Here are three exclusive videos that were produced to screen for governors and gathered influencers at the February event:

Raising the Bar on Education — What’s at Stake

When Students Dream: Inspired by Education

Why Governors Must Lead the Way

The day’s three invited guests were Govs. John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado), Roy Cooper (D–North Carolina), and Jeff Colyer (R-Kansas), all joining Axios executive editor Mike Allen onstage for a conversation about education. Our complete coverage of their appearances:

COLORADO

Carolyn Phenicie recaps: Colorado Gov. Hickenlooper on school safety, turnarounds & showing taxpayers a return on their education investment

Watch the full interview:

Exclusive backstage audio:

NORTH CAROLINA

Emmeline Zhao recaps: North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper: More than low tax rates & quality of life, CEOs care about education and a skilled workforce

Watch the full interview:

Exclusive backstage conversation:

KANSAS

Carolyn Phenicie recaps: Kansas Gov. Colyer talks about state’s school funding lawsuit, standing firm against school closures & arming teachers

Watch the full interview:

Exclusive backstage conversation:

3 VERY DIFFERENT GOVERNORS, 3 VERY SIMILAR CHALLENGES FOR EDUCATION

Andrew Brownstein notes some powerful themes among the day’s different conversations: “Bridging America’s urban-rural divide through education — 3 governors from very different states say they all face the same issues of school funding, safety & dropouts”

The governor’s answer: Assuming that there’s a “one-size-fits-all solution” for improving education outcomes.

That sounds somewhat simplistic. Who’s in favor of one-size-fits-all solutions? But among splintering Democrats these days, those can be fighting words — words that may haunt Hickenlooper if he pursues a much-talked-about presidential bid.

The governor spoke at “Raising the Bar: A Conversation on Education,” an event moderated by Allen and presented by ����Ӱ�� and the Walton Family Foundation. Govs. Jeff Colyer of Kansas and Roy Cooper of North Carolina also spoke at the town hall event.

Hickenlooper said he once assumed that the silver bullet for poor education outcomes was a longer school day and longer school year. Instead, what he and other Colorado political and education leaders created there is a full plate of options for parents, especially in Denver, where a “portfolio” district offers families the ultimate in school choice: traditional, charter, or experimental schools run by the district.

But allowing parents robust choice isn’t popular among the new left Democrats, the very same Democrats who in California, for example, , Dianne Feinstein, for her re-election bid.

Her fault? She wasn’t as progressive as rival state Senate leader Kevin DeLeon, not as fiercely anti-Trump.

At that same San Diego meeting where Feinstein was shunned, the new left Dems did their best to create a platform that would force charter schools to behave more like district schools — thus pushing parents back into one-size options. The dynamics are pretty simple: The teachers unions rule the Democratic Party, and the unions dislike the mostly nonunion charters, which they accuse of sapping money from district schools.

Can they succeed? In some instances, yes. Not long ago, the teachers unions in Massachusetts led a successful campaign to prevent any expansion of charters in that state, thus restricting school choice to parents who can afford to buy homes in high-performing suburban communities.

So, yes, the new left has that clout, especially as Democrats are scrambling to push back against anything supported by President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Trump and DeVos like charters and choice? Discussion over.

What Hickenlooper and others achieved in Denver represents the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, a wing that supports charter school options for low-income parents — and a wing that has seen its momentum sapped by the new left.

Yes, saying education leaders should avoid “one-size-fits-all” solutions sounds like a bromide. But not for a Democrat considering national office in an era of Donald Trump pushback. Those are fighting words.

While it may sound like the setup for a bad joke, the description aptly describes the former lives of three governors — John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado), Roy Cooper (D–North Carolina), and Jeff Colyer (R-Kansas) — who graced the stage last Friday at “Raising the Bar: A Conversation on Education in America.” The Washington event was moderated by Axios’s Mike Allen and presented by ����Ӱ�� and the Walton Family Foundation.

