Dan Forest 
North Carolina Lt. Governor is tired of the bureaucracy Dan Forest, an architect by trade, has served the state of North Carolina as Lieutenant Governor since 2013. As one of the state’s leaders, he is candid in his observation that the education system in America today is a broken system based on a 100-year-old industrial model designed to prepare students for factory work.
He points to the complex bureaucracy of government controlled education, and how the culture of protecting jobs can be more important than preparing students for the world they are going to live in tomorrow. He doesn’t think it has to be that way, and he thinks the government should borrow from the private sector to find ways to innovate.
“Education is the same thing. We can’t do it all internally within a government bureaucratic model. We have to partner with the innovators, and we have to allow a platform at the state level that allows those local schools to go find the innovation they need to improve the quality of success for their students at the local level.”
Dan believes that protectionism of the status quo is so ingrained in the system, that radical changes are necessary. “Let’s blow up that system and figure out what it should be for this 21st-century world that we’re moving into,” he says. “Let’s look at the high tech jobs and the types of jobs that are going away and the types of jobs that are coming that we don’t even know about yet. Let’s focus that system on the student.”
Further Reading
- North State Journal – Families, teachers rally at state capital for school choice
- HuffPost – A Focus on Curriculum and Instruction for Accountability
- Independent Tribune – A dozen to watch in 2018
