Welcome to our profiles site, where you can obtain detailed information about individual schools, learning communities and our district as a whole.

By navigating from the menu at the top of this page, you can access a wealth of data on student demographics and the academic performance of students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

These pages contain the most recent testing scores as well as our progress documented under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. We have made significant progress in improving student achievement.

More information about schools is available on two sites linked to the CMS Web site. The Data Dashboard offers data about schools displayed in a variety of ways with graphic indication of progress. School Progress Reports, released for each school, also provide information about individual schools. These reports include other measures that assess the quality of our schools and progress against goals in our Strategic Plan 2010. Both can be accessed through Quick Links on the right side of the CMS home page.

Each school is required to meet specific goals for Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP. Adequate Yearly Progress measures the progress of 10 separate groups - the school as a whole, six student ethnic groups (black, white, Hispanic, Native American, multi-racial, and Asian), economically disadvantaged students, those with limited English proficiency, and those with disabilities. Additional elements of AYP include percentage of students tested and either student attendance throughout the school year or High School graduation rate.

Targets vary depending on a school’s diversity. Some schools can have as many as 37 subgroups and thus 37 AYP targets. Other schools can have as few as 10. It’s important to remember that No Child Left Behind is an absolute standard: If a single subgroup misses the Adequate Yearly Progress target, the school as a whole does, too.

The state introduced a new, more rigorous reading test in grades three through eight last year. The increased rigor was needed – the state test had not been adjusted since the early 1990s. However, the higher standard resulted in a decline in reading scores in CMS and across the state. The reading scores are used to calculate Adequate Yearly Progress, and the number of schools making AYP also declined.

In CMS, the number of schools making AYP in 2007-2008 fell to 32 of 158 schools, or 20.3 percent, compared to 61 of 151 schools, or 40.4 percent, in 2006-2007.

We will continue to work toward the goal of increasing student achievement. We've began intense reading and mathematics instruction for struggling students in the early grades and we are making structural and significant changes to our middle schools so that students arrive in high school with the skills needed to succeed.

Many of our students are succeeding. But we have set a high goal for ourselves - we want every student to leave CMS ready to compete locally, nationally, and internationally. As the information in these profiles shows, we are not there yet. Like all school districts, we must lift a substantial number of our students over the barriers of poverty, learning English as a second language and other external conditions that can impede learning.

We will continue to develop new and innovative ways to help our children learn and become academically successful.