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- The dog days of summer started fairly early for us this year, and it seems given the political, economic, social, and global situations, these days, the events are getting even hotter.

Welcome again, to the most widely watched and the longest running program on Carolina Business policy and public affairs seen across both Carolinas for more than 30 years now.

Thank you for supporting this program.

In a moment, we will take a look at this week's dialogue.

Obviously, politics is driving a lot of that.

And later on we are joined by the education czar in North Carolina, Catherine Truitt, Superintendent of Education, will wade in with us.

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On this edition of Carolina Business Review, Anna Beavon Gravely from Restless Politico, Antjuan Seawright of Blueprint Strategy and special guest Catherine Truitt, North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction.

(upbeat music) - Hello, welcome again to our program, happy Summer, happy dog days of Summer.

And that's no more apparent than it is in the politics of this country and certainly in the Carolinas.

- For sure.

- Is that fair to say?

- Happy hot dog days in the Carolinas.

- Happy Hot Dog days.

Okay, - Excellent.

Kind of a bad joke, but we, I've made worse ones.

And AB, let me start with you and, and you know, we're careful about trying to pile on the thing about President Biden's health, and is he salient?

Is he cognitive?

He has made some mistakes.

And I I'm gonna ask you this question about the, the party Democratic Party, but AB how, how does Biden's Health and President Biden's Health, how does that reflect or how does it trickle down into North Carolina politics?

Does it matter?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

I have been asking that question basically all week to, to sort of predict and try to see can the state level policy really attach themselves to a federal or more specific, can federal policy and what's going on on the federal electoral stage attach itself to North Carolina?

We are a very different state.

Historically, that's been pretty difficult to do, whether it's on the Republican side or the Democrat side, but I think it does impact when it comes to how much Trump beats Biden in North Carolina, that will have an impact down ballot for sure.

- And, and let's unpack something in the Democratic party, Antjuan, you know, a little bit of something about that, and you're not just in South Carolina, but in DC and in many other places.

So does the, does the loyalty to, to President Biden, whether he runs or whether he doesn't run this, and these are my words, sir, but the, the challenge to loyalty to the president within the party seemingly have boiled out into the public.

Is is that an accurate perception?

- Oh, I think so.

And I'm not saying it's a good thing.

I believe in the old concept of we should yell in the places we agree and whisper in the places we disagree.

Everyone in my party has not adopted the Antjuan C Wright way of thinking, and that's okay, because politics is a relationship game, and I believe in a relationship you should respect the feelings and the sentiments of your partner.

It doesn't mean you have to agree with them, it doesn't mean you have to go along with them.

But certainly those voices should be heard.

However, at the end of the day, from my party, it has to be crystal clear that the end goal is to win in November, and we have to be united on all fronts because not just the presidency is on the ballot, the North Carolina gubernatorial race on the ballot, United States Senate, Congress, state legislative races, mayoral races, in some cases state court races.

In some states, issues are on the ballot.

And so we have to be united because we've seen the residue of not being united, i.e.

the 2016 election, and most of us are still feeling the results of that.

- Did, does this make the Democratic National Convention highly unpredictable on its outcome?

- I don't think so, because I think by and large, most people understand what the end of the day means and what we have to do.

And quite frankly, I think we'll have a settle settlement on the nomination before the convention even starts in August.

- Antjuan gave you an opportunity to talk about the gubernatorial race in North Carolina.

Josh Stein.

- Yeah.

- Mark Robinson again there.

I I don't think these candidates are close on anything.

When I look at that, how does, what's the outcome?

Does it depend on the presidential politics?

- No, I think it doesn't depend on the presidential politics, but I do.

One thing you said is that the unity of the Democrat party being winning in November, that seems to be a really strong talking point from the governor's meeting going to, to Washington to meet with Biden, to any of any press conference or any public appearance by democratic leaders since the debate, the presidential debate, but also I think the convention will be more watched.

It might be, it might not be unpredictable, but I think people are gonna watch it just in case it might be.

- So did you wanna follow?

I was gonna say both conventions are going to be highly watched because the former president, who's the Republican nominee, is going to have to pick his dance floor partner, if you will.

And not only that, you're going to see kind of the mood and temperature from a policy perspective projected on the RNC stage.

So that's going to be kind of the order of the day on the Republican side.

On the democratic side, we're gonna be balancing this idea of will there be protests?

How will the president perform?

What would the language that comes from the stage, what does that look like?

Is it more forward thinking or is it more retrospect thinking?

I think they're gonna be, people start to lean in and pay attention.

