Category Archives: Education

Et tu, Nikki?

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This gets more and more interesting. A moment ago, our good friend
Nikki Haley was up speaking for the execrable notion of school "choice" via individual tax credits.

On the one hand, big deal. Nikki hasn’t been so publicly opposed to such proposals in the past as Mr. Bingham has.

But I do hate to hear her advocate for it, even though she does so only for "failing" districts.

And I hate to hear her use such hackneyed and illogical arguments as the old saw about how if we let tuition grants and other disbursements from tax moneys go to private institutions … well, let’s use her words:

It it’s OK for college, why isn’t it OK for K-12?

Well, Nikki, I’ll answer that with another question: Do colleges and universities attempt to educate the entire population (which, by the way, is why we have public schools — because the market would never, ever have any rational motive for trying to do that; it’s one of those few things that only government can or would want to do)?

The answer, of course, is NO. Here’s another: What proportion of the population do colleges and universities try to educate?

Here’s a hint: It’s not the most academically challenged.

Oh, I take that back. Some colleges do have open-enrollment policies. What sort of reputation do those schools have? If someone who went to a choosier school were inclined to be harsh, they might look down and call them "failing."

But you know — even those schools don’t try to educate everyone. Only society as a whole, pooling its resources through the thing we call "government," could or would even contemplate such a task.

And society can only accomplish it as long as it has a consensus that this is a high-enough priority to dedicate the necessary resources to it.

That’s why it’s positively tragic to see elected "leaders" taking up the cudgels for those ideological groups who hold in contempt the very idea of public education.

Youth and inexperience aren’t the worst things in the world

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Young Artie White is looking better all the time.

I just got this winpop (sort of an internal instant message) from a colleague:

Kenny Bingham is up arguing IN FAVOR of the revised Edge amendment (revised, I think, to match the bill he introduced earlier this year).

… which is to say, he was arguing in favor of the merely horrendously awful version of Put Parents in Charge, rather than the worse-than-you-could-have-imagined version that Tracy Edge briefly had up.

I asked Cindi — that is, my colleague — whether she was sure. You know that I stop at nothing to ensure the accuracy of anything I put on this blog. Her answer:

yes, he was; I heard only the end of it. he’s done now and we’re on to shirley hinson, who is giving the most BIZARRE speech in defense of the amendment. i think the supporters must be filibustering.

If you hurry, you can go watch it yourself. It’s not every day that you get to see representatives, in real time, deliberately going out of their way to undermine public education. I mean, at least not this obviously.

Staton his case

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This is just getting too trendy.

S.C. Superintendent of Education candidate Bob Staton has started a blog. Well, it’s sort of a blog — only three posts so far. But you can check it out, if you’re so inclined.

I think I’ll put it on my links, and then start adding other candidate links as they are brought to my attention. I’ve seen a few other sites so far and neglected to save the URLs. I guess the word "blog" grabbed my attention on this one.

So the gimmick worked.

Why do we let them drop out?

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This may seem out of left field, and maybe there’s an obvious answer that I’m missing, but I’ll throw this out anyway, and y’all can throw the obvious answers right back at me.

One of South Carolina’s greatest education challenges is having one of the worst dropout rates in the country. In fact, of the favorite subject of critics of public schools in our state, that one is the most on-point. Everybody keeps wringing their hands as to what to do about it.

But I got to wondering: Why do we let them drop out? Why is that even allowed?

Thinking aloud (if you want to be charitable and call it "thinking"), I posed that question to one of my colleagues, and she said, "Well, you can’t compel people to go to school if they don’t want to."

Really? We compel them when they’re younger. Why is it OK for the state to stand in loco parentis and say, "Go to school" when they’re 8, but not when they’re 16? Is anyone really prepared to seriously argue that 16-year-olds are capable of making a decision with such huge consequences for the rest of their lives?

Actually, I’m sure some can — but they’re not the ones dropping out. Almost by definition, a teenager who drops out of school is declaring his or her incompetence to make such a huge decision, with staggering repercussions not only for the individual, but for society as a whole (in that we can’t afford to have a lot of such people deciding to be a burden to the rest of society, which they will be).

It seems to me that allowing dropouts is a holdover of a time when that was a legitimate life option, when you could make a good living without a high school education. That’s not the case any more. (And by the way, to eliminate compulsory education for all ages, as a few extremists would do, would be to condemn large swaths of society to permanent underclass status. You may say truly that we already have that — but is that a good thing.)

Yes, I know that if dropouts stayed in against their will, it would be a huge challenge to the schools to try to educate them — especially since so many quit because they’re having trouble meeting the higher academic standards required today. But that’s a challenge I think the schools should have to take on. Whether through alternative schools or innovative curricula in the mainstream schools, there’s got to be a way to deal with this.

OK, my turn on the Folks op-ed

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OK, now that the comments on the Will Folks op-ed have reached critical mass of 34 comments and rising (including two from Mr. Folks himself), I will take a few moments to address some of the points raised by readers.

First, though, let me give you a brief summary of my thinking as it went before the piece ran — before the storm, as it were.

When the proof landed on my desk, I saw Will’s mug and thought, "Oh, man — what, again?" Then I remembered the earlier conversation in which it had been mentioned that this piece was in the pipeline. A board member responded by asking, "Is it something we would run if someone else wrote it?" That’s pretty much our standard response whenever the question arises whether we should give this person or that person space on our pages — what if it were from someone else? If the answer is "yes," we generally go with it. The answer was "yes."

So I read the piece on the page and agreed with my colleague who had put it there that yes, if this had been from some other similarly situated advocate on that side of the debate, we would have run it. But note that qualification of "similarly situated": It probably NOT have run if it had come in from someone who had never been a player of some kind in the debate. I say that because the arguments were pretty weak, and persuasive only to someone who already believes all this stuff, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Coming from Will Folks, its weakness was interesting in and of itself. Coming from someone unknown to the readers, it would have had little value.

To elaborate on that, some folks have asked why we would "give a platform" to someone who pleaded guilty to criminal domestic violence. Well, we wouldn’t. But we would "give a platform" to someone who is writing on a subject that is important and timely and who:

  • Was the spokesman, until quite recently, of the current governor.
  • Demonstrated his temperamental unsuitability for the job a number of
    times during the four years he spoke for the governor, but continued to
    hold the position until, as I just said, quite recently.
  • Is still advocating, as hard as he can, policies that are priorities for that governor.
  • Writes with a tone and style that is much the same as the way he spoke when he was in the governor’s office — lashing out, dismissive toward those who disagree, etc.
  • Brings to the surface, in a particularly stark manner, something that has been hinted at more subtly up to now — the growing tension between the governor and those who think like him and an increasingly unified business leadership.

