Category Archives: Education

USC president: They’re doing it again

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As you saw in today’s paper, the USC trustees might, if they feel like it, tell us who their three "finalists" for president of the university are. Then they plan to make their final selection Friday.

In other words, they’re presenting us with the next thing to a fait accompli, with virtually no time for the community (and in this case, "community" includes the state of South Carolina) to react and offer input.

As it happens this is precisely what we told them not to do in this editorial on our June 22 editorial page.

Could it be that they ignored us, again? Naaahhhh….

Since we’re all being kept in the dark, here are my predictions of who the three will be. We’ll see how many I get right (probably none, but I have no money bet on this, so who cares?):

  1. Harris Pastides
  2. Andy Card
  3. A Woman. No, I don’t have a name; I’m just saying one of the three will be a woman.

Yeah, I got the first two from today’s story. Of course, they’re the two who’ve been most often mentioned in the past. But the very fact that we all think we have reason to believe those two are finalists probably means that they were long ago eliminated from consideration, just because the trustees want to rub our noses in just how much in the dark we are, and what little regard they have for us and what we think we know…

SCRG’s arch-nemesis

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Have you heard about the group that Bill Cotty is heading up to take on Howard Rich, SCRG et al.?  Somehow, I had not focused on it until I saw this piece in the Spartanburg paper.

It’s called "South Carolinians for Truth and Disclosure." The Spartanburg story left off the "disclosure" part, and yet that seems to be the main point of the exercise. Here’s the group’s raison d’être:

South Carolinians for Truth [hey, they left it off, too!] is a grassroots organization whose
purpose is to advocate for the reform of South Carolina’s current
campaign finance laws. We demand new laws requiring issue advocacy
groups that mention an elected official or candidate by name to follow
the same laws of disclosure that candidates and party organizations are
required to follow.

We are a watchdog group working to set the record straight when organizations misrepresent the truth.

What does that mean? Well, what I think it means is that organizations spending money to influence your vote should tell us where their money comes from. What is the organization most associated with not wanting to tell us where their money comes from? SCRG.

SCRG likes to holler that we’re trying to take away its First Amendment rights when we say it should disclose. This, of course, is a load of horse manure. We think SCRG should disclose, and we also agree with SCRG when it says the S.C. School Boards Association should disclose. Goose, meet gander.

S.C. TAD (I see that our friend Tim wrote about them and referred to them merely as "TAD" on second reference) seems like some good folks, with a good purpose. But I’m not endorsing them, on general principles. I have too much of a sense of irony. When I see a clickable tab on the TAD home page that says "The Truth About Third-Party Groups," I can’t help thinking, Aren’t you a third-party group?

But I don’t mean to play moral relativity games here. Is there a difference? Sure. The "third-party groups" being criticized here are financed by sneaky, out-of-state residents of the ideological fringe who are offended by the very idea of public schools. This newer group consists (as near as I can tell) of South Carolinians who want to maintain and improve public schools (that’s certainly what Bill Cotty has always tried to do), and don’t want them done in by misleading campaigns by outsiders.

So there are third-party groups and third-party groups. I just didn’t want you to think I missed the irony.

Oh, and speaking of our blog friends, several are involved with the items I linked to above. You’ll see Earl Capps is working with Mr. Cotty. And in the Spartanburg story, you’ll see a less-than-complimentary reference to our friend Joshua Gross.

And of course, let’s not forget Ross Shealy, author of the recently-revived (just in time for the primaries) "BBQ and Politics." More about that in a separate post, if I can get to it today…

‘Dear SCRG:’ Herndon explains himself on vouchers

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Now I have received a copy of a response that David Herndon has sent to SCRG’s response to his complaint. If you had trouble following what I just said, go back and read this, then come back here and read the following:

Dear SCRG:

Thank you for you response. Please mark me as "oppose both" on question six.

We do not remember my campaign putting the "x" where we apparently did, but if we did do so it was a mistake.

Truthfully, a campaign assistant answered your questionnaire… and I do not know if it was our mistake or the awkward wording on your part that led us to "x" the wrong box.

Hopefully, I have been very clear about my support for public education, and my opposition to vouchers, from the very beginning. In fact, my strong support for education and my opposition to vouchers was a centerpiece of my campaign long before you sent your questionnaire. (It is also worth noting that part of the reason I am running is to give voters a pro-education alternative to your voucher candidate.)

David Herndon

Interesting exchange in District 79

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Randy Page of SCRG shared with me his response to an e-mail from David Herndon, whom we recently endorsed over Sheri Few for the GOP nomination in House Dist. 79.

First, the letter he says he got from Mr. Herndon:

To: SCRG
From: David Herndon, Republican for House
District 79

Dear sirs,

As you are aware, I am a Republican candidate for the S.C.
House of Representatives. I am writing because I am concerned about your
involvement in not just this race, but many others across the state as
well.

It has been brought to my attention that your
special-interest organization has sent out many mailings in many Legislative
races in South Carolina. Some of these postcards simply promote candidates, but
others are “attack pieces” which aim to discredit Republican office-holders who
support public education.

While state law certainly allows special interest groups to
endorse whomever you wish, these mailings leave many unanswered questions.
First, and most importantly, nowhere in any of these mailings — at least the
ones I am aware of — do you disclose the true motives of your group.

It is my understanding the purpose of your organization is to
advocate private school vouchers. Strangely, neither your advocacy of vouchers
nor your preferred candidates’ support for vouchers is mentioned in any of your
mailings.

As a public school parent, I strongly support public
education, and I believe your private-school voucher scheme would only drain
needed funding away from public school classrooms. However, I view this as an
honest difference of opinion, and I certainly believe it is important for
elected Representatives to find a common ground with those of other viewpoints.
What I do have a problem with is that your organization is not disclosing your
true motives. I feel this amounts to misleading voters.

Last month, I wrote to my opponent, Mrs. Few, to express my
concern about your involvement in this race. My concerns were based on your
previous track record of running negative, deceptive campaigns against
Republican office-holders who support education; your attempts to disguise your
true motives; and published reports that say much, if not a majority, of your
funding comes from out-of-state. (In my opinion, your negative campaign against
Bill Cotty in 2006 was perhaps the most negative our community has ever been
subjected to.)

My letter still has received no response, so I decided to
contact your organization directly.