Allen peppered the governors with questions about what their past jobs taught them about education and how those lessons help them navigate their current roles. While none is a political neophyte, all three manage states with strong divisions: Republican against Democrat, affluent/poor, urban versus rural. These divides call for a common touch on hot-button issues from gun violence to education funding.

Hickenlooper, who has been with Republican Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and eyeing a possible 2020 presidential bid, told Allen, “Governors are generally less partisan.” It’s a mindset often lacking in today’s politics, whose slogan, he joked, could be “Anger is the new black.” His background as a restaurant manager — and the first brewer to govern a state since Sam Adams was elected in Massachusetts in 1792 — taught him that “there’s no margin, nor profit, in having enemies.”

“No matter how unreasonable that person is, listen,” Hickenlooper said. “There’s always a tomorrow.”

It’s a helpful posture in one of the purplest states in the country. named him “The Middleman” for traversing the strange politics of one of the nation’s swingiest of swing states, where pot is legal and taxes cannot be raised without a vote by the people.

The fissures can be seen in fierce inequities in education funding and quality. All three governors have been embroiled in major litigation surrounding school equity — where the fault lines are not only between urban and rural populations, but within cities, as students in depressed urban centers struggle to keep up with their more affluent suburban peers.

One of Cooper’s first acts as governor of North Carolina was to weigh in on a 20-year-old case in which the state Supreme Court declared that the state constitution guarantees every child “an opportunity to receive a sound basic education.”

In Colorado, Hickenlooper was governor in 2014 when his state’s Supreme Court ruled that funding cuts of nearly $1 billion per year since 2010 did not violate the state’s constitution. But the problems persist. In his final in January, the governor said Colorado remains three-quarters of a billion dollars below school funding levels required by the state constitution to keep pace with inflation and enrollment growth. “If we are being really blunt,” he said during the address, “it hurts rural Colorado more than the Front Range,” referring to the urban stretch along the southern Rocky Mountains.

And in Kansas, Colyer, on the job but a few weeks, faces a school funding battle that . The that a new funding system wasn’t equitable enough.

“I am the 10th governor in a row with litigation hanging over his head,” Colyer told ����Ӱ��. “It’s been over 50 years. We’ve had all kinds of fits and starts over the years.”

It’s clear he’s itching to plow forward. Colyer says he will be keeping “a surgeon’s schedule, not a politician’s.” Translation: Long hours, high engagement. “We have to end our litigation so we can move,” he said.

But time may not be on his side. The former lieutenant governor has only until August before he faces a potentially daunting Republican primary for the seat vacated by his predecessor, Sam Brownback, who left to become U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

David Kensinger, who managed Brownback’s 2010 campaign, likes Colyer’s chances. He told the that Colyer’s background growing up in rural western Kansas and then starting a successful surgery practice in populous Johnson County would give him broad geographic appeal.

“It’s a guy who can speak to the concerns of the whole state, urban and rural,” Kensinger said.

That’s an increasingly necessary trait at a time when President Trump’s election has exposed deep chasms — political, cultural, and economic — between rural and urban America. A 2017 of nearly 1,700 Americans found that nearly 7 in 10 rural residents say they have different values than people who live in big cities, including about 4 in 10 who say their values are “very different.” Meanwhile, half of urban residents say their values differ from rural people’s, with less than 20 percent of urbanites saying rural values are “very different.”

In North Carolina, the chasm is evident in the economic hubs of Charlotte and the Research Triangle, home to Bank of America and Pfizer, and the rest of the state, mostly rural, where industry has departed and the economy remains depressed. Rural areas face huge dropout rates and a gaping skills gap.

“We have growing, thriving urban areas, and rural areas that have been left behind,” said Cooper. “We’ve got more and more of a divide in ability.”

For Cooper, a onetime Sunday school teacher whose mom taught public school, education offers a way out. But one obstacle is that many states are cutting individual income taxes and corporate taxes “at the expense of education.”

“States cannot print money,” he said. “We see some of the aftereffects of this in some of the Midwestern states that have decided to go this route. It is intolerable.”

