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- We are literally within a week or two of the end of an epic school year.

And I don't think that's overstating it.

COVID-19 has certainly appended many things and education is the primary source of that.

We will wade into some of that later on in this dialogue with the new superintendent of education in North Carolina Catherine Truitt joins us, but in just a moment we start our dialogue and it's much more than just education.

How do we get back to normal?

We start the dialogue right after this.

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On this edition of Carolina Business Review Joe Waters of Capita, Leslie Boney from the Institute for Emerging Issues at NC State University and special guest Catherine Truitt North Carolina's superintendent of education.

(upbeat music) - Gentlemen, welcome to the program.

It's hard to miss this idea that we are probably more hopeful that COVID is now gone and it's not quite gone yet but many people looking, ahead not wearing masks we seem to be approaching this whole idea of a post COVID society.

And the things that bubble up are important issues like housing and housing was already a challenge before when it came to affordable housing but now that home prices have done what they've done and it is certainly a sellers market.

What happens to not just affordable housing, Leslie we'll start with you but what happens to housing in general, and does it leave people behind?

And is that a problem?

(mumbles) - It absolutely does.

There's a huge backlog obviously of demand from the year where people have been generally kind of staying out of the housing market and now, wanting to get in the prices are getting bid up for high-income housing.

But what that does is it really crowds out the availability of labor to build affordable housing.

So on the one hand, you have the challenge of affordable housing already being scarce, but now you have in terms of new availability, almost none of that.

And that's in large part because of the labor shortage and that's something we need to pay attention to over the longterm - Joe, same question.

How does housing factor into folks that were already at risk?

Is it a bigger gap?

Is it a bigger issue?

- Chris absolutely.

It's a critical issue.

And in my hometown of Greenville, South Carolina we're discussing and debating this right now how do you balance sane development in a rapidly growing community while at the same time, ensuring not only affordability, but access to ownership which gives people a stake in the American dream.

And we're going to have to work this out.

It's going to take people working at all levels of society to work it out, but we need to make sure that folks have a path to affordable housing and a path to home ownership that they want it in order for them to be able to flourish in a post pandemic recovery, critical issue.

- Leslie does this exacerbate, the gap that was already there.

And I know I'm asking kind of the same question in a different way, but does the gap grow between I won't say diminimous demographic, but folks and families that were already at risk, is this gap gotten even bigger and is the tail on it even longer?

- I think you're gonna see people having to buy housing further out from the major Metro areas which is gonna affect family life on the back end.

You're gonna see a lot of people that may have been in a position as Joe was talking about of considering buying a home that, are either priced out of the market or because of rent forbearance and other things like that are now in debt as opposed to having a little bit of money to put toward a down payment.

So I think both of those things are gonna take a long time to work out both the new construction people dealing with the loss of revenue from job loss and also just having trouble coming up with down payments.

- Yeah.

You talk about job loss, Joe, the idea that unemployment is in a really unique place and I'll describe it this way that the unemployment rate is low but yet now with a string of economic development announcements not just in North Carolina, but the Carolinas in general it seemed to be gathering ahead of steam around these very large employers like Apple and Google and Amazon and et cetera, et cetera.

And there is a growing demand for workers but yet we still had going into this public health crisis.

We had a gap between workers that were willing to do it and the jobs available and now with a public assistance for the unemployed that gap seemingly has gotten even longer.

Am I describing it well?

Does it create a bigger issue?

- Well, I would say it seems to me I'm not an economist but we also have a lot of people who are looking for jobs and, you know certainly governor McMaster ending unemployment at the end of June in South Carolina, the extra unemployment benefits at the end of June, something which is perhaps pointing to the issue around that keeping people out of the workforce.

But at the same time employers can offer a higher wage, right and be more competitive as well against those extra unemployment benefits.

So I think this, again, not an economist, but both sides both in terms of the employer and what government is offering in terms of extended unemployment benefits.

- Leslie you wade into policy quite a bit.

And this has got to be something that you think about it.

Would it be the right thing to do for the government to end employment benefits earlier than rather later?