I am writing you with this public challenge: In the rest of
your mailings this election cycle, please level with the voters about your true
motive — the privatization of education. The voters deserve honesty. And after
all, your group calls itself “South Carolinians for Responsible Government.” I
would think the hallmark of anyone claiming to advocate “responsible government”
would see the value in being as honest and up front as possible with the
voters.

So what do you say, SCRG? Do the voters not deserve to be
told the truth about your group’s purpose as you fill up their mailboxes with
attack pieces, pictures of pigs and postcards about conservative
judges?

I look forward to your response, and I hope you will answer
this challenge. The voters deserve as much.

Thank you,

David Herndon

Then, Randy’s response:

Dear Mr.
Herndon,

Thank you for your
email.  I appreciate you taking the time to contact South Carolinians for
Responsible Government. 

Through mail, radio and
Internet, we have been very clear about our objectives.  In fact, you can read
about it on our website at http://www.scrgov.org/content.asp?name=Site&catID=8110&parentID=8088
     We have long advocated the need for lower taxes, government restructuring,
conservative judges and for tuition tax credits.

In my view, citizens
don’t need to be wary of a conservative organization that advocates for better
schools, lower taxes and streamlining government, but rather someone, like
yourself, who one day professes a particular set of beliefs, but then decides –
perhaps on the advice of a slick political consultant – that he’s changed his
position.  What else could describe your sudden about face on the issue of
school choice? 

In the survey that you
signed and submitted to us on April 18th, you clearly checked that
you supported both a scholarship granting organization and a voucher system. 
I’m sure this will come as a complete surprise to the editors of The State.
If you don’t remember, I’ve included a copy of it for you – as well as the
members of the media that were copied on this message.

Sincerely,

Randy Page,
President

South Carolinians for
Responsible Government

I guess it’s a good thing that, as I said in my Sunday column, it was her position on the cigarette tax that made me decide against endorsing Sheri Few.

A brief political history of the PACT

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
ONE WHO TRIED to decipher what happened in the S.C. Senate last week with regard to the PACT — that’s “Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test” to the uninitiated — can be forgiven for being confused.
I certainly am.
    Start with a press release from Sen. Greg Ryberg, which said in part, “PACT is dead…. the bill we passed today kills it as of July 1, 2008.” He said “the creation and administration of our statewide assessment test belongs with the people at the State Department of Education, the State Board of Education and the Education Oversight Committee (EOC) whose sole focus is education and not the General Assembly. I am glad that we have left it in their hands.”
    This was confusing to me because I was here when the PACT was created to measure whether schools were successfully meeting educational standards set in the Education Accountability Act, which the Legislature passed at the behest of business leaders who wanted a better-trained work force and conservative Republicans who were determined that if money was going to be spent on public schools, the schools were by golly going to meet objective standards. The EAA created the EOC and charged it with making sure the DOE (had enough initials yet?) did what the Legislature insisted be done.
    So yeah, if the PACT is to be changed, it’s the bureaucrats’ job to do it. But it’s the Legislature’s job to tell them to do it.
    More confusingly, this is exactly what state Superintendent of Education Jim Rex wanted the Legislature to do. “Teachers and parents are clamoring for these changes, our students need them and our state deserves them,” Mr. Rex said in his own release. “It’s really gratifying to see the Senate make such a strong statement with its unanimous vote.”
    In case the elected officials don’t have you confused enough, the chief organization devoted to diverting public education funds to private schools declared Friday that “The PACT is an expensive and outdated test that lacks the child-specific diagnostic data required by teachers. Unlike tests used in other states, PACT is South Carolina specific, and doesn’t provide educators with a comparison of our schools to regional and national test scores.” SCRG went on to charge that “Superintendent Rex was unwilling to replace PACT on his own,” and celebrated the idea that “final passage of this Senate bill will force him into action.”
    Action that he’s been begging for authorization to take.
    It might be instructive at this point to note that the Senate is run by Republicans, as is the House, which earlier passed legislation authorizing a revamp of the PACT, while Mr. Rex is the state’s highest-ranking elected Democrat. These fact are not at all important to me; I see them as an asinine distraction. But to the players, party considerations are of the utmost importance.
    Republicans are terribly worried at the moment that Mr. Rex will challenge their divine right to the governor’s office by seeking that position in 2010. In fact, some see his insistence that a PACT replacement be in use by a year from now, rather than a year later, as a ploy on his part to give a boost to his campaign. In other words, these Republicans suspect him of being too anxious to replace the PACT, other Republicans see him as too reluctant (or say they do), while Mr. Rex sees his level of enthusiasm for replacing the PACT as being, like the Mama Bear’s porridge, just right.
    How did we get here?
    I already mentioned above how the EAA, and its child the PACT, came into being in the late 1990s. Far from being some sort of oversight, the point was to have a South Carolina-specific test, to measure whether the specific standards our state adopted — some of the highest standards in the country, by the way — were being met by the schools. The point was to make sure the schools didn’t let any students fall through the cracks.
    This Republican-driven reform was never welcome among what critics are pleased to call the “education establishment,” or among Democrats, the party most closely identified with said establishment. But Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum, elected in 1998, had to accept the whole shebang as a fait accompli.
    Teachers complained about the PACT from the start. One of their main complaints was that the test (actually, a battery of tests, but let’s keep it simple) was not useful to them in helping individual students. Of course, it had never been intended for that purpose, but it was a complaint with great appeal across the political spectrum. Even SCRG, which is certainly no friend of public school teachers, took it up.
    Add to that the fact that schools felt so much pressure over the PACT that they inflicted pressure on the teachers who then transferred the stress to the students, and before you knew it, it appeared that all teaching ceased in the last weeks of each school year while everyone involved participated in a mass panic attack over the test.
    It is a great shame that teachers have been so conscious of this pressure, and a greater one that students have. This was, after all, about helping the students by making sure the schools, as institutions, did not fail them.
    So it’s good that a bipartisan consensus emerged this year to change the PACT into an instrument that would hold schools accountable, while providing in addition an instrument that teachers can use for timely diagnosis and remediation.
    But it’s bad that partisan craziness has made it so hard for voters and taxpayers — the folks to whom the system was to be held accountable — to tell whether that is happening.

Maybe not dead so much as completely different

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Jim Foster over at the state Department of Education sent out this release, which is a tad more informative than Mr. Ryberg’s:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, May 15, 2008

Senate gives key approval to bill that would
replace PACT, reform 1998 accountability law

COLUMBIA – The South Carolina Senate today gave unanimous
second-reading approval to legislation that would replace PACT while
making significant changes to South Carolina’s overall student
assessment and school accountability systems.

