This is both a follow-up on this Tuesday post, and a preview of tomorrow’s column. Here we have members of the unanimous Lexington/Richland District 5 school board talking about what’s different about this referendum proposal, and why they think the community Irmo/Chapin community will support it.
Praise the Lord, for this day I have been a witness to one of his Wonders.
Today, Sept. 4, 2007, the entire, unanimous 7-member board of Richland-Lexington School District 5 came in to visit with our editorial board to express its support for the proposed bond referendum to build new schools and renovate and expand old ones.
Yes, I had read the news that they had voted unanimously to support this effort to deal with the district’s growth while maintaining excellence and meeting new educational challenges. But reading it in black and white and seeing it, in real-life, up-close and personal in 3D — well, that’s a miracle.
The entire board sat and met with us for over ninety minutes, and there wasn’t a single firefight during the entire time. Total harmony. The above photograph, taken just minutes before this post, stands as proof. (Left to right, that’s Roberta Ferrell, Paula Hite, Jerry Fowler, Carol Sloop, Ellen Baumgardner, Ed White, Supt. Scott Andersen and Robert Gantt.)
Don’t tell me the cause is lost in Iraq. Don’t tell me John McCain can’t get back his momentum. Don’t tell me the Cubs can’t go all the way. I know better. I have been witness to a miracle.
Does it ever occur to you, as it does to me each year, that our state average SAT score looks like a typo?
I mean, it only has three digits. So right away, you think this is the score on one part of the test or the other, verbal or math.
But that can’t be right, either, because it’s higher than 800. And it can’t be a matter of a digit left off, because it can’t be, say 1,985. That’s also impossible.
Then you realize the truth of what it represents — a whole lot of kids taking a college-bound test who are not ready to go to any kind of college — and the sadness descends once again.
The national average of 1,017 is pretty pitiful — and not much higher — but at least it doesn’t look like a typo.
This is weirdly close to the recent related post, so the people who like to accuse will claim that I’m paying extra-special attention to this because ED in ’08 advertises on my blog, but since Cindi passed it on to me, I’ll show just how much I care for such folks’ opinions by passing it on to you (wait — did I say that out loud? how do I let them know because of the unfreezing process, I have no inner monologue?):
WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 //PRNewswire-USNewswire// — Today Marc Lampkin, Strong American Schools’ ED in ’08 executive director, posted a blog entry on the Huffington Post criticizing a recent release from the National Education Association that responded to the recent Democratic debate and the candidates’ positions on performance pay for teachers.
"Instead of celebrating the dawn of a true education debate, some groups want to end it. For example, the National Education Association released a press statement that seems to imply all the candidates answered the question the exact same way — they were against it.
"Now that’s just mystifying to me. Anyone who watched Sunday’s debate should have seen a difference of opinion among the candidates. Yes, two candidates came out firmly against it. But when Stephanopoulos said ‘no one on the stage is for merit pay for teachers,’ one candidate jumped in to say that he definitely is for it. A second then asked for more time to clarify that he is for performance pay under certain circumstances. And a third offered his own version of performance pay-providing competitive salaries to compete with fields like engineering for top college students.
"That’s exactly the kind of education debate we should be having — and the kind Americans deserve! Maybe the NEA just wasn’t watching closely. Maybe they simply missed the point. With American schools needing to hire 2 million new teachers over the next decade, we should all be discussing how to attract America’s best and brightest to teach our students-presidential candidates included. Let’s not squelch that important debate just as it’s getting started."
Cindi sent me that because I was thinking about writing in my Sunday column about all these groups that are making their presence felt in S.C., from AARP to ONE, and Mike and I had been expressing thoughts about how the limitations, and even deleterious effects, of such blogs (Mike’s quote: "a question of Astroturf replacing grass roots") and Cindi stuck up for them, saying they were, too, having a good effect, and she sent me the above release as her way of saying, See? So there.
I will say that in this case, this particular rep of the Bill Gates-funded group is doing a good thing. Readers of our pages will know that we favor merit pay, so how dare the NEA try to squelch debate, via the time-honored dishonest tactic of convincing everyone it’s already squelched. This does no service to the kids in public schools, it certainly doesn’t help the Democratic candidates with us swing voters, and, believe it or not, it does the NEA no good either — at least, it does them no good when their fannies are exposed like this.
Here’s hoping the NEA takes out advertising on my blog, too, so I can demonstrate my independence by kicking them some more over merit pay… (wait! did I say that out loud, too…?)
Scroll down through this post from last night, and you’ll find one of my e-mails about the Edwards column was from a J-school prof who used something from one of my anecdotes ("Strike Two: Jan. 23, 2004") as a sort of illustrative case study on his own blog.