My friend Samuel Tenenbaum said "Shame!" over our having run this piece. But I feel no shame. Well, I will admit that one thing about the
decision to run this does nag at my conscience just a bit: the fact that the piece was so
weak in its arguments that it undermined Mr. Folks’ point of view, with which
I disagree. So should I have waited for a stronger piece expressing that
point of view to come in? Well, if I had, I’d still be waiting. It’s not like we had a strong piece and this one, and picked this one. This is what we had.

Another respondent says critics are attacking Mr. Folks, but dodging the substance of what he said. Well, let’s discuss two or three points of that substance:

  • Will dismisses the financial acumen of some of the heaviest business hitters in South Carolina (or as he puts it, "prominent leaders of the so-called ‘business community’"), and does so in a way that takes for granted that HE and the governor know better than they do what is good for business in South Carolina. He sneers at the "left-leaning S.C. Chamber of Commerce" (note to Hunter Howard — better quit wearing those Che T-shirts around the State House). He calls Darla Moore and Mack Whittle "self-appointed dilettantes." To provide a little perspective, as the governor said to me awhile back about his having hired Will in the first place, "You take someone who was playing bass guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band and you give him a chance." Yeah, OK, let’s see — to whom would I go for credible financial advice? Darla Moore, or Will Folks? Mack Whittle, or Will Folks? Harris DeLoach, or Will Folks? Don Herriott, or Will Folks? Ooh, that’s a toughie.
  • While the governor can be said to have more experience in business than his former protege, to suggest that he is someone whose credentials suggest more real-world experience in financial dealings than the people Mr. Folks dismisses is ludicrous. Mr. Sanford’s record in the private sector before he took up politics is by comparison to these people — and this is charitably understating the case — less than impressive.

Actually, I’m going to stop there, and not get into his strong suggestion that ONLY the kind of tax cut the governor wants could possibly help our economy, or his indulgence in yet another gratuitous slap at public schools ("unquestionably the nation’s worst") or his mentioning that "state spending jumping another 9.1 percent" without noting by how much it had been cut in the several preceding years (some agencies, such as the Corrections Department, by more than 20 percent during that period). Basically, I’m tired of typing.

But before I go, let me address a few reader comments specifically:

  • Scott Barrow says "you’re giving him credibility and helping him restore his bad name by printing his columns." I don’t see how.  If anything, I’m hurting the cause he advocates by running a piece from him (I already addressed the fact that my conscience nags at me about that, even though my conscience, yaller dog that it is, doesn’t know what it’s talking about).
  • Uncle Elmer asks, "Does Mr. Sanford really need cool-headed, articulate friends like this?" Well, no, he doesn’t. In fact, the last time
    we ran a piece by Mr. Folks, the governor’s office called to question our having done so.
  • Honesty says, "The fact that you found the need to edit his previous editorial due to
    his apparent dishonesty while deeming him worthy of now being published
    as a guest editorialist borders on bizarre." Well, not really. We edit everybody, and a lot of what we edit out are unsupportable statements that are wrongly presented as fact. Sometimes we miss such mistakes and instances of outright attempts to mislead, but we try.
  • Will Folks himself complained that "Just once… it would be nice to submit an article and actually
    have folks debate its merits instead of venting their spleens with all
    this anonymous speculation regarding a domestic situation they didn’t
    witness and don’t possess the slightest bit of insight into." Well, once again, Will, I tried. I refer you to the above.
  • Finally, Don Williams raised a broader complaint "about the plethora of conservative local columnists which have been given platform" on our pages. Well, first, I wouldn’t call Will Folks a "conservative." I think that term refers far better to the "left-leaning" Chamber of Commerce than to him. And Mr. Williams lumps him in with Bob McAlister and Mike Cakora as being three who "arrive at the same conclusions time after time." Well, Bob works for those "dilettantes" over at the Palmetto Institute, and is therefore pushing very different views from Mr. Folks on these issues. Mr. McAlister is also a very conservative Southern Baptist, while last I read, Mr. Cakora was an atheist. I have no idea where Mr. Cakora (whom I met once, about six years ago — a fact I thought I’d throw in for Mark Whittington‘s benefit) stands on the tax issue (maybe you can find out on his blog). Beyond that, we usually get complaints about running too many liberals. I don’t know whether we do or not. I particularly don’t know on local columns. Basically, we generally take what we’re sent, and choose between them based on quality and relevance (and whether they’ve been published somewhere else, which is generally a disqualifier). Mr. McAlister sends us far more columns than probably any other local contributor — more than we actually run, I would point out. Joe Darby — who is no one’s definition of a conservative — probably comes in a distant second (we hear from him less since he moved to Charleston). Tom Turnipseed? I would say he submits columns less often that Mr. McAlister, but more often than than Mr. Darby. (Mr. Turnipseed is also regularly published elsewhere). We run letters from him more often, including a short one on Dec. 18.

As for nationally syndicated columnists, here’s a blog by a fairly nonpartisan guy who takes the trouble to rate columnists according to how much they lean either Democratic or Republican. Of the ones on his list we run regularly, he sees five as Dems and only one as GOP. But then, he lists George Will, of all people, as being slightly Democratic, so… Also, he doesn’t include some of our conservative regulars, such as Charles Krauthammer and Cal Thomas. I guess "left" and "right" are pretty much in the eyes of the beholder, which is one reason I hate using the terms.

That’s all I have to say about that. For now.