“Teachers and parents are clamoring for these changes, our students
need them and our state deserves them,” said State Superintendent of
Education Jim Rex.  “It’s really gratifying to see the Senate make
such a strong statement with its unanimous vote.”

After receiving a routine third reading, the Senate-amended version of
H.4662 will return to the House next week for its consideration.  If the
House declines to accept the changes made by the Senate, the bill would
head to a conference committee.

One key difference, Rex said, is that the Senate bill mandates a
replacement for PACT by spring 2009.  The House bill would replace PACT
in 2010.

“Everyone agrees that we need to replace PACT as quickly as possible
with a system that’s more useful to teachers and informative for
parents,” Rex said.  “I hope the House will see that we don’t need
another year of PACT before we start using something that works
better.”

Both versions of the legislation would make the first significant
changes to South Carolina’s Education Accountability Act since it was
approved by the General Assembly 10 years ago.  That law mandated annual
PACT testing for 380,000 students in grades 3-8 and the publishing of
annual school report cards.

H.4662 is based on recommendations from two statewide task forces
appointed by Rex last summer – one for testing and one for
accountability.  Those groups, which met numerous times over the late
summer and fall, included representatives from local districts and
schools, teacher and school administrator organizations, the South
Carolina School Boards Association, the General Assembly, the Education
Oversight Committee, the State Board of Education, business groups, and
colleges and universities.

The Senate version of the legislation would:
●    Eliminate PACT and replace it in 2009 with new end-of-year
accountability tests that feature “essay” exams in March and more
easily scored multiple-choice exams in May.  Schools would get final
results within a few weeks of the May tests, compared to late July with
PACT.
●    Revise the content of annual school report cards to make it more
understandable and useful for parents, while simultaneously making
certain that any revisions are in full compliance with the federal No
Child Left Behind Act.
●    Support voluntary “formative” assessments in English
language arts, mathematics, science and social studies.  These tests
would provide teachers with immediate feedback on individual students’
strengths and weaknesses and allow them to customize instruction based
on those needs.
●    Eliminate burdensome paperwork requirements for teachers.
●    Bring South Carolina’s student performance targets into
alignment with other states.
●    Review the state’s school accountability system every five
years to be certain that it’s working efficiently and effectively.

Trouble is, and contrary to wildly popular belief, the PACT was never intended to be "useful to teachers and informative for parents." There are other devices for doing those things. The purpose of PACT was to enable policy makers to determine whether schools and districts were succeeding at teaching the standards that were created to make education in South Carolina more useful in the sense of producing an educated populace.

It was the end result of the Accountability Act. The idea was to determine what kids should be learning (the standards, which are some of the highest in the country), and then have a device to let the lawmakers who passed the Accountability Act see whether the schools and districts were getting the job done in the aggregate.

It was the creation of business leaders who said graduates didn’t have the skills needed in the workplace, and conservative Republicans whose attitude toward education was that they didn’t want to appropriate all that money for it without some objective measurement of whether goals were being met.

Anyway, I thought somebody who actually remembers what this was all about should mention that. So I did.

Ryberg: PACT is dead

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Greg Ryberg wants to claim credit for doing away with the PACT test. Witness this release:

Senator Greg Ryberg today hailed an agreement between himself and senate leaders to eliminate PACT and move forward on a new accountability system for South Carolina. “PACT is dead,” Ryberg said. “The bill we passed today kills it as of July 1, 2008.”
    Ryberg added that, “Other senators, Republicans and Democrats, agreed with me that the creation and administration of our statewide assessment test belongs with the people at the State Department of Education, the State Board of Education and the Education Oversight Committee (EOC) whose sole focus is education and not the General Assembly. I am glad that we have left it in their hands.”
    Ryberg also welcomed the decision to remove mandatory formative assessment testing for six and seven year-olds. He said that, “I opposed the 100% increase in standardized testing for our youngest students, and I thank the senators who worked with me to prevent that extra burden upon them.”
    Ryberg noted that it is now time for the superintendent, the State Board and the EOC to get to work and move us forward. “I encourage the superintendent, the State Board and the EOC to act now that the General Assembly has spoken.”

I’m not at all sure what he means by saying first, it’s dead; then saying this is in the hands of the state DOE. It reads a little like, I’m sick and damned tired of hearing about this thing, so YOU deal with it. But Sen. Ryberg is generally not the shirker sort, so I reject that interpretation and await another.

Perhaps elucidation will be forthcoming.

Let’s talk military buildup

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There are certain things that worry me, and nobody seems to be talking about them. In fact, our public conversations tend to go off in directions entirely opposed to where the discussion should be going. For instance:

  • Children’s brains are essentially formed, in terms of their ability to learn for the rest of their lives, by age 3. What do we do about that? I don’t know, but it’s weird that we can’t even make up our minds to fund 4K for all the kids who could benefit from it.
  • Also on education — we need to bring about serious reforms in public education, from consolidating districts to merit pay to empowering principals. But thanks to our governor and his ilk, we talk about whether we want to support public schools at all.
  • China is growing and modernizing its military at a pace that matches its economic growth. It won’t be all that long before it achieves parity with our own. But instead of talking about matching that R&D, we can’t make up our minds to commit the resources necessary to fight a low-intensity conflict against relatively weak enemies with low-tech weapons.

Anyway, there was an op-ed piece in the WSJ today about the latter worry:

China has a vast internal market newly unified by modern transport and communications; a rapidly flowering technology; an irritable but highly capable workforce that as long as its standard of living improves is unlikely to push the country into paralyzing unrest; and a wider world, now freely accessible, that will buy anything it can make. China is threatened neither by Japan, Russia, India, nor the Western powers, as it was not that long ago. It has an immense talent for the utilization of capital, and in the free market is as agile as a cat.

Unlike the U.S., which governs itself almost unconsciously, reactively and primarily for the short term, China has plotted a long course, in which with great deliberation it joins economic growth to military power. Thirty years ago, in what may be called the "gift of the Meiji," Deng Xiaoping transformed the Japanese slogan fukoku kyohei (rich country, strong arms) into China’s 16-Character Policy: "Combine the military and the civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military."

Anyway, discuss amongst yourselves. And if you can, try to get the people running for president to talk about it. We need them to…

Senate Dist. 21: A ‘debate’ between Wendy Brawley and Sen. Darrell Jackson over his position on school ‘choice’

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This is one of my better little videos from endorsement interviews lately.