I’m certainly flattered, as uncomfortable as I might be at being held up, for good or ill, as an object lesson for shaping young journalist-wannabes’ minds — particularly when we’re talking about Cindi Scoppe’s alma mater.
When I read Andy Bechtel‘s post this morning, I felt obliged to enlarge upon the lesson by adding some details missing from the column itself (because they were details that would only matter to a J-school prof).
If you’re interested in such academic matters, here’s the post and my comment is below it.
Anyway, as I was typing the comment, I remembered something that was in my desk drawer, and I dug it out — a snapshot, taken by the copy editor in question, on the way down in the elevator. That’s Dean, former editorial administrative assistant Sandra Brown, and me. I’m the tall one (I don’t get to say that all that often).
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
AS THE ABOVE editorial indicates, the matter of whether young children will have a chance at a good education in South Carolina is back in the hands of the political branches. That’s very good and very bad.
It’s very good because such matters of fundamental policy are political in nature. The courts can and should do no more than give us the constitutional parameters within which to act. And what the constitution says isn’t much:
“The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free public schools open to all children in the State and shall establish, organize and support such other public institutions of learning, as may be desirable.”
Courts have elaborated on that slightly. In 1999, the state Supreme Court added “minimally adequate” in front of “system” (not literally, as in amending the constitution, but in terms of our legal understanding). Many education advocates today, just a very few years later, see that “minimally” as a damning sentence of inadequacy. The great irony in that is that the chief justice who presided over that addition saw it as a great step forward for the progressive approach to education, insisting that South Carolina not define “adequate” below a certain, minimal level. That’s not the proper purview of judges, but in any case he did not have the effect he’d hoped for.
Words can be slippery.
I am reminded of the late Douglas Adams’ hilarious series of satirical science fiction novels. One of his main characters was a researcher for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The universe being a big place, the Guide had devoted only one word to describing Earth: “Harmless.” After 15 years of intensive research here on our planet, the field man manages to get his editors to expand the entry so that it reads, in its entirety: “Mostly harmless.”
As it happens, 15 years is only one year longer than the life span of the lawsuit over where we will set the floor for educational opportunity in the poor, rural parts of our state. Abbeville County School District (et al.) v. the State of South Carolina was filed on Nov. 2, 1993. Almost 14 years later, it has added “minimally adequate” to our understanding of our constitutional obligation regarding education — and not even the people who agree on what they want our school system to be can agree on whether “minimally” is a good addition or a bad one.
On to the political branches. That’s where the “very bad news” part comes in.
Education is the biggest thing government does at the state level, which is why people who vaguely, but insistently, desire to “reduce the size of government” are always talking about vouchers and tax credits aimed at preventing the state from spending so much on public schools.
It also happens to be the one thing that government does that can most affect whether our state prospers. South Carolina hasn’t done it very well, relatively speaking, and so we have not prospered as well as other states. It’s not that we don’t know how to educate. It’s that we’ve never resolved to extend the sort of education available in our prosperous suburbs to the rural parts of our state that have been economically irrelevant since the end of slavery. The test scores from those areas pull down the state’s averages, scaring off economic development, which keeps those areas poor, which continues to scare off economic development, etc.
It’s possible to break the cycle, but it would take a tremendous mustering and focusing of political will to overcome certain rather powerful political barriers.
The Legislature won’t provide the answer, because it is the nexus of 170 political agendas. Many of the most adept of the 170 are from districts that see themselves as losing what they’ve got in any effort to focus resources on the poorest districts.
The one political figure in the state in a position to chart a course that steers around all those shoals of local interest — to articulate a bold vision of statewide interest over the heads of lawmakers and fire up the electorate — is the governor. And our current governor hasn’t the slightest interest in doing that. He’s one of the folks who wants us to spend less on public education.
(But “Spending alone won’t do it!”, you cry. You’re right. It will require implementing a comprehensive vision of reform, from classrooms to the state Department of Education. But if you’re not willing to spend, you can forget the rest. As long as the affluent parts of our state see themselves losing in a zero-sum game, you can’t turn around the poor parts with current overall spending levels.)
The alternative would be an uprising of the people, a grass-roots movement that would make it impossible for even the most parochial of lawmakers to ignore the broader view.
There is such a movement. A group called “Education First” plans to dramatize the need to get serious about improving public schools by putting up interstate billboards that will welcome visitors to South Carolina, the “home of ‘minimally adequate’ education.” This will humiliate us all, and effectively dramatize the moral indignation of the sincere, well-meaning liberal Democrats who lead “Education First.”
Meanwhile, the State House is run by Republicans. Fortunately, many of those Republicans are more interested in public schools than the governor is, at least within the contexts of their own districts. Unfortunately, for them to become emboldened to risk themselves for a broader cause, they need to hear a message that sounds like it came from the people who elected them, and might elect them again.
