Advancing Kindergarten Through Third-Grade Educational Equity in North Carolina

Investing in early literacy is critical because, after third-grade, teachers spend less time teaching students how to read and more time teaching students how to gather information using their reading skills.

Literacy skills acquired from kindergarten to third-grade provide an important foundation for children to succeed in middle and high school and their professional lives. One of the most immediate ways that early reading skills impact school success in North Carolina is through the state’s mandate of third-grade retention for all third-grade students who don't pass the end-of-grade reading proficiency test. North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s (NC-DPI) state-wide school report card data indicate that at the end of the 2022-23 academic year, approximately 23% of third-grade students attending traditional elementary schools were slated to repeat third-grade due to low reading proficiency.

Twenty-three percent means that over 20,000 students repeated third-grade. This is after accounting for students who failed the test but were promoted to fourth grade because they received a good cause exception, such as students with an individualized education program (IEP) in place before taking the test.

This high level of grade retention is concerning because research shows that grade retention has a scarring effect on high school and postsecondary completion. Retention in primary grades is associated with:

• Reduced odds of completing high school by about 60%
• Reduced odds of entering college or university by 45%
• Reduced odds of obtaining a bachelor’s degree by 64%

What’s more troubling is that the burden of grade retention falls much more heavily on racially marginalized and socioeconomically disadvantaged students, based on research using data from The North Carolina Education Research Data Center.

The figures in this report are interactive. You can select subgroups of students to view and hide to see trends and comparisons more clearly. Hovering over figures will popup more information.

As detailed throughout the remainder of this report, inequalities in access to educational resources have severe adverse effects on the early literacy skills of North Carolina’s most vulnerable children–groups that have a long history of marginalization based on their race, ethnicity, and economic status. As exemplified by the work of North Carolina’s Center for Racial Equity in Education, comprehensive empirical analysis of racial, ethnic, and economic equity helps stakeholders understand where inequities exist, the magnitude of the opportunity gaps, how disparities in outcomes are produced, and how they might be eliminated.

We don’t advocate for decreased academic standards associated with reading proficiency. Instead, through this report, we call on policymakers and educators at all levels of the system to ensure that children who most need it receive high-quality, individually tailored reading instruction necessary to meet the state’s proficiency standards. As noted in an Education Next article that directly responded to North Carolina’s 2021 Excellent Public Schools Act, there is no more crucial shared task than developing all children’s basic literacy skills, starting from the first days of school.

As many before us have noted, “race” is socially constructed as opposed to being due to meaningful genetic and biological differences. However, race remains a fundamental axis upon which educational resources are distributed.

There are two undisputed facts about children's reading skills in North Carolina. First, children from all racial and economic groups need more school support to become proficient readers. Second, there are gaping racial, ethnic, and economic disparities in students’ reading proficiency starting from a young age. Although literacy gaps between economically advantaged and disadvantaged children and between White and Black children are evident when they begin kindergarten, research clearly shows that these gaps grow wider during their first few years of school. Most importantly, literacy experts agree that there are in-school solutions that can alleviate out-of-school disparities in exposure to family and community resources that foster literacy.

North Carolina school report card data shows that at the end of the 2022-23 academic year, only 51% of eighth-grade students could read and comprehend text at a proficiency level appropriate for their grade. This means that half of all high school students will need help engaging in grade-level material across all subjects and will be underprepared for postsecondary pathways. The pandemic did not cause this issue. Eighth-grade reading proficiency in 2019, the year before the pandemic, was similarly low. During the 2018-19 academic year, only 56% of eighth-grade students were grade level proficient in reading.

When test scores are broken down by race, ethnicity, and economic status, we can see that Black, Hispanic, American Indian, and economically disadvantaged eighth-grade students are the least likely to be reading at grade level.  In 2023, only 35% of Black, 38% of Hispanic, 38% of American Indian, and 37% of economically disadvantaged eighth-grade students ended the academic year with a basic level of reading proficiency. In comparison, White, Asian, and not economically disadvantaged students had significantly higher levels of reading proficiency and still have much room for advancement: 64% of White, 79% of Asian, and 66% of not economically disadvantaged students were grade-level proficient.