Wendy Brawley of Richland One school board, who is challenging Sen. Darrell Jackson for the Democratic nomination in Dist. 21, is going after the incumbent hard, and has a bill of particulars as to how she believes he’s looked after his own business more than the people’s. An example: Her accusation that he favors private school vouchers.

Sen. Jackson argues back strongly, point by point. I think it’s a video worth watching, especially if you live in that lower-Richland and Calhoun County district.

Why can’t we be smart like our sister?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THINK OF South Carolina as a restless schoolboy. He doesn’t test well, but he’s got loads of potential; everybody says so. He’s a well-meaning kid, but has an attention-deficit problem. There he sits, as far to the back of the class as he can get away with. As the teacher drones on about science and stuff, he wonders whether he can get away with spending his lunch money on candy again. Then, just as he’s turned to calculating the number of days left until school is out and he can go to the beach (he’s very good at this sort of math), his reverie is rudely interrupted.
    The teacher stands over him, her eyes just boring into him over the glasses on the end of her nose. She speaks directly to him, demanding to know, “Why can’t you be smart like your sister?”
    The poor kid hears that a lot.
    My own rather feckless, aimless mind (I was born here, you know) has been running along these lines all week, as I’ve been repeatedly reminded of how well our smart sister has applied herself. Not my sister, personally, but South Carolina’s. Her name is Queensland, and she’s our sister state in Australia.
    Her former premier, Peter Beattie, spoke at my Rotary meeting Monday, although I didn’t realize it at the time because I slipped out of the meeting early (I’m telling you, I am that boy). Mr. Beattie is the one who suggested the whole “sister-state” economic development relationship when he was in office back in the ’90s. He got the idea after a visit here in 1996. He had come to study how our state had taken advantage of the Atlanta Olympics, serving as a training site and hosting the women’s marathon trials. He hoped his state could do the same with the Sydney games.
    As things turned out, though, our “sister” would go on to do some things we should emulate. As premier, he pushed a strategy that would lead to Australia’s “Sunshine State” getting a new alias: “The Smart State.”
    During a week when the S.C. Senate Finance Committee was reacting to tough fiscal times by cutting back on the endowed chairs program and letting K-12 funding slide backward, I kept getting my nose rubbed in the smartness of our sister despite my best efforts to miss the point. On Wednesday, someone sent me a copy of remarks Mr. Beattie — who has been lecturing at USC’s Walker
Institute of International & Area Studies recently — had prepared for a speech this coming Tuesday to the Global Business Forum in Columbia. I skimmed over what he had written…

    Twenty years ago, Queensland was a traditional rocks-and-crops economy where education was not regarded as a priority. But with increasing globalisation, my government knew this was not enough to compete with the new emerging markets of China and India…. We publicly said innovate or stagnate were our choices.
    As a result we developed a strategy called Smart State. This involved a major overhaul of our education and training systems… the cutting edge of developments in biotechnology, energy, information and communications…
    The result has been… Queensland’s lowest unemployment rate in three decades… budget surpluses and a AAA credit rating. Our economic growth has outperformed the nation’s growth for 10 consecutive years and was done on the back of competitive state taxes. Our focus has been long-term and education reform was central.
    Since 1998, the Queensland Government has invested almost $3 billion to boost innovation and R&D infrastructure…

    … but I didn’t have time to read it all just then. Being that unfocused boy, I did find time to write a pointless post on my blog about how “For some reason, Queensland keeps coming up a lot this week for me….” That night, I was attending a lecture by Salman Rushdie, who had been brought here by Janette Turner Hospital, the novelist and USC professor, who as it happens grew up in Queensland.
    So guess who I ran into at the reception that night for Mr. Rushdie? Yep — Peter Beattie. (The coincidences were starting to get as weird and mystical as something out of a novel by, well, Salman Rushdie.)
    Cooperating with the inevitable, I introduced myself, and he told me eagerly about the exciting high-tech opportunities he saw here in South Carolina, what with the endowed chairs and Innovista, and our state’s advantages in the fields of hydrogen power, clean coal technology and biotech.
    Biotech, by the way, has been a big one for Queensland, employing 3,200 people, generating $4 billion a year in revenues, and leading to such concrete advances as Ian Fraser’s new human papillomavirus vaccine, which is now protecting 13 million women worldwide from cervical cancer — just so you know it’s not all pie in the sky.
    When I asked him about some of the less-than-visionary (in my view, not his) decisions being made by S.C. political leaders as we spoke, he insisted that was not his place: “I’m a guest here,” he said in that wonderful Down Under accent. “Queensland is like South Carolina. Manners are important.”
    He spoke instead about the opportunities we had in common, and about the fact that places such as Queensland and South Carolina “have to innovate or be left behind.”
    South Carolina, so used to lagging behind the other kids, truly does possess the potential to be a “smart state” like our sister. But too many easily distracted boys over at the State House keep staring out the classroom window…

The mysterious Queensland connection

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For some reason, Queensland keeps coming up a lot this week for me.

  • First, some visitors from there were introduced at my Rotary meeting Monday afternoon (at which I had to do the Health and Happiness presentation). Queensland is South Carolina’s official Australian sister state for economic development purposes, a fact that comes up frequently at Rotary, it seems.
  • Monday night, I sat in on Janette Turner Hospital‘s lecture on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, then I was the moderator of a panel discussion that followed about religion and culture and politics and how they come together in the whole Rushdie fatwa thing. Why Janette and Gordon Smith asked me, I’m still not clear. Anyway, Janette grew up in Queensland, and went to university there.
  • Then today, Samuel Tenenbaum, in keeping with his never-ending battle to save the endowed chairs program (a battle that gets tougher every day), sent me an article by Peter Beattie, the former premier of Queensland, who is now teaching at USC Moore School of Business.

Somehow, this series of coincidences seem almost like the sort of mystical stuff you’d find in a Rushdie novel (either that, or like something from "I ♥ Huckabees," depending on how high- or lowbrow your cultural associations may be). Which reminds me… tonight I’m going to Mr. Rushdie’s lecture at USC, and might meet him afterward at a reception. If so, I’ll tell you about it.

Anyway, the article Samuel sent me was about how "Queensland took the view that brain power and the encouragement of innovation are our future," and the resulting "Smart State" program took Queensland from a "traditional rocks and crops economy" to the point that it attracted some of the most sophisticated research facilities in the world, and now has about 90 knowledge-economy firms employing over 1,900 people. The whole "Smart State" thing has really caught on there, leading observers around the world to ask South Carolinians, "Why can’t you be smart like your sister?" OK, I made that last part up, but it’s not an unfair representation of how we are received, which is why folks like Samuel (and I) believe we need to maintain our commitment to endowed chairs.