So much for the political branches.
This state of affairs is not “mostly harmless” to South Carolina. Tragically, it is not even minimally so.
You want something to criticize Ken Wingate for, Democrats and other knee-jerk critics? How about his promise to denounce the extremist out-of-state group All Children Matter if it got involved with his campaign to unseat Sen. Joel Lourie, which he then failed to keep?
This was a great disappointment to me, because all other dealings I had had with Mr. Wingate gave me the impression that he was a man to keep such a promise.
Here’s why I wrote about it at the time:
LOURIE VS. THE ANTI-SCHOOL OUTSIDERS
Published on: 10/31/2004
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: D2
BY BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORTHE S.C. SENATE District 22 race is not about Ken Wingate and Joel Lourie any more.
That’s because an out-of-state group with an extreme agenda has dumped what looks like more than $100,000 into the race in the last week. (That’s $80,000 we know about in TV ads, plus a couple of mailings that likely cost more than $10,000 each.)
Even when it was just between Mr. Wingate and Mr. Lourie, two men I’d known and respected for some time, I had already made up my mind that I preferred Joel Lourie. So had our editorial board. We had good things to say about Mr. Wingate, but had to go with Mr. Lourie’s stellar record.
Also, while we thought Mr. Wingate might be OK on education, we knew Mr. Lourie would be one of the Senate’s staunchest advocates for schools.
Mr. Wingate has good things to say about his support of schools, but also has a disturbing affinity for the "choice" movement. That, combined with his close association with Gov. Mark Sanford – for whom "choice" is the only kind of education reform – gave us pause.
It also attracted the support of the Michigan-based All Children Matter. This group doesn’t care about Ken Wingate or Joel Lourie or you or me or any of the people of South Carolina. It cares only about advancing its agenda. And since it doesn’t mention its agenda in its ads (for the good reason that it is unpopular), I’ll define it: Advancing a national movement away from the notion that states have a responsibility to provide good, accountable public schools. In South Carolina, the group backs the governor’s proposal to take money that would otherwise go to run public schools and use it to pay some parents to send their kids to private schools.
It doesn’t want to do this through open debate, because it would lose. Instead, the group uses stealth tactics in an attempt to stack the Legislature with people who will do its bidding. It believes, with good reason, that Mr. Wingate will be more malleable to its purpose. By contrast, there is probably no one running for legislative office this year who is less likely to do this Orwellian-named group’s bidding than Joel Lourie.
It doesn’t matter to All Children Matter that few Senate districts in South Carolina are more supportive of public education than District 22 (and with good reason, given the excellence of the schools in the district). That just gives the group more motivation to talk about something other than its real agenda in its ads.
It is clearer than ever that Mr. Lourie is the better candidate for District 22 (as Republican Barney Giese asserted in endorsing the Democrat last week). I already had reasons to believe that. To those I must now add my disappointment with Mr. Wingate.
Several weeks ago, Mr. Wingate told me that if All Children Matter weighed into this race, he would denounce it. He now refuses to do so, using the Clintonian logic that since All Children Matter has a South Carolina presence, this does not constitute an incursion by outsiders. Yet the group had two South Carolinians representing it before he made his promise. I asked him if he had any evidence demonstrating that "All Children Matter of South Carolina" today consists of anything more than a Post Office box and the two individuals he and I both knew were involved before. "I am under the impression that there is more of a presence than that," he said. "I’m not going to start reeling off names."
But set that aside, because this is no longer about Ken Wingate and Joel Lourie. It’s about whether the voters of District 22 will be persuaded to go along with a group that would undermine their public schools.
Mr. Lourie believes that if that happens, it will not only mean his defeat. It will be a huge boost for the narrow agenda of All Children Matter. If it can use its money to defeat one of the strongest advocate of public schools in one of the most pro-school districts in the state, it will intimidate the rest of the Legislature into supporting it.
I’m afraid he’s right. And for the sake of the rest of South Carolina, I sincerely hope the people of District 22 won’t let that happen.
All Children Matter is a part of the anti-public school movement that we’ve seen manifested in other groups, such as SCRG and CIA. There’s a pattern — driven and funded from out of state, highly ideological, striving to remake our Legislature in its image, and misleading about intentions when it does get involved in the electoral process.
These groups have a much greater potential to harm South Carolinians, black and white, than the League of the South could in a thousand years. They are determined, they are well-financed, and they strike at the very heart of our state’s greatest hope for the future.
Now, do I think this disqualifies Ken Wingate to be our interim treasurer? No. Do I think it makes him a bad person? No. But I figured I should bring it up, because I had to see a guy criticized for the wrong thing.