Right now, North Carolina is investing heavily in ensuring that children recover learning lost during pandemic school closures and that literacy instruction is aligned with the science of reading to give children the best chance of developing strong literacy skills. During this time, it is critical that North Carolina also invests in educational resource equity to ensure that children who have historically received the fewest educational resources and had the poorest educational outcomes receive the quality and intensity of reading instruction needed to become proficient readers.  

Despite policymakers recognizing the need to ensure that circumstances of birth do not determine children’s success in school, disparities in third-grade reading proficiency have remained remarkably stable over the past decade. As shown in Figure 2.1 below, in 2014, there was a 30 percentage point gap between Black and White students’ reading proficiency. While third-grade reading proficiency decreased overall following the pandemic, the Black-White gap remained steady at a 29 percentage point difference in 2023. 

In Figure 2.2, the grade-level proficiency of economically disadvantaged and not economically disadvantaged third-grade students are added to the figure. This enables you to see how racial and ethnic marginalization are associated with family economic status. Specifically, the outcomes for economically disadvantaged students are closely associated with the outcomes of Black, Hispanic, and American Indian students, and the outcomes for not economically disadvantaged students are closely associated with the outcomes for White and Asian students. We will dive deeper into the association between racial and ethnic marginalization and poverty in NC’s public schools later in this report.

These trends show that North Carolina’s school system must simultaneously continue recovering from pandemic learning loss and invest in narrowing economic, racial, and ethnic disparities that have persisted throughout its public education system's history.

As you explore the interactive figures throughout this report, we ask you to consider the following questions:

• First, to what extent do these racial, ethnic, and economic gaps in third-grade reading proficiency widen as children progress through their first four years of school (from kindergarten to third-grade)? 
• Second, how do the data help us understand the role of equitable access to educational resources in ensuring that the most marginalized students receive reading instruction that enables them to meet proficiency standards? 

Let’s explore these questions by examining the associations between school resource equity and widening racial, ethnic, and economic disparities from kindergarten to third-grade. School resource equity is the systematic provision and use of people, time, money, and instructional materials to undo educational harm and promote rigorous academic acceleration for students who have been denied educational opportunities due to circumstances of birth. By looking at trends in how school resources are associated with students’ race, ethnicity, and economic circumstance, we can see which students have access to well-resourced schools, and how school resources are associated with third-grade reading skills.

The ultimate aim is for our public education system to: first, do no harm by not contributing to widening racial, ethnic, and economic disparities; second, be a mechanism through which children growing up in lower-resourced families and communities receive educational opportunities that promote upward mobility.   

The data presented in this report show that racial, ethnic, and economic disparities widen as children progress from kindergarten to third-grade. We focus on these early grades because the greatest return on educational equity investments is likely to occur when children receive high-quality reading instruction early in their educational careers:

• It costs more and is more difficult to provide remedial instruction to fill literacy gaps as children progress through school.
• Children fall behind in other content areas as they progress through school because teachers build their curriculum on the expectation that students can use their literacy skills to gain knowledge.

It is essential that we discuss school resourcing in the context of student segregation. Student segregation by race, ethnicity, and poverty continues to be an important characteristic of US schools, including those in North Carolina. As detailed in a recent report, North Carolina public schools are becoming more segregated by race, even as the overall student population becomes more racially diverse.

We focus on student segregation by race, ethnicity, and economic status because these types of segregation enable persistent disparities in students’ access to educational resources. This segregation has tremendous implications for disparities in access to educational resources, especially the resourcing of experienced and well-trained educators, and contributes to widening disparities in students' learning and academic success as they progress through school. Research informs us that when students of all racial and ethnic groups and across economic classes learn together in the same schools, they have more similar access to high-quality educational resources. However, it is essential to note that this pattern can be undermined within schools by tracking students into classes with different academic levels.    