USC/Clemson column

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Gamecock, Tiger team up against caps
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
WEEK BEFORE last, I ran into USC President Andrew Sorensen as he was on his way to an “unprecedented” meeting with House Speaker Bobby Harrell. They were going to talk budgets.
    What was so new about that?
    “Carolina and Clemson are talking to him at the same time,” Dr. Sorensen said. “And we’re using the same numbers.” To those who remember the old days of tigers and chickens fighting like… well, like cats and birds, over funding, this was remarkable. Mr. Harrell was so “overwhelmed,” Dr.Bobby_presidents_1 Sorensen later said, he sent for a photographer to record the event.
    “Jim and I have become increasingly close in terms of… what we want to do and how we want to do it,” Dr. Sorensen said when he and Clemson President James Barker visited the editorial board last week.
    Mr. Barker stressed that this new level of cooperation was “not because of the governor’s ‘tax.’ ”
    In his latest executive budget, Gov. Mark Sanford proposed “a one percent reduction for Clemson, USC, and MUSC that will result in savings of $3,232,091 in general funds to encourage such further collaboration.”
    “Yes,” said Dr. Sorensen, “he takes away a million from each of us to stimulate us to collaborate…. if you can understand the logic in that, please explain it to me.”
    This is not the only area in which the two presidents agreed with each other and disagreed with the governor.
    For instance, there is the governor’s proposed cap on tuition increases. Sounds good, doesn’t it? It would help me out, with my fourth child now in college.
    And I like the governor’s stated goal, which is to force consolidation and reorganization of the state’s non-system of public higher education.
    But are caps a good idea for the state of South Carolina? No, and not just because this isn’t going to convince lawmakers to cut the number of institutions.
    Tuition started shooting up when the Legislature decided to cut back on direct funding of colleges, and give middle-class voters scholarship checks paid for by poor folks suckered into playing the lottery.
    South Carolina’s public colleges have experienced a larger percentage decrease in state funding than those of any other Southern Regional Education Board state over the last decade — a period in which most SREB states increased funding.
    Of the 16 states, only West Virginia funded its colleges at a lower percentage of the regional average last year. South Carolina was at 72.45 percent of that average. North Carolina was at the top end, at 136.95 percent.
    Higher state funding means lower tuition. Not coincidentally, Kiplinger’s recently listed UNC-Chapel Hill as the best deal in the country, measured by quality compared to cost. Out of 130 public colleges listed, Clemson was 24th, and USC 31st — in spite of those tuition increases.
    Or perhaps because of them. The money to improve academics had to come from somewhere. And since the General Assembly has seen fit to turn the money over to the students, via scholarships, that’s where the institutions have turned for funding.
    At USC, said Dr. Sorensen, 96 percent of entering freshmen get “one of the lottery-funded scholarships.” At Clemson, it’s 99 percent. In fact, said Mr. Barker, “At Clemson, not one freshman from South Carolina paid full tuition” this year.
    OK, so the heads of the schools don’t want tuition caps. Big surprise. What about the students? I don’t know about all of them, but some student government leaders at USC sent a letter
to the governor last week asking for a meeting “to make you aware of our concerns with these proposals, as we feel they do not completely address the desires of students.”
    One of the signers, student body Treasurer Tommy Preston, was diplomatic about the governor’s plan when I asked about it, saying that it was “our opinion that there’s just not enough information” to know, but it seemed the caps “potentially could be harmful in the future.”
    Never mind what the treasurer thinks. What does Tommy think?
    “Personally,” he said, “I think our state has a bigger problem with higher education funding.”
    Smart kid, that Tommy.

About Will Folks…

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I just wrote this long piece asking what y’all thought about Will Folks’ op-ed today — not the content, but the fact that we ran it at all. I’ve gotten a lot of flak about that today.

And just as I went to save, TYPEPAD BLEW UP ON ME!!!!

Just as well — I had written down MY thoughts on the question, and it’s probably best to see what y’all think first, and then answer you.

So, what do you think?

Hey! Leave those kids alone

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The job of editorial page editor — the way I choose to do it, anyway — involves a curious mix of leadership and collaboration.

As I frequently tell readers, our editorial board makes decisions by consensus, meaning that even if not everyone in the room buys into the position completely, it has been shaped to the point that each member can live with having the editorial appear beneath his or her name (which, while editorials are by definition not signed — only columns have bylines — is always up there on the masthead with the rest of our names for all the world to see. For an illustration, zoom in on the upper left-hand corner of this page.)

My colleagues occasionally say I’m not being entirely candid when I say that because we don’t always reach consensus, and sometimes we take a certain position only because I insist , despite the lingering objections of one or more members. True, there are times when I consider it necessary to take a position, and a consensus proves impossible — on some political endorsements, for instance. Unlike other issues, an endorsement picks one candidate or another, yes or no — leaving no room for the compromises that make consensus possible. And I firmly believe that failing to endorse — when one of these people will be elected — is a copout.

My response to this gentle remonstration is that just as often (if not more so), I give in and go along with the consensus. An example is today’s lead editorial. Personally, I’d like to see summer vacation start at Memorial Day and end after Labor Day. I sympathize with those who want their kids to enjoy the same sort of three-month idylls that I remember
from my own youth. And while I’m a big advocate of standards in the schools, I personally fail to understand what is magical about 180 days of instruction. I seem to recall many thousands of hours that I spent in school as being superfluous. I believe what I learned between kindergarten and 12th grade could have been taught in half the time.

But my colleagues pretty much unanimously insist that I’m completely WRONG on this, and since I have to confess that to some extent my position is based in sentimentality rather than evidence and logic (and I tend to treat positions based in "feelings" rather than thought with contempt), I’ve gone along with them.

But I only go along so far, and the copy has to get by me to get on the page. An example — a paragraph in today’s editorial originally read like this:

On a practical level, the bill approved Wednesday by the House Education Committee isn’t quite as bad as some previous attempts to set local school calendars: It allows schools to start back as early as the third Monday of August, rather than holding them to the agrarian, post-Labor Day schedule that the businesses on the beach seem to think will benefit them. But then, if you want to talk practicalities, the whole notion that starting school in August somehow shortens the summer vacation is nutty: An early start means kids get out of school by the end of May instead of mid-June. The actual length of summer vacation is the same no matter when it starts and stops.

I was willing to go along with all but one word of that. I paused in the editing process to send an instant message to the writer:

A couple of points re this…
1. Summer vacation IS shorter than it used to be. Kids didn’t get off in mid-June; they got off around Memorial Day.
2. August is more summery than June. It’s hotter. In June, the ocean water is sometimes still cold. Most of June occurs in the spring. All of August (and most of September) occur during the summer.
I guess what I’m saying here is, I object to "nutty." "Unconvincing," perhaps — at least, to a consensus of our board.

So, being the editor, I changed the word, and the writer did not protest. But she still thinks it’s nutty.

So happy together

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Also today, I ran into USC President Andrew Sorensen on an elevator. In contrast to my cluelessness on my last two posts, I did manage during the short ride to determine what he was up to.

He was on his way over to what he termed an "unprecedented" meeting with Speaker Bobby Harrell.