Reading proof for our Monday page, I again run across that famous statistic, "one cat and her offspring produce 420,000 kittens over seven years." It’s in a letter promoting spaying and neutering.
You know, one of these days I’ve got to see that cat. That’s got to be some cat.
Speaking of statistics, there’s an interesting column in The Wall Street Journal today about another one you may have heard before:
Call it the reading income gap: Children from
low-income households average just 25 hours of shared reading time with
their parents before starting school, compared with 1,000 to 1,700
hours for their counterparts from middle-income homes.These oft-repeated numbers originate in a 1990 book by
Marilyn Jager Adams titled, "Beginning to Read: Thinking And Learning
About Print."
Here, according to columnist Carl Bialik, "the Numbers Guy," is where that stat came from:
Ms. Adams got the 25-hours estimate from a study of 24 children in 22
low-income families. For the middle-income figures, she extrapolated
from the experience of a single child: her then-4-year-old son, John.
She laid out her calculations and sources carefully over five pages,
trying to make clear that she was demonstrating anecdotally the
dramatic difference between the two groups.
Mr. Bialik isn’t arguing that the general trend Ms. Adams is trying to describe is false. He notes that the stat "makes sense. It’s a hard thing to measure and therefore hard to contradict; and the figures meld with related research."
But still, he warns against the temptation to which various child-advocacy groups succumb, that of citing the numbers as though they are statistically defensible. They are not. Using data such as that can hurt your credibility, even when you’re right in the overall point you’re trying to make.
A few days ago I visited my wife’s preschool class and someone — my memory is confused on this point, but I suspect it was my wife — suggested that I read to them. I sat down and within about 5 seconds had 8 books in my lap. I said I would read a page or so from each, and proceeded.
Audience participation was excellent —
they seemed to know their letters and numbers pretty well — and I found myself wondering, why can’t I get the Legislature to pay attention like this? For that matter, why don’t more of our lawmakers know their letters and numbers this well?
The first time I met these kids, it happened to be "W week," so my wife introduced me as "Mr. W," which is the way the kids greet me now. I think that gives me extra cachet with them — I’m not just some guy, but the guy behind the famous letter.
Anyway, it was nice to have such a civil audience, although a brief fight did break out over who had chosen the book I had just read from. That kind of behavior we do see from lawmakers.
A colleague points out the editorial in which the Anderson paper over the weekend celebrated the demise of efforts to slip the whole taxpayers-subsidize-private-schools thing into the open enrollment bill. An excerpt;
An attempt to further frustrate improvements in public schools in South Carolina was defeated in the Senate last week. The addition of private school vouchers to a bill allowing open enrollment within the public school system was dismissed nearly two-to-one, according to published reports. Debate continues on the original proposal, despite this latest pass at – and latest failure of – supporting private education with public money.
That’s good. But isn’t it a shame how, in South Carolina, we almost never get to celebrate any really good, bold, positive measures passing our Legislature — such as real DOT reform, or a comprehensive tax revamp, or addressing the profound problems in the Corridor of Shame, or setting local governments free to govern locally, or anything really helpful.
No, the best we get to do is celebrate when something really, really awful fails to pass.
Sad.
Got this e-mail today from a nosy reader:
Please inform readers on the following:
a. How many members of "The State’s" editorial staff have children in elementary and H.S.? Include in that count the publisher and editor-in-chief.
b. How many of those children are in private schools?
c. How many of those children are in public schools?
d. How many of the public schools in which the staff’s children are enrolled are graded "unsatisfactory" by PACT or "No Child Left Behind" standards?Thank you.
John Johnson
Winnsboro
Now why do I get the feeling that this is a challenge of some sort? Anyway, I replied as follows:
I’m the only editor in editorial with a school-age child, and not for long, as she graduates next week. She will be my fifth child to graduate from public schools. Two of my colleagues have children who haven’t started school yet.
The publisher has a teenaged stepson. I don’t know where he goes to school.
We don’t have an editor-in-chief. I’m over editorial; another guy is over the newsroom. Totally separate arrangement.
As for "D," none. Most of my kids graduated before those grades started, but they all went to Brookland-Cayce. So whatever that’s rated.
Why do you ask?
My other four went exclusively to Brookland-Cayce, and graduated from there. Go, Bearcats.
Here’s the AP story on what happened. As I said before, dramatic stuff. It was truly a case of Capt. Smith of the 218th Brigade to the rescue of public schools:
{BC-SOU-XGR-Legislator-Guardsman, 1st Ld-Writethru,0321}
{SC legislator, Guardsman on leave from training casts key vote}
{Eds: Will be updated.}
{AP Photos SCMC101-103}
{By SEANNA ADCOX}=
{Associated Press Writer}=
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – A proposal that would help parents pay for private school tuition with public money was defeated Thursday by South Carolina lawmakers, the third consecutive year the idea has failed.
