You see how powerfully persuasive this blog is? I just got this note from a certain source:
house KILLED the edge amendment, although my attention had drifted for a moment and I didn’t actually catch what the vote total was.
and now they’re about to vote on the full bill, which SHOULD mean this amendment won’t come back up — unless someone notes a motion to reconsider, …but they’d do that only if the vote was close.
Good thing I was quick on the draw for once, so I could claim credit.
Seriously, though, this thing isn’t gone, and won’t be — not as long as out-of-state ideologues are determined to use our state as a guinea pig for their radicalism, and keep pumping money to S.C. advocacy groups and candidates. As long as they keep doing that, certain lawmakers who know better will be too scared to stand up to them.
The price of a good public education system — and South Carolina has made significant strides toward building one since the Education Accountability Act of 1998, although we have much farther to go — is eternal vigilance. Those of us who understand how crucial universal education is to our state can’t just stand up once for it. We have to stand up over and over, and hold our lawmakers accountable for serving South Carolina’s interests, not those of outsiders who couldn’t care less about us.
Reforming and building up our schools is hard-enough work, without constantly having to defend the very idea that we should even be trying.
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Oops. I got distracted moving some copy (you know, my other job, the one I get paid for), and didn’t get that posted quickly enough. The House has gone home.
But the points I made stand, so I’ll leave it up.
When I lived in North Carolina, I NEVER heard this debate. That state very clearly had realized that their industrial phase was diminishing and they absolutely needed a knowledge based economy to thrive. They have poured money into every level of education and the result has been the development of a state that is internationally recognized for its intellectual contributions. I don’t understand how South Carolina can be so negative on public education. Seriously, is it leftover racism? Are people just happier dumb?
There are a number of things I disagree with The State’s editorial stance on, but I am sincerely glad you are beating the drum on this issue. I agree that the idea we still have to defend public education as a concept anywhere in the US is appalling. Sometimes after a particularly frustrating discussion it is very tempting to “shake the dust off your feet” and leave this issue, but we can’t. And I am very curious to hear how many of your candidates in the upcoming interviews bring this issue up on their own without being prompted by questions.
Brad
You consistently confuse the goal of having universal, publicly funded education with the delivery of that education through a government bureaucracy.
There is little disagreement with the need for universal, publicly funded education. The fundamental problem with public education today is that too much of the money flows through school districts where excellence is not the highest priority and innovation is stifled. See the case of Lee County. http://swampfoxinsights.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-would-be-unbelievable-if-it_27.html
Your insistence on preventing innovative educators from having access to resources that would allow them to create new models for delivering education to students not well served today will doom another generation of South Carolina students to poor to mediocre education, at best.
If you don’t like the analogy of higher education, use food as an analogy. Our society has decided that there should be universal access to food, but the government does not have to be in the business of running grocery stores to fulfill that objective. We provide those who don’t have access vouchers to shop at the same grocery stores you and I do, horrors of all horrors.
Uncle Elmer, in 2005 North Carolina SAT scores ranked 41st in the country. That’s better than SC’s dead last rank, but it ain’t blowing away the competition.
Brad, you seem to be spotlighting the “out of state” money flowing into SC for the school choice side. The other side is saying NEA dollars ($600,000) were spent last year to preserve the status quo and fight alternatives. Will you present both sides of the outside money?
The other side, Dave, says a lot of things, many of which are not true.
The fact is, we don’t know how much any side is spending. We know what individual candidates have reported. We know that SCRG won’t say where it gets its money, or how much it gets.
We know that the school “choice” people have threatened Republicans who have opposed their agenda — to be specific, threatened them with well-financed primary opponents.
I have not heard of anyone being thus threatened by the other side.
Money can flow wherever it wants, but if it is used by people who don’t care about South Carolina to blackmail lawmakers into passing an agenda that is clearly inimical to what South Carolinians want and need, we have to stand up and point it out.
It’s kind of like video poker. We didn’t care about it, until it resorted to bully tactics and started trying to buy a Legislature more to its liking.
The irony is, it’s very hard — if not impossible — for this anti-school agenda to win a fair fight (and if you don’t think they’re “anti-school,” listen to the rhetoric sometime; the contempt for the very idea of public schools is palpable). Witness the 2004 state Senate contest between Ken Wingate and Joel Lourie. Those very out-of-state interests (specifically, in this case, the Michigan-based “All Children Matter,” a name Orwell would have been proud to have thought of) spent six figures within one week in that one race.
