In what could be a first for the nation, Charlotte's largest philanthropic groups have joined forces to pour millions of dollars into helping Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools solve the achievement gap.

It's called the CMS Investment Study Group, and its goal is to find a way to pool corporate and private donations for a bigger impact on student performance.

The members will convene Wednesday. By the end of the year, they hope to have a proposal that could be launched as early as the 2011-12 school term. The meetings will not be open to the public.

Foundation for the Carolinas will offer support to the group, a who's who of the region's biggest givers: the C.D. Spangler Foundation, the Duke Energy Foundation, Bank of America, the Duke Endowment, Wachovia-Wells Fargo, Novant Health, the Leon Levine Foundation, the Belk Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Business leaders, a judge, a retired educator and Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx also are members.

Organizers say the idea for the group came from the Spangler and Levine foundations. Anna Spangler Nelson will co-chair, along with Richard "Stick" Williams, of the Duke Energy Foundation.

Five years ago the Foundation for the Carolinas played a similar role for another public school effort. It helped create a committee of 16 business leaders who called for widespread reforms of CMS to improve performance and restore public trust.

Cathy Bessant, board chair of the Foundation for the Carolinas, was co-chair of the 2005 committee. Wednesday, she called the latest step a "watershed moment" for public education in the community.

"A group of very generous philanthropists, all of whom share a deep and abiding interest in education, has banded together to explore what they can do to help," said Bessant, president of global technology and operations at Bank of America. "We believe this is an opportunity to make a real difference."

Organizers say this is not the first time philanthropic groups have banded together in the country for education. However, such efforts often result in alternatives to the existing schools.

In this case, the group intends to operate within CMS, focused on goals set by the district.

Superintendent Peter Gorman and his staff will supply counsel and advice, and parents eventually will be given a chance to participate.

Gorman noted Wednesday that one in every three students across the nation do not graduate from high school. Many of them are minorities, he said.

In CMS, 62 percent of the black students graduate on time; it's 55 percent for Latinos and 60 percent for low-income kids.

About 9,600 ninth-graders just entered CMS high schools. If trends continue, 2,880 of them will be gone when their class graduates in 2014.

And while the district's minority students now lead their peers across the state in major test scores, they still trail CMS's white students by profound margins.

"As a nation and as a community, we can't keep consigning a third of our children to a lifetime of poverty and lost opportunity," Gorman said. "I believe the work of this committee is a start on changing it."

The study group will spend the fall searching the nation for effective ways to close the achievement gap. Once it settles on what will work best in Charlotte, it will ask the participating foundations for money to put it in place.