Competency-Based Education Can Help Foster Educational Equity in North Carolina
May 20, 2020
In the fourth of a five-part series, Allison Redden and Kayla M. Siler take a look back at the last 10 years of North Carolina’s education system to see how investments have helped shape the state’s educational landscape and to what extent these investments have helped enhance educational equity. In 2010, “North Carolina was awarded a $400 million Race to the Top (RttT) grant.” This funding helped put public schools across the state “on a path of improving educational outcomes for all students,” through technology enhancements that enabled greater opportunities for blended and digital learning. Since ESSA’s passage in 2015, the state has “had the opportunity to be more creative and innovative with how to work towards equitable outcomes for all students while building on its successes from RttT.” Now, looking forward, the authors argue, “competency-based education (CBE) is a logical next step for North Carolina to take to both advance equity and do what is best for students.”