- Oh, North Carolina has already tested the limits of how much we can limit unemployment payments and benefits in terms of the federal government program.

I know there's a robust debate on it right now whether there are disincentives being created by the the programs that we have.

But I would just say that, you know we've seen unemployment come way down in both North and South Carolina over the past year.

We're now at 5.1 in South Carolina, 5.2 in North Carolina.

And so there's been a lot of progress and you're seeing participation rates still go up.

So labor rate labor force participation rates are still going up.

So that would, I would argue there's not a huge disincentive, more people that are there saying they're available to go to work.

So greater labor force participation rate lower unemployment would suggest at least that there's not a huge disincentive that's being created by the government benefits.

- Joe what are the other issues out there?

The Biden administration has floated a fairly large infrastructure bill as part of the even larger final round of let's just call it government stimulus and pumping money into the economy.

Does the infrastructure, does the proposed infrastructure plan, does it help?

Will it be deployed sooner rather than later?

How do you see this all shaking out?

- Well, I think the pandemic has given us a clue Chris into how expansive the infrastructure that undergirds our economy truly is and how we need to make investments beyond roads, bridges, airports water lines, certainly issues like rural broadband as well but also the issues that we focus a lot on like childcare.

We now see after 15 months of this, she session thousands, hundreds of thousands millions of women leaving the workforce because their caregiving responsibilities people not being able to get to work because of their caregiving responsibilities.

We now know, for example, that childcare is a critical part of infrastructure and I'm pleased that president Biden has included childcare proposals in the infrastructure bill.

So we have to.

It's the 21st century.

We have to take his more expansive view of infrastructure in order move the economy forward.

- Leslie, as Joe just talked about one element of infrastructure is rural broadband.

A lot of talk about rural broadband how it's going to level the playing field for all access, rural, all demographics, et cetera et cetera, where are we in the funding of it?

And when do you think it is going to be deployed?

And we actually can say that a bulk of the rural broadband challenges behind.

- Well, first, let me say that in North Carolina and in a lot of States, the bigger challenge, the greater number of people that don't have broadband right now are in urban areas.

And it's not that it's not available to them it's that they can't afford it.

And so there is an equal challenge of getting people to adopt broadband that is numerically larger than the people who don't have access to it.

In terms of rural, there is a huge amount of money and this is kind of a technical term sloshing around right now.

There's at least $10 billion that's been proposed for access getting the infrastructure built on a national level.

And then there's another $10.2 billion that's available for this adoption challenge.

And so there's a lot of money coming.

The initial rules for the adoption have already been adopted from the American rescue plan and that money is going out now and that's gonna subsidize some people getting devices and a few months of subscriptions so that money's getting out.

I think it's gonna be the fall before you see the bulk of that, the rest of the 10 billion and the other category coming out.

- There is no doubt about it.

There has been more enough coverage and cocktail chatter and just water cool talk about what educational or rather last educational attainment has happened over these last 12 months, but clearly education is at the center of what COVID has impacted in our society.

Joining us now is the superintendent of education in North Carolina, the honorable Catherine Truitt your honor, welcome to the program.

Congratulations on the election and thank you for joining us.

- Well, thank you so much, Chris.

And please call me Catherine.

- I will try, but you know, it does deserve a respect for the office as well as yourself but thank you.

Ma'am, let's start with this idea that COVID has been a seismic impact in us and not just personal lives and business lives and education, but what one or two strategy says have emerged from the disruption of COVID that you've been able to leverage and use.

- I came into office on, I believe January 4 and one of the first things that my team and I did was to create what we call the office of learning recovery and acceleration.

And we created this office to be part of our own agency strategic plan, which was really created not just as a response to COVID but as a response to our failings, if you will, as an agency, prior to the pandemic and looking at all of the ways that we need to improve public education in North Carolina.

And so that playbook which I have deemed called operation Polaris puts the office of learning recovery at the center.

And then it is bolstered around with what we call the office of district and school transformation.

And our goal is to transform the agency into not just an agency that is about compliance with federal and state regulations but also an agency that is there to support our local districts to improve outcomes for all kids.