To understand whether racial, ethnic, and economic disparities widen as children progress from kindergarten to third-grade, we focus on students in segregated schools. We do this because kindergarten readiness data is not disaggregated by demographic subgroups of students. For example, the only way to see the kindergarten readiness of White children in the public data reported by NC-DPI is to focus on predominantly White schools. This lack of disaggregated information is a significant failing of the publicly reported data. As guidance from the National Center for Educational Statistics states: “disaggregating student data can help schools and communities plan appropriate programs, decide which interventions to select, use limited resources where they are needed most, and see important trends in educational outcomes and achievement.”

Disaggregated data (broken out by race, ethnicity, economic disadvantage, gender, disability status, and other key factors) are critical to ensuring that all children have equitable access to the educational resources they need to thrive. By providing disaggregated data on how opportunities and outcomes are distributed across demographic subgroups, education systems remain accountable to the diverse stakeholders of the communities they serve, and community members can take informed actions about their children’s education. 

Lacking disaggregated kindergarten readiness data, the remainder of this report focuses on school-level racial composition and compares schools that are predominantly Black, Hispanic, White, or American Indian. Examining segregated schools is the only way to observe changes in racial and ethnic disparities from kindergarten to third-grade in North Carolina using publicly available data. There are 1,281 public elementary schools in the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s (NC-DPI) publicly shared data set during the 2022-23 academic year, and 530 schools (44%) are segregated schools. 

In the data presented here, schools are defined as being Mostly Black, Mostly White, Mostly American Indian, or Mostly Hispanic, based on having 60% or more of the student body identifying as that racial or ethnic group. Table 1 below shows the racial and ethnic composition of segregated and diverse elementary schools. The 751 diverse schools across the state are not primarily composed of any one racial or ethnic group, while the others are deeply segregated. Mostly Black schools were, on average, 74% Black, 11% Hispanic, and 8% White; Mostly White schools were 75% White, 11% Hispanic, and 7% Black; and Mostly Hispanic schools were 67% Hispanic, 22% Black, and 8% White.
       

We also utilize the concentration of economically disadvantaged students to observe how poverty is associated with access to educational resources and widening disparities from kindergarten to third grade. Of the 1,281 public elementary schools, 398 are classified by the state as high-poverty, 624 as moderate poverty, and 258 as low-poverty schools.

When the percentage of students classified as economically disadvantaged is included in the examination of school characteristics, we see that poverty segregation is also a defining characteristic of most schools in North Carolina, as it is across the U.S. As the percentage of non-White students in a school increases, the level of economic disadvantage also increases (except for Asian students). This trend is shown in the second to last row in Table 1 above. 

The following patterns exemplify the stark racial disparity in exposure to concentrated poverty in North Carolina:

• In mostly American Indian schools, an average of 85% of students were economically disadvantaged.
• In mostly Black schools, an average of 72% of students are economically disadvantaged. 
• In mostly White schools, an average of 44% of students were economically disadvantaged. 
• There were no mostly American Indian or mostly Hispanic schools that were classified as low-poverty. 
• Only 4 of the 120 mostly Black schools were classified as low-poverty. 
• 150 of the 485 mostly White schools were classified as low-poverty.   

In the U.S., schools are considered one of the primary institutions that can create equality of opportunity by providing children born into lower-income families with the resources needed to attain social and economic prosperity in adulthood. However, research informs us that students in schools with concentrated levels of poverty do not reliably receive the resources–including rigorous and culturally responsive academic content, effective and experienced educators, and physically and emotionally safe school spaces–that are necessary to counteract their experiences of poverty and racial/ethnic harm. 

As shown in Figure 3 below, we cannot understate the strength of the association between the intersection of racial concentration and poverty concentration. The relationship between school racial and ethnic composition and concentrated economic disadvantage can be seen in this figure by color-coding schools by their racial composition. There is a clear clustering of mostly White schools at the bottom, low-poverty end of the distribution; in contrast, mostly Black, mostly American Indian, and mostly Hispanic schools are clustered at the top, high-poverty end of the distribution.

Note: All traditional public elementary schools in North Carolina are shown in Figure 3.

