Rani Dasi - On the polarization of education (clip)

Kathryn Wall (KW): With the state and funding, has that changed over the time that you’ve been on the school board? Have you seen any shifts?

Rani Dasi (RD): I think it’s gotten much more political. It used to be that we could have the conversation across the aisle on whatever side folks were and they understood that education mattered. I mean I remember you know when Governor Hunt was governor years ago, North Carolina was the model for education. People would come here literally to learn about what we were doing. We had…oh gosh, memory…there was a program that we invested in developing a teacher pipeline and it was extremely…

KW: The Teaching Fellows.

RD: Thank you. The Teaching Fellows Program was extremely successful and it was very popular bipartisanly and what we are seeing more and more is that politics are interrupting the normal ways that people might care, show care, about community and it’s becoming much more of, “If my party says this I have to go along these lines,” rather than what’s in the best interest of students, and that’s a hard shift to watch and it’s so frustrating because it’s so clear how good for North Carolina investing in public education would be. And in most of the counties in North Carolina public school districts are the largest employer and so when you underfund public schools, you not only hurt the children but you hurt the families and the community members and you destroy opportunities for people.

KW: Yeah it’s a very short-sighted kind of approach.

RD: Yeah.