The Senate Commerce Committee is set to meet April 26 to hear Senate Bill 125, establishing the North Carolina School of Agriscience and Biotechnology. This regional public high school would serve students in Chowan, Hyde, Tyrrell, and Washington counties.
The bill’s primary sponsors are Sens. Harry Brown, R-Onslow, Fletcher Hartsell, R-Cabarrus, and Bob Atwater, D-Chatham. The idea for the school originated from a report by the JOBS (Joining Our Businesses and Schools) Commission, chaired by Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton.
In July 2010, Session Law 2010-41 authorized the Education Cabinet to “set as a priority an increase in the number of students earning postsecondary credentials in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics [STEM] to reduce the gap between needed credentialed workers and available jobs in those fields by 2015.”
Brown told Carolina Journal he “envisions this bill as a way to help low-wealth students by breaking down county line barriers so education leaders can come together to create regional schools.” Brown added that Jones County and many other low-income counties do not have local money to supplement state funding for schools to support special programs.
Critics question why lawmakers are even considering a regional school promoting biotechnology and agricultural sciences when North Carolina already has other programs targeting the same or similar purposes, including Learn and Earn and the North Carolina Virtual Public School. Others question the need for a new, specialized school when few students are taking the courses currently offered in those fields. Moreover, the state is grappling to close a severe budget shortfall, and any new campus would require taxpayer funding at some point.
Terry Stoops, education policy analyst for John Locke Foundation, said “now is the worst time for lawmakers to invest in another school, especially when it’s unnecessary.” He cited NC Learn and Earn and the virtual public school, which now allow students to earn college credits online while they are still in high school.
The North Carolina Earn and Learn website states that qualified public high school students can take free online college-credit courses in the areas of science, technology, and mathematics through the Learn and Earn Online program. Even qualified students in nonpublic high schools can participate by paying some of the costs of fees and textbooks.
Students enrolled in Learn and Earn, either online or in early college high schools, graduate with both a high school diploma and up to two years of transferable college credits or an associate’s degree. One of the program’s stated aims is to attract minorities, students from low-income families, and those whose parents never attended college.
NCVPS offers traditional courses, like accounting, business, and foreign languages, along with several honors courses in STEM disciplines, such as anatomy and physiology, biology, calculus, and earth science. As part of the federal Race to the Top initiative, NCVPS is getting funding to create a new virtual STEM course model to address the needs of students “at risk of failure in math and science.”
There does not, however, appear to be a strong interest among students in existing high school courses in biotechnology and agriscience. “Last year, only 352 high school students statewide completed Biotechnology and Agriscience I and a mere 102 completed Level II,” said Stoops.
“There’s nothing stopping counties now from creating a regional school. They can agree to allow students to move freely to a school in another county if they decide it’s needed,” Stoops added.
Brown did not address directly questions of whether the school would merely replicate programs now available to high school students.
As currently drafted, S.B. 125 does not include appropriations for the school. Instead, the bill would direct the State Board of Education to allocate an amount of money equal to the average per pupil allocation for average daily membership (ADM) from each of the four counties for each child who attends it. The regional school would serve only four counties and would also limit enrollment to a maximum of 100 students per grade level.
Stoops said lawmakers are attempting to separate this bill from the budget by not including appropriations, but, if the bill passes, they are likely to come back next year and ask for appropriations to fund the school.
A glut of grads
Jay Schalin, a higher education policy analyst for the Pope Center for Higher Education, told CJ that this bill is premised on a flawed assumption, namely a shortage of STEM graduates.
Last August, Schalin wrote about this issue shortly after the passage of Session Law 2010-41, citing data from employment experts in scientific, engineering, and technology disciplines that there’s a glut of scientific workers. Many scores of thousands of graduate students and post-doctoral workers in chemistry, for example, are not advancing in their careers but instead are stuck in low-paid, temporary positions.
Schalin also cited Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University and founder of two software firms, who said in 2006 that “fears of the U.S. losing its competitive edge to China and India for a lack of engineering graduates were greatly exaggerated.” Sources also said the oversupply of young scientists and engineers dates back to the early 1970s.
Lawmakers are ignoring other macroeconomic trends when they arbitrarily decide that a discipline or set of disciplines is the next “hot” career field. Schalin asked, “Who’s to say that biotechnology and agriscience aren’t the next glut of jobs?”
Earlier this month, a Wall Street Journal story reported that more big U.S. firms are shifting their hiring abroad, even as they are cutting back the number of American workers. “This trend highlights the growing importance of other economies, particularly in rapidly growing Asia,” wrote David Wessel.
Brown said the proposal is likely to undergo substantial revisions in committee. Some changes Brown said he’d like to see are eliminating the busing requirements and broadening the bill so that counties could create regional schools to address specific job needs in their region.
Karen McMahan is a contributor to Carolina Journal.