Bill
Fletcher, the Republican candidate for Superintendent
of Public Instruction in North Carolina, best puts his
goals if elected in a few words. "It is our shared
responsibility to unlock and kindle the passion for
learning in each child, to broaden each child's vision
of what is possible, and to equip each child with the
skills to climb as high and as fast as he or she
desires," explains Fletcher. "That is what I believe
is our responsibility in this education industry to
try to do: to find a way to unlock that passion for
learning in every child."
How does Fletcher describe himself? One of his best
interests is his family, which happens to be very much
involved with education themselves. "I am happily
married to one wife for 27 years with three children,
one who is a kindergarten teacher, one who is a senior
in college and wants to be a police officer (he's
studying criminal justice), another who is in the
community college and transferring to one of our state
universities to be a P.E. teacher. My wife has been a
teacher assistant a volunteer and is now what's called
a data manager in one of our schools she's responsible
for doing all the accounting responsible to our
students."
Q: What is the major issue
that you would like to get out to people about your
campaign?
A: North Carolina
is making good progress in terms of public education,
but we're not making progress fast enough. It's not
happening for every school, and it's not happening for
all students. I think it's very important to refocus
our state department of education on the classroom
results, what's happening in the classroom. That
should shape everything we do as a state department in
terms of providing leadership and encouragement for
each of our school districts, schools, and
communities. That is ultimately, a key fundamental
necessity that our state department has to focus on,
what's happening on results from students in the
classroom.
Q: What would you like to
tell voters about yourself and why you are qualified
for the office?
A: Number one, I'm a businessman, I'm not an educator,
so I come out this whole picture from a different
point of view where we set goals, where we establish
benchmarks, where we strive to use best practices,
where we measure results in different ways, and I
bring that same kind of approach to the education
arena. I have been on the Wake County School Board for
ten years, I'm in my third four-year term, and have
applied the same concepts to my service on the board
in Wake County. For example, the first thing we did
was to set one single goal for the school district,
and that was that 95 percent of our children would be
at grade level according to the North Carolina end of
grade tests by 2003. We adopted that in 1996. At the
time, about 73 percent of our children in grades three
through eight were at grade level. Today, we're just
under 90 percent, we're striving for 95 percent. Our
goal said by June 2003. We may be about one or two
percentage points short. We've come a long way, and
the goal has been the factor that has allowed us to
shape and change what happens in the district.
We've looked at every educational and non-educational
program we were doing and said, "Is this helping us
reach our goal? Is this the best use of our money? Can
it be reallocated to a higher value activity?" Over
several budget cycles and with some good evaluation by
our research department, we have been able to either
change programs so they're more effective or choose
between good programs so they were using the best
program to accomplish a particular academic objective.
That's been key to reallocate resources to a
classroom. Our central office expense is now down to
less than 7 percent of our total budget - that
includes the payroll, budgeting, finance, insurance,
and all those kinds of things that have to happen in
business. At the same time, we've gone from 76 percent
of our kids at grade level to 90 percent of our kids
at grade level. That's huge. I want to do that same
thing at the state level.
Q: Is there any legislation
recently passed that you think will affect the state?
A: Certainly, the federal legislation, No Child Left
Behind, is going to affect the state. North Carolina
is fairly well prepared because we do have in place a
standardized testing program. Many other states are
going to have to develop one. I am a firm believer in
the goals of No Child Left Behind, which is as our
education system, we have a responsibility to educate
every child, no matter how weak or strong they may
walk in our door. I do have some concerns about the
implementation of the law as defined and described by
the Department of Education. It ignores some of the
realities of districts that new students come into
your schools every year who you haven't had the
opportunity to educate. The requirements for annual
adequate yearly progress are very stringent, so I have
some concerns about the fairness of implementation,
but I believe the goal is what we should have been
about for many years.
Q: Why do you think people
should vote for you instead of the other candidates?
A: The business background, the fact that I've
demonstrated the leadership in working with an
educational bureaucracy and helping to shape it and
move it forward. We've been successful in improving
the teaching profession, in improving results for
children, and improving taxpayers' satisfaction with
what's happening in their schools. I believe those are
things that differentiate me from the other
candidates. My passion is to see that we properly
serve every child so they can reach their potential,
and that requires someone at the top setting very high
expectations and encouraging extraordinary performance
everyday from the educators in the schools.
There are other things that have to be done too. The
structure of our school finance system in North
Carolina needs to be overhauled, and for the last six
years, the administration has been pointing at the
legislature, which has been pointing at the courts,
which has been pointing back at the administration,
and no one's been trying to fix it. I want to lead an
effort to try to fix our school finance system and to
put a new model on the table for the legislature and
the courts to look at.
Bill
Fletcher
Politics
Today:
Bill Fletcher for
North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction (R)