Category Archives: Education

Darla Moore makes her voice heard, at the 5 million decibel level

When she spoke to students and others at the Russell House today (and yes, the turnout for this was SRO huge, unlike at the rally yesterday), Darla Moore acted with the class you would expect. No whining or moaning or pointless lashing out.

But boy, did she make her voice heard. You can watch the whole speech here. After thanking those present, particularly the students (and she made it clear on multiple occasions that her message was for the students rather than the media and university honchos on hand) for their “encouragement, your kind sentiments and your support,” she went on to “reaffirm my love for the USC, my support for the USC and for the state of SC,” and to speak of the “shared obligation to move this institution forward not only for ourselves but for generations to come.”

Saying she was not there to talk about “the wonder of me,” and adding, “This is also not about money,” she went on:

By your reaction, you have ignited what I believe is the collective consciousness of this state to an issue that is far more fundamental to the state’s future than any other challenge that we face. And this is about having the courage, and the singular focus to understand the critical importance of a strong, progressive and properly resourced higher education system — and I mean from technical colleges to research universities — and the role it plays in securing a bright and productive future for all of us….

We can compete at the highest level.

Just because I no longer serve on the board does not mean for one second that I will be deterred in my efforts to expand our reach for excellence.

And I’m sure y’all have noticed that I don’t need a title or a position to speak out; I just need a voice, my vision and a forum to be heard.

Just like you did this week…

Then, in her one directly defiant statement toward the governor — and by implication, toward her replacement, whom the governor said she picked because he shared her “vision,” she said:

I’ll not allow our university to become a discounted graduation mill. I want you to be proud of your degree; I want you to be first in line for the best jobs available. And I want you to stay in South Carolina, to be a part of our effort to make our state great.

Excellence is our standard, and it must be maintained even if there are those who would offer policies that would dumb us down….

Finally, she said:

This is very personal: There’s been speculation that I would take my checkbook and go home. I want you to know that my commitment to USC is as strong as ever.

She then demonstrated that by hauling off and giving another $5 million:

Ousted trustee Darla Moore told USC students today that she does not plan to take her check book and go away. Instead, Moore – removed from USC’s board by Gov. Nikki Haley – said she would give the school $5 million to start an aviation research center named after Ronald McNair, killed in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

Like Moore, McNair was a native of Lake City.

USC had sought the money from the state to, it said, capitalize on Boeing’s plans to build 787 Dreamliner aircraft in Charleston.

However, House budget writers, faced with a $700 million shortfall in state money, killed the request, which Haley opposed as premature.

Moore is USC’s largest single benefactor ever. Her removal by Haley, who named a campaign donor to the USC board, has angered many USC students and graduates.

Key to photos below:

There were plenty of honchos on the front row, but Ms. Moore repeatedly said she was there to speak to, and take questions from, the students.
The view from the back of the ballroom.
The view from the front (hey, you’re not paying extra for captioning here).
Taking questions from students.
President Harris Pastides was slightly mobbed by media afterward. He was very diplomatic, as I would expect him to be. He said he appreciated that the governor called to explain her decision — which was the first time I’d heard that she had (and marks the first thing I’ve heard of her doing properly — the first thing I’ve seen of her showing respect to anyone involved — in this whole affair).
Yep, that’s Will Folks, all dressed up. I don’t recall having seen him this way. By the way, he said that while he sides with the governor on this issue, he was favorably impressed by the way Ms. Moore handled it.

Surging sea of rage (not): The ‘Reinstate Darla Moore’ rally

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Well, that was a bust. As I Tweeted when I arrived at the “Reinstate Darla Moore” rally at the State House on this sunny day:

@BradWarthen
Brad Warthen

The big protest over Darla Moore being unceremoniously dumped by Nikki Haley looks like a bit of a bust so far. They DID say noon, right?

As I said again at 12:43, it was still a bust. Which is a shame. Because Nikki Haley insulted all of the 30,000 or so students on the Columbia campus alone with her petty patronage move — not to mention the way she dissed the other 4 million of us who have a right to expect a governor to exercise some modicum of responsible stewardship at our most important state institutions. Instead of, you know, what she did.

Old New Left Activist Tom Turnipseed grumbled about these kids today who don’t know how to stage a protest: They think they do something with social media, and it’s done, he says. Well, yes — the “We Support Darla Moore” Facebook page has attracted 4,703 people who probably think they’ve made a statement by “liking” it.

But that doesn’t mean that Martha Susan Morris, the 22-year-old economic and poli sci senior who started the “Students for the Reinstatement of Miss Darla Moore” FB page, lacks seriousness in her convictions.

After all, she showed up, and spoke at the rally — once it finally got around to getting started. And she understood why she should be there, and why thousands of others should have been there with her:

Gov. Haley cited that her main reason for replacing Mrs. Moore with Mr. Cofield was the fact that Mr. Cofield’s vision was more clearly aligned with her own.

Martha Susan Morris

And we the students ask ‘What vision?’ What vision is not aligning with Gov. Haley…?… Mrs. Moore’s vision for years has been one of high expectations, increased educational funding, and increased standards for universities, research and development in our state…. and we could not be more grateful to her…

Our university is on the upswing, and we want her to be a part of it. She’s been an amazing benefactor… since she was appointed to the board in 1999…

Amen to that, Martha Susan. She said afterward that she started the FB page at 4 a.m. after having hearing about Ms. Moore being dumped. When she next looked at the page later that morning, there were 400 fans. There are now 2,495.

Too bad more of them didn’t show up. Because although we know Nikki Haley loves her some Facebook, she’d have been a tad more impressed to look out her window and see some folks show up to protest her action. Not that she’d have changed her mind, but it would have made an impression.

One of the people I chatted with before leaving was Candace Romero, communications director of the South Carolina House Democratic Caucus, who observed how much of the crowd were media types, and she complained that that there was no media turnout like that for the “Rally for a Moral Budget” back on March 12. (I asked her, and her Senate counterpart Phil Bailey, whether they were in any way involved in this rally. No, and no. They had just dropped by. That’s the answer I got from all the usual suspect-types I found.)

Well. As one who didn’t even thinking about going downtown on a Saturday for that particular quixotic gesture, I must accept service. But I will add that good-government-type rallies tend not to draw multitudes. Have it about something people get passionate about, such as the Confederate flag, and you can get a crowd (5,000 or so if it’s pro, as many as 60,000 if it’s anti).

Which is a shame. Today’s rally was for good government — or at least, against grossly irresponsible government. (I enjoyed hearing a speaker who followed Martha Susan say he and his fellow protesters were there to “change the usual business of government.” You know, what Nikki Haley is always saying she wants to do — right before she does something as old-line political Business-As-Usual as dumping a highly respected board member in favor of someone whose only known qualification is having contributed to her campaign.)

