CCFP researchers examine how education policies and programs, learning environments, and other factors impact student and school success. Our teams partner with school districts, schools and teachers to develop, implement, and evaluate innovative strategies to support student success. Through the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, CCFP provides researchers and the broader policy community with ready access to the data that they need for policy-oriented research.
School-based telemedicine clinics (SBTCs) provide students with access to healthcare during the regular school day through private videoconferencing with a healthcare provider. SBTC access reduces the likelihood that a student is chronically absent and reduces the number of days absent.
Increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of educators serving students in our public schools is a promising strategy that is vastly underutilized. The research has repeatedly shown the importance of a diverse teacher workforce. However, the path to increase diversity of educators is complex and will take significant efforts and investments by policymakers and advocates to accomplish.
In this policy memo, Ladd argues that charter schools disrupt four core goals of education policy in the United States, namely: 1) establishing coherent systems of schools, 2) attending to child poverty and disadvantage, 3) limiting racial segregation and isolation, and 4) ensuring that public funds are spent wisely. Ladd offers policy recommendations to better meet these challenges.
A diverse teacher workforce has the potential to improve outcomes for all students, and especially for students of color. While North Carolina clearly recognizes the importance of increasing diversity in the workforce – and despite national and local efforts from school districts and policy makers – the teaching workforce remains largely white and female, even as the students they serve become increasingly diverse, widening the racial gap between teachers and students.
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Project goal is to design, develop, and test an online professional development program called Bridging English Language Learning and Academics (BELLA) for improving teacher and student outcomes for working with English Learners (ELs).
learn more about BELLA Online: ESL and Classroom Teachers Working Together With Children and FamiliesThis study examines the essential nature of coordinating entities during a crisis by comparing the experiences of out-of-school time (OST) stakeholders in cities with coordinating entities to OST stakeholders in cities that may have elements of an OST system (e.g., common data system) but not a coordinating entity.
learn more about Study of Out-of-School Time Coordinating Entities Response to Covid-19This project seeks to understand whether, for whom, and how the effects of successful early childhood school readiness interventions are sustained across a child’s development.
learn more about Factors in Persistence Versus Fadeout of Early Childhood Intervention ImpactsThe North Carolina Resilience and Learning Project is a partnership with the Public School Forum of North Carolina to promote and support trauma-informed schools across the state. The project team works closely with districts and schools to provide professional learning and ongoing coaching to meet school-specific needs and goals. Our work aims to create systems-level change by shifting the culture and mindset of an entire school so that staff begin to see a child’s behavior in the context of their life experiences, in consideration of possible trauma history or stress response system triggers.
learn more about N.C. Resilience and LearningThis article examines the impact on student absenteeism of a large, school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during times when students traveled to and from school. The authors find that the program resulted in a 0.58 percentage point (8.5 percent) reduction in the elementary school-level absence rate in the years following initial implementation.
The author investigates the effects of a multiyear program, StudentU, on the early high school outcomes of participating students by exploiting data from oversubscribed admissions lotteries. Results suggest that comprehensive services delivered outside of the regular school day have the potential to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students.
In their chapter, Latinx Immigrant Parents and Their Children in Times of COVID-19: Facing Inequities Together in the “Mexican Room” of the New Latino South, in The Pandemic Divide: How Covid Increased Inequality in America, Leslie Babinski and co-authors outline the state of affairs for Latinx families in the southeastern US in times of Covid-19 and to situate what is happening within the broader experiences of Latinx communities in the US.
This research brief examines two measures of educational opportunity in North Carolina public school districts, average achievement and achievement growth. The first measure— average achievement—indexes the average level of student achievement at a single point in time. The second measure—achievement growth—indexes the rate of growth in student achievement over time.