Who normally would not have this early, - Who's gonna be in the governor's office in North Carolina for next year?

- That's so tough to say right now.

It, I think that does sort of have a, a need to figure out what's gonna happen at the top of the ticket.

- So it's tight?

- It's tight, it's really tight.

And I think one day it's, it's Robinson, the next day it's Stein.

They both have their challenges.

Stein is not necessarily a great fundraiser.

- Does the hyperbolic nature of Mark Robinson's comment affect the good or bad?

How does it, how does it affect the challenge?

- That is a handicap, that is one of his handicaps for sure.

Stein's fundraising is strong, but his campaigning is not.

Robinson has very electric language, but if Trump wins in North Carolina handily, that could impact him greatly - In a way, I know you wanna talk, I'm sorry Anna.

- No, go.

- I Know you want to talk about Mark Robinson, but we, we gotta we gotta close the loop quickly.

South Carolina conservative state, not surprising, certainly in the General Assembly, what was surprising was that the only three Republican senators in the Senate in South Carolina, in the State House were not reelected seemingly because they did not support the full abortion ban.

How did that happen in a state that already leans fairly conservative?

- Well, it's no surprise.

We had 13% turnout statewide.

And what happens in primaries usually is the more extreme or the more loyal to the party, to the cause, or the ones who show up and vote.

And I think that was reflective when you see three women who, who are women by the way, who says a woman should be trusted with the ability to make her own healthcare decisions and those decisions should remain between her and her doctor.

I think that's a sad reflection of sometimes why my state does not always get it right in terms of the national stage, because we've seen conservative states, Ohio, Kansas, and others who have a totally different perspective on that issue.

- Okay.

Hot dog days of summer.

- For sure.

- You picked up on it.

- Yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

You know, I was born at night, not last night, but I I get it more at times than not.

Thank you.

Stay with us please.

Coming up on this program, he's been here before.

Jim Sills is the CEO of M and F Bank out of Durham.

A very thoughtful, insightful banker, has a lot of insight for us, and he'll be back on this program.

Also, the president of the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank, his name's Tom Barkin.

Tom will be back on this program as well coming up and a surprise loss during the Republican primary in North Carolina earlier this year.

Katherine Truitt's, hope for a second term as the North Carolina Education Czar was dashed.

How liberating, though, is that now for her to think about the job, to think about what's to come and what needs to get done?

Joining us again now is the North Carolina Superintendent of Education.

We welcome the Honorable Katherine Truitt.

Madam, welcome back.

- Thank you so much.

It's great to be with you.

- So here you are smiling.

You didn't get the bid for the reelection, and you seem not just at peace for it.

And, and, and I don't wanna put any words in your mouth, Catherine, but the idea that, how do you think differently, how do you reflect on the job now of not just what you've done in, in a few tough years, but what needs to get done?

- So I am very much at peace with what has occurred.

It was certainly not an an easy loss to take for many reasons.

But at the end of the day, reflection is a healthy thing.

And what I have really come to terms with is that the Department of Public Instruction is a state agency that is not set up to be a place of innovation.

And that is what my team and I tried to do.

We were successful with, with so much of what we did.

And at the end of the day, I prioritized doing that job every day so that I would never have any regrets about the way that I served the students, families and educators of our great state.

- Well done.

Thank you for the leadership.

Tough during COVID.

- Yes.

- The, the, the two candidates now heading into the fall, Michelle Morrow and Mo Green, what are the platforms, and not to, to extend this even more, what are their policies?

How do they fit into where you think DPI needs to go?

- Well, I really haven't heard much substance from either candidate at this point.

I think we hear much more from Michelle Morrow about what she wants to do, but what she says she wants to do are not things that she has the ability to enact at the state level.

She's talking very much about local things that make me think she really doesn't understand what local control means in North Carolina, or how, you know, who's really controlling education in our state, which is the legislature because they hold the, the purse strings and essentially write the laws for public education in our state.

Mo has a great education background, but I've not heard any platform from, from him either.

So I, I think that, you know, education has become such a wedge issue for, from both sides of the party for their bases.

And because of that, I think both candidates are not putting forth agendas that appeal to a wide variety of people.

I think they're both in echo chambers.

And I think that because education is such a wedge issue right now, voters are not hearing what the real plans that are actionable, practicable and innovative should be for our students and their families.

- Yeah.

Okay, Anna, - Will you talk a little bit more about the innovation that you wanted to take place with DPI?

I think that there's the, it really resonated with me when you said that it's not really a place for innovation.

