My Views for Education

As Lt. Governor, I would serve on the State Board of Community Colleges and the State Board of Education. Here are my thoughts on the state of education in North Carolina and my vision for how we can get back on track. Our schools are no longer teaching the basic values that underpin America. We no longer instruct students in the value of hard work, thrift, morals, and determination. Instead, we've substituted Prayer in Schools and open acknowledgment of our Creator with a secular humanism where absolute Truth is ridiculed and cultural ideologies are the norm. We've replaced American Exceptionalism with a curriculum that teaches that America is the root of all evil. Today, many schools are teaching the new radical doctrine that our black children are born victims and our white children are born oppressors. Critical Race Theory must not be allowed in our classrooms. It runs counter to the founding principles of our country - that all people are all created equal and if left unchecked will divide our country to the core. The same can be said for the sexualization of the classroom with the introduction of inappropriate sexual content to our children in grades as young as kindergarten. To be clear, drag queen story hour is never appropriate for school kids and our schools should be more concerned with the reading, writing and arithmetic skills of our children, than what pronouns they want to use. Here's a novel idea: when a teacher is asked by a student a question about topics like sexuality, gender fluidity and the like, they should direct the child to go "Ask their parents". And let's be clear, parents have an absolute right to know what is being taught to their children at all times. We need to get back to the basics and focus on developing the skills that our children need to compete in the workforce or attend college. We need to harness technology to allow students to move at their own pace, with fast learners moving ahead in the curriculum, while other students can receive more attention from teachers. The days of one size fits all are over. I want to fundamentally change the perception of our community college system to lift up people who work with their hands. This means working to integrate our community colleges not just with graduating high school seniors, but also with our traditional four year universities. I would love to see a world where students graduating with a four year degree also graduate with an associate's degree in a practical vocation. This will dramatically improve the skills of our workforce. Similarly, our apprenticeship program needs an overhaul, making it more user friendly, better advertised, with incentives to companies to drive participation. We need to root out and stop the use of ideological litmus tests in the hiring and promotion of our post secondary professors and administrators, that drives the hiring of the professors based on their adherence to an orthodoxy rather than their skills and abilities. Such litmus tests are discriminatory in nature and run counter to our Constitutional rights of free speech. Likewise, our high school guidance counselors need to be retrained to elevate post graduation trade work and vocational pursuits with the same intensity they are pushing a four year university option. Our schools need to teach financial literacy: the value of homeownership, the basics of building equity, the principle of compounded interest, the basics of opening a bank account, managing debt, and the superior advantages of the free enterprise system and the fallacy of socialism. I'm for school choice - public, private, homeschool, parochial, charter or traditional public school. Every child deserves a great education and their future success should not be dictated by the zip code they are born in. Education funding should follow the child to any education choice that student's parents decide for them. In a post Covid world, we have seen a surge in homeschooling. North Carolina needs to avoid any temptation to add further government regulations on our homeschool families. Finally, every school throughout the state needs an armed guard on duty to protect the lives of our states' most precious asset - our children.