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Lt. Gov. Bev Perdue and Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory engaged in a scrappy debate broadcast across the state Tuesday, frequently contradicting and talking over one another as they staked claim to being the strongest leader.

Broadcast from WRAL’s studios in Raleigh, the debate did not include Libertarian Mike Munger whose poll numbers are in the single digits. Perdue is a Democrat finishing her second term as lieutenant governor. McCrory, a Republican, was elected to a seventh two-year term as Charlotte’s mayor in November.

One of their fiercest exchanges came over education. The candidates were asked what they would do to lower dropout rates and otherwise bolster public education.

“We’ve got to get back to basics,” McCrory said, drawing on a major theme of his campaign. He has called for strengthening math education and channeling more students into technical fields such as mechanics or into trades such as masonry.

“I want to reintroduce and put special emphasis on vocation training,” McCrory said.

Perdue has emphasized pushing students to aim high, promoting programs that would help students go to college with little or no cost.

She said McCrory’s idea, “harkens back to the old low expectations of the status quo.”

McCrory said that statement betrayed “an elitism” in Perdue’s programs, showing that she valued academic degrees over people who did blue collar jobs.

Perdue blasted back with criticism of McCrory’s support for school vouchers, a government program that gives money to public school students so they can attend private schools.

In campaign ads, she said McCrory’s proposal would take $900 million out of public schools and called the mayor “a real danger to North Carolina.”

McCrory cried foul, saying that he supports the idea of vouchers but that Perdue’s campaign ads were inaccurate. In particular, he said vouchers should only be offered to certain “special needs” students whose public schools can’t meet their needs. That, he said, would cost nowhere near what Perdue’s campaign has estimated.

“Your commercial is misleading and wrong, and you ought to pull it,” McCrory said.

He counter-attacked that Perdue herself favors a type of voucher, the annual college scholarship that North Carolina students are given to go to college at either public or private universities.

“I don’t hear her arguing that takes $700 million out of the university system,” McCrory said during a post-debate interview.

But Perdue argues the “vouchers” that McCrory is talking about are scholarships and fundamentally different from vouchers that drain money from public schools, which the constitution obligates the state to provide.

Both candidates were asked about third party ads that are running in the state from groups not linked to their campaigns but who are targeting their opponents.

“I would prefer the ads be stopped,” McCrory said after the debate, calling the latest Republican Governors Association ad “silly.” That ad features two men asking an actor playing Perdue to do various things such as raise taxes, prompting her to push a “status quo” button.

Perdue said during the debate that she has fought against a variety of status quo situations.

“The thing that bothers me about that ad is the girl, the woman who is playing me has such a bad hairdo,” Perdue said.

Both candidates said they couldn’t control the purveyors of the third-party ads.

WUNC, the public television network, is due to rebroadcast the debate at 1 p.m. Sunday.

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com