Education

Dan Besse is the son of a teacher in North Carolina's public schools.  He graduated from our public school system, and from the University of North Carolina system.  He has years of experience in teaching at the college and community college level.  He is committed to the goal of excellent educational opportunity for every child in our state.  Dan will use the powers of the office of Lieutenant Governor—as President of the N.C. Senate, as a member of the N.C. Board of Education, and as a clear voice from the "bully pulpit" of statewide office—in the pursuit of that goal.  The following points of emphasis set out Dan's views on important guidemarks for this effort.

1)   We must ensure that the best educational opportunity is provided to every individual student.   We should continue to reduce class size, and raise the compensation of teachers so that we can retain the best teachers for our students.  We should also develop extra incentives for teachers to take on the tough challenges of teaching in lower-performing schools and classes.   Finally, we need to do a better job of allowing teachers to teach—reducing red tape and paperwork, increasing instructional time, and providing for mentoring time.  We should move away from the emphasis on “teaching to the tests” in favor of promoting fuller comprehension and the ability to think.

2)   We must provide a school environment that is conducive to real learning.  First, our schools must be safe.  We must provide good physical facilities, with good classrooms and laboratories, and modern electronics and learning tools, in permanent buildings.

3)   We must emphasize parental and community involvement in our schools.  To learn, our children must come to school ready to learn, and be supported at home and outside the classroom. Active, involved parents and community volunteers build successful schools for all our students.

4)   We must make a full commitment to our constitutional mandate of equal educational opportunity, through our public schools, for all North Carolina children.    

We must address the disparity of financial resources between high- and low-wealth school systems.  The quality of education available to our children should not depend on whether they live in the city or the county, or whether they live in a rich county or a poor one.

We must work harder to ensure that economically disadvantaged school systems get the resources they need to provide a quality education for young people.

We should also work with our school systems to address the resource gaps between schools within the same system.  We must especially deal with the problem of growing disparities between the opportunities available in schools serving wealthy areas, and those serving poor neighborhoods and communities within the same school system.

We need to provide incentives to school systems to avoid the dangers of re-segregating our schools—a process which unfortunately is underway now in many systems.

The lessons of Brown v. Board are still true today:  a system segregated by race, ethnicity, and economic class inherently generates inequality.  That inequality appears in the resources made available to those schools.  Concentrations of parents and families with less resources, and less opportunity to provide volunteer time, result in reduced opportunity for students in those schools.  Too often, schools in those circumstances continue to fall ever farther behind.  We must work to break this cycle of neglect.