Education
Keep up with our latest demographic insights
Chronic absenteeism is a metric that’s closely monitored by school districts, because it can be a sign that students are out of school so much that it can affect their academic progress. In this post, we talk about how the pandemic has affected student attendance data. First, a definition: Chronic absenteeism is the percent of public K-12 students who missed ten percent or more of school days in a year. We calculate chronic absenteeism using…
Results from the National Assessment of Student Progress (NAEP), known also as the Nation’s Report Card, have been getting a lot of attention over the past month. The US Secretary of Education has called the results “unacceptable.” North Carolina’s Superintendent, Catherine Truitt, said the results were unsurprising, given the COVID-19 impact on K-12 learning in the state. What did the results show? National 2022 test scores showed an average decline of 5 points in reading…
With myFutureNC, we have released the 2022 County Attainment Profiles which highlights specific opportunities for improvement that will ultimately lead to increased attainment. The profiles highlight each of North Carolina’s 100 counties’ educational attainment levels and performance on key myFutureNC metrics in order to assist in the decision-making process regarding local priorities to increase educational attainment at the local level. There is also an overall 2022 attainment profile for the state. Each 2022 County Attainment…
Dr. Michael Cline is the state demographer for North Carolina at the Office of State Budget and Management and has given us permission to re-post his content here. Each year, he publishes population estimates and projections for North Carolina and its counties. It’s a time of excitement for thousands of 5-year-olds (and their parents) in North Carolina. As a new school year begins, many of these children will start kindergarten. According to current OSBM projections,…
As part of our work on the county attainment profiles with myFutureNC, we regularly identify new data sources and metrics that help answer questions we are hearing from local stakeholders. For example, we developed county-level opportunity youth metrics to provide county leaders information on how 16-24-year-olds in their communities are doing with respect to work and school. We used this same methodological approach to develop another new county indicator: the share of children who would…
Today we are launching a new tool with myFutureNC—the myFutureNC Attainment Trends Workbook—to help you understand trends in educational indicators at the state- and county-level. This tool draws from state and federal sources to highlight trends in three attainment-relevant areas: Academic Readiness, including NC Pre-K participation, College- and Career-Ready in Math and Reading, Advanced Placement and College & Career Promise participation, chronic absenteeism, and high school graduation; College & Career Access, including ACT performance, FAFSA…
Today we are launching a new tool with myFutureNC to help you visualize educational indicators at the county-level. The County Explorer map tool provides a bird's eye view of county performance and uses data from the 2020 County Profiles. To use the County Explorer tool, select an indicator from the drop-down menu in the left sidebar. Information about the county will be displayed in the right side bar, along with a link to the corresponding…
Our recently published guide on Opportunity Youth explains why we replaced the Disconnected Youth indicator on the MyFutureNC state dashboard with the Opportunity Youth indicator and expanded the ages we were studying for this indicator from 16 to 19-year-olds to 16 to 24-year-olds. We always try to provide data at both the state and county levels. However, one of the challenges in transitioning to the Opportunity Youth indicator is the lack of data at the…
The application cycle for the 2022-23 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) cycle began on October 1, 2021 and runs through 11:59 p.m. Central time (CT) on June 30, 2023. Students are strongly recommended to fill out the form as soon as possible after October 1 because awards are made until funds are depleted. Federal Student Aid, an office of the U.S. Department of Education, provides more than $150 billion in financial aid each…
The population of homeless students enrolled in public school districts nationwide decreased 4% between the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years, according to The National Center for Homeless Education (NCHE) at UNC-Greensboro, which recently released their annual look at children experiencing homelessness and attending public school. Nationally, there were 1,384,301 homeless youth enrolled in public school in the 2018-19 school year. However, things looked very different in North Carolina. In 2017-18, there were an estimated 28,903…
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