But it was a bust.

Oh, one more thing — it was announced, late in the rally, that Darla Moore herself will address students “in a town-hall meeting at 12:15 p.m. Thursday, March 24, in the Russell House.”

I wonder whether that will be better-attended.

: Martha Susan Morris

The “polls” (such as they are) run against Nikki’s “idiotic” move to replace Darla

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First and foremost, a thing where you go online and click “yes” or “no” to a current-events question is not a POLL, in any meaningful sense. It has no statistical significance. If you don’t have a properly constructed sample, with the right elements of randomness and screening questions (“are you the head of household, etc.”), you cannot extrapolate that the result you obtain indicates what you would get if the entire population, or electorate, answered the question.

A self-selected sample doesn’t cut it, not by a long shot. It’s a great way to invite readers/viewers to sound off — they like that — but it doesn’t generally give you much, if anything, to base conclusions on.

Still… my eyebrows raised when I saw this “poll” result over at the WLTX Facebook page:

Yeah, I know — 244 respondents, which makes a self-selected survey even MORE meaningless. But it still surprised me. Because for the last few days, any time someone says “This is going to cost her,” I say they are totally wrong, that Nikki made the calculation that her base wouldn’t care (or would even applaud, being so anti-elitist), and therefore she’s fine — from her perspective (certainly not from South Carolina’s).

It’s one thing for all the folks I run into at the Capital City Club to be shocked and appalled. One expects that, and Nikki Haley couldn’t care less. But this kind of populist thing should draw out the Haley fan club. For that matter, particularly with such low participation, it would be so easy to stack (which is the biggest reason you don’t regard self-selected “polls” as serious).

This result has NO statistical significance, but it’s SO lopsided. At the very least, it indicates a lack of eagerness on the part of her peeps to jump out and defend her. (I mean, did even ardent fan Eleanor Kitzman vote?) The way they rushed to back her on the WACH-Fox thing. What happened to that default mode of “If the elites and the media say it about our gal, it’s WRONG! And we’re gonna run out and shout it!”?

By the way, for what it’s worth… the latest WLTX nonpoll asked, “Should the U.S. have used force in Libya?” So far, this is how it’s going:

Yep, a dead heat. So far. And I figured that would be a blowout on the “yes” side. Because, you know, that’s something it looked like we had some consensus on before we went in. Of course, that consensus was among elites — including leading liberals who might otherwise oppose military action — and this is far from that. But that’s the factor that I thought would help Nikki on such a “poll” — at least to even things out for her. And it didn’t.

Once again, you can throw all of this out and you will have lost nothing of value — no methodology, tiny numbers. But it DID strike me as interesting, because it was such a blowout. And that’s all it is — interesting.

So I greeted this item from Columbia Regional Business Report in much the same spirit:

Staff Report
Published March 21, 2011

Gov. Nikki Haley made a grave misstep by removing philanthropist Darla Moore from the University of South Carolina’s board of trustees, said a vast majority of the people who responded to a two-day poll on the Daily Report.

Haley had few supporters of her move with only 7.1% saying they approve of her decision to replace Moore with Lexington attorney Tommy Cofield, who financially supported Haley’s campaign.

However, 78.8% want Moore back on the board; 44.2% of the respondents said Haley needs to admit her mistake and reinstate Moore, while 34.6% said the General Assembly should rectify the situation and by electing Moore to the board.

The remaining 14.1% asked who Tommy Cofield is.

Comments were fairly consistent, with the majority saying the move was “idiotic.”…

There was no methodology mentioned, so I figured this was an informal survey. I double-checked with CRBR Publisher Bob Bouyea, and he confirmed, “Informal poll.” Of course. No one in SC media has money to run real polls on the spur of the moment these days.

But I did find some of the comments interesting. Of course, they were fairly typical of what I’ve been hearing among the business movers and shakers, which is the same circle CRBR moves in.

As I say, interesting. Thought you might find it all interesting, too.

Filling young minds with wisdom (lots and lots and lots of it…)

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Busy day — speaking this morning, speaking tonight. Yakkety-yak. In fact, if you’re the last-minute type, you might want to attend the Politics and Media Conference at The Riley Institute at Furman tonight. I’m on a panel with some media types, followed by another panel with Bob Inglis and Vincent Sheheen. In fact, I’d better run if I’m going to get up there (no Virtual Front Page today, I’m afraid). They’ll feed me if I get there in time. But before I go, about this morning’s appearance…

Kelly Payne, the former state superintendent of education candidate who teaches a “Current Issues” class at Dutch Fork High School, is one of those… intense kinds of teachers you may remember from your own schooldays. A teacher with certain expectations. I remember them, because slackers like me tended to run afoul of them sometimes.

Anyway, Kelly asked me to come out today for a second time to speak to her class, so I guess it went OK the first time. I wanted to go straight to questions and answers, knowing the kids would have questions (I prefer that as a speaker; I don’t have to think as hard), but she asked me to talk for a few minutes first about “SC Politics,” so I started speaking nonstop about why we’re so different, why people say “there’s the South, there’s the Deep South, and there’s South Carolina,” starting with Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke and the colonial period an The War and what followed, generally explaining to them in FAR more detail than they want to know why we have some of the problems we have, and why we are SO resistant to changing that fact, and…

… once they were good and glassy-eyed, I asked them to throw their questions at me. Because I knew they had some. In most high school classes I’ve spoken to (admittedly, I don’t do it often; I generally shy away from anything earlier than post-grad, because there’s only so much of that bored-kids look you can take), you can wait awhile for a question.

But not Kelly Payne’s class — because of what I said about intensity, and expectations and such.

I knew there were questions because they were printed out on the lectern in front of me, pages of them, with kids’ names attached. They were to ask them in order. So we got started. Unfortunately, the 90-minute class was over before we could get to all of them. In fact, we only got to the first eight. I like to give thorough answers. Anyway, here are ALL the questions, since they bothered to compile them:

Hailey

1. Explain the difficulties you’ve experienced in transitioning from being a full-time journalist to your current activities.

Horace

2. Since you were last here the media hasn’t made much progress in gaining the public trust. What will it take for it to improve at doing so?

Venisha

3. When you were an editor at the paper, did you have other editors to check your grammar and spelling to keep you from making mistakes?

Hannah Jane

4. How significant a factor are your feelings about a topic when you write a story? If you’re really angry or really happy about a topic do those emotions impair your objectivity?

Jaquarius

5. How can social media be an effective tool in reporting? What social media platforms do you use (e.g., texting, Twitter, Facebook) to deliver news content?

