Elizabeth Dole and Kay Hagan agree that No Child Left Behind is flawed.

But they disagree on what to do about the federal legislation, which measures the educational standards of public schools across the country.

Dole said she would support reauthorization of the bill as long as changes were made. She specifically said that it should hold principals and administrators "to a higher standard" and avoid schools "teaching to the test."

Saying that teachers are her heroes, Dole said she would also ask their opinion.

Hagan said that the legislation lacks "common sense," telling the story of a sixth-grader named Annabelle in Guilford County who suffers from severe cerebral palsy. She said that the student, who has a permanent feeding tube, is tested by the same standards as her peers.

Hagan said that the legislation was well intended, but has been underfunded by $70 billion, and she said she would not vote to reauthorize it.

"Reforms without resources are like schools without teachers," she said. "They just don't work."

North Carolina has the 12th highest dropout rate, a new report says.

The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center report found that 67 percent of state public school students graduated from high school with a regular diploma in 2005 — below the national average of 70.6 percent.

Only Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Delaware, Georgia, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, Louisiana, New Mexico and Nevada had higher dropout rates based on the report's calculations.

The rate was calculated using the Cumulative Promotion Index, which tracks whether a student graduates from ninth, tenth, 11th and 12th grades.

For its own calculation of dropout rates under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, North Carolina uses the Cohort Rate, or the percent of students from an entering ninth grade class graduate within four years. Sixteen other states use a similar formula.

Under that calculation, the class of 2005 had a 95 percent graduation rate. The 28-point difference with the Cumulative Promotion Index was the second-largest gap in state-reported rates versus the number calculated by the research center.

Update: Agency say researchers misstated the state's own calculated graduation rate.

ELON -- Former President Bill Clinton spoke for nearly 45 minutes this afternoon to a crowd of several hundred curious college students and longtime fans at Elon University in Alamance County.

Clinton urged students to throw North Carolina to his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the May 6 primary, saying she would be best for college students, reports Barb Barrett.

As proof, he mentioned her work on student loan legislation, her quest to create thousands of new jobs by making American energy independent.

"She will give the young people in this audience their future back, and I hope you agree," Clinton said.

He also slammed the federal No Child Left Behind program and said his wife would best be able to end the war in Iraq and provide health care to returning troops.

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Robert Peterson considers himself an old-fashioned blogger.

A life sciences researcher in Chapel Hill, Peterson started out blogging for The Daily Kos, where he first learned about BlueNC in 2005 when he saw a piece crossposted by James Protzman. 

"At the time, I thought it was this well-established Web site," he said. "It wasn't until some time later that I found out that I was user No. 14."

Peterson, 37, started out writing about health care, something he knew about from a stint as vice president of Health Care for All's North Carolina chapter. As a volunteer for John Edwards, he also wrote a lot about that campaign.

When that ended, Peterson became interested in the race for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor.

He says that the main contributors to BlueNC agree on a few basic principles: They support increasing health care coverage for the uninsured; they think No Child Left Behind should be changed or scrapped; and they opposed the proposed landing field in Eastern North Carolina.

The one area where they disagree: Which candidates to support.

Larry Kissell says No Child Left Behind is hurting the classroom.

He speaks both as a Democratic Congressional candidate in the Eighth District and as a social studies teacher at East Montgomery High in Biscoe since 2001.

At a stop in Raleigh last week, Kissell told Dome that the federal education law has penalizes schools with diverse student populations, discourages potential teachers and focuses too much on "high-stakes testing."

"As a teacher, it comes down almost to one day how you and your children have been successful," he said.

He also said the testing regimen does not account for how much a student has grown.

"You may take a young person who comes in knowing very little and you may get them very close to what they needed to know, but they don't take that into consdieration," he said. "It's 100 percent — either you succeed or you failed."

Derald Hafner says economics is central to his run.

The candidate against U.S. Rep. Brad Miller in the Democratic primary said he was motivated to run by the failure of federal economic policy.

"We've lost 40 percent of our dollar in the last six years," he said. "I don't know how anyone can be happy with that."

He said he was a Republican until recently, but did not agree with the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind.

Hafner, 63, is retired from the material handling business and runs a small organic farm in Franklinton where he grows beef and chicken. He has a bachelor's degree in economics from Graceland College in Iowa.

U.S. Rep. Brad Miller has an opponent in the Democratic primary.

Derald Haffner of Franklinton filed today to run for the 13th Congressional District seat held by Miller since 2002.

According to his campaign Web site, Haffner wants to dismantle the Federal Reserve, repeal No Child Left Behind and the Patriot Act, end the federal income tax, encourage local food production and avoid bailing out mortgage companies. He's pro-life and against gun control.

"It's a slippery slope that gives up freedoms to answer 'needs,'" he writes. "Our founding fathers in crafting the constitution clearly understood that rights come from God. Government is instituted to secure rights."

In 2007, Hafner served on the board of the National Organization for Raw Materials, an organization that believes in a "natural economic law" and opposes Keynesian economics.

Hafner's e-mail does not work, however, and the phone number listed on his Web site is for directory assistance in Massachusetts.

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist campaigned across the 3rd Congressional district Monday, saying that Republican Congressman Walter Jones had broken his anti-tax pledge.

Norquist said Jones had violated an anti-tax pledge by voting last year for major farm and energy bills, Rob Christensen reports.

Norquist said he had known Jones for years, and had sent letters and talked to him by telephone urging him to avoid voting for a tax hike.

"There were flares up in the sky that were tax increases," Norquist said.

Glen Downs, Jones' chief of staff, said in both cases the farm bill and the energy bill were major pieces of legislation, and only a small portion involved increasing revenues — involving renegotiating oil company leases in the energy bill.

"There has never been a straight up tax increase that Walter has voted for," Downs said.

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John Edwards wants to make Smart Start national.

In a speech at a Des Moines middle school Friday, the Democratic presidential candidate unveiled an education reform plan that included a nationwide version of North Carolina's early childhood education program, the Boston Globe reports.

Edwards unveiled a similar initiative, called "Great Promise," during his 2004 campaign for president.

The new plan also calls for a partnership to pay teachers more to work in high-poverty schools, create a national teachers university to recruit and train teachers and overhaul the No Child Left Behind Act.

"I grew up in a small, rural town and my parents didn't have a lot of money," Edwards said in a statement. "But I was lucky to have public school teachers who taught me to believe that somebody from a little town in North Carolina could do just about anything if he worked hard and played by the rules."

Bob Orr has released his answers to a teacher's survey as well.

The former Supreme Court justice's cited his role in Hoke County Board of Education vs. State, which argued that educating children is a "paramount" concern of government, and his previous endorsements by the N.C. Association of Educators.

On the issues, he said he doubts that school vouchers or the lottery are constitutional, but he said he would continue using lottery money for education until a court rules otherwise.

In contrast to the two Democrats, Orr said he would support increasing the cap on charter schools.

He also hedged on whether North Carolina's teacher salaries are competitive, saying he thinks that they are not competitive in poorer counties, but he's not sure that's true everywhere in the state. 

However, he also criticized the federal No Child Left Behind Act, saying that though it has done "a pretty good job in pointing out deficiencies," it has not produced "the desired results."

"I do believe that we know better how to address the education challenges in our state than the federal government does, regardless of which party is in power," he wrote.