Charlotte, N.C. (May 8, 2017) –Read Charlotte’s bold goal of doubling the percentage of third grade students reading on grade level by 2025 requires community-wide action, which led the organization to launch a user-friendly community data tool, announced Monday.

“There hasn’t been anything quite like this in Charlotte-Mecklenburg but it’s crucial in order to reach our goal of 80% reading proficiency,” explained Read Charlotte Executive Director Munro Richardson. “The Reading Success Dashboard will not only help enable the community to move the needle for particular schools, but it will help us track progress on Read Charlotte’s community indicators and allow us to focus resources in the right areas.”

In the dashboard, users will have a chance to visualize 2025, and exactly what it will take to get to Read Charlotte’s80% goal, by diving into the data. The Reading Success Dashboard breaks it down by school, grade level and more, across Mecklenburg County.

“This is the best interactive, data visualization I’ve seen so far from a community in the Grade Level Reading Network,” said Ron Fairchild, Director of Campaign for Grade Level Reading Support Center. “We look forward to seeing other communities follow Charlotte’s example of providing clear and compelling data that drives people to take action and keeps the focus on ensuring that more low-income children reach the critical milestone of third grade reading proficiency.”

“Part of our initial promise to this community was that we would create a way to keep the community informed and inspired to take action. We feel confident this tool will help us do that,”said Richardson.

In December 2016, Read Charlotte was awarded an Impact Grant from IBM. A team of IBM consultants and data scientists worked closely with Read Charlotte to help the organization gain a deeper understanding of how to leverage data in furthering programmatic and mission-related results. IBM consultants assessed Read Charlotte’s current capabilities, along with longer-term goals where data can assist, and provided a customized and actionable
data and analytics roadmap.One component of IBM’s work included conducting 19 interviews of Read Charlotte stakeholders (funders, board members, literacy providers, Mecklenburg County staff and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools staff), to learn about stakeholders’ expectations for a data dashboard to help the community take action.

“The Reading Success Dashboard would not be possible without our partnership with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools,” said Richardson.“We are grateful to CMS for sharing data with us about children’s progress on our community indicators. CMS also provided helpful feedback as we were creating the Reading Success Dashboard. This tool will allow us to better target community efforts to reach our goal of 80% third grade reading proficiency by 2025.”

The Reading Success Dashboard can be found on Read Charlotte’s website (ReadCharlotte.org) under the “Results” tab, or CLICK HERE.

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