This afternoon, MeckEd will hold a timely and very important Community Conversation: “Legislative Changes Coming to Our Schools?” in Pease Auditorium, located on the Central Piedmont Community College Central Campus, from 1:00-2:30 p.m. A panel of education champions will weigh in on six education bills currently pending in the North Carolina General Assembly, and Q&A with the audience will follow. This Community Conversation is an opportunity for you to be part of the important discussion surrounding this pending legislation that, if passed, could have a long-lasting impact on our public schools. We hope you can attend (no RSVP is required) and that you will share this information with others who may be interested in attending. Learn more information here.

Please also take a few minutes to watch a video recap of the 2013 MeckEd Teachers of Excellence event. Stay tuned for event photos, attendee testimonials, and more videos.

Read the complete May 22nd e-Newsletter

To meet the future demand for a more skilled and educated workforce, North Carolina must invest in what works: high-quality early care and education.

We agree with Gov. Pat McCrory and many of our state lawmakers that proficiency in reading by the third grade will help children succeed in our K-12 system and graduate from high school ready for college and career. High-quality early-learning programs are crucial to achieving that goal.

Children who participate in these programs are more likely to graduate from high school, hold a job considered semi-skilled or higher, attain a four-year degree and earn more as adults. And that is good for our businesses and our state’s economy.

Key to these economic outcomes are two critical factors: the quality of the programs and access to the programs.

• Quality: Some policymakers have been led to believe that improvements in school performance for children in early learning programs diminish as they get into elementary school. Some call it “fade-out.”

But decades of data and longitudinal studies do not support this conclusion when early learning programs are high-quality.

A 2012 Duke University study of our state’s early learning programs shows North Carolina third-graders have higher standardized reading and math scores and lower special education placement rates in those counties with more funding for those programs. In fact, researchers found that the expected savings in reduced special education and instructional costs for children in these programs is at least equal to the cost of the programs – a break-even or savings of taxpayer money.

This study is not alone. A quantitative statistical analysis of 123 studies across four decades of early education research – a meta analysis – found that by third grade, one-third of the achievement gap can be closed by early education.

North Carolina is already a national model for high-quality early learning programs, being the second state to enact a Quality Rating and Improvement System. North Carolina’s programs have the quality components that get the results businesses want: appropriate teacher-to-child ratios, teachers educated in early childhood development, strong parental involvement and coaching, and screening and referral services to catch problems early.

North Carolina also leads the country in tying subsidies for child care to the quality of the programs. Programs receiving subsidies must have a star rating of three or higher.

Today, 70 percent of all young children in North Carolina’s regulated early learning programs attend high-quality programs rated with four or five stars.

• Access: Currently, parents – our workforce – can receive state financial assistance to place their children in our quality early learning programs, such as N.C. Pre-K, if their income is at or below $33,021 for a family of four. Some lawmakers are considering cutting that eligibility in half, which would make our state among the five most restrictive for accessing early learning programs.

Cutting eligibility is not good for our businesses. In North Carolina, 65 percent of children under age 6 have both or their only parent in the workforce. The median income in North Carolina is $44,083, while the annual cost of a quality early learning program is $7,803.

It does not take a financial expert to understand that these programs would simply be out of reach for too many working families without financial assistance.

We support McCrory’s proposal to pay for 5,000 more children in our N.C. Pre-K program.

We also support maintaining current levels of eligibility so children can access the quality programs our state has created. The definition of “eligibility” should not be tied to a single year’s budget target.

It should be tied to ensuring that North Carolina working families can place their children in programs that will strengthen our future workforce and economic growth.

If we are serious about improving North Carolina’s economic future, we must address the issue of our sadly leaking education pipeline.

Our children’s educational needs should be served at the very beginning by investing in high-quality preschool rather than trying to remediate later.

*Please note the views expressed in For Your Consideration are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of MeckEd.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Charlotte, NC (May 21, 2013)—The Women’s Impact Fund, a collective-giving organization of almost 400 women from the Charlotte community, recently announced at its annual meeting that local education champion and nonprofit MeckEd was the recipient of its 2013 education grant. The $90,000 grant will support the organization’s Career Pathways Program, which informs Charlotte-Mecklenburg high school students about numerous career pathways and provides access to internships and apprenticeships for students who have limited resources or lack of support.