The effort to defeat the plan was energized by a House legislator who flew home from Army National Guard training to argue against the proposal.Army Capt. James Smith, on leave from Fort Riley, Kansas, told colleagues that voters decided in November they didn’t want school vouchers when they elected a Democrat to head the Education Department.
Smith, a Democrat, is set to deploy to Afghanistan in a couple of months.
"I’m here solely for the voucher vote," he said.
Smith said he told his battalion commander Lt. Col. John Nagl that it was an important vote and was granted a day’s leave.
"He said he didn’t want to stand in the way of Democracy," Smith said at the Statehouse, where he was flanked by his 11-year-old son, Thomas.
House Minority Leader Harry Ott said he called Smith on Wednesday after Republicans proposed a plan that would allow students to transfer to private schools. The idea came as legislators debated a proposal to let parents enroll their children in any public school regardless of attendance lines.
"I said, ‘Get home. We need your vote,"’ Ott, D-St. Matthews, said he told Smith.
Smith told colleagues that when voters chose Education Superintendent Jim Rex – the only Democrat elected to statewide office – it showed they did not want public money going to private schools. Rex wants to give parents more choice by allowing them to send their student to any public school.
Advocates of private school choice thought they had the votes Wednesday night, but Smith’s presence likely renewed Democrats’ efforts, said Denver Merrill, spokesman for South Carolinians for Responsible Government.
"We’re inching along, and we’re not going anywhere," Merrill said.
The libertarian impulse doesn’t stand up all that well in the face of a
man so willing to lay his life on the line for the greater good. That’s
just a little too much moral force, I guess.
Apparently, efforts to use our tax funds for private schooling have failed again, in a dramatic series of events this morning. I don’t have all the facts yet, but it seems that the following have happened:
A lot of big-time good news happening very quickly. More as I’m able to get to it.
South Carolina now has it’s very own version of the stem-cell debate — unfortunately.
The stem-cell fight, as we all know, isn’t about stem cells; it’s about abortion. Similarly, the virtual school fight has morphed into a surrogate for the "school choice" debate.
Consequently, the virtues, or lack thereof, of virtual pedagogy have been pushed to the back burner. But that’s what I’d like to talk about.
I have my suspicions about the efficacy of the whole idea. I think offering long-distance classes to kids who might not otherwise have access to such pedagogy sounds very good — after all, the greatest challenge in public education in this state is what to do about the kids who live in poor, rural, thinly populated districts that have trouble offering the quality found in the affluent suburbs.
At the same time, after about 25 years of witnessing the limits of electronic communication, I have my doubts. That’s about how long I’ve been dealing with e-mail in one way or another. I’ve also had some experience with teleconferencing, which is a tool of dubious value.
Yet I’m torn about it.
I know virtual schooling can’t be as good as being face-to-face with a teacher. At the same time, it sounds better than no access at all, which is the option many kids are stuck with. Question is, should finite resources be devoted to this approach, or would they be better spent on other priorities? I’m not sure.
We had a long discussion about it in yesterday’s editorial board meeting, and it was inconclusive. We’ll have to return to it to decide what to say. Of course, we discussed other aspects as well. We’re all over the place on the culture-war aspect (to what extent kids not in the public system should have access), but I’d like to address here the underlying question of whether this is a good approach to begin with.
We’ve all experienced the misunderstandings that can occur in what was once called Cyberspace; this blog serves often as a monument to that effect. Of course, some of the misunderstanding is willfully obtuse, but plenty of it is honest miscommunication between people who would be much more likely to have a meeting of the minds if they actually met.
You sit two people who’ve been speaking at cross-purposes down together — as when Randy Page and I had lunch recently — and you’re somewhat more likely to communicate effectively. Similarly, if the problem is that a given subject, or a given child, is hard to teach, do you do any good giving him or her a "virtual" teacher?
Of course, if you want to address the choice aspect, go ahead — but know that I’m not staking out a position on that myself, not yet. If you can get private school and home-school kids in without pushing some public school kids out, I’m for it. It depends on how limited the device is in terms of accessibility. I need to know more about the program, and one of my colleagues is looking into that.
I’m hopeful that we can have a debate here that we can all learn from each other. On this recent post, Randy and LexWolf gave indications of a willingness to carry on real dialogue about this and possibly other education issues. That sounds great to me. Let’s see how we do.
Somebody came up to me after last night’s "school choice" forum saying he’d like to get together and discuss the subject, perhaps over a lunch, from the Club for Growth perspective.
