Category Archives: Education

A gratuitous slap, signifying nothing

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You’ll notice that though this is Sunday, I had no column today. I thought Warren’s topic was more relevant than anything I was prepared to write at the end of the week. And it let me get to some administrative work that was due Friday — you know, TPS reports and the like. Such fun.

However, I do have something I’d like to add to today’s lead editorial. It makes a passing reference to the recent release of South Carolina’s SAT scores and comparative ranking. That reminds me of something I never got around to commenting on at the time — this press release, which is probably the most gratuitous, reflexive and pointless bit of partisanship I’ve seen in quite a while. And it really surprised me coming from a nice, reasonable guy like Katon Dawson.

OK, let’s look at the facts: South Carolina is tied for 49th in the nation, but is catching up on the herd by improving faster than anyone. No state that has as many students taking the test as we do has improved by as many points as we have in recent years (and we’re talking actual, raw score, here, not percentages). I have to ask, how in the world can anyone expect a state as far behind as South Carolina has historically been to do better than to improve at a faster rate than any competitor — in fact, at three times the national rate? Any fair observer would think such progress was remarkable.

So what does Mr. Dawson do in the face of this news? Well, basically, he doesn’t deal with the facts at all. First, in a statement that could have been drafted by a PR man on the Bizarro World, he says, "this is sad and disappointing day for South Carolina’s students and parents." I mean, how much more insulting to students and parents (and teachers) can you get than to call their achievement of leading the nation in improvement "disappointing?"

But that wasn’t his point at all, of course. That was just knee-jerk public school bashing. He gets right away to his true objective, which is to "blame" Inez Tenenbaum for this progress.

Set aside for a moment the strange disconnect between Mrs. Tenenbaum’s actual character and abilities and the way Republicans love to paint her. The really twisted thing about this release is that it doesn’t even make any sense by the "logic" of political partisans.

Did no one clue Katon in on the fact that Mrs. Tenenbaum is in no way his political opponent? The woman isn’t running for office. Why go to the trouble of twisting the truth 180 degrees, making SAT progress out to be failure and insulting the majority of people out there who value our public schools, to attack an "enemy" who has retired from the field? This would be like the United States firing a volley of nukes at Moscow to celebrate the fact that the Cold War was over.

Yes, I know Mrs. Tenenbaum could decide to run for office later. But why not save your ammo until then? Or better yet, wait until you actually have some ammo, instead of attacking her for "failure" that is actually an achievement — something you would think a partisan would do only in the desperate last gasps of a losing fight.

You know, it’s never mattered to me which party occupies which office. In fact, we endorsed Mrs. Tenenbaum’s predecessor, Republican Barbara Nielsen. But it does matter to Katon, so I think I’d better point out that South Carolina slipped in SAT improvement during Mrs. Nielsen’s time in office, and only assumed its present rate of forward movement after Mrs. Tenenbaum took office.

So if I were a Republican Party leader, I wouldn’t try to use SAT scores for partisan advantage. But then, thank the Lord, I’ll never be a party leader of any kind.