“We are excited to support MeckEd, a leading organization in addressing critical issues in public education in Charlotte-Mecklenburg,” said Pam Johnson, chair of the Women’s Impact Fund Grants Committee. “We look forward to partnering together on the expansion of the Career Pathways Program.”

Education is one of the five areas in which Women’s Impact Fund focuses its philanthropy efforts. Awards are given to organizations that have initiatives that serve a critical community need and/or address an emerging issue in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg community. Winners are voted on and selected by Women’s Impact Fund members.

“MeckEd is truly honored that our organization has been selected as the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Women’s Impact Fund Education Grant. The competition for the award is especially rigorous and MeckEd coming out on top will help us reinforce our role in the community as the thought leader and champion for public education in our region,” said Bill Anderson, MeckEd executive director.

The support of the Women’s Impact Fund will enable MeckEd to expand its Career Pathways Program to more Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools and continue its work of exposing Charlotte-Mecklenburg students to numerous career pathways and workplace learning opportunities so students will graduate from high school, college- or career-ready.

About Women’s Impact Fund

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Women’s Impact Fund. Since 2003, the Women’s Impact Fund has amplified the significant role women play in philanthropy. The mission is to maximize women’s leadership in philanthropy by engaging and educating members, increasing charitable contributions and strengthening communities through the impact of collective giving. The organization has emerged as one of the largest women’s collective giving groups in the country and continues to create powerful change within Mecklenburg County. To date, the Women’s Impact Fund has made 44 grants totaling $3.4 million. For more information, visit www.womensimpactfund.org.

About MeckEd

MeckEd is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit and local champion for excellent public education for all children in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. MeckEd’s mission is to inform and engage the community around the critical issues facing local public education and to ensure students graduate from high school, college- or career-ready.

Contact:

Tori Belle-Miller, MeckEd Director of Communications
704.335.0100, ext. 224 | vmiller@mecked.org
www.mecked.org

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Charlotte, NC (May 15, 2013)—Wells Fargo has awarded $50,000 to local education champion and nonprofit MeckEd to support the organization’s Career Pathways Program and efforts to inform and engage the community around the critical issues facing public education in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

“We are pleased to make this grant to MeckEd,” said Kendall Alley, Community Banking regional president for Wells Fargo in Charlotte. “Wells Fargo has designated education as one of our primary focus areas and supporting a program that provides career planning for students in Charlotte is one of the most important investments we can make. Wells Fargo is responsible for being a leader to promote the long-term economic prosperity and quality of life for everyone in our communities. If they prosper, so do we.”

The support of Wells Fargo will enable MeckEd to continue its work ensuring Charlotte-Mecklenburg students are exposed to numerous career pathways and workplace learning opportunities so that they graduate from high school ready for college or a career. Wells Fargo’s support will also enable MeckEd to continue its engagement initiatives in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg community encouraging citizens to become invested in improving Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

“The education community of Charlotte is so privileged to have such a supportive corporate partner like Wells Fargo who realizes the importance of strong schools in all zip codes and is unwavering in its ongoing support for public education,” said Bill Anderson, MeckEd executive director.

About Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE: WFC) is a nationwide, diversified, community-based financial services company with $1.4 trillion in assets. Founded in 1852 and headquartered in San Francisco, Wells Fargo provides banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance through more than 9,000 stores, 12,000 ATMs, and the Internet (wellsfargo.com), and has offices in more than 35 countries to support the bank’s customers who conduct business in the global economy. With more than 270,000 team members, Wells Fargo serves one in three households in the United States. Wells Fargo & Company was ranked No. 25 on Fortune’s 2013 rankings of America’s largest corporations. Wells Fargo’s vision is to satisfy all our customers’ financial needs and help them succeed financially.

About MeckEd

MeckEd is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit and local champion for excellent public education for all children in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. MeckEd’s mission is to inform and engage the community around the critical issues facing local public education and to ensure students graduate from high school, college- or career-ready.

