Improving Education

There is no greater priority than ensuring our kids get the quality education they need to succeed in life. Yet, North Carolina spends less than nearly all other states in the nation on public school funding as a share of our state’s economy – 49th out of 50! It’s a disgrace. The state legislature is making it harder for our children to learn and compete by defunding public education.

North Carolina’s kids need good teachers in every classroom and good principals in every school. As Attorney General, I worked to defend students’ constitutional right to receive a sound basic education by properly funding public education, but extreme politicians continue to undermine and underfund our public schools year after year.

We have to work together to bolster public education from pre-kindergarten through community college and university. We must increase access to high-quality early childhood education so kids start kindergarten healthy and ready to learn. We must support our educators and give teachers meaningful pay raises to recruit and keep the best and brightest teachers for our kids. We must also invest in other critical school staff, including counselors, nurses, social workers, and bus drivers. We must help kids who are struggling from lost instructional time to meet their learning goals, reduce the number of students absent from school, and confront the mental health crisis that is plaguing our kids. No child should show up to the classroom hungry, which is why I will work to invest in universal, healthy school meals for all public school students. We must give our kids access to the tools they need for a bright future — from textbooks to technology and career and technical education. And we must do everything we can to keep our kids safe from gun violence, which is now the leading cause of death for kids.

And we must ensure that North Carolinians who want to continue their education or training can afford it, including keeping tuition affordable at our public universities and making our community colleges tuition no-cost for students training in our state’s growing, high-demand industries. That way, our students can get good paying jobs and our businesses can hire the workers they need. Additionally, North Carolina has the largest number of four year historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and largest HBCU student population in the nation. Our HBCUs are critical to our state’s success, and the state must do a better job supporting them.

I’m proud to have been endorsed by the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) in this campaign, and as Governor, I’ll work tirelessly to improve public education to ensure a brighter future for all children.