Samuel wants me to consider the piece for op-ed, and perhaps I shall. If not, I’ll post it here.

Earmark crusader still takes credit for SOME funds going back home

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Jim DeMint deserves a lot of credit for his crusade against earmarks. While we were reminded recently by Andrew Sorensen that earmarks are not necessarily always a bad thing — they’ve brought significant research funding to our universities — there’s no question that the whole process was out of control. Sen. DeMint has played a leadership role in embarrassing Democrats and Republicans alike on the issue, and on the whole I think that has had a salutary effect.

I was a little taken aback the last couple of days, though, when I received releases from Sen. DeMint announcing grant money for schools back here in South Carolina. No, they weren’t technically "earmarks." But by "announcing" these grants that were ostensibly "competitive" — which suggests that they were disbursed according to some criteria other than the political pull of a member of Congress — he is participating in the standard political practice of suggesting to the home folks that he is somehow responsible for this largesse.

And that, of course, is why politicians go after earmarks — so they can say to the folks back home, "Lookee what I brung you!" Here’s the release I received today:

Department of Education Awards $955,101 in Competitive Grants to Richland and Lexington School District 5

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) announced that Richland and Lexington School District 5 will receive $955,101 in competitive grants under the Teaching American History Grants program. This grant is designed to raise student achievement by improving teacher’s knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of U.S. history.  The program also aims to improve the quality of history instruction by supporting professional development for U.S. history teachers.

            ###

These releases do not cancel the cred Mr. DeMint has earned on the
earmarks issue. And they’re not a lot of money, and this one sounds like it’s
for a good cause (Lord knows we need to increase the level of understanding about our history in this country). They just seemed worth taking note of.

What is the useful role of CHE?

10 Replies

Waltersgarrison

As foreshadowed in a previous post, we met this afternoon with Garrison Walters, the new (new to us, anyway) head of the state Commission on Higher Education.

Once upon a time, that post was filled by Fred Sheheen — Vincent’s Daddy, for those keeping up with political genealogy — who had an active, aggressive notion of the role the CHE should play in marshaling this poor state’s limited higher education resources to greatest effect. The powers that be, such as those who revere the prerogatives of the godlike boards of trustees of the respective institutions, did not like his style. They moved not only to get rid of him, but to restructure the CHE to make it kinder, gentler and less likely to say "nay" to anything they wished to do — or to have any authority even if it did say so.

Since then, the organization has been a lot more studious and polite — content with a "coordinating" rather than "governing" role. Mr. Walters is aware that our board has long favored a Board of Regents that would treat our collection of public, post-secondary institutions as a system rather than islands. He maintains, as do many who cast doubt on our restructuring fervor (say, the Senate on doing away with the "long ballot," or defenders of the council-manager system in Columbia), that some states with such boards do well, and others do not, while some states without overall governance do fine (he cites Michigan, Illinois and Texas).

My position, as always, is that given a choice between a structure intended to facilitate efficiency and accountability on the one hand, and a structure that one can succeed in those regards in spite of, I prefer the former.

As previously noted, of course, we temporarily have a condition in which our three research institutions, motivated in part by such inducements as the endowed chairs, are pulling at their oars as though they understand that we’re all in the same boat. Mr. Walters made note of that. Our position is to applaud our current state, but to worry about what happens when the current individuals in leadership move on, as Andrew Sorensen is about to do. Below that level cooperation and coordination is less evident, although there are encouraging exceptions to that trend.

Anyway, Mr. Walters held out hope that once a study committee finishes its work in September, we might see a new focus and purpose toward focusing our higher ed efforts. Let’s hope he’s right. In the meantime, I provide a video clip in which I ask our guest what he thinks it will take for South Carolina to get where it needs to go, and what CHE’s role is in that…

South Carolina just got a little smarter

25 Replies

Morad

This morning I had the honor of meeting Martin Morad, who plans "to develop the world’s first pacemaker made from living tissue," and to do it right here in South Carolina. He’s the latest extraordinary individual that the endowed chairs program has brought here. (That’s him with Larry Wilson and Harris Pastides above. I think those are Ray Greenberg’s arms folded at left; I don’t know the lady in the background.)

There are a lot of things I could say about this guy, and I hope to come back here and say them later (right now, I’m stealing time from other things that need doing today in order to write this — as usual). For now, read the story that was on today’s front page.

I’ll just mention one thing that may seem small to you, but which marks a huge step in my mind…

If there is one thing that holds South Carolina back economically, politically, socially and in every other way more than anything else, it’s fragmentation. Our government is completely dysfunctional thanks to the fragmentation of authority and accountability in the executive branch. On the local level, you see fractals reflecting the same pattern — Columbia as an economic entity can’t get its act together because it’s split into about a dozen municipalities, two counties, seven school districts, various special purpose districts, etc. Even when you distill it down to the tiny political entity that is technically Columbia, political power is fragmented across a seven-member council with no one, elected individual in a position to be responsible for the big picture.

In the realm of higher education, fragmentation has taken us into some amazingly stupid realms in our recent history. First, there is the fact that each of our colleges and semi-colleges is a political entity unto itself, answerable to no one but each institution’s respective board of trustees, each member of which is elected by the 170 members of the General Assembly. This has led to such things as the battle over supercomputers in the late 80s, right after I came back to SC to work at this newspaper — if USC was going to get a supercomputer, then the political "logic" of this state was what Clemson had to have one, too.

We have the charade of a coordinating body — the Commission on Higher Education — which is, by legislative decree, toothless. (Coincidentally, the new head of the CHE is coming to meet the editorial board this afternoon, which puts this even more immediately in mind.) But there is nothing like, say, a board of regents with real power to assign missions, coordinate and focus resources and avoid duplication.

In the last few years, we have been fortunate in that the three presidents of our research institutions — Andrew Sorensen, Ray Greenberg and James Barker — have formed an alliance to work together on a variety of fronts to accomplish some of the things that a unified, rational system of public higher education was accomplished. One of the greatest factors encouraging this relationship to flourish — giving it an undeniable economic impetus — is the endowed chairs program.