What do you think could fix that?

- Well, I think the biggest challenge that we have in North Carolina with public education is our governance structure.

Our governance structure is the only one of its kind in the United States where you have a constitutionally created state board of education whose authority comes from the constitution, whose members, excuse me, members are appointed by the governor.

So they are political appointments for eight years with an elected state superintendent, and then local superintendents who report up to their local boards.

I mean, no one is actually accountable for education in the state of North Carolina.

So I, I think that innovation is hard to take place in a, in a government agency.

I mean, we have 1300 employees.

Our expenditures hit $16 billion last year.

It's a really big job on its face.

And had it not been for federal COVID dollars, I would not have been able to create, for example, the Office of Learning Research, which was able to measure student learning loss down to the student.

We're one of the few states that was actually able to do that so that we could say to local education leaders, here's where the learning loss occurred in your district.

And, and that's something that, that I'm really proud of.

But that was a very heavy lift.

- Obviously the great equalizer should not be viewed from a partisan lens, but here we are.

So how has politics, whether it's Moms for Liberty and others, how has that shaped how we view education as a whole?

And then secondly, what did you learn or what should we all learn from how the pandemic has rearranged the furniture, if you will, when it comes to education?

- Well, I think that, I'll start with that question.

So I think that the pandemic really showed the limitations of the system of public education that we have.

I think that when I talk about the system of public education, I always talk about the fact that teachers and administrators are doing the best they can within the system we have.

The system we have is very antiquated.

And I think COVID really showed how antiquated it was.

It showed that assessments do not provide a valid picture of what is happening at a school.

A lot of parent research has been done during, both during and coming out of the pandemic by groups like Learning Heroes in DC that show that parents value things different to what teachers value, parents value report cards, teachers value test scores, and those are two very different things.

So your first question about the, the politics of education, - Politics and the policy.

- The, yeah, the politics and, and the policy.

I mean, I, I think that, that, that's a really good example of why this role shouldn't be elected.

I mean, it's, it's very difficult to separate the two when you have political appointments working with an elected leader.

And so the way that I handled that personally was to create a strategic plan who put students at the center of everything we did.

That was our North Star, was not just that we prioritize students, but that we think about students first and foremost with every policy decision with everything that we were going to advocate for.

- You know what's interesting, madam, listening to you talk about the job now and, and closer to when you started, world's different because you're down in the mix.

- Yeah.

- That one of the nuances that I know you have learned, and, and there is a question here was the idea of school choice.

And it gets couched of course politically.

It's a bell we clearly cannot unring.

And a couple of questions about this is, is school choice here to stay?

And does school choice represent the one of the best innovations around education to come?

And I don't mean just, you know, private school or, or charter school, but just the idea that the whole system is changing and it's not the rigid public schools that it used to be?

- Yeah, I mean, we, we live in a time where school doesn't have to mean four walls in a building- - For 180 days.

- Yeah.

For 180 days.

I mean, technology allows us to do the business of education independent of time and place.

So I, I think that when I think about school choice, I think about the idea that we still live in a time where the government tells you where to send your child to school.

No other facet of life does the government say, well, you're gonna send your child to this doctor, or you're gonna send, you know, your child to this summer camp or, or use this babysitter or whatever.

But he, the government says, by virtue of where you live, this is where you go to school.

Now, we do have school choice with, we have school choice within the public school system in some places, but it's certainly not the norm.

It's in larger urban areas by and large.

So I, I think that at the end of the day, parents in for right, wrong, or indifferent should know their child best.

No one cares more about their child than that child's parents.

Parents are imperfect just because they're people, but parents should be the ones who decide what is best for their child.

And not every school can be all things to all children.

And we have a system that dictates that a child goes to school based on geography rather than their need.

And I think that's what school choice is about.

But at the end of the day, innovation is hard in big institutions.

I always say the only place that's more slow to see innovation is higher education.

So, you know- - UNC system.

- Yes, yes.

I mean it's, it's, it's hard to innovate in big institutions.

So school choice is definitely here to stay.

- Okay, Anna.

- So you are in a very unique space.

You have been elected and you have, you will not be going on to the, to the general.

What advice do you have for whoever takes the seat after you?

- Well, my advice is to pay attention to what education policy demands or I should say what students demand from education policy.

There are things that need to happen in education that have nothing to do with politics.

So for example, what we've done for reading in North Carolina, we now need to do for math.

And we were poised to do that.