Cooper did not mention Kansas by name, but he may as well have. When Brownback was governor, Kansas offered steep tax cuts for businesses and individuals — but instead of a promised economic boom, the cuts busted the state’s budget, causing what called “an explosion of red ink.” The politics continue to be tricky for Colyer, who is promising to end the state’s education funding quagmire without raising taxes or closing schools.

On the national level, perhaps nowhere is the urban-rural divide more evident than in the polarization over guns, pitting small-town residents for whom hunting is a way of life against urbanites who are increasingly leery of the status quo. The debate rekindled anew when a gunman wielding an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

For Hickenlooper, the shooting marks a potentially important shift, not only in the debate over gun violence but in the way denizens of the two Americas see and understand each other.

“It’s a reflection of the continued divide between rural America and urban America,” he told Allen. “It’s almost a different facet of what Lincoln talked about: ‘A house divided against itself shall not long stand.’ We’ve got to fix it.”

The urban and suburban elites, he said, can afford to listen better. “Anybody who lives in an urban area and thinks they’re not dependent on where their food comes from is crazy,” he noted. But even in Colorado, which he acknowledged is “a representation of the Old West,” he is beginning to see a softening of once-entrenched positions.

“I think this might well be a tipping point,” he said. “People are thinking, ‘Maybe assault weapons belong in a shooting range and don’t need to be taken home.’ ”

The perennial American push for job growth — and outcry against overseas outsourcing — has hovered at the top of the economic and policy agenda: and sweetening the pot of perks to get them to move their operations to areas that need jobs. But, according to Cooper, those might not really be the things companies care most about.

“I talk to CEOs all over the world … and the No. 1 thing they ask me is, ‘Do you have the people, do you have the workforce?’ ” Cooper told Axios’s Mike Allen last Friday in Washington, D.C. “That question comes before taxes. It comes before quality of life. It is the No. 1 question. If you do not have that workforce, they will not come.”

Cooper’s comments came at “Raising the Bar: A Conversation on Education in America,” an event moderated by Allen and presented by ����Ӱ�� and the Walton Family Foundation. Govs. John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Jeff Colyer of Kansas also spoke at the town hall event.

On a personal level, Cooper said, those CEOs care most about where their children can go to school if the company relocates. But to have the quality schools, and a skilled and educated workforce to attract corporations to bring jobs, states must put dollars into education and increase teacher salaries.

“If we could treat our teachers and principals and our school support personnel like the professionals they are, recognize how critical their job is, that they are shaping the workforce for the future, that we not put them down,” Cooper told ����Ӱ�� in an interview. “I can go through the whole list [of my own public school teachers], and I tell these teachers, ‘You are making a difference. I remember who they were, these kids will remember who you are in helping shape their lives, and what better way to have a positive effect.’ ”

Watch Gov. Roy Cooper’s backstage chat with ����Ӱ��:

One of the biggest mistakes states are making, Cooper said, is cutting taxes to the point that they can no longer adequately fund education. That’s what his predecessor, onetime political foe Gov. Pat McCrory, did, and Cooper criticized North Carolina for cutting individual income and corporate taxes over the past several years “at the expense of education.”

“States cannot print money. States cannot lift the debt ceiling,” he said. “We see some of the aftereffects of this in some of the Midwestern states that have decided to go this route. It is intolerable.”

Watch Gov. Roy Cooper’s full conversation with Axios’s Mike Allen:

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card, North Carolina students in math and reading in 2015, the latest year for which data are available. North Carolina high school students graduated at a rate of 86 percent in 2016, two percentage points better than the national average of 84 percent.

But those modest educational wins over national averages aren’t translating to the workforce. North Carolina’s unemployment rate was a seasonally adjusted 4.5 percent in December, compared with the national 4.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And those figures are even more dire when broken down by educational attainment: Nationally, the unemployment rate for high school graduates with no college experience in 2016 was 4.6 percent. That rate climbs to 6.5 percent for those without a high school diploma.