Anyway, here’s the thing about Dr. Morad that is in its way as remarkable for South Carolina as, say, developing a living pacemaker: He is the first faculty member in the history of the state to be simultaneously hired by all three research universities at once. (Why? Because it took all three institutions to come up with the talent he needs to make his project happen — which suggests that maybe we should start referring to the three, and governing them, as one institution; put them together, and you’ve got something impressive.) Therefore he embodies the combination of our resources to achieve great things that our petty divisions have kept us from accomplishing in the past. He is the New South Carolinian, the Adam in our new-tech Garden of Eden.

I’ll stop with the metaphors now. Suffice it to say, his arrival in this, his new home, is a big deal for South Carolina.

Bud testifies about the constitutional amendment

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Just so you know Bud Ferillo thinks about more than spending Belinda Gergel’s money, here’s his testimony to the Senate subcommittee considering whether to amend the S.C. constitution to read that the state "will provide a high quality education, allowing each student to reach his highest potential."

Bud, as you may or may not know, is the guy who made the film, "Corridor of Shame:"

Presentation of Bud Ferillo
Senate Subcommittee
On S.1136
March 13, 2008
9:00 AM
          It is a privilege for me to address the subcommittee this morning, something I have never done before.
          While I served this state, in the 1970’s and 80’s as Chief of staff to House Speakers Rex Carter and Ramon Schwartz and as Deputy Lieutenant Governor under Lt. Gov. Mike Daniel, I come today as a private citizen still in awe of these halls and full of respect for those of you in both parties who serve our state today.
          The Constitution of the State of South Carolina which the legislation before you would amend was adopted in one of the most difficult periods of our state’s history by some of our most unenlightened elected officials. It was the era of Jim Crow and the long shadow of slavery has given way to legalized racial segregation, a cruel, one sided system of rights and privileges for the few over the many. It was not until 1911 that South Carolina attained a majority white population and so the constitution adopted in 1895 was not a declaration of human rights. In fact, it sought to enshrine the benefits of government only to those with political and economic power.
          Our racially segregated public schools remained separate and unequal for another two generations because that was state policy. Even with the Brown decision in 1954, rising from the school desegregation case of Briggs vs. Elliott in Clarendon County, it was not until Governor Hollings declared in 1963 as he left office that “South Carolina had run out of courts” and the state negotiated the admission of Harvey Garnett into Clemson University, followed a year later by the integration of USC and our public school system.
          This difficult history is painful to recall and painful to hear but it explains why we have attained no little progress in securing quality public education for all the children of the state. To be honest, we have not been about the business of providing quarterly education to all the children of South Carolina for very long.
          Even today, sadly, the legal position of our state in the Abbeville vs. State of South Carolina school funding case, still places South Carolina on the wrong side of history. This state continues to claim it has no obligation to provide even a “minimally adequate” education for our children.
          I have come to you today as a witness to the failure of our state to achieve either minimally adequate education or the opportunity for our children to achieve an excellent education which would equip them to contend in a world changing before their eyes at warp speed.
          My plea today is a simple one: I urge the General Assembly to put the issue of high quality public education to the people of this state to decide.
          Our sister states of Virginia and Florida have shown the way by amending their constitutions to require their states to provide high quality education to their children.
          A state’s constitution is its highest standard of governance; it is the document that enshrines our noblest aspirations; it is the final repository of who we are and what we care about as a people. While we were born into an unjust society in South Carolina; we do not have to grow old in it.
          I respectfully urge this subcommittee to favorably report S.1136 so that it might begin its rigorous journey through the legislative process and be given to the people of this state to determine in the general election of 2010. The amendment will serve a useful purpose in setting the highest standards of educational attainment against which future legislative actions and funding can be judged.
          My friend and ally John Rainey, who will address you shortly, and others across this state in a coalition too broad and lengthy to name will soon launch a petition campaign that will allow South Carolinians to participate directly in the legislative process.
          We will soon unveil the web site www.goodbyeminimallyadequate.com where South Carolinians may sign a petition in support of this constitutional amendment. It is our ambitious but accepted challenge to present the signatures of 1,000,000 South Carolinians in support of S.1136 to the General Assembly during the opening day of the 2009 General Assembly.
          We cannot miss this opportunity to involve the people of our state in this process which will, to a large extent tell, us everything about what kind of state we have and what kind of future we will pass on to those who follow.

I’m not entirely sure what practical effect Bud and other advocates believe this wording change will have. I mean, even based on the "minimally adequate" interpretation, all that a court case that started in about 10,000 B.C. has accomplished was a ruling saying South Carolina should do better at early-childhood education, to which the Legislature responded by nodding vigorously, expanding a pilot program, then forgetting about it.

Such a wording change might make a lot of folks feel better, but the fact is that if South Carolina wants to pull up its rural areas to the educational level of the suburbs — which it must do if we’re ever to begin to catch up to the rest of the country — it will do so, whether the constitution mentions education at all or not.

David Shi, Furman president

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Shidavid

Today we had a visit from David Shi, president of Furman University. He also spoke to the Columbia Rotary, and his topic was the same, so if you were there you heard what Mike, Warren and I heard this morning.

He was here to stress Furman’s focus on public policy-related initiatives across the state, which he said was unique (at least, to this extent) among private colleges in South Carolina, and to a certain extent nationally. He knows of no private, liberal arts college anywhere else with the statewide focus that Furman has. Among the programs to which he referred:

  • The Riley Institute, named for former Gov. and Education Sec. Dick Riley, a Furman alumnus. You can read about it here. One program offered under the aegis of the Institute is the Diversity Leadership Academies across the state.
  • The David Wilkins Award, named for the ex-Speaker and current ambassador to Canada, which is awarded annually for bipartisan statesmanship. John Drummond, Bobby Harrell (Wilkins’ successor) and Hugh Leatherman have all received it.
  • The Rushing Center for Advanced Technology, which offers tailored training programs for businesses.
  • Being a signator of The American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. One cool thing related to this — a model "green" home being built on the campus for an upcoming Southern Living cover, which after that will become office and meeting space for the university’s overall green initiatives.

There was more, but you get the gist. And why go to so much trouble to engender public leadership? One reason he offered, which I thought a masterpiece of academic understatement, was because Furman is in South Carolina, which is "not really known for prolonged, high-quality public leadership."

‘Choice’ advocate realizes markets aren’t enough

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There was a rather extraordinary piece on the WSJ Web site yesterday that I meant to call to your attention, but the piece was so long I couldn’t find a chunk of time long enough to finish reading it myself. Now I have, and I highly recommend it.

