As Alabama heads into the new year, our elected leaders will be heading to Montgomery for a new session of the Legislature.

With new years come new expectations, and Alabamians have every right to expect a different outcome than lawmakers’ business as usual.

The year ahead promises to be a challenging one with the state’s educational system in the grip of financial turmoil and joblessness in the business sector still in double digits.

School reserves are gone, and cuts are being made at the very time investments need to be ensuring a better future for Alabama children and this state.

And the job picture, while improving, is still cloudy at best in the short term.

But delving deeper into underlying factors of what plagues Alabama requires a look back rather than a look forward. U.S. Census Bureau statistics just released show Alabama lagging behind most of its southern neighbors in growth.

Georgia, Florida and North Carolina are in the lead while Alabama hovers in the bottom four. Georgia with Atlanta as its center and Florida with tourism at its core are obvious choices for leadership in growth.

But North Carolina is the storyline worth following. A look back at its past reveals a conscious decision by its leadership to move that state forward.

In 1970, leaders committed themselves to factors like improving education and capitalizing on technology by creating a Research Triangle Park. Today, North Carolina is a leader in education and has developed a global reputation in research. Growth, obviously, has followed.

It is a lesson Alabama would do well to study. Capitalizing on the state’s strengths and opportunities by investing in them was North Carolina‘s approach. To do that in Alabama, its lawmakers must make the same conscious decision North Carolinians made decades ago.

It would be much easier to employ business as usual tactics, wrangling over the same pot of money for education and pitting K-12 against higher education rather than develop a solution.

It’s a simple matter to just cut rather than to find innovative ways to do business or provide stable funding to save programs that are already working.

It is harder to do what North Carolina did and make decisions that might not have been politically expedient at the time but put the state in a better place for the future.

North Carolinians made a conscious decision to turn from politics of the past and worked to transform their state.

It’s a lesson Alabamians would do well to learn if they do indeed expect a different outcome.