NC school test results are in. How did CMS students fare during the pandemic?

In a year of mostly remote learning due to the pandemic, a majority of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students failed state exams for the 2020-21 academic year, according to results released by the state on Wednesday.

Yet CMS students only slightly trailed others statewide on the reading, math and science scores.

The new state test results show that only 45.4% of students statewide passed state reading, math and science exams during the 2020-21 school year. The proficiency rate was 45.6% for the exams given to elementary and middle school students and 44.7% for tests given to high school students.

In CMS, 44.6% of students in all subjects passed the exams.

District Superintendent Earnest Winston said at a news conference that the pandemic and resulting academic decline represent the “most significant disruption of public education in our lifetimes.”

For all subjects combined, 44.2% of CMS elementary and middle school students and 46.1% of high schoolers passed the state exams.

The statewide results were lower than in previous years. For instance, 58.8% of K-12 students passed state exams in the 2018-19 school year.

Declines in CMS were precipitous across nearly every subject and among every racial and ethnic group. In reading tests for grades 3-8, for example, pass rates dropped from 44% in 2018-19 to 28.5% in 2020-21. In Math 1 for grades 9-12, results dropped from 47.4% to 26%.

Though the rate of decline was similar in several subjects across racial and ethnic groups, some of those groups were already seeing low pass rates. In Math 1 for grades 9-12, the pass rate among Black students dropped from 10.2% to less than 5%. For Asian students, it dropped from 28.9% to 16.8%.

“The gaps didn’t get larger, but unfortunately the ceiling got lower,” Frank Barnes, the district’s chief equity officer, said during Wednesday’s news conference.

Just 7% of elementary and middle school students statewide did not take the state exams. In CMS, 8% of elementary and middle school students opted out. Only 8% of high school students statewide and in CMS did not take the tests.

Last fall, CMS had 142,177 students, 3.2% fewer than the year before. Statewide, 1.5 million students attended public schools.

This year’s results didn’t include the A-F school performance grades and growth scores that have been used in the past.

CMS’ response to the crisis

CMS’ results were not a surprise to district leaders.

During a school board meeting Aug. 10, both Matthew Hayes, the CMS deputy superintendent of academics, and Barnes said it will take a multi-year recovery effort to make up ground lost from the pandemic.

“This is not a flip of a switch coming out of 17 months of where we’ve been with the work that needs to be done,” Hayes said. “It will take a multi-year effort to get this corrected. ... Understanding that we are not entirely out of the pandemic’s grasp. The pandemic is still at our doorstep.”

Barnes said results of the pandemic on academic performance are “deep and wide-ranging, and district leaders foresaw declines across the board.”

“We need to acknowledge and be prepared to support students based on those results,” Barnes said.

On Wednesday, the district said its most immediate goal was to get students back to face-to-face instruction as quickly and safely as possible.

With that, officials said they would make investments aimed at pulling the district out of its academic hole. Using money from the federal American Rescue Plan, CMS will allocate up to $50 million over three years to provide extra resources for students in English-learning courses and mathematics. The money will be directed at the district’s 42 lowest-performing schools.

Officials said they will also hire and deploy 20 new school counselors, social workers and psychologists to add to the 35 it had previously hired using CARES Act COVID-relief money. To supplement those efforts, schools will adopt a new social-emotional learning curriculum for grades K-12.

Other new hires will include bilingual school advocates in 34 language-diverse schools and five full-time translators at five language-diverse schools. The district also hopes to combat absenteeism at three high schools, which increased during the pandemic, though officials declined to provide many details on that effort.

After Labor Day, the district will begin taking academic, emotional and social assessments of students to best determine ways to move forward for individuals.

“The first step is to take stock of where we are,” Barnes said.

The exam results can be found online at https://bit.ly/3yAXYL5.

(Raleigh) News & Observer staff writers David Raynor and T. Keung Hui contributed.

This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 5:36 PM.