Here’s a link. I hope it works for you; I’m never sure since I subscribe to the Journal, and I can never tell what I have access to as a subscriber and what’s free.

The piece, written by an advocate of private-school vouchers, is a point-by-point explanation what’s wrong with the idea that if we just provide market-based options, our education problems will be solved. What really struck me about it was the extent to which it supports pretty much every point we’ve tried to make as to why vouchers and tuition tax credits are a bad fit for South Carolina.

  • For "choice," in the sense of vouchers and tax credits, to work at all, there have to be real choices — there has to be someplace for kids and parent to spend those incentives. As we’ve said so many times, it makes zero sense to apply a system designed for dense northern cities with an existing, parallel Catholic school system to South Carolina, where the usual problem is in poor, rural areas where there are no viable private alternatives, and where the population is insufficiently dense for such alternatives to arise as an economic response to vouchers or tax credits. As this writer says (about the Catholic schools that are themselves going away, in spite of the availability of vouchers), "where would the city’s disadvantaged students use vouchers even if they had them?" The question has exponentially greater force in the Corridor of Shame.
  • The existence of voucher-backed private competition does NOT cause the public schools to get better. This would seem obvious to most people, who understand that if external pressure were all that was needed, the Accountability Act would have solved all our problems. Ask a teacher whether he or she feels pressure to perform. They’ll probably answer that pressure is about all they feel from the world outside the classroom. As the author says, "sadly — and this is a second development that reformers must face up
    to — the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is
    making public schools better."
  • The only thing that will improve the public schools is — drumroll here — improving the public schools (which, in the absence of the kind of alternative educational infrastructure northern cities once had, are the only schools most kids will ever have the opportunity to go to, with or without vouchers and tax credits).

Mr. Stern holds up Massachusetts as an example of what works:

Those in the school reform movement seeking a case of truly spectacular academic improvement should look to Massachusetts, where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The state’s average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.

The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom.

Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the state’s board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Ms. Stotsky sums up: "The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students’ academic achievement."

Mr. Stern hasn’t abandoned his faith, in spite of the evidence: "Obviously, private scholarship programs ought to keep helping poor families find alternatives to failing public schools." And he remains one of those ideologues who considers "choice" advocates and school "reformers" to be the same set of people. (We see that in South Carolina all too often, in which people who simply don’t buy into the idea of public education decry others for standing in the way of "reform.") But within his own definitions, he asserts that "we should re-examine the direction of school reform."

And I will say yet again, the proper direction is clear. We should implement the kinds of reforms that our editorial board has pushed for years, starting with curriculum standards (which the EAA is meant to address) to such innovations as merit pay for teachers, principals empowered to hire and fire without interference, and consolidation of districts to get money out of administration and into the classroom.

Unfortunately, every effort to implement ANY kind of educational reform — and "reform," when I use it, means fixing schools, not abandoning them — is quickly suffocated by "choice" advocates in our Legislature, who tie their amendments around the neck of any education bill that tries to get through the General Assembly. This, of course, has the the effect on education reform of tying an anvil around the neck of a swimmer, causing all sides to spend all available political energy arguing about their digressions. So we get nowhere.

Another county heard from on endowed chairs

12 Replies

Tenenbaumsamuel

Samuel Tenenbaum (pictured above, back when he was running Columbia’s Katrina relief effort) hipped me to this editorial from over in Anderson this morning. An excerpt:

    We’re puzzled by Gov. Mark Sanford’s estimation of the effectiveness of endowed chairs for research, especially considering his usually forward-thinking positions on technology and economic development.
    Last week, Mr. Sanford encouraged House lawmakers to reconsider a proposal that removes the cap on lottery proceeds for the Centers of Economic Excellence program…..
    Before the lottery became official in South Carolina, we questioned whether endowed chairs were the best use of funds. But it’s clear that transforming our state into one that is in the forefront of research into health care, automotives and other economic development opportunities could not have gotten this far without the financial boost from lottery proceeds.
    For once, South Carolina is thinking not just about what next year might bring but what could develop in five years or 10 years or even 20 years in the future as a result of research efforts right here at home.

Frankly, I’m puzzled as to  why the Anderson paper is puzzled. Maybe it’s because it labors under the mistaken impression that Mr. Sanford "usually" manifests "forward-thinking positions on technology and economic development." Where they got that, I don’t know. If he’s done that, I must have been looking somewhere else at the time. His pattern ranges from neutral to hostile when it comes to ecodevo investments. If you’ll recall, his first big move in that arena came in his first month in office, when he put the brakes on Clemson’s I-CAR program. Soon after being hit by a tsunami of outrage from Upstate leaders, he let the project go ahead. Here’s what the chair of our endowed chairs board had to say Sunday about what that project has produced:

For instance, the endowed chairs program is a central component of the Clemson International Center for Automotive Research. The recruiting of three world-renowned experts in automotive engineering has already attracted major investment from companies such as BMW, Timken, Sun Microsystems and Michelin, and — all told more than $220 million in private investment and 500 jobs in the Upstate with an average salary of $75,000.

Also, here’s what BMW had to say recently about that partnership.

Again, as I said in my column Sunday, our governor doesn’t believe, deep down, in public investment in building our economy, whether we’re talking K-12 public schools or endowed chairs. He believes all that is needed for a robust economy is the right "soil conditions," which to him largely means reduced income taxes.

Finally, why did Samuel,  the head of the Energy Party’s think tank, bring this to my attention? Because Samuel is the father of endowed chairs. He came up with the idea of spending lottery funds this way, he fought to convince Gov. Jim Hodges to go along with it, and has fought ever since against short-sighted efforts in the Legislature to kill or curtail the program and spend the money on something more immediately politically appealing. Samuel also served on the endowed chairs board from its inception until Mark Sanford replaced him last year.

But while he may be a cheerleader without portfolio, he cheers just as loudly as ever, and for good reason. The endowed chairs program, his baby, offers a lot to cheer about — and will continue to do so, if it survives the likes of Mark Sanford.

