’t sure what her next step will be. But she said she has no plans to leave North Carolina and intends to remain involved in education.
