Panel Discussion: Candid Conversations about Public Education in NC (Part 1)

Bill McNeal: Thus, we understand the governor’s focus on having students career and college ready. We understand the premise behind race to the top and his focus on effective teachers and school leaders and the use of data in improving low performing schools and appropriate curriculum standards and assessment. So, if we are preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist and technologies that have to be invented in order to solve problems we don’t know are problems yet, how do we prepare them? President Obama, February 2010, said because economic progress and educational achievement go hand in hand, educating every American student to graduate prepared for college, and success in a new work force is a national imperative.

Meeting this challenge requires that states can perfect a level of teaching and learning needed for students to graduate ready for success in college and careers. In fact, he said in his State of the Union message, we need a Sputnik moment. So, I turn to my two state panelists. We scoured the countryside seeing if we could find people who had all the answers, and we found them. And the presence of Leslie Winner, who is executive director for Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and Dale Whitworth, who is controller and Senior Vice President of Golden Corral. And I put together a couple of questions for them. And, by the way, if there’s enough time, if someone has a burning question, we might let you ask it. Here are the questions. What is the value and role of K-12 public education? And the second part of it is how do we generate support for our plan to reform public schools? So, I’m going to start with you, Leslie.

Leslie: So I’m just going to that first question now, right?

Bill McNeal: Sure.

Leslie: Okay. So, I would say that when we in this room, uh, we education thought leaders and, um, education practitioners think about the purpose of public education these days, we tend to think of it as we need a strong public education system to transform and revitalize the economy of the state. But when people who study these kinds of things look at what the public thinks is the purpose of public education, almost exclusively and almost uniformly, the public thinks of about education in terms of its individual benefit for individual kids, not in terms of its collective benefit. So, the public thinks of public education as the way that my kid or my grandkid or my neighbor’s kid is gonna have a chance to get ahead in life. This very individual benefit of public education. And I think that if you think of the purpose of education as having this almost exclusively individual benefit, with parents in a kind of a consumer role, that leads to a very different kind of policy towards this as you might make. So thinking about that, I decided that I needed to try to understand, and I’m going to share with you a little of what I’ve learned about why is it in, that we in this state have consistently invested in public education, and why do we continue to do that?

And there really are four public collective reasons for public education. One goes back to Thomas Jefferson, who understood that without a well-educated citizenry, you could not sustain democracy. So, early inputs from Thomas Jefferson say if you’re worried about democracy, the answer to that is to educate the public. The, the second reason goes back, that I’ve got, goes back to the early eighteen hundreds, when they understood that you needed education to produce good citizens and to, uh, maintain the social order. Now, the social order they wanted to maintain is not one that many of us believe in, but it was a focus on a communal good of a strong community that, that they were focused on. It wasn’t till the late eighteen hundreds, when the South was trying to move out of this pre-war Agrarian economy into a manufacturing economy, that they thought of public education as necessary to produce the workers and leaders for a manufacturing and commercial economy. And then later, in about the beginning of the 20th century, as the South was clearly lagging behind.