Education

If North Carolina goes forward with the recommendation to allow a private charter operator to take control of a Goldsboro elementary school, they should expect a protracted resistance, the school’s principal told Policy Watch Wednesday.

The following set of figures comes from the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities' new report: Unkept Promises: State Cuts to Higher Education Threaten Access and Equity.

The UNC Board of Governors is changing the process by which it selects chancellors for UNC system schools. The new process will be more confidential, include more rigorous background checks.

Long after the presidents, and the governors, and the press conferences cease, and the swollen rivers of our state subside, will North Carolina be there for those students displaced by Hurricane Florence?

A controversial website touting Superintendent of Public Instruction Mark Johnson may have broken North Carolina law, a Policy Watch investigation has found.

When N.C. Superintendent of Public Instruction Mark Johnson announced a $6.6 million purchase of iPads to support early grade literacy in August, it seemed welcome news for North Carolina school districts that have long complained of inadequate state resources.

Public school demographics in the United States are shifting, but, based on emerging national data, there’s reason to believe public schools are struggling to keep up with the changes.

When State Board of Education members Bill Cobey and Becky Taylor step down next month, it’ll mark the third time in six months that members of North Carolina’s top school board depart before their term is up.

“Show me the money!” Minnie Forte-Brown, president of the N.C. School Boards Association (NCSBA), which advocates for local boards statewide, is standing in a cramped computer lab at George Watts Elementary in Durham with a handful of reporters and school advocates.

On Wednesday, members of the N.C. House of Representatives were prepared to cast a vote on town-run charter schools with major ramifications for the future of public education, but Rep. Kelly Alexander’s mind was on the past. In the late 1950s, as Alexander explained, some North Carolinians were urging state lawmakers to pursue predominantly white sub-districts, an attempt to assuage the budding uproar over the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 order to desegregate public schools in Brown v. Board of Education.

When GOP leaders in the General Assembly unveiled their privately-crafted $23.9 billion budget Monday night, the biggest surprise wasn’t its proposals for teacher pay or another round of tax cuts.

On Tuesday, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger—one of the state’s most powerful Republican politicians—told North Carolina’s teachers they’d soon be receiving their fifth consecutive round of raises. Emily Rex heard Berger’s promise. But the fifth-year, special education teacher—who lives in Berger’s state Senate district in Guilford County—points out she’s received raises in four of the last five years, not that she could much tell after soaring health premiums took their toll.

In the 11 years since she became a North Carolina teacher, Fayetteville’s Tamika Walker Kelly has seen more than a few changes in the state’s public schools. In 2009, she watched North Carolina, then under the control of a Democratic General Assembly and governor, push sweeping cuts and pay freezes in the midst of an economic recession. And she’s seen a new legislative majority—seized by Republicans in 2010...

The longtime leaders of North Carolina’s top public school agency are questioning the depth and the cost of a newly-released organizational review that calls for a “transformation” in the N.C. Department of Public Instruction. Consultants with Ernst & Young conducted the agency review over a period of 12 weeks this year, after state Superintendent Mark Johnson asked for and received a $1 million budget allocation from state legislators last year to audit DPI.

An ex-North Carolina lawmaker received financial benefits for his work with a nonprofit that stands to win a state contract with the public school takeover program he helped create, documents obtained by Policy Watch show. A state disclosure form shows Rob Bryan, a former Charlotte legislator...