The success of our economy depends on the success of our students, our future workforce. A well-rounded education maximizes our students God-given talents and teaches our students real-world skills for real-world success. Unfortunately, in today's global economy, most of our high school graduates cannot compete for highly skilled, highly technical jobs without technical training, much less those students who choose to drop out.
The 21st century workplace will require our students to be highly-skilled and highly-motivated; we must give every student the opportunity to succeed.
A Skill Promise:
No student should be allowed to leave school without a skill. Well before high school, we must promise our students every opportunity to learn a skill related to a future career. With less than one in five students graduating from college, we must steer these students towards a career through more career technical education programs starting in middle school. With only 18% of our students graduating with a 4-year degree, we must make our K-12 education go further by offering more career-technical programs geared towards current and future needs in our economy.
Eliminating High School Dropouts:
It is hard to believe that more than one third of our students drop out of high school, 37% in our district alone. We as taxpayers bear the financial burden of every one of these student that fail. Dropouts are three times more likely to commit a crime and twice as likely to be unemployed.
North Carolina taxpayers pay for it with over $169,000,000 per year in higher Medicaid and prison costs and even more in lost tax revenue.
Increasing the dropout age to 18 alone does not fix the problem; instead, it locks students into a classroom against their will, strains the educators, and strains the students who are currently succeeding in this environment. We must offer these at-risk students personal and career counseling and steer them toward success through required alternative education with an emphasis on job training. The program would work through career technical education but include basic math, reading, and writing skills - either we pay for these students now or we pay double later.
Further Improving Our Curriculum:
Great teachers are enhanced by great curriculum – we must ensure that our curriculum is the best. We must live up to the promise that each teacher receive at least five hours of instructional planning time each week. Teachers and parents must also be allowed more freedom and opportunity through pilot programs, such as allowing schools to take advantage of looping educators with students throughout elementary school.
We must encourage more technology in our classroom. Computer learning programs give students a more hands-on learning experience and interactive learning helps our educators address the strengths and weaknesses of every student. North Carolina must advance interactive learning through facilitation of its Online Virtual Public High School Program to include every grade level.
Teacher Recruitment and Retention:
Quality educators are the fuel that drives our success and our educators will carry our educational system and our economy into prosperity. They are the most important resource we have and we must support them and empower them. When our classrooms are led by great teachers, our future becomes brighter.
When nearly ½ of educators quit by their 5th year of teaching, we must address the problem. Within the theme of career technical education, we must expand and facilitate the North Carolina Teacher Cadet program to encourage our top students to consider a career in teaching. Every North Carolina student called to teach deserves the opportunity to have real world experience early on so that they can make an educated decision regarding this calling. And for these exception students who show a passion for teaching, we must expand our Teaching Fellows Scholarship Program.
So that North Carolina can be the best place in the nation for passionate educators, we must increase the salary of first-year teachers and decrease the number of pay steps so our best educators are paid for their efforts. We need to make all our educators salaries more competitive, build in a yearly raise to meet inflation, and tie retirees COLA's to that of the Cosumer Price Index. We must stop playing these political games and distracting our educators from their goal of educating our students.
K-14 Education - College Tech Prep:
Our community colleges are more important than ever. We must encourage students choosing a technical career to receive a technical degree and we must encourage our students who plan for a four-year degree to choose a smoother transition into the University environment by utilitizing our community colleges to obtain an Associates degree. Technical and Associate degrees increase our students likelihood of success drastically and further grounds our future workforce to our community.
