This study examines job postings for full-time postsecondary Career Technical Education (CTE) faculty to explore job duties. Document analysis was used on the job postings collected on JobsEQ Real-Time Intelligence for CTE instructors in North Carolina. Over a year, 318 job postings were found through specific search terms in JobsEQ, with 205…

The Optimizing Learning Opportunities for Students (OLOS) Observation System was developed by the Early Learning Network's assessment team at the University of California, Irvine. OLOS is a user-friendly, web-based tool designed to help teachers understand what is happening in their classrooms and uncover ways to meet the unique learning needs of…

Prior research has found that financial investments in North Carolina's early childhood education programs--Smart Start and NC Pre-K--generated positive effects on student achievement in reading and mathematics through eighth grade (Bai et al., 2020). The current study examined if these effects were moderated by two dimensions of educational…

This study explored a place-based summer enrichment offering for gifted rural students through the lens of a critical pedagogy of place (Greenwood, 2003). To ameliorate well-documented opportunity gaps for rural students, we established a residential camp on our university's campus where middle school students engaged in STEM and humanities…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of Equal Opportunity Schools on high school minority achievement in Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses. The 48% of students in this research study were identified as minority students, which means they were identified as non-white or African American/Black,…

Background/Context: The underrepresentation of students from lower socioeconomic status (LSES) backgrounds among college graduates with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees, and consequently in STEM occupations, is a concern with respect to reducing, perpetuating, or increasing social inequality. The loss of their…

This report examines the status of women in North Carolina in terms of their employment, earnings, and occupations. The report includes an Employment & Earnings Composite Index comprised of four indicators--women's median annual earnings, the gender wage ratio, women's labor force participation rate, and the share of employed women in…

Even before the coronavirus pandemic began, policymakers, businesses, and workforce advocates were already recognizing that workers were not being replaced by robots, but rather, being called upon to work hand-in-glove with rapidly evolving technology. When the pandemic struck, millions of U.S. companies hustled to change how they did business.…

Over the course of four meetings, the Hunt-Lee Commission engaged in comprehensive conversations around key education opportunities including transitions, structure and alignment, funding, and access. Each meeting included presentations from resource experts and opportunities for Q&A and small group discussions. The final report summarizes…

To challenge deficit thinking concerning immigrants and refugees in urban schools, we engaged members of local immigrant and refugee communities from China, Mexico, Liberia, and Sudan in focus group discussions about their prior educational experiences, their hopes and aspirations for education, and the supports and challenges they encountered in…

This paper presents a comparative case study of the alumni of two multi-term civic learning programs that combine academic service-learning with a series of other student experiences such as the creation of online portfolios and capstone experiences over at least four semesters of an undergraduate education. Findings of this study suggest that…

"The Status of Women in North Carolina: Political Participation" is the third in a series of four publications on women's status in North Carolina. This report presents data on several aspects of women's involvement in the political process in the North Carolina, comparing North Carolina to other states and the United States overall. The…

Public Impact's "Opportunity Culture" (OC) initiative provides a suite of models aimed at extending the reach of highly effective teachers and has partnered with school districts to implement these interventions in schools. Using administrative data from three partner school districts that collectively include 44 OC schools, we estimate…

The maker movement has evoked interest for its role in breaking down barriers to STEM learning. However, few empirical studies document how youth are supported over time in STEM-rich making projects or their outcomes. This longitudinal critical ethnographic study traces the development of 41 youth maker projects in two community-centered making…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the experiences of women leaders in the higher education sector of North Carolina, United States of America (USA). The qualitative phenomenological study specifically explored the lived experiences and perceptions of 12 adult women leaders to better understand (1) the major perceptions on leadership…