Ruby

6. What do you miss most about your old job at the paper?

Eric

7. Do blogs really move public opinion or do they just provide “some fun” for people in the Echo Chamber to take anonymous shots? Is there any way to assure a little more fairness in blogs?

Taylor

8. What do you think about requiring public officials who hire bloggers to shill for them to disclose those relationships in order to improve transparency and increase public trust?

Katherine

9. If elected officials make blog comments hiding behind assumed names, wouldn’t the publics’ interest in transparency and its desire for more civil conversation be better met by calling on those public officials to “man-up,” take ownership of their comments, and stop hiding behind assumed names?

Kelsi

10. How do you rationalize disagreements between your religious convictions and

your political beliefs? (i.e., gay rights)

Marshall

11. What should the response of the United States be to Gadahfi’s suppression of his own people?

Taylor

12. You’ve criticized the Governor for her appointment on the USC Board of Trustees. Please explain why you don’t believe that election outcomes matter.

Katherine

13. You seem very focused on the need for the Governor and her team to guard against “gender politics” yet your profession admonishes society on the need to be “gender sensitive.” Please explain this dichotomy.

Kelsi

14. Eleanor Kitzman recently spoke to our class and we loved her. Why do you criticize her for defending the Governor’s honor and performance given the Governor selected her for that position?

Lexie

15. Why do you think being loyal to the Governor makes Eleanor Kitzman disloyal to the other four Budget & Control Board members?

Shaun

16. The Governor has talked about more transparency with legislative votes and the Treasurer has talked about “calendar transparency.” Which of these ideas do you think is the most sophomoric?

Christian

17. Given that Senator Sheheen and the Governor are about the same age, why is he more appealing to young people?

Kenneth

18. What do you think should be done to keep deep pockets from having an excessive influence on election outcomes? (i.e., Bloomberg, Schumer, candidates supported by Howard Rich, etc.)

Christie

19. How soon do you think it will be before we see meaningful restructuring in state government?

Ben

20. Which of our Constitutional Officers would it make more sense to appoint? Explain your reasons.

Hailey

21. What’s your opinion of eliminating the Budget & Control Board and replacing it with a Department of Administration reporting to the Governor?

Andrew

22. Give the best reason to support and the best reason to oppose the Voter ID Bill?

Kenneth

23. Please explain the post you recently wrote on daylight savings time.

Evan

24. What is the legacy you hope to leave?

25. What do you think about paying teachers based on classroom outcomes?

26. Why are the two major political parties so segregated along racial lines?

27. How can South Carolina Republicans be so diverse as to have elected two Republican Senators that are so different in their ideology? (Lindsey Graham, Jim DeMint….earmarks)

28. I’m optimistic about the next generation of public servants — my fellow classmates and me– who will soon by making decisions that impact our daily lives. What advice can you give us as we move in this direction?

Frankly, with that many questions, I could have talked for a month. But it was great. Been pressed for time, I was really antsy this morning about all I had to do, and ran late and got lost (turns out that Kelly Payne doesn’t teach at Dutch Fork Middle School, which I went to first — they have a nice office — even though I’d been to the right place previously), and I was rattled.

But driving away, I felt nice and relaxed. Ninety minutes of high-speed, non-stop, stream-of-consciousness talking does that for me. It probably doesn’t do all that much for the people listening (so it’s nice when they HAVE to sit there and listen, or get a flunking grade), but I find it… calming. Probably why Freud was such a hit back in the day.

If I don’t hit the road, they won’t feed me in Greenville. As Vincent Sheheen’s Uncle Bob always used to say to bring interviews to a sudden stop: Gottagobye.

And yes, that IS a picture of me, speaking to the class last year, in the upper left-hand corner. Kelly's like that. Very thorough.

Nikki Haley dumps Darla Moore: A plain case of old-fashioned naked patronage

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It’s really hard to keep up with all the petty outrages (both “petty” and “outrageous” — yes, that seems about right) that our new young governor keeps pumping out.

I’m a busy guy — working, blogging, trying to grab a little sleep at night — and sometimes find myself momentarily out of the loop. Particularly when there are so many far more important things going on in the world. Let’s see, the Japan earthquake, Qaddafi (I’ve gotten to where I just spell his name with the first combination of letters that my fingers hit, so I hope that suits) moving to crush the rebellion while the world is distracted with Japan, Saudis intervening in Bahrain and people getting killed… And sometimes you have to put even that aside, and do other stuff…

So when I finish my Virtual Front Page and close the laptop, I sometimes don’t see any new developments until 7ish the next morning. Which is why I was taken aback at the very first Tweet I saw this morning:

@nettie_bNettie Britts

Explain Darla Moore to me.

I replied, “Well, she’s this rich lady from South Carolina who tries to give back to her home state. That’s the Twitter version, I guess…” And I went on to breakfast. There, the grill room at the Capital City Club was buzzing with what I didn’t know about, since I hadn’t sat down to read the paper yet (don’t ask me why it wasn’t on thestate.com when I was doing the Virtual Front Page yesterday; maybe it was and I just missed it). The state and community leaders weren’t going, “Did you hear about Darla?” It was more like, “What do you think of the news?” Period.

Yep, this stuff happens to me, too. Not often, but sometimes.

So I sat down, and I read the paper. And I Tweeted this out:

@BradWarthen Brad Warthen

Nikki Haley dumping Darla Moore is classic case of naked, arbitrary exercise of patronage power….http://tinyurl.com/4nu4of8

You can congratulate me later for having gotten a link, an editorial point, “Nikki Haley,” “Darla Moore,” and “naked” into the Twitter format (with 14 characters of room left!). Let’s move on to the substance.

And the substance is… well, what I just said. It just doesn’t get any more blatant, plain, slap-in-the-face, I-don’t-care-what-you’ve-done-for-our-state-or-this-institution-I’ve-got-my-own-guy than this. Just bald, plain, take-it-for-what-it-is. Although I do have to hand it to Haley staffer Rob Godfrey for managing to twist the knife a bit with this bit of sarcastic insouciance:

Asked why the appointment was not announced, he said: “Given that there are over 1,000 appointments to boards and commissions the governor can make, we never intended to have a press conference for each one.”

Because, you know, Darla Moore isn’t any more important than that.

At the Cap City Club this morning, one of the regular movers and shakers made a rather naive and innocent remark (sometimes movers and shakers can surprise you that way), honestly asking, “How do you just brush aside someone who’s given $100 million to South Carolina?” (Yeah, I know she’s only pledged $70 million to USC and $10 million to Clemson, according to the story, but I guess he was rounding.)

I replied, patiently, here’s what Nikki Haley would say to that (were she brutally honest, of course): “She didn’t give ME a hundred million dollars. Tommy over here gave me $3,500. I don’t understand the question.” That’s Tommy Cofield, by the way, a Lexington attorney.