And I would hope that whoever wins this race is going to take up that mantle and say, yes, we have to fix our lack of math proficiency in the state the way that we are now.

Well, on our way with reading, you know, third grade reading scores are the only standardized statewide score in North Carolina to rise above pre pandemic levels.

And that is because of our investment of, of time and money from our teachers in the legislature in the science of reading.

- That's great.

- Growth, artificial intelligence, jobs in the economy, education put the triangle together for us.

- So that's was a huge part of my administration.

We are a state that launched the North Carolina portrait of a graduate.

Many states have portraits of a graduate, but not very many are aligned to the workforce.

Ours are aligned to durable skills, which are the skills that employers say they need.

Things like personal responsibility, communication, collaboration, empathy, personal responsibility, learners' mindset, all of those things.

So we did that.

We added also as a graduation requirement, computer science that is the first content area like English or social studies to be added to the canon for 120 years.

And then we also got legislation passed that requires students to have, you know, a plan for what they wanna do after high school.

So we, we were, one of my goals was to realign the purpose of K 12 education at its core, to be, to prepare students for the post-secondary plans of their choice, whether it's to be employed, enlisted or enrolled.

- This is, this doesn't go right to the core of what DPI or what your job or what, what K through 12 is, but it certainly is early on in the, in the life cycle of it.

And that's the idea of a childcare crisis that's being talked about and that the general assembly did step up and make some funds available.

How would you describe the crisis?

How does it show up and how concerned are you knowing what you know about kids in school, and families about this childcare crisis?

- Well, that goes back to Antjuan's comments about the, the pandemic and the impact of education.

I mean, and, and parents, we, the pandemic shed light on the fact that, you know, parents have to have a place for their children to go.

Is that the purpose of school?

No, but that's a byproduct of public education.

And that is certainly the same when it comes to pre-K.

I think that the way our system is right now, you've got pre-K sitting with and childcare sits at the Department of Health and Human Services.

So it's not something that educators per se are tackling.

And so I, I think that moving forward after this election, there's got to be some sort of cross agency collaboration in a way that we've not really seen before between DHHS and our education leaders to help solve this crisis.

- Yeah.

Go ahead.

- So do you think that's one of the biggest challenges facing education as a whole in the next five to 10 years?

- The, the pre-K?

- Yeah, pre-K or, or like childcare issues with parents.

- You know, I know that that exists.

That's not, and those are not, those are not the emails I get from parents.

- Okay.

- I don't hear from parents telling me that they don't have childcare.

I hear from parents who have children with special needs telling me that FAPE is not being met, that the law is not being followed.

- Okay.

- I hear from from parents that they love their neighborhood public school and don't need school choice.

I hear from parents that they need a different option and they don't have it.

So I think the biggest, the biggest challenge that we have is that we have the job of being a teacher is outdated, needs to be revisioned.

It doesn't attract young people to it.

And it's not just about pay, it's about the structure of the job and the fact that we expect a brand new teacher to do the exact same job as a teacher who's been in, or as a worker who's been in a job for 20 years.

- Quick.

Quick 30 seconds.

- Quick 30 seconds.

In my home district, one of the only ones in the country, we have a three K program should North Carolina follow Rural South Carolina's pilot project.

- I would love to see that piloted.

Absolutely.

I would love to see it piloted, researched, and evaluated and reported on.

Absolutely.

- Where are you gonna show up next?

- I don't know, but I do know that I have more work to do.

There's more work to be done.

I cut my teeth leadership wise during one of the most difficult times in our country's history, in one of the most difficult areas of public life.

And that is, you know, as a statewide education leader, at a time when schools were closed.

And so I have more to give, there's more work to be done, and I would love to somehow find a way to continue working on those things that my team and I initiated.

- Well, we hope you bring to bear all of that incredible knowledge.

It's been talked about and certainly not this cycle, but would Governor be out of the question for you?

- Well, I, I've, I, you know, I've never really considered myself a politician, but I've heard enough politicians say, never say never.

- You could fake it.

- So I never say never.

- You could fake it.

- Yeah.

I can.

- Thank you.

Thank you for your leadership.

Thanks for taking time to debrief with us here because it's important.

- Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

Nice to see you again.

- You as well.

- Thank you.

Nice to see Antjuan.

Thank you Anna Bevin.

Good to see you.

- Good to see you.

- Until next week, I'm Chris Williams.

Hope your days are cool but fun.

Goodnight.

- Gratefully acknowledging support by Martin Marietta, Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina, Truliant Federal Credit Union, Sonoco, Colonial Life, High Point University, and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music)