For those who want a deeper examination of these associations, Figures 4.1 to 4.5 below enable you to see each racial and ethnic group separately. Figures 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 show that as the percentage of Black, American Indian, or Hispanic students increases, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students also increases. This pattern is reversed when looking at schools based on their percentage of White and Asian students. Figures 4.4 and 4.5 show that higher percentages of White or Asian students are associated with lower percentages of economically disadvantaged students.

Most of the figures in this report display 2018-19 academic year data because school systems are still recovering from pandemic disruptions and learning loss. The 2022-23 data were also examined, and all the trends and relationships continue to hold true. 

Understanding how race, ethnicity, and economic disadvantage are connected with access to educational resources provides a fuller picture of how schooling often compounds rather than reduces disadvantage. We focus on teacher professional characteristics because research consistently shows that teacher performance and quality are the most essential school factors determining student achievement. The teacher resource index measure shown in the figures below is a composite of the percent of teachers in the school that are experienced (3 or more years of teaching), state-certified, and national board-certified. The closer the teacher resource index measure is to 100, the larger the percentage of the teachers in the school that meet these standards.

While teacher quality has many more components beyond experience and credentialing, we focus on these factors due to their availability in the data. We assessed the validity of our teacher resource index measure by checking its correlation with the direct teacher performance measure of being rated as “needing improvement” that is available in the 2022-23 academic year data. There was a strong correlation between the school-level teacher resource index measure and the percentage of teachers in the school rated as needing improvement.  

As shown in Figures 5.1 to 5.4 below, the teacher resource index decreases as the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in the school increases.

Next, when color coding for school racial and ethnic composition is added, we see that mostly White schools have lower percentages of economically disadvantaged students and higher levels of teacher resources, as shown in Figure 6 below. In comparison, schools that are mostly Black, American Indian, or Hispanic have higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students and lower levels of teacher resources.

These intersections between race, ethnicity, economic disadvantage, and teacher resources have substantial implications for the extent to which schools can contribute to either narrowing or widening racial and ethnic disparities in educational outcomes. As detailed in the next section, racial and ethnic disparities widen during the first four years of schooling.

Figures 7.1 and 7.2 below enable you to compare racial disparities at kindergarten entry and at the end of third-grade, and see that a stark racially patterned gap emerges. Figure 7.1 shows the percentage of students in each school who score as being ready for kindergarten, and Figure 7.2 shows the percentage of third-grade students who are reading proficient. There is a clear shift in the distribution of schools from Figure 7.1 to Figure 7.2 based on racial composition. At kindergarten entry, school racial composition is somewhat but not strongly associated with kindergarten readiness. There are mostly White schools with higher and lower levels of kindergarten readiness; the same is true of mostly Black schools. However, by the end of third-grade, mostly White schools are significantly more likely to have higher levels of reading proficiency, and mostly Black schools are significantly more likely to have lower levels of reading proficiency.

As shown in Figures 7.3 and 7.4 below, this pattern of widening racial and ethnic disparities as children go from kindergarten to third-grade holds for the 2022-23 academic year.

Kindergarten readiness assessed in the fall of 2022 is used because NC-DPI no longer reports school-level kindergarten readiness data. This policy change that prevents public reporting of kindergarten readiness data will make it much more difficult for the general public to hold the Department of Public Instruction, their school district, and their school accountable for narrowing the economic, racial, and ethnic disparities that emerge during children’s first years of schooling. 

This dramatic widening of racial and ethnic disparities from kindergarten to third-grade is consistent with the state superintendent’s August 2024 report to the State Board of Education, which showed that the Black-White gap emerges as early as between the beginning and end of students' kindergarten year. The 2023-24 data shows that at the beginning of kindergarten, 36% of White students scored as ready for core instruction, and a similar 32% of Black students scored as ready for core instruction. However, by the end of the academic year, 81% of White students scored as ready for core instruction, but a significantly lower 61% of Black students scored as ready for core instruction. The beginning and end of kindergarten scores for all subgroups of students are shown in Figure 8 below.

