Spending an hour with North Carolina's top two public education leaders can give you a pretty fair glimpse of the shape of things to come in the state's public schools.

When State Board of Education chairman Howard Lee and Superintendent of Public Instruction June Atkinson came over to The N&O the other day, the common thread in the discussion had to do with improvements -- taking better advantage of technology, upgrading school leadership, getting good teachers into schools that struggle to attract them, doing a better job of measuring student performance.

It was a reminder of just how pivotal to the state's well-being is the task of making sure young people are properly served in our schools.

Oh, it's not all about doing things for the kids -- they have to learn how to take responsibility for their own futures. But it's our responsibility -- that's we who elect the policymakers and pay the taxes -- to make sure students are given all the chances they need to succeed if they're willing to try. In fact, it could be said that part of our responsibility even includes figuring out how to persuade kids to take advantage of those chances.

Parents should play the largest role in that, and many do. But students shouldn't have their prospects dashed when parents aren't up to that task.

Howard Lee is a long-time politician who's used to listening to constituents. Way back when he was mayor of Chapel Hill, one of the South's first African-American elected officials in the modern era. As a state senator he was a force in efforts to improve the state's schools.

Now, when he talks about making the schools work better, he has a way of boiling things down to the human element. He says he has learned that students want to feel as if they're known, valued as individuals. Kids who drop out often have gotten the idea that they don't matter to the people running the school -- that nobody will even realize they're gone.

A remedy for that, Lee says, is to break up large schools into smaller communities. And then students have to be able to make a connection between what they're being asked to do and how it will affect their lives later on. That's the rationale for "learn and earn" programs that meld high school with two years of college, often with a career focus.

Sometimes, it's very capable students who lose steam because they're simply not challenged enough. But take a smart kid who's on the verge of dropping out from boredom and put him in Asheboro's cutting-edge "Zoo School" at the N.C. Zoo, and it's a different ballgame. Perhaps it also will be different for many kids as North Carolina ramps up its foray into virtual schools -- learning communities linked online and taking advantage of new features like computerized foreign language lessons. Or, as June Atkinson described, electronic portfolios of students' writing.

For a decade and more, North Carolina educators have been scrambling especially to upgrade the schools in rural areas that lack the resources of their urban counterparts (no Saks or Nordstrom, fancy office parks or million-dollar subdivisions to be found in the orbits of Rich Square, Raeford, Rockingham or Robersonville).

The Leandro case put the state Supreme Court on record that public school students in struggling rural counties were being denied their right, under the state constitution, to an equal opportunity to get a "sound basic" education. The trial judge who was given the task of overseeing the state's response, Howard Manning Jr. of Raleigh, has labored to analyze deficiencies and chart a path toward compliance. Manning and Lee have made the rounds together so often that Lee quipped they're now best friends.

Reform on this scale is a colossal task that requires not only money but also changes in deep-rooted traditions and expectations.

Lee pinpointed three particular needs among the so-called low-wealth school systems: more extensive leadership training, more inducements for skilled teachers to go to work in what typically are some off-the-beaten-track places, and a stronger central office capacity to monitor performance school by school.

Leadership training is in progress, as are new approaches to attracting teachers (subsidized housing, for example).

But the chairman cut pretty deep with his criticism of the way some school boards operate. "They see the school system as their own private employment agency," he said. As North Carolina works to bring all of its schools up to the level where students even in poor counties can raise their own expectations, and meet those higher goals, it has to be what you know, not whom you know, that determines who will be entrusted with the huge responsibility of shepherding young people toward success.

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