What was so new about this? "Carolina and Clemson are talking to him at the same time," Dr. Sorensen said. "And we’re using the same numbers." Basically, he was talking budget requests.

To those of us who remember the old days of tigers and chickens fighting like
… well, like cats and birds — in the General Assembly over funds, we have already seen a remarkable degree of cooperation between the state’s three research universities (counting MUSC) in recent years.

But this sort of coordination does sound new. It will be interesting to see what comes of it.

What else did he say?

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My first version of today’s column originally started out with a summary of what Gov. Sanford considered to be most important in his State of the State speech. But I took so many words setting up that list, and then had so much trouble deciding where to go after listing those items, that I scrapped it and started over with what you see on today’s page.

Here is that first rough draft/outline, as far as I took it, anyway:

     One of the great challenges in making the most of the governor’s annual pre-State of the State briefing luncheon for editorial page editors is that you don’t get a copy of the speech until you get there.

    So you find yourself trying to eat, read the speech (which is on your lap with your notebook, there being no room on the table), ask the governor questions about it as you’re reading it, hear other people’s questions, and take notes simultaneously.

    (By the way, this is not a complaint aimed at our current governor; it was ever thus. Or at least, ever since I started going to these in 1994.)

    So after a lot of scattershot questions based on things haphazardly gleaned from the text on the run last Wednesday, Charleston Post and Courier Editor Barbara Williams had the good sense to make this request: You tell us what you consider to be the main points of your speech, governor.

    His answer, as near as I could write down while trying to get some salad into my mouth, was as follows:

  • Workers compensation
  • Restructuring
  • Holding the line on spending, and paying back trust funds.
  • Leverage private-sector investment in rural South Carolina (broadband access).
  • Education.

    On education, he said he had three main points to stress:

  • Early childhood.
  • Charter schools, for the in-between-aged kids.
  • Tuition caps at the higher-education level.

That’s as far as I got. Anyway, I thought you might find this helpful if you try to wade through the speech itself. Or maybe you won’t. Anyway, there it is.

No commies here

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Mark Sanford is not a communistSanford_state_2
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
‘I DON’T want people to lose sight of who they’re talking to, and I sound like a half communist by the time I’ve laid out all these different options,” said Gov. Mark Sanford at a pre-speech briefing on his State of the State address Wednesday.
    “… which I’m obviously not,” he added with an easy laugh, the same laugh he uses when he calls me a “socialist,” which he does with some frequency.
    I should add some context.
    First, the governor isn’t any kind of communist — half, quarter or full. Nor am I a socialist; he just says that because he’s such a thoroughgoing libertarian, and I’m not. I’m sort of in the middle on the whole small-government-versus-big-government thing. Government should be as big or small as we the people, acting through our elected representatives, decide it should be, and whether taxes rise or fall should depend upon the situation.
    The governor was mock-concerned about being perceived as a demi-Marxist because in his speech, he was actually taking a more pragmatic view of the whole tax-and-spend thing. While insisting that if lawmakers swap a sales tax increase for a property tax reduction it must be revenue-neutral or even an overall decrease, he went on to speak about the need to consider other aspects of our overall tax system. In other words, he was to an extent embracing our position that tax reform must be comprehensive.
    He spoke positively of impact fees to transfer the cost of growth to new development, and proposed to “take the opportunity to look at (sales tax) exemptions that are not serving their purpose.”
    Mr. Sanford tiptoed repeatedly around the question of whether he considers property tax relief — which conventional wisdom holds is Job One in this election year — really needs to happen in 2006.
His fancy footwork on that went over the heads of many legislators — the first time they interrupted him with applause for a policy statement was on page 21 of a 24-page speech, when he said, “We think this can be the year of property tax relief….”
    The solons clapped like crazy, and I had to wonder why.
    Can be? Not will be? What did he mean by that? Back at that luncheon briefing with editorial page editors, Charleston Post and Courier Editor Barbara Williams tried for several minutes to pin him down on that. Finally, with a somewhat exasperated tone, she said: “Are you pushing for it this year? This is what I’m asking. Are you going to be one of those who says we’ve got to absolutely do something this year?”
    “Do you see that written in here?” the governor asked.
    “No,” she said.
    After a grunt that sort of sounds like “Yeah” on my recording, he concluded, “But that’s as much as I’m going to say.”
    But even though he refuses to declare himself clearly as part of this headlong rush to placate angry homeowners before November, the governor need not fear that anyone will erect a bust of him alongside Lenin’s (assuming anyone still has a bust of Lenin).
    Never mind that he has stopped saying overtly dismissive things about public education. Nor should you attach much importance to the fact that he keeps saying things like, “This is not about some philosophical jihad that says government is bad and the private sector is good.”
    Make no mistake: Mark Sanford is still a libertarian to his core. It’s hard-wired into his reflexive responses, even while he’s trying to reach out to folks to the “left” of him by repeatedly citing Thomas Friedman.
    Check out the one most radical proposal in his speech.
    This is a man who ran for office on a plan to restructure South Carolina’s government so that each branch can exercise its separate, enumerated powers, with proper checks and balances. So you’d think he’d understand the way the system should work.
    And yet, he proposes to undermine the central deliberative principle underlying the republican form of government devised by our nation’s Founders. He would do this by asking voters to approve a change in the state constitution that would set a specific formula for future spending growth, regardless of what future needs might be.
    Does that sound good to you? Well, fortunately, George Washington and James Madison and Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton et al. realized that you couldn’t conduct the complex business of running a government — even one firmly rooted in the consent of the governed — through simple, up-or-down plebiscites. They knew that we would need to delegate the business of deciding what needed to be done through government, how much it would cost, and how to pay for it. And that if we didn’t like the decisions delegates made, we could elect somebody else.
    If you ask most people, without context, whether they want to limit government spending — yes or no, no in-between — they will of course say “yes.” If you ask me that, I’ll say yes, and mean it.
    But if you ask me whether I think this state is adequately meeting its duty to, for instance, keep our highways safe, I’ll say “no.” And if you ask me whether insufficient funds might be a factor in that failure, I’ll say “yes.” And if you ask me whether I have the slightest idea what percentage of our state economy the General Assembly would need to devote to that purpose to get the job done in future years, I’d have to say, “Of course not.”
    And yet that is the kind of arbitrary judgment that the governor would have us make this fall — and lock into our constitution — with his proposed “Taxpayer Empowerment Amendment” plebiscite.
So never fear: Mark Sanford is still Mark Sanford, and he’s certainly no commie.
    If Mark Sanford were not still the supply-side, privatizing, anti-tax, anti-spending guy we’ve all come to know over the past four years, I’d be disappointed in him. I’ve always res
pected his honesty and consistency. And those are definitely still intact.