People who are not movers and shakers (and who in fact have a sort of visceral aversion to movers and shakers) can say some naive things, too. Over in a previous comment, our own Doug said “Are we assuming that Sheheen wouldn’t have replaced anyone he didn’t like?”

To that, I responded once again with the painfully obvious: “No, Vincent would not have replaced Darla Moore with an unknown, minor campaign contributor in such a prestigious post. If that’s what you’re asking.” Of course, I should have added, “without a reason.” By that, I would mean a valid reason, one that takes South Carolina’s and USC’s legitimate interests into account, one that is not just arbitrary.

Oh she GAVE what I suppose some folks (probably including Doug, believing as he does that there is nothing so deleterious to society as experience and commitment to the public weal) will regard as a reason: “As is the case with many of our appointees, the governor looked for a fresh set of eyes to put in a critical leadership position…”

That’s it.

And if you are one of the people who takes Nikki Haley at face value, as her supporters tend to do, and you don’t know or care about Darla Moore or the University of South Carolina — you just like to cheer on your Nikki — that will suffice. In with the new, out with the old. She will feel in no way obligated to explain what was wrong with Darla Moore’s service on the board, or to cite any of the exciting new ideas that her appointee brings to the table that were previously missing. No one will expect that of her; it probably wouldn’t even occur to her to think about it. The governor will skate on this with these people — this is something that is core to her whole approach to politics ever since she transformed herself into the darling of the Tea Party in preparation for her run for this office for which she was so unprepared.

This WORKS for her. She skates on this, just as — with the voters she cares about — she will skate on apparently having told a prospective employer in 2007 that she was making $125,000 a year when she was telling the IRS that she made $22,000. This will matter not. People are just picking at her. The nasty, powerful, status quo people — those people who hang out at the Capital City Club! — are picking at Nikki because they’re mean, you see. (By the way, on the “petty” vs. “outrageous” spectrum, the thing on the job application is more the typical “petty” violation of her alleged principles that we have come to expect; the Darla Moore thing, dealing as it does with the leadership of such an important state institution, is more of an “outrage.” If you’re keeping score.)

She will not only skate, but her supporters — or at least, this is what the governor banks on — will continue, in spite of all evidence, to see her as a champion of transparency, a reformer, a nemesis of “politics as usual” and patron saint of Good Government. Which just, you know, boggles the mind if you’re the sensible sort who thinks about things.

That’s the plan, anyway. And that’s why she did this, and really doesn’t care if you, or the university, or the business community, or Darla Moore don’t like it.

Just to say something you don’t hear all that often

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The quixotic demonstration at the State House yesterday by citizens sick of seeing our state’s infrastructure rapidly eroding under the stewardship of shortsighted politicians was of course an exercise in futility.

But I’m no stranger to that. A few minutes ago, looking for a link for a previous post that needed one, I went back to the last week of posts on my old blog I had at the paper, and ran across this forgotten item — which, as it happens, was day after the post in which I announced that I had been laid off:

Good job rejecting the tuition caps

This might sound strange coming from a guy who was already counting pennies (or quarters, anyway — I miscounted how many I had this morning in my truck, and ended up with a parking ticket because I didn’t have enough for the meter), with my two youngest daughters still in college. And now I’m about to be unemployed.

But I’m glad the House rejected tuition caps at S.C. colleges and universities. I have an anecdote to share about that.

Remember the recent day when college students wandered the State House lobbying lawmakers on behalf of their institutions. They wanted the state to invest in higher education the way North Carolina and Georgia have. Either that day, or the day after, I had lunch with Clemson President James Barker, and he told me an anecdote he had witnessed: He said the students were pressing a lawmaker NOT to support the tuition caps, because they were worried about their institutions being even more underfunded — they hardly get anything from the state — some are down below 20 percent funding by the state, and the rest has to come from such sources as tuition, federal research grants and private gifts. Eliminate the ability to raise tuition, and the institution’s ability to provide an excellent education is significantly curtailed. If we want lower tuitions, the state should go back to funding higher percentages of the schools’ budgets, the way our neighboring states with better higher ed systems do.

The lawmaker listened to the kids, and then said with great condescension, maybe you kids don’t care if tuition goes up, but I’ll bet your parents would like a cap. He thought he had them there, but the kids set him straight: None of their parents were paying the bills. These kids were working their way through schools and paying for it all themselves. And they didn’t want to see the quality of what they were working so hard to pay for be degraded by an artificial cap on tuition. The lawmaker had not counted on getting that answer.

I wish I had been there to see it, because I’ve been in a similar place before. Back in 95 or 96, Speaker Wilkins had brought his committee chairs to see us, and I started challenging the wisdom of their massive rollback of property taxes paid for school.One of them allowed as how he bet I was glad to get that couple of hundred dollars I didn’t have to pay. And I answered him that I was ashamed that I was paying so little through my property tax to support schools that I knew needed more resources. He said smugly that he was sure I wouldn’t want to give it back. I told him I didn’t see as how there was any channel for doing that, but if he could point me to the right person who would take my money and see it gets to the right place, I would pay the difference. He didn’t have a good answer for that.

It would be great if our lawmakers would stop assuming that all of us in South Carolina are so greedily shortsighted that we can’t see past our personal desire to pay less money, and that we are corruptible by a scheme to starve colleges of reasonable support.

Reading that now, with all that’s happened since — the rise of the Tea Party, the eagerness of Republicans, demoralized after their 2008 defeat, to embrace destructive extremism (and of course, what happens to the Republican Party as happens to South Carolina, which it dominates), the election of Nikki Haley over more experienced, less extreme candidates of both parties — it reads like thoughts from another century. And, of course, another place.

Imagine, even dreaming of our state caring enough about education to invest in it the way our neighboring states have, much less suggesting that we do so. How anachronistic can one get? All that’s happened since then is that South Carolina has run, faster every day, in the opposite direction — with out elected leaders firmly convinced that that is not only the right direction in which to run, but the only one.

Why mommies can’t make friends: the cartoon

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In response to this previous post, Maude Lebowski — you remember Maude — shared a link to this auto-animation video.

It’s quite a hoot, and I thought that with everyone talking about the “Tiger Mom” book these days, y’all might appreciate having your attention drawn to it with a separate post.

Mind you, by posting this, I’m not just totally making fun of the blonde Mommy character, as it might seem. We started having kids in the mid-70s, and we lived across a tiny side street from a natural food store (“The Pumpkin Seed”) and we were totally into natural. My wife was a member of the La Leche League, so of course our kids were all breast-fed for as long as possible. And yes, we used real diapers, not disposables, for the sake of the Earth. And no soda or anything junky like that. And we ground our own baby food from fresh cooked (but alas, unseasoned) food. I say “we” — but the truth is that my wife did almost all of it. She was at home, I was at the newspaper.