Contact:

Tori Belle-Miller, MeckEd Director of Communications
704.335.0100, ext. 224 | vmiller@mecked.org
www.mecked.org
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Our second annual MeckEd Teachers of Excellence event last Wednesday was a great success! MeckEd was honored to recognize 25 exceptional Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools educators in front of a large audience of district leaders, community members, and business leaders. If you attended last Wednesday’s event, we hope you left feeling inspired and rejuvenated, and we hope you now have a desire to become more engaged with our local public schools. Once again, congratulations to the 2013 MeckEd Teachers of Excellence! We look forward to next year’s event. Please stay tuned for photos, videos, and testimonials from the event.

Now that we have celebrated and recognized the second class of MeckEd Teachers of Excellence, it is time to get back to the business of informing and engaging our readers about the many critical education bills currently being debated in Raleigh by the General Assembly.  There are several bills pending that MeckEd feels could dramatically affect public education. As the General Assembly faces the ever-important crossover date on Thursday, May 16th, it is important for you to contact your Mecklenburg County legislators, and make them aware of how you feel students and families will be affected. Read talking points here. Find contact information for Mecklenburg delegations here.

Read the complete May 15th e-Newsletter.

Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.

Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.

What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.

One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.

These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.

In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?

We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.

Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.

Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.

Read more

*Please note the views expressed in For Your Consideration are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MeckEd.

Do you have a comment? Please post your response below:

Twenty-five Charlotte-Mecklenburg educators were honored for their commitment to excellence in the classroom and for being leaders in their school communities. MeckEd, a local education nonprofit, held the Teachers of Excellence awards ceremony on May 8 to publicly thank and recognize teachers for their dedication and hard work.

“We appreciate MeckEd’s work to recognize outstanding CMS educators for the important work they do each day for our students, “said Superintendent Heath Morrison. “The Teachers of Excellence event not only boosts teacher morale, but it also gives the community an opportunity to recognize and celebrate educators who are making a significant difference in the classroom.”

Principals, students, district leaders and community members attended the celebration. Honorees were surprised with drawings for tablets, a US Airways gift card and a free six-month membership to the YMCA that would include family members.

“I don’t think there is much that can top this year. I was the teacher of the year for my school and now I am an honoree for the Teachers of Excellence,” said Stephanie Wright, Newell Elementary fifth-grade teacher. “What made these awards even more special was receiving a card today from one of my students saying ‘Thank you for loving us’. This is why I became a teacher, to positively impact the lives of my students.”

Gregory Gabriel, an Eastway Middle seventh-grade math teacher, won the Paul Jackson Award. MeckEd created the award in memory of Jackson, a Providence High band teacher who died of leukemia last year, a week before attending the district’s first Teachers of Excellence ceremony.

The honorees were gratified to be recognized by the community and their peers. All 25 teachers shared outstanding stories of exemplary teaching.

“MeckEd was proud to honor educators and the profession of teaching at the second annual Teachers of Excellence event. We are convinced it is in the best interest of all community members to invest in the teaching profession and to value the work educators do for the children of Charlotte,” said Dr. Bill Anderson, MeckEd executive director.

This year approximately 150 teachers were nominated for the award. Nominees are chosen by their principals and then selected by a committee based on criteria that include student academic growth, those who have mastered instructional best practices, and those who are leaders in their respective school communities.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Charlotte, NC (May 9, 2013)— Last Wednesday evening at the Westin Charlotte, local education nonprofit and education champion MeckEd, along with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Superintendent, principals, students, district leaders, and community members, recognized and celebrated 25 CMS educators for their commitment to excellence in their classrooms and for being leaders in their schools communities. The second annual event drew a large crowd and included a reception, presentation of awards—including a special recognition of the first Paul Jackson Award recipient—, remarks from business and school leaders, and surprise drawings for tablets and a US Airways gift card.

“CMS appreciates MeckEd’s work to recognize outstanding CMS educators for the important work they do each day for our Charlotte-Mecklenburg students. The Teachers of Excellence event not only boosts teacher morale, but it also gives the community an opportunity to recognize and celebrate educators who are making a significant difference in the classroom. We applaud and thank these educators and hope their example will create a ripple effect throughout the district,” said CMS Superintendent Dr. Heath Morrison.