We examine whether the children who need the most support enroll in schools with the highest quality teachers by first looking at the association between the percentage of students in the school that are ready for kindergarten and the teacher resource index measure. Figures 9.1 and 9.2 below have a dashed line drawn across to show the schools in the bottom quarter of teacher resources. This shows a clear clustering of mostly Black and high-poverty schools in the bottom left of these figures, which are schools that have students entering with the lowest levels of kindergarten readiness couples with accessing the least experienced, least certified teachers. 

One way to understand what may be happening in the widening of racial, ethnic, and economic disparities in academic skills from kindergarten to third-grade is that schools with fewer White children and with higher levels of economic disadvantage also employ educators with less teaching experience and certification. Figure 9.1 below shows that schools with mostly Black, mostly Hispanic, and mostly American Indian students, as well as those with more economic disadvantage, have less experienced teachers and fewer state and national board-certified teachers, on average. 

The pattern shown in the figures above indicates that students who experience higher levels of marginalization and disadvantage outside of school also face additional disadvantages in the education system based on the characteristics of the teachers available to them. Figures 9.3 to 9.8 below show the results separately for each teacher resource measure.

This pattern of differential access to teacher resources means that policy interventions to narrow racial, ethnic, and economic disparities in reading proficiency must go beyond giving all teachers the same LETRS training. Districts and schools that have higher numbers of less experienced teachers and teachers rated as “needing improvement” will likely need additional training and coaching support to ensure they can provide the strongest instruction possible.

The strong correlation between the poverty level of the school and the percentage of students in a school that are Black, American Indian, and Hispanic means that state-wide and district-level educational policies can begin to narrow disparities with economically targeted interventions.  

Research informs us that the level of concentrated economic disadvantage in the school multiplies the challenges that schools have in promoting students’ academic success. This trend shows up in the literacy outcomes for North Carolina students. As shown in Figure 10.1 below, there is a strong negative association between the level of economic disadvantage in the school and reading proficiency. Because the state must report disaggregated reading proficiency data for each racial and ethnic subgroup, Figures 10.2 to 10.6 below show that the negative effect of school-level concentrated economic disadvantage holds for all subgroups of students.

This negative effect of concentrated disadvantage also holds for students who themselves are individually not in an economically disadvantaged household. Figure 11 below shows the statewide average reading proficiency for economically disadvantaged students and not economically disadvantaged students. It shows that in schools where 40% or less of the students are economically disadvantaged, 80% of not economically disadvantaged students are reading proficient. In comparison, in schools where 60% or more of the students are economically disadvantaged, a significantly lower 58% of not economically disadvantaged students are reading proficient. This negative effect of attending higher-poverty schools on not economically disadvantaged students is partially due to overall school quality. Remember that as the level of economic disadvantage increases, teacher educational resources also decreases, as shown earlier in Figure 6.

Figure 11 also shows that in schools where 40% or less of the students are economically disadvantaged, 52% of economically disadvantaged students are reading proficient. In comparison, in schools where 60% or more of the students are economically disadvantaged, only 41% of economically disadvantaged students are reading proficient. The benefits economically disadvantaged students get from attending lower-poverty schools are partially due to their access to more experienced, more certified teachers.

More details can be seen in Figures 12.1 and 12.2 below, which show the full distribution of traditional elementary schools based on the percent of economically disadvantaged and not economically disadvantaged students in the school.

Of the 561 racially and ethnically segregated traditional elementary schools across North Carolina during the 2022-23 academic year, 49 of them had both a high percentage of economically disadvantaged students and a strong level of reading proficiency. These are schools with 60% or more of economically disadvantaged students and 50% or more of third-grade students who are reading proficient. These 49 schools are highlighted in green in Figures 13.1 and 13.2 below. Of these 49 schools, 4 were mostly Black, and 45 were Mostly White. Notably, these schools saw a wide range of Kindergarten readiness scores, indicating that it was not simply that students in these schools came in with high levels of academic preparedness, but that the educators in these schools worked with students and their families to promote strong reading proficiency. 

Over the coming years, we will dig deeper and profile several of these schools to better understand what works for advancing reading proficiency in schools serving a moderate to high percentage of economically disadvantaged students.