Let’s talk tax reform

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That’s right, I didn’t have a column today. Not out of laziness, I assure you — as plausible as that explanation may sound — but because I thought it worth making room for our full-page editorial overview of the main issues that should be considered as the state embarks upon tax reform.

Comprehensive tax reform, of course, has long been one of our favorite hobby horses, right up there with government restructuring. But here we put most of the main principles involved in one place. I urge you to peruse it, and use this post as a forum for sharing your thoughts on the subject. Or better yet, write us a letter to the editor.

Or best of all, write or call your lawmakers, and urge them to carefully consider the good of the whole state in changing our tax laws for the better.

Lake rising column

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First, take action to make
the whole lake rise
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
POLITICAL NOSTRUMS often become obnoxious with excessive application. Some simply start out that way.
    For me, one that has always fit in the latter category is “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
    I’ve never denied that there’s truth in it. At least, I intuit that there’s truth in it. I’m no economist, but it’s always made sense that if you pump more wealth into a reasonably fair and open economic system, many people’s boats — if not most people’s — should float somewhat higher. Not all boats, of course, what with the poor always being with us, but there was logic in the saying.
    I still didn’t like it. It was too devil-may-care: Don’t worry about whether everybody’s boat is seaworthy; just don’t impede the tide, and assume everything will be copacetic. It’s like something one would say over drinks at the 19th hole, followed by: “I’m fine. Aren’t you fine? Well, then everybody must be fine.”
    Oh, and don’t give me a bunch of guff about “class warfare.” I enjoy a round of golf as much as the next man. That doesn’t mean I have to adopt an air of insouciance toward society’s have-nots. So the “rising tide” metaphor always left me a little cold.
    At least, it did until last week, when I heard it put another way: “The whole lake has got to rise for my boat to rise.” That implies a sense of responsibility for raising the water.
    Harris DeLoach — chairman, president and chief executive officer of Sonoco Products — said that Wednesday, when he and other state business leaders presented their “Competitiveness Agenda” for the 2006 legislative session, which starts Tuesday.
    This is an agenda with considerable juice behind it, since it is being promoted in common by the state Chamber of Commerce, the Palmetto Institute, the S.C. Council on Competitiveness and the Palmetto Business Forum.
    The groups banded together last year to push successfully for tort reform, retirement system restructuring, a measure to encourage high school students to choose “career clusters” that help them see the point of staying in school, and “innovation centers” to connect university-based research to the marketplace.
    They had less success advocating adequate funding for highways and health care, but overall, the stratagem showed what could happen when state business leaders combine their clout and let lawmakers know they’re truly serious about some issues.
    “This time last year, I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive,” said Chamber President Hunter Howard, who has carried water for his organization in the State House lobby for many a session. But once he tried a “whole new approach… going after the Legislature with really a stick kind of approach — but in a nice way,” he was pleased with the results.
    There will no doubt be those who detect an odor of self-interest whenever business people push for anything. And there’s truth in that, too. Mr. DeLoach does want his boat to rise, after all. But the encouraging thing is that he and the others leading this coalition understand that for that to happen, the water has to rise for everyone. Rather than simply saying “I’ve got mine” and being satisfied, they are pursuing policies that — whether you think they’re smartly crafted or not — acknowledge the truth that we’re all in this together: If the least of these in South Carolina are left back, so are we all.
    Take tax reform, for instance. As my colleague Cindi Scoppe noted in a recent column, the business sector is determined not to be outsqueaked by homeowners to the extent that businesses bear a disproportionate share of the tax burden.
    But there’s good in that. Lawmakers are coming back to town this week all in a sweat to get angry residential property taxpayers off their backs, which creates the danger of overreacting yet again with little regard for the stability, fairness and efficacy of the overall tax system.
    Basically, the business honchos are saying what this editorial board has said for years — that however much emotion swirls around property taxes or some other outrage of the moment, the goal should be “comprehensive tax system reform.”
    Of course, the biz types have a few things on their wish list that most of us would never think to ask for, such as workers’ compensation “reform.” (I put that in quotes because I haven’t decided whether it’s reform or not.)
    But I’m still struck by the extent to which these business leaders seem more interested than many of our politicians in doing, as Mr. DeLoach put it, “what’s good for the whole state,” seeing that as the way to benefit them all.
    Those who reflexively distrust the private sector see it as wanting nothing more from government than to cut its taxes and leave it alone. But too many aspects of this agenda give the lie to that.
    In fact, “We’re referred to as the group that wants to raise taxes,” said Carolina First Bank CEO Mack Whittle. “Well, we’re the businesses that pay the taxes” (about 43 percent of the total, asserts the Palmetto Institute’s Jim Fields). “We have to look at the road system; we have to look at education. And if it does take more revenue, then so be it.”
    So it is that you see the business community leading the charge for kindergarten for all 4-year-olds who need it.
    It is, in large part, the kind of agenda that reflects what real pro-business conservatives — the kind who have a proven ability to meet a payroll, and a realistic grasp of what it would take to provide better paychecks for all South Carolinians — see as the state’s real needs.
    What they come up with differs necessarily from what professional “conservatives” who are all theory and no practice tend to advocate. You know, the Grover Norquists, and those w
ho would play along with them.
    Am I endorsing this whole agenda? Of course not. I haven’t begun to make up my mind about significant portions of it. Others I know I’m against. For instance, while I welcome these groups to the comprehensive tax reform cause, my colleagues and I staunchly oppose some of the particulars they advocate under that umbrella — such as imposing spending caps on local government. And we disagree with their position on the powers of the Ports Authority.
    But I do like the stated attitude that underlies much of this approach. Like Mr. DeLoach, I want to see the whole lake rise.

Relative family values

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Paul DeMarco, a potential charter member of the Unparty from Marion County, had the following to say in response to this post:

I do agree that more fairly allocating funds to poor districts like ours will help…

But there is no amount of money that can repair the disintegration
of the family. Many students in our district enter K-4 or K-5 already
so far behind they will never catch up and the most important single
factor holding them back is lack of a stable two parent family. If a
child spends his pre-school years in a single parent home he has been
handicapped in a way that is very difficult to overcome. My hat goes
off to the single parents who are doing their best to make it work but
we all know that two parents paddling in the same direction will take a
child farther than one.