Of course, we relaxed a bit on some things with our later kids, as the older ones will complain — although not on the breast-feeding or the real diapers. By the late 80s, we really stood out on the diaper thing.

But on most other things, we were pretty cool. And the intensity of middle-class parents today toward their kids is scary, which is why I like Lenore Skenazy’s work.

It’s not just scary, though. It can also be funny.

“What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness”

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Isn’t that a great headline?

Stan Dubinsky sends out a lot of cool stuff to read via e-mail. You should ask to be on his list — if you’ve got time to read the stuff. I don’t really, but I do tend to glance at the headlines to see if anything draws me in (which, Journalism 101 here, is what headlines are for). And “What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness” definitely did the job.

And the piece was worth reading. An excerpt:

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness

The decline and fall of American English, and stuff

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity.

Then came 1985….

Undergraduates… seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness….

We all note, and many of us decry, what social media have done to (and for; there’s an upside as well) effective and elegant use of language. But I found this piece interesting because it went far beyond that, and identified an insidious enemy not only to communication, but to clear thought as well.

That enemy is Vagueness.

NC disses SC as the obvious path NOT to follow (and who can blame them for seeing us that way?)

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Thought y’all might find the above interesting. Samuel Tenenbaum sent it to me.

It hurts, but NC has room to talk. They’ve invested, while we’ve wallowed in self-destructive ideological wrangling — an argument that we, the people of South Carolina, have been on the losing end of, every time. While NC pulled farther and farther ahead of us.

In case you have trouble with the embed, here’s a link to the site of the group that did the video.

Also, there’s the fundamental issue of accountability

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I’ve always been in favor of charter schools, and so has the editorial board at The State. (Some would think those two points are redundant, and some of my former colleagues would say the same, but I continue to insist that the board under my leadership operated by consensus and was not an autocracy. So my opinion and the board’s during that period were not the same thing. And that’s the way it was, because I say so, speaking ex cathedra. None may say me nay.)

Today’s editorial explaining why local districts shouldn’t fund state-chartered schools made me go “huh?” for a second, because I hadn’t really thought about that aspect of it (and I guess I missed when the issue came up).

But only for a second. Once I thought about whether such funding should come from DISTRICTS, I could think of all sorts of reasons why that was a bad approach to an otherwise good idea.

And many of those reasons were set out ably in the editorial. An excerpt:

What’s not reasonable is the plan before the House to force school districts to take local property tax money away from the schools they are responsible for and give it to charter schools that are completely independent of the districts. Unlike district-sponsored charter schools, many state-sponsored schools were set up over the objections of the local districts, and they do not receive local property tax funding.

The idea of forcing local schools to subsidize the state charters is particularly unreasonable today, when we are calling on districts to make difficult choices to reduce their costs. Consider what happened last week: The day after Lexington 2 Superintendent Venus Holland recommended closing one of the district’s 10 elementary schools to save money, the House Education Committee voted to make her district — and the rest of the state’s districts — spend money to keep the doors opened at a dozen schools over which it has no control. Although the timing isn’t so dramatic, the situation is even more absurd in Abbeville, where the legislation would force the district to pay for a school that opened in a high school that the district had shut down to save money.

In addition to the districts’ need to make these sorts of difficult decisions, there’s this very practical problem: Property taxes are set based on the number of students the districts expect to have in the schools they operate — not in the schools over which they have no say and whose enrollment they have no way of guessing.

In defending the plan to make local districts fund state-chartered schools, House Education Chairman Phil Owens claimed it “creates parity and equality.” But it does no such thing: To the contrary, it highlights the “parity and equality” problem we have throughout our public schools, because it requires each district to contribute whatever amount of money it spends per student for each local student who attends one of these schools. That varies widely from district to district, based on how wealthy each is and how much the people who live there value public education…

But the one main, critical, essential, fundamental reason why it was a bad idea was left out, or only implied, and it is this: As stewards of taxpayers’ money, districts shouldn’t have to fund something that they can’t hold accountable.

The districts run the schools under their jurisdiction, holding them accountable — with varying degrees of success — for the appropriations provided. That’s the essence of responsible government: You elect people to make decisions about raising and spending tax money (as well as other essentials of government). Taxes are levied on the local level specifically for the purpose of running those schools.

The whole idea behind charter schools is that they are free from being held accountable by that local district structure. There’s no way that local districts should be allocating any portion of the finite, limited funds (a demagogue would throw in, “taxpayers’ hard-earned money”) to any entity that is not answerable to that body for what it does.

The state charters these schools, and should be responsible for any funding that comes from public sources.

To elaborate… the editorial also made the very important point that ultimately, school funding is a state responsibility. And it is. And eventually, we need to get to the point where schools are not dependent on taxes raised locally — a practice that only exacerbates the gross inequities in quality of education available statewide.

This issue — the local funding and governance of schools — is one on which my opinion has changed over time. As one who believes in the principle of subsidiarity, my general tendency is toward pushing governmental responsibilities down to the smallest, most local level (the federal government should do far less than it does, and states should leave more up to local governments — in South Carolina, that means the Legislature getting off the necks of local governments and letting them serve their citizens unhampered).

That’s in general. But subsidiarity holds that functions should be performed by the smallest possible entity competent to perform them. And increasingly, I’ve started to think in recent years that the state (or at the very least, the county) is about as small an entity that can both fund and administer schools competently. Mind you, I think the SCHOOLS should enjoy more autonomy than they do, in terms of principals being more free to run them — particularly in terms of freedom to hire and fire. But to the extent that there has to be administration above the school level, that doesn’t have to be nearly as local as it is, and there are a number of reasons why it shouldn’t be (including the fact that while school boards are elected, the overwhelming majority of voters don’t have the slightest idea who’s running for school board, or which would do a better job, and you often get the kind of governance you would expect from that — and there is NO WAY these little-known entities should be levying taxes, as they do in some districts). A good start in making that less local is what I’ve advocated strenuously for 20 years: Consolidate school districts. But the ultimate goal, perhaps (I’m not 100 percent on this yet), should be statewide administration.

But I’m getting off the subject. Bottom line: Charter schools are a state creation (and it’s a good thing the state has created them, I continue to think). The state should pay for them, to the extent that they should be publicly funded. Legislators should deal with that, rather than trying to dump the problem on the overstressed districts.

A few thoughts on the State of the State

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Watch the full episode. See more SCETV Specials.

EDITOR’S NOTE: THERE IS A SERIOUS ERROR BELOW, WHICH I HAVE NOW CORRECTED. PLEASE SEE THE CORRECTION POST.