Here’s the really interesting part: They knew — presumably because their polls told them — that their actual agenda couldn’t win, because the folks in that swing district (previously occupied by a Republican) didn’t want it. So their ads talked about other things.
Anyway, Lourie won decisively, even though Ken Wingate was a former gubernatorial candidate with high name recognition. I had thought Joel would squeak it out, but I had not expected him to defeat Ken as thoroughly as he did.
Brad,
You say that “South Carolina has made significant strides” in building a good public education system but also acknowledge that we have much farther to go. Since the Educational Accountability Act of 1998 is approaching a full decade of existence, one could then assume that you feel we’re at least two decades from a “good” system. Another generation or more of students will be lost.
I’ve got three kids in three different Richland 2 schools right now. I’ve had kids in school since 1993. My view – the quality of the education they receive now is no better and probably worse than it was ten years ago. I put the blame on PACT testing at the elementary/middle school level. Did you know that the educational component of the school year ended last Friday at the middle school level? My son has no homework, no tests this week because of PACT starting next week. PACT runs for two weeks and there will be no homework or tests during or after that. That makes 17 school days with no teaching going on…
And then the PACT results will come in and NOBODY will care. When a school drops from an excellent rating to good, nothing happens. They blame the test. Or blame the “demographics changing” (we know what that means). They also won’t release test scores by teacher to allow parents to see any trends. After experiencing PACT for so many years, my gut tells me it has done nothing to improve education. The best test of accountability comes from talking to parents. When we moved here in 1990, all we heard was “You want to be in Richland 2 or Lexington 1″… it didn’t take PACT tests to figure that out.
Why not a “voucher” type system where education money follows the student as in some other countries (Poland?). No money goes to parents, but to the school the child attends.
Certain core subjects are paid for and would include “reading, writing, ‘rithmetic”, real US history, real state history, etc. Money for these core courses is paid to ANY school that a child attends (can get to) including public, private, religious, home school. Any subjects outside the core are NOT paid for such as religion or whatever.
I get so tired of hearing the latest fads and buzzwords, like “moving to a knowledge-based economy”, from people who are know nothing about technology or business, but will use change to create confusion, fear and doubt, in order to preserve the status quo of their jobs.
The only idea from the status quo is to give them more money.
They can’t tell you what the last billion dollars bought in education improvements. They can’t tell you where a dollar would be best spent to improve any single student. They can’t tell you why the management teams which have had so little success should not be replaced.
There are some good public schools in South Carolina, in spite of having some really lousy clientele who don’t care to learn. Unlike business, the management and teaching methods which work in those superior schools are seldom transferred to other schools.
As pointed out above, socialism is not the only model for education, not even for tax-funded education.
Exactly, Lee… as with most things in this world, our educational system is “all about the Benjamins”. It’s about the government taking as much as they can without any real accountability. It’s about funneling millions and millions of dollars to school construction companies and wasting millions of dollars on technology that either unused or under utilized.
Did you know that in Richland 2, the ten year plan for school construction is developed by M.B. Kahn, the company that builds many of the schools? And that we taxpayers PAY for M.B. Kahn to decide how much those schools will cost (I believe the last time I looked, they used an inflation factor of about 10% per year)? I would love to see The State investigate the relationship between the construction companies and the school districts.
Is it REALLY necessary to have $10K smartboards in every classroom when a third or more of the kids cannot read or do math at a proficient level? Is it REALLY necessary to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars so that a few high school students can learn German over a video feed?
All of that money would be better spent on salaries to attract, retain, and develop the best teachers. No matter how much money is thrown at technology and state-of-the-art buildings, the bottom line in the educational process comes down to the student-teacher-parent triangle.
Years ago, a local county political guru told me, “You can’t steal money from wages.”
Every wage earner knows exactly what is supposed to be in his paycheck, and watches it like a hawk. Kickbacks, payoffs, embezzling, cronyism all depend on procurement of goods and services, and there is no better place to do it than construction, especially when the agencies keep no good accounting records.
I asked for the Richland One building plan back in 1989, and was told they, “were working on it, and it will be ready in 2000.” They still don’t have one, and they still don’t have bookeeping that would keep a private company out of jail.
Brad: Please tell Nina Brook when she and therefore The State newspaper so stupidly and blindly supported Richland School District 1’s hiring of Kathy Greer at AC Flora, I told you so.