I did NOT hit him, and I’m very proud of that. In fact, he and I conducted a very civil chat, from the auditorium aisle out into the Richland Northeast High School parking lot, for almost another hour. We were joined by a nice lady from SCRG who had always wanted to meet me and ask a few questions.
So, that brings my tally to this in the last couple of weeks: Two-and-a-half hours with my bishop over dinner, with me talking almost the whole time (and aware each moment how rude that was on my part, as his guest); three hours and 20 minutes with three representatives from SCRG on Wednesday, and three hours last night.
All on the same subject: Vouchers and tax credits for private education. And how many hours have I spent in intense debate over substantive education reform ideas, such as funding parity, consolidating districts, greater leeway for principals and superintendents in hiring and firing teachers, merit pay for teachers, and the like?
None.
I am a microcosm. My wasted time represents the time and political energy that South Carolina has wasted on this useless debate over a very bad idea. There is so much we need to do about improving educational opportunity in South Carolina. But we’re not even talking about the real issues.
As for what was said (in vain) at the forum last night — well, it’s hard for me to take a lot of notes when I’m participating like that. Suffice to say that you’ve pretty much heard it all before. What I can do is share with you the notes from which I spoke. I learned at the last minute that I had to have a five-minute opening statement, so I wrote the following, pretty much stream-of-consciousness:
choice talk notes
2/22/07What are we talking about here? Choice? I’m always suspicious of that word. In politics, it ends to be used to dress up the otherwise indefensible. I could elaborate on that, but that would probably make for more controversy than those who invited me were counting on.
What do you mean, school choice? Want to talk the merits and demerits of open enrollment? Fine. But it’s certainly not the most important thing to be talking about – much less sucking up all the political oxygen available for the discussion of education reform. I’d put something like revamping our whole system of taxing and spending in order to provide some parity of education opportunity between rural and suburban kids an awful lot higher on the list.
But we’re talking school “choice.”
Well, we’ve got choice, as proponents of vouchers and tax credits keep saying – for the affluent. Their point is that the same choices available to the wealthy should be made available to everyone else – with the government paying for it.
They don’t call it that. They say, “We’re just giving people back their own money.” They’re talking about the tax credits, which would only be fully available to the middle class, because they’re the only ones who pay enough in taxes to get it. But even if that didn’t leave out the poor, it is indefensible.
It’s not their money. It comes from the taxes they paid – mandated by a duly elected representative government – for the funding of the essential infrastructure of a civilized, secure society (the sort of society without which wealth and personal security are impossible to maintain). Like roads and public safety, public schools are an essential part of that infrastructure – in South Carolina, education is actually a mandated part of that infrastructure.
Now, to vouchers – that would clearly be an expenditure from the public purse, and a singularly irresponsible one. Critics of the public system often complain about throwing money at schools. Taking the money out of our accountability system and handing it to folks and saying spend this wherever it strikes you to spend it, without any controls to protect the taxpayers’ interest in this vital function for which the taxes were raised in the first place – now that’s throwing money.
Back to infrastructure: Say that we committed ourselves to providing a fully effective, comprehensive system of public transportation. We’ve done nothing of the kind, of course, but say we did. There would still be well-off people who would prefer to drive a Lexus or a Mercedes or a Hummer (assuming that government actually kept the roads up), and would have the means to do so. Should we then provide tax credits to folks who could only afford a Chevy to buy something pricier? Of course not. That would be crazy. So is this.
Unlike with public transit, we HAVE supposedly committed ourselves to providing education. We’ve just never followed through to the point that fulfills the promise – particularly in rural areas. To divert a single dime from the legitimate governmental purpose of funding public education – the only kind of education that can possibly be held accountable to taxpayers – is unconscionable, as long as we have such severely underfunded schools in our rural areas.
You’re not satisfied with the quality of public education we’re providing in those rural schools, or in some of our inner-city schools? Neither am I. So let’s fix them. We CAN fix them, because they belong to us. We can do whatever we have the political will to do with them.
Taking finite resources out of that system and throwing it at anybody who comes in and says they’ll start a private school in order to take that money makes no sense at all. And there’s no reason for us to do it.
Had I not received an e-mail from a teacher saying she’d see me tonight, I would have forgotten that I’m appearing at this event tonight. OK, if you don’t want to follow the link:
School choice forum tonight
A
public forum on school choice will be held from 7 to 9 tonight at the
Richland 2 auditorium at Richland Northeast High School, 7500
Brookfield Road.Panelists will include:
- Cynthia Jackson, a teacher at Hood Street Elementary at Fort Jackson
- Richland 2 superintendent Steve Hefner, chairman of state
Superintendent of Education Jim Rex’s transition team committee on
school choice- Larry Watts of the S.C. Independent Schools Association
- Terrye Seckinger of South Carolinians for Responsible Government, an activist group
- Brad Warthen, The State newspaper’s editorial page editor
The forum will be moderated by Bruce Field from the University of South Carolina.
