State of Learning

While Newton, Mass., is demonstrating that creative teaching can improve a city's school system, North Carolina is showing how education can be used to lift a whole state's economy. Ranking 42nd among the states in per capita income, North Carolina aims to improve its schools by means of a belt-tightening 3% sales tax on food, pushed through the biennial general assembly three years ago by Governor Terry Sanford. The tax enabled the assembly to add $100 million to school funds over two years, proved so beneficial that the 1963 assembly added $69 million more, bringing annual state school spending to $268 million.

Democrat Sanford's campaign, when he ran for Governor 31 years ago, was watched keenly by educators everywhere: in making "quality education" his most emphasized plank, he insisted that education should come first in voters' minds. It did, no doubt in part because North Carolina schooling was embarrassingly bad, particularly for Negroes, who comprise 25% of the population. The dropout rate was 50%, and 16% of adults are only semilliterate.

Artful Outgo. "Terry's tax" went first of all for meat and potatoes. Granting the nation's biggest teachers' raise in 1961, North Carolina moved from 39th state to 32nd in average teachers' pay. Teachers flocked in from other states. New schools have gone up at an accelerated clip. Then Sanford launched artful pilot projects that drew foundation help and in effect committed the assembly to further school aid.

To stimulate, gjfted children, Sanford last summer set up a Governor's School in Winston-Salem, where in eight weeks 400 of the state's most brilliant and creative children did the equivalent of a year's work in one subject. (TIME, June 28). Impressed, the Carnegie Corporation gave $225,000 to the school; state businessmen matched that sum, and the program will run for at least two more years. Private foundations also financed a Shakespeare repertory company that tours schools and a planned school of performing arts, and the assembly has already provided state money to carry them on.

In one of its largest grants ever, Carnegie last month gave $500,000 for Sanford's planned Advancement School in Winston-Salem--a pioneering state center for studying promising "underachievers" in order to develop better teaching methods. Each year the center will bring in 1,400 grade-schoolers and 200 of their teachers. While the kids live and learn there, the center will treat them to such new approaches as programmed learning, at the same time training their teachers to go home and spread the new methods.

Against Illiteracy. In its first such statewide effort, the Ford Foundation earmarked $7,000,000 to back Sanford's new North Carolina Fund--a consortium of private and public agencies that aims to cut school dropouts by improving three-R teaching. Sanford also plans a state training school to give adult illiterates six months of concentrated schooling. "I think we ought to deny the driver's license to anybody under 20 who is illiterate," says Sanford. "If we had such a catch-up school, it would be perfectly fair to do it."

North Carolina's special schools, new and planned, are biracial, and on the score of desegregation the state's big cities and its university have led the South. But rural areas are so segregated that even now only one-half of 1% of Negro pupils go to school with whites. Sanford is not proud of that fact, but apparently feels that it was hard enough to get his new tax through the assembly without also trying to push desegregation by faster means than the present case-by-case court tests.

Sanford's campaign as "education Governor" has meant a 50% jump in the school budget, to a four-year total of $1.14 billion. The state has risen from 46th place to 42nd in spending per pupil. The 1963 assembly not only added to the previous budget for public schools, but also voted for three new four-year colleges and a statewide system of two-year community colleges. Industrial investments of almost $600 million came in during Sanford's first two years, and he credits the lure of better schools. Says the Ford Foundation's admiring President Henry T. Heald: "North Carolina leadership may well set a pace for other states."

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