This issue (the disintegration of the family, particularly in the black community) seems to be the elephant in the living room….

Why are we not focused on this issue? Is is something that people feel
is inevitable or simply too overwhelming to address comprehensively?

Later, Dave wrote:

Paul, You hit the nail right on the head but you will never see the
State publish (in print) what you just wrote. We all know that one of
the reasons, if not the main reason, that this problem cannot be solved
is that if someone acknowledges the true problem, then you will be
attacked by the race-baiters. As a result, we as a society peck away at
symptoms of the problem, while politely ignoring the cultural
dysfunction inherent in many black families. Keep in mind there is a
major political party, called Democrats, who give lip service to fixing
the problem, but in reality it is in the Democrats interest to have a
huge voting block living on the welfare plantation….

Paul, demonstrating the sort of lively debate we’d be likely to have at Unparty meetings, came back with:

Brad,

How do you respond to Dave’s complaint that the State is too timid
about identifying single-parent families as a major source of society’s
woes.
Also, it seems to me that on this and other issues our focus should be
on trying to come up with viable solutions/interventions rather than
simply debating.

After all that — and partly because that thread is scattered through a 36-comment conversation among multiple parties, meaning that lots of folks might miss it — I thought I’d respond in a separate post, as follows:

Paul,

The issue isn’t whether The State is "too timid;" it’s whether there’s a public policy issue to be addressed. In the conventional sense, there’s not. But once you start talking about the state getting into pre-K development, you are into unconventional territory. So let’s explore it.

Up to now, our concern has been what to do with the reality that faces our public schools: There are children out there with only one or no parents — or parents who don’t give a damn about them or their education — and what are we going to do about those kids? We can rant all we want about how that shouldn’t happen, but it does, and it’s not the kids’ fault. So we end up about where Judge Cooper did — we need to do something to help those kids whose parents have failed them. It’s the well-established principle of the state acting in loco parentis under extreme circumstances.

But if you’re talking about acting to prevent such situations from arising, you’re getting into areas that give the civil libertarians fits (which, come to think of it, might be enough reason to go there in and of itself). Are we going to license reproduction … outlaw bastardy … make the term "illegitimate" true to its Latin root, as in "not lawful?" What would be the penalties for the inevitable breaches? And what would you do with the children who are the products of such illegal activity? Actually, that brings us back to where we already are…

Personally, I’m for going the non-governmental route and simply resurrecting shame as a salutary force in our society. I’ve been for that for a long time. My being for it, though, hasn’t done much to stem the tidal wave of shamelessness I see washing all around me.

Maybe we should make shame a plank in the Unparty platform. What do you think?

On the sixth day of Christmas…

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… I finally filed a post…

Did you wonder if I’d fallen off the face of the Earth? Or were you too busy with more more worthwhile pursuits than perusing my pontifications? Let’s hope the latter. I also hope you’re having a fine Christmas season, and rest assured I will be opining to the limits of your endurance and likely beyond, once the new year is well under way.

In the meantime, this matter has come to my attention, as it no doubt has to yours. What do y’all think about it? Personally, I think what I’ve always thought: Does it really matter whether we were meeting the constitutional minimum, in terms of what South Carolina really needs to be doing to catch up with the rest of the nation? I mean, it’s shameful for a court to have to find the state to be deficient in any area by that lowly standard. But suppose the judge had found the state had met the "minimally adequate" standard in every area? Would that have been enough so that South Carolina would no longer be last where it should be first, and first where it should be last?

Of course not. Most every other state in the union has been doing much more than South Carolina’s minimum for generations.

What does "doing more" look like for South Carolina? Does it mean devoting more resources to make schools in Richland District 2, or Lexington 1, even better than they already are? No. It means the state stepping in to make sure that kids in Marion, Lee and Allendale counties have the same opportunity for a good education as do those growing up in Columbia’s suburbs and bedroom communities.

And what that means is that the main business of the upcoming legislative season should still be what it already needed to be before this ruling: Revamping the state’s entire system of taxing and spending so that fundamental needs are met in every corner of the state (not just those parts with good property tax bases), and raising the money in a manner that is fair, reliable and conducive to economic growth.

I look forward to seeing what y’all think about this once I have time to return to the blog on a regular basis — which, as I said, will be a couple of days or so into the new year.

Until then.

“Three Amigos” column

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Reform backers disappointed,
but not discouraged
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
THEY WERE called the “Three Amigos,” even though there were up to five of them. They were business leaders who were instrumental in pushing the Legislature to pass the Education Accountability Act of 1998. Later, they served on the Education Oversight Committee that was created by that legislation.
    They were Bill Barnet, Larry Wilson, Joel Smith, Bob Staton and James Bennett (scroll down on the link to bio). But the old “Amigos” gag led me to ask three of them for reaction to last week’s news that, for the first time since the standards they pushed went into effect, schools across the state failed to advance.
Far more (354) got a lower grade than received a higher one (55), compared with 2004, while most (668) held steady.
    Messrs. Wilson, Barnet and Staton were all “disappointed” by the results, but none would own up to being “discouraged.”
    They were not surprised by what they saw as a temporary setback on a long “journey.”
After all, this is what the Accountability Act was supposed to do — use tough standardized tests to show objectively where the challenges are, so that they can be addressed.
    “I’m not all that upset about it,” Larry Wilson (whose latest ideas on education and economic development were the subject of last week’s column) called to tell me.
    “You have to look at long-term trends,” he said. One year’s setback isn’t enough to worry about. If schools lose ground next year, too, “Then I’ll begin to be concerned about a trend.”
    He noted that those who have spent their whole school careers under the law’s regimen are showing remarkable progress. For instance, our fourth-graders exceeded the national average in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, the “nation’s report card.”
    “As these students progress, we’ll see better results,” he said.
    He said the state has four big areas to work on:

  • Appropriate, early remediation for kids who need it.
  • Consolidating school districts to eliminate the “inefficiency and high cost of small districts.”
  • Early childhood education, getting children ready for the increased rigor they’ll face in K-12.
  • Raising expectations of students, parents and communities.

