State Board of Education Vision:Every public school student in North Carolina will be empowered to accept academic challenges, prepared to pursue their chosen path after graduating high school, and encouraged to become lifelong learners with the capacity to engage in a globally-collaborative society.
State Board of Education Mission:The mission of the North Carolina State Board of Education is to use its constitutional authority to guard and maintain the right of a sound, basic education for every child in North Carolina Public Schools.
The Carolina Journal Theresa Opeka | Dec. 8, 2022: Truitt: Testing-based formula for grading schools needs improvement - Truitt said many schools in the state are still dealing with being designated, both on a federal and state level, as low performing due to poor end-of-grade testing during school closures that occurred during the pandemic. The accountability model uses a formula that looks at how students performed in grades 3 through 8 and then again in a couple of courses in high school on high-stakes end-of-grade testing. The scores from that test make-up 80% of the school’s A-F letter grade, and the other 20% comes from how the scores have improved compared to prior years. Truitt said they look forward to presenting a new slate of measures to the General Assembly during the long session.
NCDHHS Press Release | Dec. 8, 2022: NCDHHS Launches New Mental and Behavioral Health Training and Consultation Support in K-12 Schools - This winter and spring, 130 public schools across North Carolina will receive mental and behavioral health training and consultation through the North Carolina Psychiatry Access Line (NC-PAL). The services are designed to ensure participating K-12 school staff have the support they need to help their students who may be dealing with mental and behavioral health concerns. The program is free to local schools as part of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services StrongSchoolsNC COVID-19 Testing Program.
More than 25 schools from across the state joined State NC Superintendent Catherine Truittand NCDPI's Office of Digital Teaching and Learning on Wednesday afternoon for an Hour of Code Student Expo at the Education Building in downtown Raleigh.
K-12 student computer science teams showcased the skills they are learning in coding and computer science through a variety of hands-on activities such as robotics, drone technology, virtual reality experiences, and more.
Additionally, Sean Roberts, vice president for Government Affairs for Code.org, announced a partnership with the Agency to provide professional learning in computer science to ensure more than 50 of North Carolina’s school districts will have a qualified computer science teacher at every high school, at no cost to the state, districts or teachers.
EducationNC sat down with Torbettrecently to take a deeper look at the areas of education he hopes to see reformed.
These are thoughts he’s developed in the past year as the select committee began re-imagining education in the state from the ground up. It has so far met 13 times, often in the General Assembly building in downtown Raleigh, but also on the road in places such as Gaston, Randolph, and Mecklenburg counties.
The origins of the futures committee
Torbett’s current leadership role in education came when House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, tapped him to take on the responsibility for chairing the House education and education appropriations committees.
“After several months, I went to the speaker. I said to him, I honestly think that the fix that we need is to get back to just the basics of educating children as the primary focus,” Torbett said. “That’s it. That’s the job. That’s the task. If nothing else happens, educate each and every child in that classroom.”
But he said he doesn’t believe that can be done within the current system.
“I think it would honestly be easier just to create a new system from the ground up with all the technology we have we can bring to bear, and look forward for 100 years,” he said.
As the committee has met and traveled around the state, Torbett said he has been looking to identify the foundational items needed for a strong education system in the state. The “structural piers,” as he calls them.
He identified five during an interview with EducationNC, though in many cases he said they are all interconnected. The most pressing, he said, was what many critics of the General Assembly have been calling for repeatedly since the Republicans took the reins of the legislature in 2011: teacher compensation.
“First and foremost — always first and foremost — we have to adjust teacher compensation,” he said. “We have to make it so they are paid at the professional level they have been educated to be.”
The General Assembly has provided regular salary increases to teachers over the years, but some have criticized both the amount and distribution of those raises.
In the most recent session of the General Assembly, lawmakers added on to the 2.5% average raises passed for the 2021-22 fiscal year with an average 4.2% increase for 2022-23. But that’s not across the board. Some teachers will get bigger raises than others.
That ties into another one of Torbett’s structural piers: advanced teaching roles. These are leadership roles that teachers can take on rather than going into administration, the route that many educators looking to advance take. Torbett said he wants to avoid the brain drain out of the classroom into the central office.
“I’ve talked to principals, and I’ve talked to administrators. What they would love to do, why they went in there, is to teach, but because the compensation isn’t equated in administrative as it is with teachers, it isn’t equal,” he said. “Then they feel like to adjust compensation, to send their kids to college, to be able to afford another car, to do those things that families have to do as you age within a system, they have to jump into administration to earn that extra dollar.”