Been trying all day to get to Nikki Haley’s speech last night. Here are a few quick observations:

First, the style: Nikki is a WAY better speaker than Mark Sanford. She, at least, can read a speech that’s right in front of her (and do it in a fairly engaging way). Her predecessor could not, or would not. Every year, I’d get my copy of the speech over lunch on the day of. I’d read it, mark it up, and ask questions about it. I would have completely digested it by the time of the speech itself. Then came speech time, which I generally watched from the comfort of my office on the tube. And then I had to suffer through his hems and haws, and “I would says” and “at the end of the days,” and flat-out off-script digressions, all of them awkward, pausing to search for words, ignoring the speech in front of him. Nikki, with her teleprompter, was MUCH better. But I expected no less.
This is not to say that her style is without its irritating characteristics. There’s her prim, smug, I’m-the-girl-with-the-most-gold-stars-in-the-class tone that she too often affects. Watch, for instance, when she extols the blessings of having “a chief executive willing to lead the charge and make the tough decisions” — speaking, of course, of herself. I guess someone who came from the back bench to governor in a year is bound to be a bit self-congratulatory. Human nature. But she could tone it down a bit. And often, she does.
Do you know why she can only suggest $120 million worth of cuts toward the $719 million shortfall? Because she hasn’t suggested anything that her political base might object to. And it’s hard to come up with cuts that deep and still do that. She hit programs for those worthless, lazy poor people, of course. And when she got to the middle class, she only went after the stuff that those wicked, decadent liberals like — such as ETV. But the truth is, everybody will have reason to gripe when all the cuts are in. Because believe me, this state’s leaders will never pull an Illinois. Not that they should; I’m just assuring you that they won’t. It’s going to be cuts all the way. And that has nothing to do with Nikki Haley; that’s just the way our State House does things.
The ETV thing, of course, is nothing new. Back during the GOP runoff last year, I went over to tape an interview at ETV. They had already talked with Gresham Barrett for the same show. But Nikki wasn’t even calling them back. Scuttlebutt in the ETV corridors was that she didn’t want to talk to them because she was going to back Mark Sanford’s veto of their entire budget. Don’t know whether they were right, but I could see how they’d get that impression.
Don’t you love the way she blithely suggests that if you kill ETV (excuse me, “When you release government from the things it should not be responsible for…”), it has this miraculous effect: “you allow the private sector to be more creative and cost efficient.” Remarkable, the things these ideologues will say as though they believed them. Love or hate ETV — and I see it as what it is, one of those few things that South Carolina can point to as something it has done as well as, or better than, other parts of the country (at least in past years) — the notion that the private sector will fill the gap is laughable. You know, this private sector… (Remember when Bravo was known for high-quality arts programming. Not anymore, baby.)
I’m definitely with her on asking for quick confirmation of her appointees. She’s made some good picks, and they deserve the opportunity to get to work. Advise, consent, but let’s do it quickly.
That little nonsensical (to all but Tea Party ideologues) lecture about how federal funding is inherently a BAD thing was painful to listen to. See, the trouble with the feds sending us money to fund services is that “federal money comes strings, and with those strings come limitations.” The alternative, of course, in South Carolina is that those needs don’t get funded at all. But they’re not really needs, are they? Say that often enough, and you start to believe it. Apparently. In my book, it’s offensive nonsense to say “my cabinet will stop the practice of working the system to get increases in federal funding simply for the sake of expanding our budgets” — as if agencies have sought such funding for any other reason that to fund important services — services they are charged with providing — that the state won’t fund. But yeah, I get it: Her base believes government shouldn’t do such things anyway.
I love, love, love that she’s starting out asking for ending the separate election of constitutional officers. Of course, I’m disappointed that she’s only pushing to do two of them — Gov Lite and superintendent of education. But it’s a start, and maybe that’s the smart way: Isolate a couple, so lawmakers can’t hide their votes to kill them. Then do the others later. Remember what they did last time there were votes on the whole shebang? The senators swapped votes, with just enough voting against putting each constitutional change on the ballot to kill it, but each senator being able to say he voted for some (or most) of them. So in this case, maybe piecemeal is smart. And, we hope, a substantive move toward the greater accountability Nikki says she wants to foster.
NOTE: THIS BULLET POINT IS COMPLETELY WRONG. I MISREAD WHAT THE GOVERNOR SAID. IN FACT, I THINK WHAT SHE SAID WAS PRAISEWORTHY. I’VE WRITTEN A SEPARATE POST TO SAY SO, IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS. How’d you like this part? “The state of South Carolina pays more than $16,000 annually to incarcerate a single prisoner. We spend more each year on a prisoner than we do on a student. Think of the savings we’ll realize if we aren’t constantly welcoming back behind bars those prisoners who finish out their initial terms.” Usually, when a politician says that, he or she is suggesting that we need to do more to make sure kids get a good education so they don’t end up in prison, which IS more expensive. Nikki says it to justify spending less than our current lowest-in-the-nation amount per prisoner. One way she’d do this? Well, we’re already spending rock-bottom per meal, so we’ll just serve fewer meals. If you think this is a great idea, there’s nothing I can say to you. Except that there is a danger to all of us in running undermanned, underguarded prisons full of starved prisoners. But let’s move on.

I very much like that she’s started off her tenure on the Budget and Control Board by helping it work well together. She’s right to be smug about that. I like even better that she sound MORE determined last night than she has to insisting that the board be replaced with something more answerable to the governor. For years, lawmakers were able to shrug off this reform (and cling illegitimately to executive power) by saying you just couldn’t work with that Mark Sanford (which was true, but it was still just an excuse). Now, with the cooperative tone she’s set, they can’t say that. Let’s see some action. Stay on them on this, and keep pouring on the honey — since vinegar didn’t work.
This morning, I saw tweets from SCRG touting her speech. But there was no getting around the fact that she did not mention their signature issue — diverting funding from public education to private schools. Good for her. That was a welcome relief from the distracting nonsense of recent years.

Finally, a bit of a digression of my own: On the day that the U.S. House engaged in one of the most offensive partisan gestures I’ve seen in many a year — their farcical “repeal” of health care reform, demonstrating yet again that these yahoos who have taken over the GOP don’t give a damn about health care in America, they just want to cock a snook at Barack Obama at every opportunity — it was just as offensive to see the governor of our state take ANY time in a 34-minute speech to say that HER Cabinet will do all it can to opt out of that same reform. Because, you know, we don’t want South Carolina reaping any benefits that might accrue. If she hadn’t done that, I might have been able to take the fact that she wants to make the lion’s share of her cuts to Medicaid. But paired with that ideological statement, there was no way to put a positive spin on the cuts to care for the poor. Together, those gestures said, “We’re not going to help these people get health care, and we won’t let anyone else do it, either.”