- Did you feel like you got fairly wide subscription from the staff at DPI, Department of Public Instruction around this idea - A hundred percent.

And not only that it's also been approved by the state board of ed - Leslie - Huge amount of support for a really intensive summer learning program right now, superintendent Truitt.

I'm wondering, I was looking at some data about a projected learning loss, McKinsey, at least in one of their projections was showing maybe four to eight months by June for white folks, eight to 12 months for people of color.

And wondering whether you think that an intense summer session is gonna be enough or what the strategy of your office is for making it up in the following academic year - The answer to the question is that enough is largely no.

And the reason it's no is because a lot of children in our state were behind pre pandemic.

So we know from our own data that 67% of eighth graders pre pandemic are not reading and doing math proficiently when they start high school.

And that is a statistic that has not really moved since the nineties.

And so our recovery plans are in many ways not that different than what they would be, had it not been for the pandemic with the exception of the fact that we've got this infusion of federal dollars coming to us that will hopefully allow local districts to look at the specific needs of their communities and say, what can we do differently?

How can we take the students, we have meet them where we are and carry them forward?

And we are certainly positioning ourself at the department to lend our expertise to local superintendents and their teams and schools especially our chronically low-performing schools to come alongside them and help them make decisions about using this money to meet the needs of their students.

- [Chris] Joe.

- You indicated in your comments just a few minutes ago that there are some outcomes that have not improved in almost 30 years.

That makes me wonder if we need to be completely rethinking the model of public education in North Carolina or continuing to work within the system as it is currently structured to improve outcomes.

I mean, certainly I think we can all agree that teacher quality is important but should there be a bolder reworking of the system overall?

30years is a long time?

- Yeah, the system that we have is perfectly designed to get the results that we're getting.

I would say that not just in North Carolina in our country we need to redesign how we do public K-12 education.

Absolutely no doubt about it.

First of all, it should include pre-K. And,second of all, we need to, the most bold thing that we could do and we are laying the groundwork for this at the department.

The boldest thing that we could do as a state and a nation is to remove the idea of age grading from our public school system which is to say just because you're nine doesn't mean that you should be in the fourth grade.

That is a very outmoded part of the early education system in this country that was essentially training farmers and factory workers.

And it worked 150 years ago, 120 years ago.

It doesn't work now and I've argued for a long time that the system we have is outdated and needs to reflect better.

The workforce challenges that we have in our state and in our country.

And we do need to completely rethink things and move towards a more competency-based approach to public K-12 education.

- Your honor, you know, some of the initiatives try to attain these things that you are talking about one of the initiatives, at least specifically in North Carolina is a group called my future NC and my future NC as you well know and I'm gonna repeat it for our viewers has a goal of two million by 2030.

And what that means is it means graduate two million graduates, at least by 2030 need to have a degreed or a higher credentialed education.

What's the largest barrier to attaining that goal?

- The largest barrier to attaining that goal is that we didn't prepare a lot of young people when they were coming through their public K-12 education to be...

They were not prepared to be ready for post-secondary credit bearing coursework.

When we look at the numbers of students who needed to be remediated and still do in community college, as well as in traditional higher education for four year traditional higher education, we see that we have a lot of gaps and my future goal is not going to be met because it's it's if we don't change some things because that goal is for 24 to 54 year olds those that's the age group that needs to be brought into the workforce in new ways that will require more education for those groups more training and education.

And if you are already working a minimum wage job it's very difficult to stop what you're doing and return to school.

And traditional higher education does not always make it easy for people to return to school.

And that is, I think the biggest barrier is working on an adults and adult learners, timetable, and pocketbook.

- Awesome.

- How do you prepare more of your high school graduates to not be in that situation a few years from now?

I think we've got, obviously a lot of people who may have come through and not had a good experience in K through 12, got out, started college dropped out a million people have some college, no degree.

How do we graduate a greater percentage of our high school students who know that they need that extra credential whether it's a bachelor's or associate's, or just a certificate, how do we change that mindset?