And about 85 percent of the jobs that will be available in 2030 , according to a 2017 report by the Institute for the Future. Compounding that challenge in North Carolina is a gaping urban-rural divide, as well as the fact that — and one-fifth of them have parents who aren’t working at all. So growing opportunities outside the research and financial hubs of Charlotte and the are key to equity and boosting the state’s economy.

Of North Carolina’s 100 counties, 13 surround the Triangle — home to major corporations like Cisco Systems, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer. To the southwest, Mecklenburg County encapsulates Charlotte, home to Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Those 14 counties alone house nearly 36 percent of the entire state’s workforce, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

To address these issues, Cooper , an initiative announced earlier this month to raise workforce development to the top of North Carolina’s priorities.

This means bringing businesses together, he said, to “lower the thresholds of educational attainment” and help students, as well as those hiring, understand that two- and four-year degrees do not need to be the universal prerequisite for all types of employment — that other types of certifications can provide career opportunities. It also means working with companies to create internships and apprenticeships to learn and communicate more about what human capital businesses need.

Cooper’s subdued, collaborative “recruiter” approach is perhaps heretical in a political climate fueled by sensation and fury. Throughout his onstage discussion Friday, as well as in a subsequent backstage interview with ����Ӱ��, not once did Cooper use the words “fight” or “battle” to describe the revolution he is leading on education — despite the state of political combat he’s been in, even since before his inauguration.

The Democratic former state attorney general defeated McCrory, a Republican, in 2016 by a slim 0.2 percent — just over 10,000 votes — and only after a month-long postelection stalemate, ballot recounts, and statewide acrimony over the fiercely contested race. McCrory’s one term in office was embroiled in a national firestorm for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. The run-up to that election was scrutinized nationwide and so heated that comedian Will Ferrell showed up to a tailgate at North Carolina State University .

And amid the charged rhetoric in the aftermath of the Florida school shooting that killed 17 people earlier this month, Cooper’s rallying cry for a crusade against firearms in schools was similarly resolute.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Cooper said of President Trump’s proposal . “All options have to be on the table to prevent this senseless gun violence, and we’ve got to do something. Hopefully, hopefully, we’ll see this push to get something done. The president has said that he was going to do some things, but he said some things before that he hasn’t done, so we’ll see.”

Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer has only been on the job a few weeks — and he’s ready to get moving.

But there’s a longstanding issue in his way: a decades-long tussle between lawmakers and the state Supreme Court over school funding.

Colyer ascended to the top job Jan. 31, when the U.S. Senate approved former Gov. Sam Brownback as ambassador at-large for international religious freedom. Fights over school funding in Kansas , with a flurry of activity in recent years after lawmakers, following Brownback’s plan to slash taxes, made huge cuts to state spending, including on schools.

The that a new funding system — which included a tax hike passed by lawmakers over Brownback’s threatened veto — wasn’t enough, nor was it equitable. Justices said the legislature must come up with a new funding system by April 30 so it can be reviewed before next year’s appropriations go to districts.

“I’ve told the people that I’m only going to sign something that ends the litigation and doesn’t force schools to close. I think we can get there. …It won’t be easy. And it won’t be a short solution. We’re thinking longer-term,” Colyer said Friday.

He spoke to ����Ӱ�� after his appearance at “Raising the Bar: A Conversation about Education in America,” an event moderated by Axios’s Mike Allen and presented by ����Ӱ�� and the Walton Family Foundation. Govs. Roy Cooper of North Carolina and John Hickenlooper of Colorado also spoke at the town hall event.

Here’s Gov. Colyer’s conversation with Allen:

And here’s his quick one-on-one chat with ����Ӱ�� backstage at the Washington, D.C. town hall:

Colyer said he believes an equitable system can be reached without a tax increase and that the ongoing litigation is holding back some long-term planning. Legal proceedings will take some time, but “we can all move forward in a constructive manner” to improve education if everyone agrees to a final plan, he said.

Colyer, like Cooper and Hickenlooper, also discussed school safety and shootings in the wake of the Valentine’s Day killing of 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

The solution will be multi-faceted, Colyer said.