There was good and bad in this brief, brisk, well-delivered speech. But that one thing kind of cast a pall over it all for me. Maybe it wouldn’t have bothered me so much if not for what the House had done that day. After all, while she couched it in ideological language (which is the only way to say the things she was saying, since pragmatism doesn’t enter into such an equation), and while her 1860-flavored digression about the rights of states to resist federal initiatives was kinda creepy amid the celebrations (as opposed to mere observances) we’re seeing related to that period, was downright creepy… still, I was pleased with the respectful, nonpartisan way she described her interaction with the president. But in the end creepy is creepy. And playing ideological games with the lives of sick people is inexcusable. No, we can’t pay for everything we’d like. And no, that federal legislation is far, FAR from perfect. But it’s the only live preserver that’s been thrown, and our governor has no business trying to yank it away.

It just seems to me that we have enough challenges here in South Carolina, more than enough for the governor to say grace over. I can see NO good reason to use any of our limited time, energy or resources mixing into these national partisan fights — especially if we don’t have a better plan for accomplishing what the feds are trying to accomplish.

For real accountability in higher ed, here’s the first number Haley should look at: 10.9 percent

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Just read this item over at thestate.com:

Gov. Nikki Haley and higher education leaders said today they are working together on ways to objectively measure the performance of South Carolina’s public colleges and universities.

School officials said Tuesday they will provide the governor with data including class sizes, the number of in-state and out-of-state students, classroom spending and their economic development impact. The goal, Haley said, is to determine which schools were getting the best results from their budgets.

State spending on higher education has been cut in recent years, and, with the state facing an $830 million budget deficit, public colleges likely face more cuts…

College officials said they welcomed the opportunity to show their value.

“Accountability and transparency and quality can all coexist,” said Clemson University president James Barker.

Barker said he had not had a similar meeting with former Gov. Mark Sanford, who targeted rising higher education costs.

“It felt very different,” Barker said.

I’m with President Barker on this: It’s great that Nikki Haley even cares enough to talk to the public higher ed institutions. Her predecessor’s lack of interest was deafening.

But as she presumes to decide the institution’s fiscal fate (suddenly, I’m flashing on Rowan and Martin: the Fickle Finger of Fiscal Fate), there’s one number I hope she absorbs before any other: 10.9 percent.

That’s how much of the USC system’s total budget is provided by state appropriations. For USC Columbia, it’s 10.3 percent. (I don’t have the numbers for the other institutions in front of me at the moment.) It used to be more like 90.

The college administrators are too polite, and too politic to say it (personally, I’d be tempted to say to everybody at the State House, “Yeah, and I’m going to care about you and your opinion of what I’m doing, oh, about 10.9 percent.”), and I suspect they are truly pleased that Nikki wants to work with them at all. It’s a nice change. But it would be good if politicos who want to call the tune for these institutions were a little more cognizant of just how little they are paying to the piper.

“The Brad Show,” Episode V: Jim Rex

Coming on “The Brad Show” tomorrow: Jim Rex

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Just another teaser/preview. Sometime tomorrow the latest installment of “The Brad Show” will air, with guest Jim Rex, SC superintendent of education.

As background, here’s a PDF Dr. Rex sent over in advance of our interview, detailing accomplishments during his tenure.

And for what it’s worth, here’s a list of the questions I used in our interview:

JIM REX – The Brad Show

December 15, 2010

Looking back, what do you consider to be your main accomplishments as superintendent?

What would you have done differently?

Particularly, I’d like to delve into your public-school choice initiatives. To what extent was it a response to the voucher movement? And doesn’t it face many of the same problems that private choice does? (Transportation, equality of access, etc.)

What are the remaining challenges for education in South Carolina?

Why did you decide to run for governor?

Do you wish now that you had run for re-election?

Is there anything you would have done differently in your gubernatorial campaign?

Is there anything the eventual Democratic nominee could have or should have done differently?

You’re an unconventional political officeholder in that you didn’t rise up through a party system and through lower offices. What does it mean to you, and to South Carolina, that the Democratic Party is no longer a player on the state level?

What are your hopes, and your worries, as you look toward Mick Zais taking the helm?

I didn’t read them out, of course — the list is just something I do to prepare my mind and help me if I get stuck. But I think we covered most of the material that the questions envisioned.

It’s too easy to get my conscience on my case

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FYI, folks, I got this from Randy Page over at SCRG, in response to this earlier post:

Appreciate your selective use of tweets from the SCRG account….

Ouch. I hate it that Randy feels put upon — I think he’s a nice guy and I want him to think I’m a nice guy, too, and all that — but it wasn’t all that selective. I mean, go look at the timeline. You be the judge.

I said the Onion thing reminded me of SOME of SCRG’s Tweets, and I showed you some of the ones I was talking about. And I didn’t have to look hard. (And the ONE Tweet I found saying something positive about schools — “Schools’ Report Cards Improve” — hardly disproves my thesis, since in the same span of time I easily found seven negative ones. Since my post, SCRG has had two new Tweets. Neither was complimentary toward public schools, and one said “South Carolina’s Worst Elementary and Middle Schools.” I’m not holding my breath waiting for that companion Tweet about the BEST schools…)

I don’t see that I did a single wrong thing there. I definitely didn’t misrepresent the overwhelmingly predominate thrust of SCRG’s Tweets. But I still feel bad about it. As Mark Twain wrote (in the voice of Huck Finn):

But that’s always the way; it don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person’s insides, and yet ain’t no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer he says the same.

Uh-oh. Now I’m going to get in trouble with animal lovers. Hey, it was Huck Finn who said it, not me… There’s goes my danged conscience again…

Worth revisiting: The flaw in tax credit argument

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Yesterday I got this kind note from a schoolteacher:

Mr. Warthen,

For years I have quoted an article you wrote for the state newspaper entitled, “Put Parents in Charge isn’t a ‘voucher bill’ it’s something much worse” to my public speaking classes as they begin persuasive arguments and to my friends and family who insist that school choice is fair and responsible. I continually return to your argument that asks, are we a citizen or a consumer?

I searched The State archives today to find a way to link to your article on my FaceBook page. In my ever so humble peon public school teacher opinion, I have never encountered a better argument against vouchers. Public schools are the least discriminatory institution in America—we serve everyone—whether a parent has the money to choose or not, and we are part of the infrastructure of our country.

I hope that you understand…, [but]… I have photocopied your article since its publication in March of 2005. What is a public school teacher in Lexington County to do?? I have used it to make my students see one side of this issue that they may never have been able to see otherwise. With the election of Mick Zais, I am truly frightened that this issue is on the table again and more a reality than ever before. The article, as well as your very logical argument, needs to be resurrected and published again.