- Well, this sounds harsh, but I would argue that a high school diploma is not a proxy for post-secondary college readiness whether it's community college or four year residential college.

And so this all begins with legislation that was passed and the governor has signed a couple of weeks ago and that is legislation to equip teachers with training in early literacy instructional methods that are grounded in the body of research known as the science of reading.

All of the challenges that we have with high school dropout rates and college dropout rates, goes back to literacy.

And when 67% of eighth graders are not reading proficiently when they start high school, what chance do they have to be able to compete with their peers and themselves in order to complete a two year or four year program?

The jobs of today and the future, even in the military as well require a certain level of reading that are many of our graduates are just not attaining.

And this goes back to the way that as a state and as a nation we have been teaching reading for the last 30 years.

- Mr.

Waters.

- Yes, you're new to this role and it's been more than a hundred days, but that's a helpful marker.

How would you grade your first 100 days and what have you learned?

- We have made so many changes within the agency to allow us to be better able to support our local districts.

That is a difficult line to walk because my agency does not have regulatory authority over local districts.

And so how we position ourselves to be a help rather than a hindrance is again, a fine line to walk.

And I think that many superintendents would say that we are doing just that.

I would also say that a barrier to progress in the past has been on both sides of the aisle has been the relationship that the office of the state superintendent has with the state board of education.

And what people have seen since my first meeting with the state board of education in January is that we are doing everything we can to speak as one team with one voice.

And that has been the mantra and the culture between the board and the agency since January.

And we had another state board ed meeting this week where, the same attitude towards collaboration has played out.

And so I would say that my team gets an A for everything that we've accomplished in the first 100 days - Your honor, let me go back to something that you've talked about.

You talked about the science of reading and you've got some coverage from the executive mansion in North Carolina that the governor signed into law.

What is, termed the science of reading or phonics teaching phonics.

And that's a huge step forward.

Of course.

The idea that having that now wind at your back is important.

How do you deploy teachers teaching the science of reading?

- So the legislation that the governor signed actually mandates that teachers receive science or reading training from a particular company, and that company was chosen because they already have a track record of doing this in other States.

And these other States have seen reading proficiency levels increase in all students.

And so my agency will be deploying federal dollars to train all pre-K through fifth grade teachers starting this summer.

We're going to train the first cohort in starting in July and then the second cohort in January and the third cohort a year from July.

And this training involves a synchronous online work for the teacher, but also involves small group at the building at the school building coaching with experts, as well as in class coaching.

And those as a former teacher, I can tell you that those kinds of supports are so frequently what is missing from good professional development but we are definitely going to make sure that those supports are in place for our teachers.

- We have about a minute and a half left and I do want to get to sorry, Leslie, but I wanna bring it around to a political and policy question.

You talked about your relationship, your honor, with the state board of education and what is traditionally not been a close relationship at least in the last few years between DPI and the state board.

Do you feel the general assembly has your back in large part?

- That's a great question.

I would say that there is definitely, you know there's always room for improvement.

There's always room for better communication between both the agency and the general assembly.

They are part-time folks trying to do the work of what really requires an enormous amount of time and effort.

They're... You know, I see things from an from a statewide context whereas our legislators are very much part of a local context and the area of the district they serve, I would say that there are certainly things that they've put forth that I do not support other things that they've put forth that I do support, but, you know sometimes they ask for my opinion and sometimes they don't.

I'm not really a fan of the way that they have appropriated some of the federal dollars that have come down but other things they've done, I'm a fan of.

- Okay.

All right.

I wish we had more time, but that said as always we try to put so much information into 30 minutes.

Superintendent, Catherine Truitt, thank you.

Best of luck going forward for all of us and certainly for the kids in school and nice to see you.

Good luck to you.

- Thanks.

It was great to be with you all.

- Thank you Joe Waters, always nice to have you on the program, Joe, thank you.

And Leslie Boney as well from NC state and the Institute of emerging issues.

Best of luck to you as well.

Gentlemen, thank you for joining us.

- Good to be with you - Until next week.

I'm Chris William.

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