Education

This multimedia presentation shows the results of research into dropout behavior in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools from school years 1995-1996 to 2009-2010. It shows how concentrated poverty at a school makes the dropout situation worse for black and Hispanic/Latino students. It also shows how positive academic climate at a school lowers the chances of dropping out for […]

It’s a simple concept: Focus on fewer goals and bigger results. That’s the idea behind the Collective Impact approach United Way of Central Carolinas (UWCC) has adopted. For United Way that goal for the next 10 years is to increase the graduation rate among the more than 13,000 at-risk children who receive services from 16 […]

What should be the end goal of K-12 education? To prepare students for college, the workforce, military, trade school, life? I support Common Core standards because I believe including rigorous standards that require higher-order thinking skills prepare all students for a variety of career and educational paths. The Common Core is a set of standards […]

Increasing teacher turnover has been in the news for districts across North Carolina. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools district is no exception – but what does teacher turnover look like when you get down to the individual school? Interactive maps and dashboards give you a new perspective. The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute has partnered with MeckEd through […]

It is no small task to get the school bus to your neighborhood each day. Planning starts in March for most North Carolina school districts to open school in August. As buses begin their routes again this year, did you know: North Carolina’s public school districts operate 13,349 public school buses. Those buses travel 180,000,000 […]

Want to know which of the state’s public high schools have above-average SAT scores? A map of income is a good place to start. Nationally, average SAT scores have bumped along in a narrow range since the late 1980s. (Read more.) A similar pattern is evident in North Carolina’s state-level scores over time. Comparing individual […]

A new data resource about Gaston County is available through online, interactive dashboards. Trends on the county’s demographics, economy, education, health and quality of life are tracked and compared to peer counties as well as state and national figures. This represents a continuing partnership coordinated by Gaston Together and other local Gaston County groups with […]

Charlotte’s metro has one of the fastest-growing college-educated populations in the U.S. Where exactly do the educated live in Charlotte? As people with college degrees cluster in metros, what does that mean for rural areas? The number of college-educated adults exceeds 40 percent of the working population in just a handfull of counties across the […]

This article is a summary of a yearlong study to be published in an edited volume printed by Harvard Educational Press in fall 2014. The study uses administrative records from the N.C. Department of Instruction and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, media reports, and in-depth interviews with parents, teachers, and administrators. In 1997, when North Carolina launched its […]

Where your child (or grandchild or niece) goes to school is important to you personally. How the demographics of your child’s district compare to that of other districts across the country is important to researchers, policy makers and even disaster relief planners. A program used in North Carolina should streamline the work of updating this […]