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State Ed Board chairman speaks in McDowell

Bill Harrison on 21st century education

photo by Britt Combs

Bill Harrison, chairman of the state Board of Education (right) called McDowell Superintendent Ira Trollinger (left) “one of the brightest and most articulate superintendents in North Carolina.” He said Trollinger was a leader in global perspective and international understanding in education.

By Britt Combs | The McDowell News

Published: August 24, 2009

McDowell County Schools hosted a day of conferences and seminars on global perspective in education last week. The event took place at East Junior High and featured an address by Bill Harrison, the chairman of the state Board of Education.

As a former teacher, principal and superintendent, Harrison spoke from a lifetime of experience in education.

The phrase "21st century education" gets used a lot these days, he said. All too often it is reduced to mean higher standards, but global study is just as important.

"What we call 'global education,' the rest of the world just calls "education,'" he said.

The point of global awareness, multi-lingual and multi-cultural education, he stated, is to better enable students to compete and prosper in the emerging business environment in which national boundaries mean less and less.

He said often times American students dismissed concerns about higher achievement among students in other countries.

"'We're more well-rounded, they say, but being well-rounded is no substitute for rigor," said Harrison.

Rigor was a major theme of his remarks. He cited a recent study in which Asian parents and American parents were asked the secret to academic success. The Asians parents, he explained, cited effort, study and rigor as the greatest factors of success in school.

American parents, by contrast, said innate ability, being born gifted, was the most important factor.

Some 28 percent of North Carolinians do not graduate high school, he said, a figure that would be considered unacceptable in other parts of the world.

"Of those 71 percent who do finish high school," he asked the assembled educators, "how many are truly college ready? How many have 21st century skills?"

He called on educators to view raising graduation rates as an economic imperative and a moral obligation.

But graduation alone is not enough, he added. Education in North Carolina must become more rigorous. Last year, he said, China produced 3.3 million new high school graduates, "every one of who speak English. Soon China will be the single largest English-speaking nation on Earth."

On that note, he praised McDowell's language immersion classes – the Eastfield Elementary Spanish language immersion students displayed their abilities earlier in the day – as an example to the whole state. He spoke of the intriguing notion that a language immersion cohort, after going from kindergarten through eighth grade, should take their high school classes in a third language.

"That's standards," he said. "That's rigor.

"When we were young," he said, "we all heard our mothers say, "Clean your plate – there are millions of children starving in China and India.' Now I say, study hard, there are millions of children studying hard in China and India."

North Carolina is very much already in the global market place, he said.

"There are some 1,100 foreign owned firms employing some 209,000 citizens in our state," he said. "In 2008, we exported $2.5 billion in goods."

He said Canada, Mexico, Japan and China are the state's chief export markets.

Communication, cultural awareness and tolerance, along with academic achievement, are the keys to unlocking those markets further, he stated.

Harrison said that just as a 1950s car was good in its day but is no longer suitable for the road, so a 1950s education is no longer good enough.

A great modern classroom, he summarized, should be just as engaging as a good video game; it should be exciting, interactive and fast-paced, with an ever-increasing skill level and immediate feedback. The student should know every day what the score is.

A friend and political ally of Gov. Bev Perdue, Harrison was, until his resignation last month, also the CEO of North Carolina Schools, a post she created and to which the governor appointed him.

A lawsuit brought by state Superintendent June Atkinson – an elected official – was decided in Atkinson's favor, that the governor could not appoint a CEO to overrule the superintendent.