BEST NC’s members believe North Carolina has a moral, economic, and constitutional imperative to ensure each student has access to a sound, basic education. As business leaders, we recognize that the current education systems - for educators, finance, and accountability - are outdated and underperforming in terms of meeting student, educator, and community needs. Ensuring equitable access to a sound, basic education requires a systems’ change approach that will transform how students and educators are supported for student success; not just doing more of the same or remediating a fundamentally inadequate system.

What is a Sound, Basic Education?

The North Carolina courts coined the phrase “sound, basic education” as part of the landmark Leandro case, which began in 1994. This case affirmed that the North Carolina constitution grants each student the right to access to a sound, basic education, defined as providing a competent, certified, well-trained teacher in every classroom; a competent, well-trained principal in every school; and the resources necessary to support effective instructional programs to meet the educational needs of all children.

How We Got Here: Understanding the Industrial Era Model of Education

Overall, our current education system fails to meet the needs of students, educators, and our 21st century economy. In fact, the structure of the current education system was designed in the 1800s, reflecting the norms of the Industrial Revolution. Even though our economy and the needs of our students have shifted tremendously since then, the fundamental way we design our classrooms and the way we treat our education professionals has evolved very little.

These systemic flaws include the fact that principals have far too many direct reports, an unreasonable set of responsibilities, and little to no access to their budgets. It is just as bad for teachers, where beginning teachers are often given the hardest classrooms in the buildings and effective teachers are forced to leave the classroom if they want to extend their professional reach. Students also suffer under a teacher sorting system that deprives them of equitable access to educators, with high poverty schools having fewer effective teachers than more affluent schools. This would be unacceptable in any other modern, human-centered organization... and it is entirely fixable!

In this video, BEST NC highlights these and other fundamental flaws in our educator support systems, while also identifying several ways we can transform these systems to better support educators, so educators can do what they love to do – support student success.

As business leaders, our members understand that the most important thing we can do to improve our education system is to recruit, prepare, support, and retain great talent for our schools. We also recognize that the outdated education system is not adequate to meet students’ and educators’ fundamental needs.

Since 2015, BEST NC has engaged alongside key education stakeholders to design and implement new policies, programs, and initiatives that will address the systemic barriers facing North Carolina's education system, specifically the educator pipeline. BEST NC’s strategic and actionable effort to support systemic improvements is called the Educator Innovation Plan, and it has three main components:

BEST NC also collaborates on several other initiatives, policies, and programs that are aligned with the Educator Innovation Plan, including:

The New NC Teaching Fellows Program:

The DRIVE Taskforce:

Principal Standards Subcommittee of the PEPSC Commission: