GREENSBORO — While U.S. Representatives found plenty to fight over in a Wednesday morning hearing on pandemic learning losses, North Carolina’s Education Secretary used the opportunity to tout her office’s efforts to advise school districts on effective academic recovery strategies.
Catherine Truitt, a Republican elected statewide, was among education leaders and experts from across the country called to Washington to testify before the Republican-chaired House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education.
The hearing was entitled, “Generational Learning Loss: How Pandemic School Closures Hurt Students.”
Republicans and Democrats on the committee voiced conflicting opinions over whether pandemic school closures made sense and on the usefulness of federal COVID-19 relief funding for schools.
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However, in her statement to the committee and responses to their questions, Truitt mostly focused on steps she said she and her staff took to better advise districts on how to use the relief dollars.
Truitt said she set up a special office to study learning loss in North Carolina and offer advice to districts on how to best use their federal money. She said the state urged districts to focus on the most affected academic subjects and students, such as middle school math students, and to use strategies expected to be effective.
Examples, she said, in response to a question from Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., include summer academies to help students transition into middle school and high school math “boot camps,” targeted teacher professional development, and “high dosage” tutoring for students.
Guilford County Schools was honored by the Biden administration last year for its efforts to implement “high dosage” tutoring, aiming to provide students in need with at least three separate tutoring sessions of half an hour to an hour each week with a consistent tutor.
Republican Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida, the subcommittee chair, asked Truitt how long it could take for students to bounce back.
“It’s going to take multiple years to recover and some students may never recover,” she said. “Many were behind in their academic progress when the pandemic hit, which one could argue is why so many parents seeking alternatives to their neighborhood public schools.”
Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the House Education Committee Chairwoman, wanted to hear Truitt’s thoughts on the idea of further federal spending.
“One of the arguments we hear frequently from the left is that the federal government must spend more money, and yet we have seen states like North Carolina be remarkably successful with existing resources,” Foxx said. “What would you say to Democrats who claim that learning loss can’t be fixed without billions of dollars in new taxpayer dollars at the federal level?”
Truitt didn’t explicitly reject — or welcome — the hypothetical billions of dollars, or say whether she thought learning loss could be fixed without them.
In North Carolina, she said, some rural districts have tiny central office teams, and having to figure out how to best spend massive amounts of COVID-19 relief dollars over a limited number of years to best help their students, “was very daunting for them.”
She said she wanted to make sure the committee understood how unique North Carolina was among states in setting up the new office to offer support and in quickly providing data to help districts make their decisions.
“That’s how I would answer that question,” she said.