Sanford fails to derail progress — this time

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LATE WEDNESDAY, I thought I had come up with an excuse to say something encouraging about Gov. Mark Sanford.
    Such opportunities come so seldom that I didn’t want this idea to get away from me. I sent a note to my colleagues to enlist their help in remembering: “Should we do some kind of attaboy on the governor using his bully pulpit for this good cause (as opposed to some of the others he is wont to push)?” I was referring to his efforts to jawbone the Legislature into meaningful reform of our DUI law.
    Moments later, I read the governor’s guest column on our op-ed page about a flat tax, which was his latest attempt to slip through an income tax cut, which at times seems to be the only thing he cares about doing as governor. This chased thoughts of praise from my mind.
    For the gazillionth time, he cited Tom Friedman in a way that would likely mortify the columnist and author. His “argument,” if you want to call it that: Since The World Is Flat, folks on the other side of the world are going to get ahead of us if we take a couple of hours to pull together our receipts and file a tax return. Really. “Rooting around shoeboxes of receipts” once a year was going to do us in. (And never mind the fact that most paperwork is done on the federal return, with the state return piggybacking on that.)
    Then, he argued that his plan for cutting the income tax (which was his point, not avoiding the onerous filing) was necessary to offset a proposed cigarette tax increase. The alternative would be “to grow government,” which is how he describes using revenue to get a three-to-one federal match to provide health care for some of our uninsured citizens.
    Here in the real world, folks want to raise our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax to price the coffin nails beyond the means of teenagers. Everybody who has in any way participated in conversations at the State House about the issue over the last several years knows this. Yet the governor of our state, who seems only to have conversations with himself, can ask this about raising that tax: “(W)hat for, more government or a lower-tax option?” In his narrowly limited version of reality, those are the only considerations.
    But enough about that essay from an alternative dimension. What I read on the front page the next morning drove it from my mind: “Sanford: ‘Endowed chairs’ a failure.” It was about his latest attack on one of the few really smart, strategic moves this state has made in the past decade.
    It’s the one good thing to come out of Gov. Jim Hodges’ execrable state lottery. (I used to struggle to come up with good things to say about him, too, but this was one such thing.) The scholarships? We were doing that without the lottery, and would have expanded them without the lottery except Gov. Hodges vetoed that bill (because he wanted a lottery).
    But a small chunk of the new “chump tax” was set aside to provide seed money to attract some of the best and brightest minds to South Carolina, and put them to work building our economy. Gov. Sanford has never liked this idea, because he doesn’t like the state to invest in the future in any appreciable way apart from land conservation (which is a fine idea, but hardly a shot in the arm to the economy). He believes we don’t need to invest more in education, or research, or even our Department of Commerce, which he takes such pride in having trimmed. His entire “economic development” plan is to cut the income tax. This attracts folks who have already made their pile and are looking for a tax haven in which to hide it, and makes him a hero to the only political entity in the nation that sees him as a hot property: the Club for Growth, whose president showed just how out of touch that group is with even the Republican portion of the electorate by suggesting John McCain pick Mr. Sanford as his running mate.
    The thing that made this outburst from the governor particularly galling is that on Wednesday, I had met Jay Moskowitz, the new head of Health Sciences South Carolina — a consortium of universities and hospitals teaming together to make our state healthier, both physically and economically.
    Dr. Moskowitz is the former deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, and most recently held a stack of impressive titles at Penn State, including “chief scientific officer.” He made it clear that he would not be here if not for the endowed chairs program. Nor would others. He spoke of the top people he’s recruited in his few months here, who have in turn recruited others, an example of the “cascade of people that are going to be recruited with each of these chairs.”
    These folks aren’t just coming to buy a few T-shirts at the beach and leave. They’re here to make their home, and to build their new home into the kind of place that will attract other creative minds. The endowed chairs program is the principal factor that convinces them to pull up stakes and make the effort. “I had a wonderful job in Pennsylvania,” said Dr. Moskowitz, and he wouldn’t have left it without believing that South Carolina was committed to moving forward on a broad research front.
    He doesn’t say it this way, but it’s obvious he wouldn’t have come if he had thought Mark Sanford’s “leave it alone” approach was typical of our state’s leadership.
    Fortunately, it is not. The S.C. House, led by Speaker Bobby Harrell, rose up in response to the governor’s naysaying and voted unanimously to extend the endowed chairs program.
    This is a moment of high irony for me. For 17 years I’ve pushed to give more power to South Carolina’s governor because our state so badly needed visionary leadership, and I thought there was little reason to expect it would come from our Legislature.
    But on Thursday, it did. And if the Senate has the wisdom to follow suit, your children and my grandchildren will have reason to be grateful.

The Wireless Cloud

20 Replies

Just got this press release:

February 15, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Representative Cathy B. Harvin

Wireless Cloud to Support South Carolina Learners
    House Democrat Cathy Harvin, Clarendon & Williamsburg Co.’s, has collaborated with House Republican Dwight Loftis, Greenville Co. and 34 other members in introducing a Joint Resolution, H.4692 that would equip South Carolina Schools with a much needed wireless networking capability and would extend this capability to include a 10 mile radius around each school district education campus in support of homebound learners.  The resolution calls for ETV to utilize its existing towers for this purpose.
     Harvin indicates that this capability will allow enhanced learning experiences for students to use computing anywhere on the school grounds where students may now be limited to computer labs and will support children and adult learners in their homes.
     Harvin says,” South Carolina is truly blessed to have received many more communications licenses than any other state.  ETV has had these licenses for years and we must submit a plan to comply with FCC regulations by January 2009 that will indicate how we will move to digital delivery and how we will use these licenses.   What more perfect way to use the licenses than to empower learners in this state.  We now rank 48th nationally, so we have no place to go but up.  We seem to be in a timeframe where it is difficult to find any issue on which democrats and republicans can agree.”  Harvin was most pleased to find when it comes to helping South Carolina’s children learn, there is no argument.

I get excited every time I hear anybody talk about the "Wireless Cloud" proposal — not because I fully understand what it is, but because the name rocks. In fact, it’s now on my short list for names for the band that I’ve been meaning to start since about 1971 (you can’t rush these things, you know; got to find the right name first).

This legislation, or legislation related to it, came up in one of our edit board meetings last week, and I kept asking Cindi to explain it to me. And then I’d have to stop her because she’d get into explaining the politics — who would benefit and who would lose under each alternative (there was something in it about a plan that would give away bandwidth that belongs to the taxpayers, but I didn’t really follow it, because it was like talking about money) — and I wanted to hear the technical explanation: How would a "wireless cloud" work? Could I use it with my present laptop? Would it cost me to use it? Would more cell towers have to be built, or what?

I didn’t get all the answers I wanted. And this release, with all its talk about kids and education and stuff, didn’t help with the self-centered questions I had. For all I know, the idea may not be feasible, or it might cost to much, or something. But it sure sounds cool. Especially the name.