We close by discussing policies that advance equitable access to good instruction: actions that can initiate change and foster sustainable progress toward narrowing these educational disparities. The role of schools is urgent, given that, as shown in Figures 13.1 and 13.2 above, there are large racially and ethnically patterned disparities by the end of third-grade that are much stronger than the ones that exist at the start of kindergarten. Equitable access to good instruction is an important piece of the solution. Resource equity involves consistently allocating educational resources (staff, time, funding, curriculum materials) to align with the level of student needs. 

In North Carolina, resource equity aligns with NC’s Excellent Public Schools Act, and achieving it would require that the students who need the most support to become grade-level proficient readers by third-grade receive increased access to high-quality teachers, more time spent exposed to Science of Reading aligned practices, and more exposure to individualized reading interventions. This is not the current state of North Carolina’s educational system. As detailed in Figure 6 above, the students at the highest risk for becoming struggling readers are among those least likely to be enrolled in schools that have the highest percentage of high-quality teachers and receive the highest quality literacy instruction. 

Our focus on equitable access to good instruction is consistent with a recent analysis of racial disparities in grade retention in North Carolina, which found that 90% of the Black-White disparity was due to differences in the quality of schools attended by Black versus White students. They also found that 100% of the Hispanic-White disparity in grade retention was due to differences in school quality. 

North Carolina legislators and NC-DPI have taken the first steps in improving literacy outcomes across the state by investing in building the capacity of kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers to align their instruction with the Science of Reading. Now they need to take the next steps and ensure that the children who are most dependent on their schools and teachers for their developing reading skills access the most skilled teachers and receive the highest quality literacy instruction. As the Center for Racial Equity in Education detailed in their 2019 report, "race, [ethnicity, and economic disadvantage] condition students’ access to educational resources and opportunities, and therefore, has been and remains a present and powerful predictor of every measure of student success.”      

Equity shifts need to occur at state, district, and school levels for more equitable access to educational resources. Policymakers need to ask how teachers are hired, placed, and strengthened through coaching and other supportive professional development in ways that determine which students have access to the most skilled educators These policies must be both immediate–getting educational opportunities to current cohorts of students–and long-term–developing the pipeline of educators and administrators that can create sustainable shifts in longstanding economic, racial, and ethnic disparities.

Advancing equitable access to good instruction will require policies that shift the allocation of resources:

• Shifts across the state: attracting strong teachers, literacy coaches, and Science of Reading aligned curricular materials to high-poverty and rural districts. 
• Shifts within districts: incentivizing and supporting strong teachers and literacy coaches to work at the schools with the highest need. 
• Shifts within schools: incentivizing, assigning, and supporting the strongest teachers to teach in classrooms with struggling readers, and allocating additional aides so that there can be more small grouping during the earliest grades. 

For all equity-oriented policies, state legislators can set measurable short-term and long-term targets and require tracking and transparent reporting of the data in ways that enable the general public to understand whether progress is being made. It is important that parents and the broader public are empowered with access to equity-focused data dashboards that provide disaggregated data early, before children reach the third-grade and are potentially harmed by mandatory grade retention. 

Decades of research inform us that what gets measured is what gets attention and what gets changed; therefore, our strongest recommendation is the creation of equity dashboards that would enable parents and the general public to hold the district accountable for narrowing opportunity gaps.

Conclusion

We began with a focus on student segregation by race, ethnicity, and economic status because this segregation facilitates disparities in students’ access to high-quality educational resources. If historical patterns of segregation did not persist into today’s public education system, and if students across categories of race, ethnicity, and economic status were learning together in the same schools, there would be more equity in access to high-quality educational resources. All of these factors can be changed through policy and practice. 

Instead, decades upon decades of resistance, retrenchment, and increasing resegregation creates a system in which racial, ethnic, and economic school segregation has been and continues to be a defining characteristic of schooling across the U.S., including North Carolina. Policy solutions to patterns of unequal achievement can and should focus on ensuring that the children who most need their schools to mitigate the harms associated with economic disadvantage and racial and ethnic marginalization have access to high-quality educational resources, similar to the educational resources accessed by students who are growing up in economically advantaged families.