When it comes to what students actually learn in the classroom, Torbett said he feels like the education system needs to get back to “core curriculum,” another one of his structural piers.
He said the teacher’s time in the classroom needs to focus on the basics, things like math, science, English, history. He even considers courses such as the performing arts essential. But some others subjects — electives such as Spanish, he said — could perhaps be moved mostly online.
As part of that structural pier, Torbett also said he would like to see the calendar year go back to being marked by Labor Day and Memorial Day as the start and end dates.
Districts have been pushing lawmakers for years to let them have calendar flexibility: basically the ability to choose their own calendars rather than the one mandated by the legislature. The state says that students must be in school for a minimum of 185 days a year or 1,025 hours of instruction. It also says that schools can’t start earlier than the Monday closest to Aug. 26, and they can’t end later than the Friday closest to June 11.
Hopefully, by moving some classes online and focusing on core subjects in class, schools wouldn’t find themselves pressed for time and thus in need of a different calendar year, Torbett said.
“I’m thinking we’ve been fighting this battle for well over two decades now,” he said of calendar flexibility, indicating he thinks it’s time to be done with the debate.
Another long-standing issue that Torbett wants to tackle is the testing apparatus surrounding the state’s public schools.
The End-Of Grade and End-of-Course tests taken by many North Carolina students are used both for grades and also for evaluating how well schools are doing around the state. School Performance Grades are overwhelmingly weighted toward proficiency, a metric determined in large part by these tests.
“So we’re expecting a child to be the best they possibly can be on one given day over a certain amount of hours. And it’s you get it or you don’t,” he said. “And that’s the grade, and that grade is a basis for other things. That is the most terrible system I’ve ever heard of in my life.”
That brings Torbett to another one of his structural piers. It doesn’t really have a concise word that defines it, but essentially Torbett wants to use data to reform the way students are evaluated and move through school.
He wants to de-emphasize testing and instead use a more competency-based approach that could measure a student’s performance throughout the year in real time and give a cumulative grade at the end. This would also enable students to advance if they are performing above grade-level.
“As an old school guy, kind of like your equalizer on your old stereo system where you would see the bars go up and you want to do your treble and your bass to kind of get the sound that you’re looking for,” he said. “This would give this information to a teacher so a teacher could, at moment’s notice, at real time, go and see where each child in the classroom is currently on the subject matter. And they can adjust their teaching talents and skills to effectively address the ones that need to be pulled up to the level where maybe other ones are in the classroom.”
The final “structural pier” Torbett discussed relates to school discipline.
He said the education system is doing a disservice to students who cause a disruption by not getting them the help they need to deal with the root cause of the behavior. And at the same time, he said it’s unfair to other students when one child disrupts the learning taking place in the classroom.
“So we need to take a disruptive child out of that system so we can let the other kids continue on with their education course, and then figure out what’s triggering this individual and move it to the point where we help this individual get back into the classroom,” he said. “But we can’t just turn a blind eye or act like it’s not going on.”
Critics of the current state of school discipline point to the way students of color seem to be disproportionately punished when compared to some of their peers.
“The constitution places educating each and every child in North Carolina at the feet of the North Carolina General Assembly,” he said, “and it’s high time we pick that responsibility up and make sure we do the best we can to educate each and every child in that classroom regardless.”
If punishments are handed out unfairly by teachers or other school leaders, Torbett said that would have to be remedied.
“If it shows signs of racial bias or or gender bias, then we have to address that, of course we do. I have no problem with that,” he said.
What now?
Torbett said the House Select Committee on an Education System for North Carolina’s Future will come out with a report ahead of the upcoming long session, but that it will likely not include any draft legislation. He said it is more of a “first round look” at what the committee has found.
Torbett called education one of the “issues of our time” and said that it is incumbent upon lawmakers to address it. The ability of people to get a good education is paramount to their success in life, he said. Which brought him back to his original “structural pier” of teacher compensation.
“(People) can move mountains with a good solid education. And then to have a good solid education, you have to have that teacher in the classroom that’s helping that child reach whatever goal that child wants to reach,” he said. “And to do that, we have to compensate them adequately so they can also raise a family and send their kids to college — just like every one of us hoped for — and have a good earning level for their kids as well. And we just got to do better in education.”
Bianca Quilantan and Eleanor Mueller | Dec. 7, 2022: 