The annual MeckEd Teachers of Excellence event seeks to uplift the teaching profession and engage the Charlotte community to thank and honor exceptional CMS educators who have dedicated their careers to ensuring the future successes of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students. 2013 honorees were elated and appreciative to be publicly recognized for their commitment and hard work by their community and their peers.

“MeckEd was proud to honor our very best educators and the profession of teaching at the second annual Teachers of Excellence event. We are convinced it is in the best interest of all community members to invest in the teaching profession and to value the work educators do for the children of Charlotte,” said MeckEd Executive Director Dr. Bill Anderson.

Vice President of US Airways Airport Customer Service/CharlotteHub Terri Pope said, “This is US Airways’ first time sponsoring this event, and it’s not going to be our last…I can’t tell you how much this means as a parent to see that we have such awesome educators out here.”

Thank you to event sponsors: Allen Tate Companies, US Airways, Wells Fargo Bank, YMCA of Greater Charlotte, Bank of America, Novant Health, Charlotte Bobcats, TIAA-CREF, The Charlotte Observer, OrthoCarolina, WTVI, Synder’s-Lance, Inc., Foundation For The Carolinas, Lesley University, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, Northeastern University Charlotte, Piedmont Natural Gas, EnPro Industries, Charlotte Chamber, PwC, and Rodgers.

About MeckEd

MeckEd is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit and local champion for excellent public education for all children. As a trusted source of education information, MeckEd’s mission is to inform and engage the community around the critical issues facing local public education and to ensure students graduate from high school either college- or career ready.

Contact:

Tori Belle-Miller, MeckEd Director of Communications
704.335.0100, ext. 224 | vmiller@mecked.org

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For Teacher Appreciation Week, Stephanie Wright, who teaches fifth grade at Newell Elementary, got a note from a student Wednesday thanking her for loving her and all of her classmates.

“It’s nice to know they feel that love I pour into it every day,” Wright said, smiling.

Wednesday night, Wright and 24 other Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools teachers were recognized at the second annual MeckEd Teachers of Excellence awards ceremony.

MeckEd is a nonprofit advocacy group for anything related to Charlotte’s public schools, connecting many people, from teachers to businesses.

Bill Anderson, the executive director of MeckEd, said CMS principals nominated 150 teachers for the awards.

Gregory Gabriel, an Eastway Middle seventh-grade math teacher, won the Paul Jackson Award. MeckEd created the award in memory of Jackson, the Providence High band teacher who died of leukemia last year, a week before attending the district’s first Teachers of Excellence ceremony.

Gabriel has been teaching for three years. He left the family business, Gabriel Brothers clothing, to follow a calling to teach. “It just made sense at this point in my life,” he said.

Upon winning the award, one of his students, Kelmy Guillen, 14, introduced him.

“I passed the EOG (End of Grade test) for the first time last year, all because Mr. Gabriel worked with me,” he told the audience.

Gabriel’s principal, Anne Brinkley, said she has been impressed by his innovative teaching strategies using data.

“He’s carried his students so far, so much, it couldn’t be calculated,” she said.

Gabriel said he loves bonding with students and the diverse environment of Eastway. “It’s just a joy to be around these kids all the time,” he said.

The other 24 teachers also had exceptional stories of exemplary teaching.

“This is wonderful,” said Celeste Ellis, principal of Allenbrook Elementary. “To recognize and honor these people doing great things, our community doesn’t do it enough.”

Dear Friend of MeckEd,

We are excited for our second annual Teachers of Excellence event this evening at the Westin Charlotte! We will celebrate and honor 25 exceptional CMS educators who are leaders in their school communities and committed to excellence in their classrooms. MeckEd believes it so important for us, as a community, to not only commend and recognize these stellar 25 Teachers of Excellence, but to also understand the critical importance of investing in the teaching profession and valuing the often thankless dedication our teachers provide to the more than 140,000 students served in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools each day. We look forward to seeing you this evening!

Learn more about the 2013 MeckEd Teachers of Excellence.

Read the complete May 8th e-Newsletter.