She’s got a point. Maybe this would be a good time to revisit some of the basic flaws in the arguments for tax credits (and, for that matter, vouchers). Not because Mick Zais was elected, but because Nikki Haley was. (Think about it: when was the last time you saw a state superintendent lead a significant political fight? The job is ministerial, not political, which is why it should not be elected.) Here’s the column she was looking for. It was published in The State on March 4, 2005:

Put Parents in Charge isn’t a ‘voucher bill’ — it’s something much worse

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

SOUTH CAROLINIANS for Responsible Government, the group advocating Gov. Mark Sanford’s tuition tax credit proposal, criticizes its opponents for repeatedly calling “Put Parents in Charge” a “voucher” proposal.

On this score, the group is absolutely right, and Mr. Sanford’s critics are dead wrong.

This is not a voucher bill. It’s nothing like a voucher bill. It’s something much worse.

It’s worse because of the hole it will blow in state revenues, to be sure. To pass what is essentially a tarted-up tax cut bill without considering its effect on all state services (not just education), would be inexcusable.

But the main way in which a tuition tax credit is worse than a voucher is that it promotes the insidiously false notion that taxes paid for public schools are some sort of user fee.

Whether you agree with me here depends upon your concept of your place in society: Do you see yourself as a consumer, or as a citizen?

If you look upon public schools narrowly as a consumer, and you send your kids to private schools or home-school them, then you might think, “Hey, why should I be paying money to this provider, when I’m buying the service from someone else?” If that’s your view, a tuition tax credit makes perfect sense to you. Why shouldn’t you get a refund?

But if you look at it as a citizen, it makes no sense at all. Public schools have never been about selling a commodity; they have always been about the greatest benefits and highest demands of citizenship.

A citizen understands that parents and their children are not the only “consumers” of public school services — not by a long shot. That individual children and families benefit from education is only one important part of the whole picture of what public schools do for society. The rest of us voters and taxpayers have a huge stake, too.

Public schools exist for the entire community — for people with kids in public schools and private schools, people whose kids are grown, people who’ve never had kids and those who never will. (Note that, by the logic of the tax credit advocates, those last three groups should get tax breaks, too. In fact, if only the one-third or so of households who have children in public schools at a given time paid taxes to support them, we wouldn’t be able to keep the schools open.)

Public schools exist to provide businesses with trained workers, and to attract industries that just won’t locate in a place without good public schools. They exist to give our property value. If you doubt the correlation between good public schools and property values, just ask a Realtor.

They exist to create an informed electorate — a critical ingredient to a successful representative democracy. (In fact, if I were inclined to argue that public schools have failed, I would point out just how many people we have walking around without a clear understanding of their responsibilities as citizens. But I don’t expect public education critics to use that one.)

Public schools exist to make sure we live in a decent society full of people able to live productive lives, instead of roaming the streets with no legitimate means of support. In terms of cost-effectiveness on this score, spending roughly $4,400 per pupil for public schools (the state’s actual share, not the inflated figure the bill’s advocates use, which includes local and federal funds) is quite a bargain set against the $13,000 it costs to keep one young person in prison. And South Carolina has the cheapest prisons in the nation.

Consider the taxes we pay to provide fire protection. It doesn’t matter if we never call the fire department personally. We still benefit (say, by having lower insurance rates) because the fire department exists. More importantly, our neighbors who do have an immediate need for the fire department — as many do each day — depend upon its being there, and being fully funded.

All of us have the obligation to pay the taxes that support public schools, just as we do for roads and law enforcement and the other more essential services that government provides. And remember, those of you who think of “government” as some wicked entity that has nothing to do with you: Government provides only those things that we, acting through our elected representatives, decide it should provide. You might disagree with some of those decisions, but you know, you’re not always going to be in the majority in a democracy.

If, as a consumer, you wish to pay for an alternative form of education for your child, you are free to do that. But that decision does not relieve you of the responsibility as a citizen to support the basic infrastructure of the society in which you live.

Radical libertarians — people who see themselves primarily as consumers, who want to know exactly what they are personally, directly receiving for each dollar that leaves their hands — don’t understand the role of government in society because they simply don’t understand how human beings are interconnected. I’m not just saying that we should be interconnected; I’m saying that we are, whether we like it or not. And if we want society to work so that we have a decent place in which to dwell, we have to adopt policies that recognize that stark fact.

That’s why we have public schools. And that’s why we all are obliged to support them.

Just the facts, Jack: Dept. of Ed. employment

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So we’ve heard Vincent Sheheen say there are only about 800 something state Department of Education employees, and Nikki comes back that no, there are eleven hundred and something (going by memory, since I can’t see my DVR from here).

And you think, “Whoa! Surely she wouldn’t give an actual NUMBER if it’s not true!” That is, you think that if you’re one of those simple folk who think numbers represent a special kind of truth.

And if you don’t know our Nikki, who is completely unbothered by actual facts.

Happily, self-styled “Crafty ol’ TV reporter” Jack Kuenzie bothered to check:

Debate issue: # of employees @ SC DOE? Dept. says 1,179 FTEs authorized, many slots vacant. Filled: 449 in bus shops, 434 administrative.

Those of you inclined to be overly kind will say, “Then they were both right!”

No.

The context in which this keeps coming up has to do with Nikki repeating the canard that our wicked, evil public education system never lays off “bureacrats,” but always lays off teachers first, because… well, just because it’s mean and evil.

Which, like most of what she says, is not true. The Department of Education — you know, the place where you find people actually enforce all those accountability rules and regulations that people who don’t trust public education have instituted over the years — actually employs far fewer than it’s authorized to employ.

And half of them (actually, more than half) keep the buses running. Just as Vincent keeps explaining.

“The Brad Show” is BACK! Our guest — Caroline Whitson

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Well, I told you it was coming back, and here it is!

After a well-received pilot episode, “The Brad Show” got put on the back burner — not by network twits like the ones who canceled “Firefly” (and who will no doubt go to the “special hell” that Shepherd Book preached about) — but by me, because I was way busy trying to keep a blog going while working a new job.

But now it’s back, and it has cool new intro and theme music, compliments of ADCO Interactive’s Jay Barry. I told Jay I wanted something sort of NPRish, or Dick Cavettesque, and with that crystal-clear direction, this is what he came up with.

Watch, enjoy, and be edified. Not by me, but by my guest, the president of Columbia College, and leader in the effort to pass the penny sales tax for transportation — which is what we talked about.

We also talked about Caroline’s plans to don a Catwoman-like costume for the Ludie Bowl festivities over the weekend. She promises pictures, which I’m looking forward to seeing, and posting…

bradwarthen.com

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