USC is sponsoring the forum along with the S.C. School Improvement Council and the Richland 2 Teacher Forum.Audience members can submit written questions at the forum or e-mail them ahead of time to [email protected].
School choice has been a hot topic in the General Assembly for
several years. This year, there are competing proposals to offer
private school tuition tax credits or expand public school options for
parents.
I hope I still have something left to say on the subject. I had a three-hour-and-20-minute lunch yesterday (no martinis) with SCRG President Randy Page and SCRG attorneys Kevin Hall and Butch Bowers. It was affable, but it would have been a lot shorter had my good friend Kevin and Butch not come along (no offense, guys). I had just wanted to get to know Randy, since we had talked past each other so many, many times at a distance. Part of my politics-is-people schtick.
Do I routinely have such lunches? No, at least, not that long. In fact, this was a record. I’m still recuperating. Not until it was over did I realize it was longer than the previous record, the three-hour repast I had with the late Gov. John West several years ago when he was trying to do shuttle diplomacy between me and then Gov. Jim Hodges. Needless to say, we pretty much exhausted that subject as well, to little avail.
God bless Gov. West. He said that would go down in his list of personal failures with the fact that he couldn’t further Mideast peace as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I thought that was a bit of an overstatement, but I saw what he meant.
He’d be gratified to know that whenever Gov. Hodges and I run into each other today, we are quite cordial. In fact, I met Mrs. Hodges for the first time at the Galivants Ferry Stump last year, and she was quite charming. Sometimes peace takes time.
More confusion on the rally.
First, The Associated Press said:
Hundreds of people, including many school children who arrived by the
busload, gathered at the Statehouse on Tuesday, rallying for
legislation that would help parents send their young ones to private
schools.
Later in the day, The Associated Press said:
Thousands of people, including many private school children who arrived
by the busload, gathered at the Statehouse on Tuesday, rallying for
legislation that would help parents send their young ones to private
schools.
Maybe the busloads of "private school children" arrived after the first version was filed. I don’t know. Note the AP picture above, which was taken from a rather different angle from mine. And possibly at a different time; I don’t know.
Anyway, remember — for the truth, in all its infinite variety, come to Brad Warthen’s Blog, which is always first with the burst.
OK, so maybe there weren’t any official estimates. But if you want to estimate how many people were at
the "gimme some money for sending my kid to private school" rally today at the State House, you can look at the image at right.
I know; it’s pretty low-res. I didn’t have my camera, and shot this with my phone. But I think you can tell, at the very least, that the "organizers" who estimated the crowd at 4,000 were evidently a little, shall we say, overly enthused. I’ve seen a lot of crowds at the capitol, and this looks a good bit short of that figure to me.
You’d think they could have pulled more together, especially in light of reports that (to my sorrow as a Catholic), St. Joseph’s school gave kids the day off to attend. That’s what I by a parent and a grandparent associated with the school. If that’s correct, this is pretty anemic turnout.
I shot this from across the street, where I was having lunch with the governor’s chief of staff. Maybe I saw it before the crowd had fully assembled or after it had dissipated. But the governor’s man saw what I saw, and did not suggest anything of the kind.
So you’re for ‘school choice.’
What do you mean by that?
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
EVERYBODY likes “school choice,” it seems. S.C. Superintendent of Education Jim Rex is for it. Gov. Mark Sanford is for it.
Even my bishop, Robert Baker of the Diocese of Charleston, favors it, as he said in a letter
that
appeared in our bulletin at St. Peter’s Catholic Church 14 days ago.
But look just a bit closer at what “school choice” means to each of them, and you find profound differences.
Personally, I’m suspicious when any policy issue is summed up as a matter of “choice.” It often means that the people advocating the given position can’t sell it on its merits. They may be avoiding less palatable, but more descriptive, terms such as “abortion,” or “public subsidies for private schools.”
But not always.
Of course, the governor is pushing public subsidies for private schools.
Mr. Rex seems to be clothing his proposed liberalization of school attendance rules in the “choice” mantle, at least in part, in order to head off the folks on the governor’s side.
In last year’s election, he essentially said to the school privatization crowd: You want choice? I got your choice right here, in the public schools.
Then, he trotted out his proposals in a press conference the day before the usual crowd unveiled its usual private-school-subsidy plan last week.
Not that I don’t think Mr. Rex is sincere. He really does want to make it possible for parents to send their kids to the public schools of their choice. It’s an attractive idea.
