North Carolina Education Corps

North Carolina Education Corps (NCEC) envisions a nation where all students have the educational support they need to thrive. By equipping caring adults to support students in data-informed ways, NCEC accelerates student learning while strengthening American communities. Since 2021, North Carolina Education Corps has engaged and equipped over 1,600 corps members to tutor nearly 30,000 low-performing K–5th graders in more than 246 Title 1 schools across North Carolina.

The Problem
The foundational skills of reading comprehension are critical for children to achieve academic, economic, and socio-emotional success. However, public schools across the U.S. are grappling with systemic challenges such as chronic underfunding, teacher shortages, reduced support staff, and program cuts. Consequently, by the fourth grade, a staggering two-thirds of students fail to achieve proficiency in reading and math, hampering their educational progress and future prospects. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these disparities, leading to a significant regression in educational attainment, particularly among low-income students, erasing two decades of academic gains in reading and math.

High-impact tutoring, facilitated by local community members who serve as in-person tutors, has proven highly effective in enhancing student achievement across various communities. Despite the availability of enthusiastic volunteers — such as retirees, caregivers, and college students — schools often struggle to effectively recruit, train, supervise, and secure funding for these tutoring programs.

The Solution
NCEC emerged in 2020 in response to the educational crisis precipitated by the pandemic, which forced schools across North Carolina to transition abruptly to online learning, widening existing learning gaps. Founded as a nonprofit out of the NC Governor’s Office, NCEC’s mission is to introduce high-impact tutoring programs in schools, aiming to bolster student academic performance and mitigate the pandemic’s adverse effects on learning. NCEC engages and equips an untapped local workforce, including parents and caregivers, retired teachers and educators, and community college and university students to work as part-time, paid tutors that provide high-quality, high-dosage, at-school tutoring to low-performing K–5 students. These “Corps Members” are recruited, trained, coached, and monitored by NCEC to ensure their success, addressing the roadblocks most schools face when implementing high-impact tutoring.

Additionally, NCEC helps schools access public and private funding to finance high-impact tutoring at scale. NCEC is currently serving over 250 elementary schools across 41 districts in North Carolina, improving student academic performance and mitigating the pandemic’s adverse effects on learning. Within the next five years, NCEC plans to scale their model to support 100,000 students in North Carolina — 71% of whom are reading below grade level — while also replicating their successful approach in additional Title 1 elementary schools throughout the southeastern United States.