The Election November 5, 2008, 3:33PM EST

James Goodnight

Founder and CEO, SAS, a Cary (N.C.) software maker

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James Goodnight, CEO of SAS

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The most important thing is to try to get the economy rolling again. Exactly how do you do that? Whether it's through some additional stimulus package or tax cuts, which puts money back in people's hands, I think that's the No. 1 outstanding issue. I think Congress and the new President need to be very careful about how they go about that. They can end up wrecking things very easily, like what happened during the Great Depression when money was tightened down. Credit was tightened down. Barriers were thrown up to protect the country. All of these things created a disastrous depression.

I think Hank Paulson has done a great job at Treasury. Hank is probably one of the few individuals who has spent enough time in the financial markets to understand them really well, so I'm just glad we had someone like Hank in charge to take over.

This whole idea of the Colombian Free Trade Act—[there is] every possible benefit to the United States to be able to export more to Colombia because Colombia is going to take down all of their tariffs that they have against us. For the life of me, I don't see how anyone can argue that it's bad for the U.S. But that's one issue [in this economy] that probably will not be touched. It's a small example. Anything we can do to help increase U.S. exports would create jobs here in the U.S.

The Bailout

I don't want to see them do a whole lot more for a while. I would say let's do the bank bailout, but because the price of oil has dropped so much, the dollar has gotten much stronger now... Let's give this thing a few months. You've got the bank bailout. They're talking about another set of stimulus checks. Remember all this stuff is just putting us more and more in debt. We probably created enough debt for our grandchildren already. We ought to really take a look at slowing it down. What I would like more than anything else is a reduction in the size of our government. The huge number of people the government employs and all the programs that they have, quite a lot of them are a waste of money.

Education

I was amazed, at preparing for this little moderator job I did last week [between education advisers/aides for both the McCain and Obama campaigns], I went to the Education Dept. home page. Their budget this year is $68 billion. For No Child Left Behind, it's $17 billion. And that program doesn't really do much other than the testing aspect. I'm sitting here thinking, $17 billion. You know what you could do with $17 billion? You could buy every high school student in this country a laptop computer. That would come to around $17 billion. There are approximately 17 million high school students, and for $1,000 a piece you could give them each a computer. And also have a few hundred dollars left over to help wire the schools.

[After the economy, education] needs to be second [on the next President's agenda]. There's no question about it. Every day we delay educating our children, the more dropouts are created, the less kids are prepared for a job or for further education. Somebody has got to realize how much money we can save in the long run if we keep our kids in school, keep them interested in school. ... If we can find a way to do that, we're going to save billions of dollars in our court systems, our legal systems, our prison systems. We've got to keep kids interested in school.

Last week, I spoke to all the superintendents right here in the Triangle, 115 school superintendents in the state of North Carolina. I mentioned to them about the laptops. I said, "Do you realize if we could just drop No Child Left Behind for just one year"—and I had to wait for the applause to go down because they were all applauding, the superintendents hate it—"[we could] give the kids the tools they need in school, not just a test at the end of the grade. We could give them the actual tools they need to improve their grades, to improve their level of interest." I talk about the use of laptops in school because I've had many years of experience at Cary Academy [a private school Goodnight funded]. We've also got eight of our high schools here in North Carolina that have one-to-one laptop initiatives for the kids. Some of the results are just amazing. Already, dropouts are way down, discipline problems are way down, the teachers love it because it puts all the resources of the world at their fingertips. They don't have to send kids to the library to do research on a subject where there are only one or two books on the subject.

Quite frankly our postsecondary system, our university system, is one of the best in the world. If you list the top 25 colleges and universities in the world, over 20 of them are here in the U.S. But our K-12, we've got to find a way to graduate closer to 100% of our kids in high school, instead of 69%, which is where we are right now. ... If we're going to keep No Child Left Behind, we absolutely need growth models, where we can measure the growth of each child. In each class, it shows whether or not that child is growing at the rate they should, rather than did they pass the bar. The question is the ones that are excellent students, we want to make sure they stay excellent by making sure that the teacher is paying attention to them, not just the slowest performers.