    As one trained in systems engineering, he says “education’s no different from any other complex system.” The key is finding the right buttons to push and dials to turn.
    Bill Barnet left the Oversight Committee to become mayor of Spartanburg, but his interest in the mission hasn’t waned.
    He said it’ll take time to overcome the “generational abuse” that led to the conditions the Accountability Act sought to address.
    He illustrated this with a story: For years, he ignored a herniated disc — until the pain in his leg became excruciating, and he consented to surgery. When his leg still hurt weeks later, he complained to the doctor. The doctor told him he couldn’t just assume the pain would go away overnight when he had allowed the damage to continue for 10 years.
    Similarly, the challenges to educational achievement in South Carolina “cannot be solved in any one- or five-year period.”
    He bristles at any suggestion that the struggle should be abandoned for, say, tax credits that encourage parents to abandon the schools.
    “The governor says, ‘How can you be comfortable and pleased with where you are?’.æ.æ.æ. I look him in the eye and say I’m not comfortable and I’m not happy,” he said. And then, he says, he tells Gov. Mark Sanford that while he, Bill Barnet, believes in “choice” (such as charter and magnet schools) where it works, the “Put Parents in Charge Act” is “all about your constituents, and maybe your run for president.” Ultimately, it’s a “huge distraction” from the real issues, such as the inequality between rich and poor districts.
    He keeps an eye on efforts to address that through comprehensive tax reform, but wonders if it is politically possible: “Greenville has to be willing to accept the premise that they’re going to take their money and send it to Dillon.”
    The message, he insists, shouldn’t be “stay the course.” It should be “stay the course, with thoughtful adjustments.”
    The only one of the three still on the Oversight Committee, Bob Staton takes heart from the knowledge that “Our kids are still being better educated than they were seven or eight years ago.”
In fact, he expected a setback such as this one last year — the first time the bar was raised on what schools had to accomplish.
    But he knows not everyone sees it his way: “People will use this information to validate their point of view that we’re awful, we’ve always been awful and we’ll always be awful,” he said.
    “My frustration is, people just look at a piece of it,” such as graduation rates. But today’s dropouts started school before the Accountability Act. “The kids that are beginning to come through it are doing better,” he said. “The graduation rate is the culmination of 18 years of that kid’s life and what goes on in it.”
    He cited “three things to look at” going forward:

  • Where a child is in the third grade. Remediate if necessary.
  • The transition from middle to high school, when reading proficiency is essential to mastering critical thinking skills.
  • Moving out of high school and into career preparation.

    “We’ve got to get them through each of those stages,” he said.
    And my reaction? The questions to be asked today are: What are the conditions that led to 55 schools doing better, and how do we go about replicating them in the 354 that slipped?

Attention, District 5 voters!

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Opponents of Tuesday’s referendum on whether to let Lexington-Richland School
District 5 borrow $131 million needed to build new schools think they smell a
rat: They shrug off the district’s insistence that the bond issue will not
increase the taxes they pay for capital debt service, saying their taxes for
operating these new schools will go up.

Typical of this point of view is Don Carlson of
Chapin, who was quoted in today’s lead news story as saying:

"Unless these new buildings plan on heating, cooling, feeding,
supplying and teaching these students all by themselves, you can bet … your
tax bill is going to see an increase."

For Mr. Carlson and
like-minded voters in the district, I have the following three points to
make:

  1. Your taxes for
    that were going up anyway.
  2. Your taxes for
    that were going up anyway.
  3. Your taxes for
    that were going up anyway.

OK, so I’m being a
little facetious. Actually I only have two serious points to
make:

  1. Your taxes for
    that were going up anyway, because the school-aged population of the
    district is growing at a rate of 500 to 600 kids a year, and the district has to
    pay to educate them somewhere, somehow.

  2. The real issue in
    this referendum is whether you’d rather those taxes be spent entirely on paying
    teachers and operating the classrooms in new schools that will be assets to the
    community for generations to come, or spend a large chunk of that operating
    money — which would otherwise have gone into the classroom — on mobile
    classrooms that depreciate the moment they are placed on the grounds of
    increasingly overcrowded, less-excellent schools.

That’s the choice
before you: Whether to spend your increased taxes for operations wisely or
foolishly. A "yes" vote is for the wise option.

In the interest of
full disclosure, there are two ways that your property taxes might not go up to
pay for school operations. One is that you just let one of the best districts in
the state go to pot, and watch your property values fall like a rock along with
the quality of the schools. The second is that legislators come up with a better
way to pay for school operations. That could happen, but there are a lot of
variables between the talk going on at this moment and an actual new school
financing system.

Column on Larry Wilson’s trial balloon

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A comprehensive plan for
making us wealthier and wiser
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LARRY WILSON, one of the chief architects
of the Education Accountability Act, came by the office the other day and offered a pretty compelling vision for what South Carolina should do next.
    The local entrepreneur doesn’t hold elective office, and doesn’t claim to speak for anyone but himself. But the ideas he put forth are worth sharing because:

  • He is a board member for the Palmetto Institute, and that think tank is expected to join with the Palmetto Business Forum, the Competitiveness Council and the state Chamber of Commerce to set forth a unified vision for how to make the average South Carolinian wealthier. Some of these ideas may crop up in that context.
  • He is also close to the new speaker of the S.C. House, Bobby Harrell. How many of these ideas Mr. Harrell buys into and how many he has told Mr. Wilson — according to Larry’s account — just aren’t feasible I don’t know.

    Nor do I know how many of these ideas my editorial board colleagues and I will go for once we sit down and study them.
    But I was sufficiently impressed by this set of interlocked proposals that it seems worth throwing out to see what others think. If not this, we need some kind of comprehensive strategy for moving South Carolina forward. We must get beyond the usual piecemeal responses to crises and interest group demands if we’re to catch up.
    The critical element that ties all of these ideas together is the unassailable fact that education and economic development are inseparable. If we don’t realize that, we’ll continue to make 80 percent of the national income.
    I don’t have room to set out everything covered in our wide-ranging discussion, but here are the most intriguing and/or appealing ideas that I heard:

EDUCATION
    Mr. Wilson wants an Education Quality Act that includes:

  • Early remediation. Third-graders scoring below basic on the PACT would attend school year-round in the fourth grade, under master teachers or National Board-certified teachers. The teachers’ incentive? Higher pay for 230 days of teaching. He would then add a grade level at a time, on up to high school.
  • Full-day kindergarten for 4-year-olds. This would be provided at “accountable, certified” public and private schools, “financed by vouchers and integrated w/First Steps.” The money might come in part from consolidating current pre-5K efforts, and be distributed in a way markedly different from the awful “Put Parents in Charge” scheme: Low-income kids would get full funding (about $4,000 apiece). The money would go to the school their parents choose. Higher-income folks would get a tax deduction (not a credit) to help with a portion of the cost. “I’m absolutely against vouchers in the public schools, by the way,” Mr. Wilson said. “But this is an area where I think it will work.”
  • An appointed state superintendent of education.
  • A BRAC-style commission for reducing the absurd number of school districts in the state. He credited this idea to Rep. James Smith, D-Richland, citing the facts that 41 of the state’s 85 districts serve only 14 percent of all students, but account for 100 percent of schools judged “unsatisfactory” under the Accountability Act.
  • A statewide salary schedule for educators, by category and qualification. This way, for instance, Marion County wouldn’t lose good teachers to Horry just because the Grand Strand county can pay so much more.

KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
    Mr. Wilson would like to increase the lottery money going to endowed chairs from $30 million to $40 million to take greater advantage of this indispensable tool for helping our research universities to boost our economy.
    He would also push for an Industry Partners Act that would:

  • Recruit or set up companies to apply cutting-edge research going on in the state, accelerating the growth of economic clusters built around automotive innovation (Clemson), “Next Energy” development (USC) and biotech (MUSC and USC). The idea would be to market the state’s under-acknowledged assets and provide such incentives as local demonstration projects — say, running buses in the Midlands on hydrogen. The goal: to see these products manufactured here, by highly paid South Carolinians.
  • Define respective, interconnected roles for the state Commerce Department, universities, S.C. Research Authority and tech system in boosting knowledge-based enterprises in the state.

TAX REFORM
    Comprehensive tax reform, of course — the only kind worth talking about. Fortunately, while there’s a lot of talk regarding “property tax relief” as an end in itself, the climate has never been better for realigning our whole tax structure.
    Mr. Wilson calls it “tax-balancing.” He would shift the burden of financing schools to the state (the only way to standardize teacher pay and otherwise reduce the gap between rich and poor districts). A Senate panel is talking about replacing the property tax as a school funding source with a higher sales tax. But Mr. Wilson raises two caveats: Care must be taken not to raise the sales tax to the point that S.C. merchants can’t compete with the Internet and neighboring states, and the tax burden must not be shifted to businesses to the point that it stifles job creation.
    That latter point is worth considering for a reason he didn’t bring up: If only owner-occupied homes were exempted from school property taxes, gross inequality would still exist between districts rich in industry and commerce, and those without that base.
    He would also:

    “The point of all this is, it fits together,” Mr. Wilson concluded. “You can’t fix one problem without fixing the other.”
    Exactly.

Well, not exactly…

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I agreed with much of what this contributor had to say on our Sunday op-ed page, but she fell down in this one paragraph:

Some folks will continue to believe that the care and education of young children is the sole responsibility of parents. But we have the responsibility for making decisions based on the world as it is, not as we wish. For example, we wish all families could save the money necessary to send their children to college. The LIFE scholarship is a public recognition that some families cannot save the necessary tuition and that the public benefits when more children go to college.

The problem was with that last sentence. The LIFE scholarship, properly understood, is a public recognition that lawmakers (and at least one former governor) believe that middle-class voters can be persuaded to vote for people who help them pay for their children’s college educations.

If the Legislature truly valued public education, and wanted it to be more widely available, it would send more money to the colleges themselves with a caveat that the money be used to lower tuition. Then the middle class — and that’s mostly who benefits from the LIFE scholarship, given its requirements — would not need financial help. That wouldn’t address the problems of the truly needy, but it would express the idea of valuing higher ed.

Lawmakers opt for the scholarships instead because voters are less likely to be personally grateful for marginally lower tuition. Worse, if they are grateful, they might direct their appreciation toward the college or university itself — and what political use would that be to anybody?

Plays better with others

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By contrast with the release from GOP HQ quoted in my last posting, I’d like to point out how much the governor’s rhetoric has improved in this same area.

The governor started out, a couple of years back, making the same kinds of misleading statements about public education as Mr. Dawson — saying, essentially, that we weren’t getting any improvement for our investment in public schools, when most of the data indicated otherwise (he was careful to select those very few data that supported his false conclusion). This has been, since the beginning, the standard rhetorical procedure for all those who want to undermine public education — first say that we’re wasting our money on it, then try to get the voters to buy some snake oil instead.

But the governor is no dummy, and ultimately an honest man. (I think the false and misleading things he’s said about the schools arise from his utter ignorance of the world of public education, and his instinctive distrust of that terra incognita.) This shows in the rhetorical about-face I’ve witnessed on his part recently.

Check out, for instance, the governor’s release of the same date as Mr. Dawson’s. Mr. Sanford has now learned to say,

This goes to show that there are a whole lot of teachers, parents and students working very hard to educate our state’s children, and they deserve credit for these improvements.

Mind you, he’s referring to the exact same data that caused Mr. Dawson to say, "Regrettably, this is sad and disappointing day for South Carolina’s students and parents."

Of course, the governor uses his congratulatory statement as a setup for the sales pitch for the snake oil, following those words immediately with:

Unfortunately, incremental change in SAT scores isn’t going to get us where we need to be in terms of competing with other states, let alone in competing with the rest of the world. That’s why this administration will continue pushing for fundamental reforms to the current system that give parents more choices…

Still, Gov. Sanford’s acknowledgment of progress is laudable. And it’s smart, on one level: Most of us love our public schools and are proud of their progress. The governor is trying to sell a political idea, and you don’t get anywhere with most voters by trashing the schools.

But on another level, he’s throwing away an essential tool in his selling process. It’s impossible to sell something as far-out and obviously unworkable as PPIC without getting people so worked up against the current education reform process that they’re unable to think clearly. Don’t expect to see the governor’s allies in this process drop the tactic. The only sector of the electorate in which they have made any progress is among those who have heard the statement, "We keep throwing money at the schools (they love that phrase, "throwing money"), and they just keep getting worse" so many times that they believe this utter canard.

They’re like the poor, programmed souls in Huxley‘s Brave New World:

The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.

Groups such as the Orwellian South Carolinians for Responsible Government and its moneyed out-of-state fellow travelers aren’t going to give up the lies, because they can’t win without them.

But let’s at least appreciate that the governor is learning a little of the truth about the schools, and speaking it. Yes, you can say he’s being the "good cop," but we usual suspects should learn to appreciate any kindnesses we can get. Remember, the bad cops will be back in the interrogation room in force, come January.