But the idea has its limitations. Richland District 2 — which already has a generous intradistrict “choice” policy — can’t make enough room when every child in Fairfield County wants to come on down. How will the state pay to transport those children, when — as is too often the case — their families can’t afford a car?
The other side has the same problems. Even if we fantasize that an excellent, welcoming private school even exists in a poor, rural child’s county, and has space for him and his voucher — how’s he going to travel the 10 miles each day?
I know Mr. Rex has thought about those things, by contrast with the private-school choice advocates. We’ll see how well he addresses them.
The governor is sincere, too. He really does want to use tax money to pay people to desert public schools.
I know my bishop is sincere. He believes parents should determine what sort of education their children receive, and that it’s important to provide an option for them that teaches Christian values. I agree completely.
Where we differ is on whether it’s right to ask state taxpayers to subsidize Catholic education. I say no. We shouldn’t do that any more than we should ask the state to fund a new steeple for us.
The bishop’s letter pretty much freaked me out, because it used rhetoric of the more extreme advocates of privatization. Worse, it urged Catholics to attend a rally those folks are holding at the State House on Tuesday.
Since then, the bishop has assured me that he did not mean to back any movement that criticized or attacked public schools. And while he’s not withdrawing his support for the Catholic “choice,” you won’t see him at that rally.
“I apologize for the tone of my letter,” he said, referring to portions that repeated the “South Carolinians for Responsible Government” mantra that “most of our children are not receiving a sound education” from public schools. “I would reword it” if he had it to do over, he told me Friday. He “would like to be seen as a respectful partner in dialogue” with public educators.
He just wants people to be able to afford the Catholic option. The diocese closed a number of schools that served poor and minority communities back before he became bishop, and he’d like to reverse that trend.
He would only seek state subsidies “for the working poor and people who are economically at the poverty level.” That’s just what Mark Sanford said he wanted when he ran for governor in 2002. But when out-of-state libertarian extremists started funneling vast sums of money into the state, he embraced their far more radical agenda, which has its roots in the notion that “government schools” are essentially a bad idea.
My bishop doesn’t embrace that. Of course, I oppose even the more limited funding of Catholic schools with public money. If we Catholics want to provide education to the less fortunate — which we should do — we need to dig into our pockets and pay for that ministry ourselves.
Jesus didn’t fund his ministry with the money St. Matthew had squeezed from the public as a tax collector. He didn’t take from the world; he gave. He told us to do likewise. We Catholics are far too stingy when the collection basket comes around, and that should change. We shouldn’t force Baptists, Jews, agnostics or anyone else to make up for our failing.
Uh-oh; I’m preaching again.
Another eminent Charlestonian told me he was concerned about the bishop’s letter, and kept meaning to say something to him, but hesitated because of his reluctance as a lifelong Catholic to tell his bishop what he ought to do.
As a convert baptized at Thomas Memorial Baptist Church in Bennettsville, I was not so inhibited. I sort of went all Martin Luther on the bishop. That’s OK, he said: “You’re free to say you disagree.” Which I do. But not entirely. I’m glad we spoke.
Bottom line: When somebody says they’re for “school choice,” ask for details. The differences are huge, and of critical importance to what kind of state we’re all going to live in.
For the bishop’s letter, my letter to him, and more, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.
This blog, like its author/host, has no sense of time. Sometimes I’ll blog on something I’ve been meaning to get to for a week or so; other times we go real-time.
This is sort of one of the latter cases. As I type, Jim Rex is about to announce his first major initiative as S.C. superintendent of education. Here’s the release:
TO: Editorial page editors
FROM: Jim Foster
RE: Rex conference call this afternoon for editorial page editorsDr. Rex will hold a news conference at 10:30 this morning in the lower
lobby of the Statehouse. He will be joined by a large bipartisan group
of legislators and K-12 education leaders from across South Carolina to
announce a three-year public school choice initiative. An embargoed
news release is attached.Superintendent Rex’s proposal is the result of many conversations in
recent months, particularly in recent weeks, with K-12 administrators,
local school board members and a number of state lawmakers. The pilot
projects he proposes will be designed to answer many of the questions
and concerns he has heard during those conversations.This afternoon at 2:30, Dr. Rex will hold a special telephone
conference call for editorial page editors to discuss his proposal.
Cindi, who’s gone over there to check it out, says she’s heard from at least one source (a certain GOP senator), that this proposal is fairly extensive, and has strong backing, although she’ll be interested to see just how broad it is.
For my part, I’ve set the bar high. Based on what Cindi said she’d been told, I sent the following to Jim Foster, head flack at the department of ed.:
At our meeting this morning, Cindi said Rex had assembled an "amazing" coalition. I’m going to be really disappointed if they’re not wearing superhero tights. I’m planning art on this.
We’ll see.