Education tries to raise its grade.

• Position: Public schools in North Carolina

The state pushes to get public schools to the level of the university system.

Two neighboring Triangle counties show the dilemma education faces in North Carolina. Nearly half the residents of Orange County, home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have college degrees. In Durham County, home of Duke University, nearly half the students in grades 9-12 drop out before they finish high school.

"What we need to do is build a public-school system and a community-college system that's comparable to what we have in the universities," admits Jay Robinson, who became chairman of the State Board of Education last year. "It won't cost that much to do it. We can do it, we should do it, and I believe we will."

Robinson has seen both sides. He used to be vice president of the University of North Carolina system and lobbied the legislature on its behalf for more money. Before that, he was superintendent of the largest school system in the state, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

"We don't need large infusions of money as much as we needed them 10 years ago," he says. "We've made a lot of progress since then." The areas to focus on now, he adds, are reducing class size in the lower grades, focusing on communications skills and mathematics and getting a small increase in state funds for improving school buildings.

Last year, the General Assembly appropriated $3.96 billion for public schools - 41% of the 1994-95 general-fund budget - an inflation-adjusted increase of 61.7% over what was spent 10 years ago. It gave higher education $1.28 billion, 31.8% more than it received in 1984. Also, $454 million went to the community colleges. More than half the entire state budget goes to public education.

Despite the increased spending, money is still tight. One reason for that is the increase in enrollment, which had dropped through most of the '80s before rising by almost 30,000 statewide between the 1989-90 and 1993-94 school years. Most of the increase had been predicted from birth rates, Superintendent of Public Instruction Bob Etheridge notes, but there was no way to anticipate the number from families moving to North Carolina.

Of the $90 million increase the legislature appropriated for public-school programs last year, $26.3 million was earmarked for reducing the average size of kindergarten classes from 26 to 23 students. The Department of Public Instruction will ask for more money this year and next year to reduce class size first in the first...