“There isn’t just one simple solution. The mental health issues are important,” he told ����Ӱ��. One of his acts as governor was a in Hays, Kansas, a mental health center for K-12 students, he noted.

During his town hall conversation with Allen, Colyer said the Kansas response to school shootings will be led at the local level — but that President Trump’s proposal to allow teachers to carry concealed weapons on campus “may be a good solution.”

Andrew Brownstein contributed reporting to this story.

To get more sorely needed education funding in Colorado, policymakers have to prove to voters that schools are getting results, Gov. John Hickenlooper said.

“At a certain point, I think, what the voters want to see is, if we’re going to increase taxes, what are we going to get for it? … I’m not sure anyone’s been able to demonstrate that to them successfully, that ‘Here’s how we’re going to use the money, and here’s the increase you’re going to get from it, the increase in performance,’ ” said Hickenlooper, a Democrat who will end his two terms in office this year.

Hickenlooper spoke to ����Ӱ�� ahead of his appearance at “Raising the Bar: A Conversation on Education in America,” an event moderated by Axios’s Mike Allen and sponsored by ����Ӱ�� and the Walton Family Foundation. Gov. Roy Cooper, Democrat of North Carolina, and Kansas Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer also spoke at the town hall event.

Here’s audio of my exclusive backstage conversation with the governor: 

And video of Hickenlooper’s conversation with Allen: 

Hickenlooper, in his , said Colorado remains three-quarters of a billion dollars below school funding levels required by the state Constitution to keep pace with inflation and enrollment growth.

All tax increases must go before Colorado voters, who historically have not backed most of them. The state spent $9,245 per student in 2015, , citing Census figures. That put it at No. 39 among the 50 states and the District of Columbia; the national average the same year was $11,392.

That low funding “makes it really difficult for us to compete for teachers, to do all the things you need to make school districts,” Hickenlooper said.

This year, he has focused in particular on rural schools, where teacher shortages are a growing problem, and has advocated for $10 million to $20 million in additional funding for recruitment there, he said Friday.

Testing, particularly in the two decades since the passage of No Child Left Behind, has been the key metric for measuring schools’ success. But Colorado has been an epicenter of the opt-out movement, and state lawmakers prohibited the state education board from lowering a school’s ratings if fewer than 95 percent of students take required tests. That stance , as the law requires 95 percent test participation.

Although Colorado did have “too much testing,” and testing used for teacher bonuses and compensation resulted in harmful “teaching to the test,” exams are important, Hickenlooper said.

Most students would understandably opt out of exams if given the choice — the real hurdle is convincing parents of their merit, the governor said.

“The challenge here is, when opting out becomes acceptable to parents, then we’re in trouble. We need to reach out and begin that conversation with parents again, to say, ‘Don’t you want to know how your school is doing?’ ” Hickenlooper said.

Many Colorado parents would praise their children’s schools and teachers while panning public schools writ large, he said.

“There’s a big disconnect. That’s why we need assessment, testing,” he added.

A key to improving education is also being willing to make big changes at schools that aren’t performing well, Hickenlooper said during the town hall event.

“You’ve got to be willing to step up and try to provide the tools for a massive changeover. But in some schools, the culture is so bad you need to close the school, clean it out, and then reopen it. That has, in many cases, proven successful,” he said.

Hickenlooper also talked at length about school safety. Both the 1999 Columbine school shooting and the 2012 Aurora movie theater assault occurred in his state, and he oversaw passage of several gun control measures after the Aurora attack.

He panned President Trump’s recent proposal to allow teachers to carry weapons on school grounds, saying most educators think it’s a “terrible idea.”

Training and background checks are important, but “having guns so available to so many people makes the task of keeping schools safe almost impossible,” he said.

Hickenlooper also said he believes the country is at a tipping point on gun control.

“We are allowing ourselves to be terrorized. If you were someone in a basement in Leningrad and you wanted to hurt America as badly as you could, what better way than to make our children feel that they’re unsafe in school?” he asked.