Molly Sherrill
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Mindy Adnot
Due to segregation in the city of Charlotte and the current methods used to assign students to schools, based on where they live, the school system is inevitably also segregated. This poster uses the 2016-2017 State, District and School Level Drilldown Performance Data from the Public Schools of North Carolina website to analyze the impact of segregation on education. This dataset provides test score averages by schools and also these scores broken down further into demographics including race, disability, economic status, english proficiency and academic giftedness. The data shows that the percentage of white students attending a school has a large impact on not only the total average test scores for the school but also on the test scores of other racial groups and demographics. Unlike the white percentage of a school population, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students has a negative relationship with test scores and with graduation rates. The higher the percentage of white students, the more likely a school is to have high achievement on tests. The amount of white students in schools has a positive relationship with the success of all students on these tests and also with graduation rates. The logical next step after this data analysis is to figure out how and why the white population of schools has such an important influence on schools. If the reasons behind this relationship are discovered then this could help provide valuable solutions to make all schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public School system equally as successful and work to mitigate the impact of segregation on childhood education.