One of North Carolina Superintendent Catherine Truitt’s big wins during her four-year term was the General Assembly’s 2021 vote to mandate changes in the way students are taught to read.
In 2021, a few months after Truitt took office, lawmakers mandated that all elementary and pre-kindergarten teachers take extensive training on literacy instruction. The course, called LETRS, guides teachers in making sure children learn the sounds letters make, how they combine to form words, what those words mean and how to read fluently. That step-by-step instruction had not always been part of the curriculum, and it was something Truitt desperately wanted to see.
“That alone is why I ran for this role, was our reading scores,” Truitt said in a recent interview with WFAE.
Truitt has proudly reported on significant gains on North Carolina’s early-grades reading assessments. But when state test scores for older students are released next week, Truitt says the state will still be a long way from its goal of universal proficiency.
“We’re five years away from that at least,” she said.
Reflecting on her term
Truitt was defeated in the March Republican primary. She still has four months left in her term. But as I neared the end of my 22-year stint covering education in North Carolina, Truitt sat down for a 45-minute “exit interview.”
We talked about why it’s so hard to overcome racial disparities and teach kids to read, whether North Carolina’s public education system discourages innovation and how Truitt’s style as a moderate Republican affected her political survival.
“I had a lot of people who were ready to write me off simply because I had an R by my name, and a lot of people who work in education have a D by their name,” she said. “And I worked very hard to put those fears to rest by speaking to groups that were left-leaning groups instead of right-leaning groups. I hired people who probably didn’t vote the same way I do. … I think that in doing so, I cost myself the election.”
Truitt is a former high school English teacher who served as an education adviser to Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. She was chancellor of the private Western Governors University North Carolina when she ran for state superintendent in 2020. When she won, she became only the second Republican, after her predecessor Mark Johnson, to hold that post.
The General Assembly holds most of the policy power over public education, and the GOP has controlled both houses throughout Truitt’s tenure. Nonetheless, she’s hit plenty of roadblocks in her efforts to restructure the system. But the LETRS training was an easy sell, as policymakers across America reexamined how reading should be taught.
Why so little progress?
Truitt took office in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she says getting students back into classrooms became her first task. The disruption of remote learning set students back, here and across the country.
And the literacy training for teachers, which requires about 160 hours of work, has been phased in over the past three years. That’s why Truitt hopes the combination of pandemic recovery and better-trained teachers will show up in significant gains over the next few years.
“This is the first year that all kindergarteners, first-, second- and third-graders will all start school with a teacher who has completed the LETRS professional development,” she said.
In January, “nation’s report card” reading scores for fourth-graders will be released, providing a national context for North Carolina’s work.
“I think that they will be somewhat improved,” Truitt said. “But we’re not going to see the big ‘Aha!’ until the next round, which will be two years from then.”
But the state and individual school districts have gotten their hopes up before, only to see reading scores remain relatively flat. Since 2012 North Carolina’s Read to Achieve program has provided extra support for reading and made it harder to advance to fourth-grade without passing the third-grade reading exam. Even before the pandemic there was little progress, especially for Black, Latino and low-income students.
Mississippi, the first to adopt LETRS on a statewide basis, has seen significant gains in elementary reading scores. But its proficiency levels remain similar to North Carolina’s in elementary school — and worse than North Carolina’s in middle school.
Importance of principals
Truitt says teaching all students to read well is one key to overcoming the persistent racial and economic gaps that occur across the nation.
“The other solution is leadership in our schools,” she said. “And you have profiled one of our best and brightest leaders that I’ve come across in the last four years and that’s the Southwest Regional Principal of the Year for Charlotte, Dwight Thompson.”
I reported extensively last year on Thompson’s work with an ambitious public-private partnership trying to break the cycle of poverty in west Charlotte. At Renaissance West STEAM Academy, Thompson recruited strong teachers and saw significant gains on test scores, getting the school off the state’s F list for the first time in 2023.
Truitt noted that he has also reduced suspensions and improved discipline.
“And when you do those things you provide the fuel that communities of color or high-poverty communities need to leverage an education to climb out of poverty,” Truitt said.
The state provides training for current and aspiring school leaders, as well as financial incentives to get strong principals into high-needs schools. But strong principals tend to get offers from other districts, as well as private companies working on education reform.
When I told Truitt I’d often jokingly asked Thompson when he’d be leaving, Truitt said she understood that pattern, but “I told him I’m coming to visit his school this fall. And I don’t think I’ll do very many school visits this fall.”
But less than 12 hours after that exchange, CMS announced a new principal for Renaissance West STEAM. Thompson has taken a new job out of state.
Not designed for innovation?
Truitt says she’s proud of another success: creation of the state’s Portrait of a Graduate, a framework for refocusing schools on career preparation, including the development of skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking and empathy.
The goal, she said, is “getting districts to help our teachers and our students and their parents think differently about what the purpose of K-12 school is, that crossing the graduation stage is not an ending but a beginning. The goal should be to graduate and be employed, enlisted (or) enrolled.”
But she never managed to persuade state lawmakers to revise the state’s school performance grades to incorporate those elements. And she spent much of her term pitching a “Pathways to Excellence” plan to revamp the way teachers are licensed and paid. It met with opposition from teachers, got a tepid response from the state Board of Education and so far has inspired no action from the General Assembly.
Truitt said she thinks she could have made progress on grading and teacher licensure with another term. Both, she said, are complex concepts that require building trust with different groups, including lawmakers who may have competing priorities.
“One of the things I’ve realized since I lost the primary is that the Department of Public Instruction is not really set up to be a place of innovation. And that’s what I was trying to do,” she said.
No endorsement for successor
Truitt was beaten in the primary by Michele Morrow, a MAGA Republican who home-schools her kids, had never won elected office and hadn’t raised as much money as Truitt. During the campaign, Morrow cast Truitt as not conservative enough and a poor steward of public money.
“I’m not an anomaly. There were a lot of moderate Republicans who lost,” Truitt said. “I could have moved further right during the primary, but that wasn’t me.”
Maurice “Mo” Green is the Democratic candidate. He served as deputy superintendent in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and superintendent of Guilford County Schools before taking a job with the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
Truitt says neither candidate has asked for her endorsement, and she doesn’t plan to offer one.
“I haven’t seen enough of a platform from either candidate to be able to say that they’re going to do what needs to be done,” she said.
Truitt says she isn’t sure what her next step will be. But she said she doesn’t plan to leave North Carolina and expects to stay involved in education.