August 31 column, w/ links

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Snippets from a conversation:
Bill Gates, innovation and leadership
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
    JOHN WARNER responded to my Sunday column about Inez Tenenbaum’s decision not to seek a third term as education superintendent by quoting Bill Gates.
    Specifically, he quoted from a speech the Microsoft honcho delivered to the National Education Summit on High Schools a while back. Everybody’s talking about it. In fact, Mrs. Tenenbaum was talking about it during our interview last week, holding up Mr. Gates’ efforts as an example of someone doing what she hopes to do once she’s left office — pushing for reform from the private sector. Here’s part of what Mr. Warner cited in comments on my blog:
    “America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded — though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools — even when they’re working exactly as designed — cannot teach our kids what they need to know today…. This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.”
    I’m afraid my gut response was rather dismissive, along these lines: Yes, everyone’s heard or read what Bill Gates said about our secondary schools system. What I haven’t heard is an understandable explanation of what he would replace it with.
    To be fair to Mr. Gates, I went back to read the full speech. (Which you can also do by following the link from my blog.)
    I found that while much of what he said was interesting and wise, little of it struck me as new. I was pleased to see that he is as interested in equality of opportunity as we are on this editorial board:
    “In district after district, wealthy white kids are taught Algebra II while low-income minority kids are taught to balance a check book!” he said. “The first group goes on to college and careers; the second group will struggle to make a living wage…. (E)ither we think they can’t learn, or we think they’re not worth teaching. The first argument is factually wrong; the second is morally wrong.”
    I could also write that — along with what he sees as standing in the way of a solution: “The key problem is political will” (as in, the lack thereof).
    His prescription for what should be done sounds much like the central idea behind No Child Left Behind on the federal level, and a number of initiatives — such as more rigorous requirements for graduation — that have been in place in South Carolina since the turn of the century.
    “The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous work, and — for their sake and ours — they have to,” he said, adding that the aim should be “to prepare every student for college.”
    Then, he spelled out the active ingredients of his prescription: “If we can focus on these three steps — high standards for all; public data on our progress; turning around failing schools — we will go a long way toward ensuring that all students have a chance to make the most of their lives.”
    Those are the same principles we’ve already put into action through the Education Accountability Act. It is laudable that Mr. Gates is putting considerable amounts of his own money where his mouth is, transforming hundreds of high schools across the country.
    But there’s only so much he can do, even with his resources. Turning around the dropout rate (which Mr. Gates correctly sees as a national epidemic, not just a South Carolina problem) and taking the next steps in making sure all kids are prepared for productive lives will take leadership in the political sphere.
    Mr. Warner bemoaned that “Today we’re making incremental improvements, and that is good but not sufficient to make the progress we need. There is no way an educational Bill Gates could emerge because there is no vehicle for them to pursue truly innovative ideas.”
    John, I wrote back, the entrepreneurial culture you envision is politically impossible. You know why? Because politicians and their constituents, being extremely jealous of every tax dollar, absolutely refuse to trust educators. Therefore we get rigid standards, tests, measurements and controls that force everyone to follow certain patterns. (I once wrote a whole column on the lack of trust as being the root of all evil in our society. I’ll put that on my blog, too.)
    Everything I’ve seen in my career about the politics of public education indicates that the state will never hire teachers, give them resources and say, “Go to town; be creative!”
    Mr. Warner agreed:
    “Brad, I have been talking to people about this for a long time too. I absolutely agree with you (about the lack of trust).
    “There is the trust factor you mentioned, not trusting educators. There is a lack of trust of parents to make the right decisions. There is also a serious lack of trust among minorities, especially older minorities, who have historical experience that honed their instincts to be wary. There (is) a large segment of people who are cynical in general and don’t trust anyone else, especially those in government. Some of our leading politicians in the state have made an art form out of tapping into this latent cynicism.
    “In a flat world, only innovation can keep us globally competitive. Public education needs to be a part of that culture. Somehow, we need to find a leader in this state who can empower people to begin to create a culture of innovation.
    “Dick Riley brought enlightened leadership to public education 25 years ago. And Carroll Campbell brought it to economic development 15 years ago. Without the next strong leader, it will be difficult for us to make significant progress.”
    What can I say to that, except that he’s absolutely right. This is why I hate to see a leader such as Mrs. Tenenbaum leave the public sphere, and why I worry about who will lead us to the next steps in the reform that is so essential to our state’s future.

Extras from Tenenbaum meeting

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There were a few points of interests from our Thursday editorial board meeting with Inez Tenenbaum that didn’t fit into my column Sunday.

First, she made a number of comments that — despite her continued attempts to be diplomatic — betrayed the degree to which her frustration with Gov. Mark Sanford has grown over the past couple of years. Since he came into office, at the same time that her second term began, she has gone out of her way to be at least neutral toward the governor, if not actually reaching out and trying to build bridges. For instance, she was the only major constitutional officer (as I recall; Cindi or someone correct me if I’m wrong, since I’m at home and have limited access to the archives) to go along with his desire to have her job become appointive rather than elected. Given the partisan currents that swirled all around this issue, the fact that the individual at the center had an accepting attitude should have been very helpful. Beyond that, the superintendent met with the governor once or twice early on, and this encouraged me that two people whose elections I had strongly favored would be able to rise above the partisan and ideological considerations that would have separated lesser individuals. All of this encouraged me greatly in early 2003.

But as time wore on, while the governor continued to say things to me that indicated his willingness to work with Mrs. Tenenbaum (and to this day, while he has shared with me — off the record, of course — negative impressions of a number of other leading political figures, within and without his own party, I don’t remember when he has directly criticized Mrs. Tenenbaum in my hearing), there was a lack of reciprocation on his part that was discouraging. He seemed noncommital personally, and among his administration and its fellow travelers there was a sort of passive-aggressive (and sometimes aggressive-aggressive) antipathy toward Mrs. Tenenbaum and her department that doused my hopes for a productive working relationship between them.

Then, of course, there was the larger problem: It became clear by early 2004 that the ideological wall between them was just too tall, and too thick. And the wall was constructed by the governor. If ideological rigidity were bricks, he’d have enough to build a full-scale model of the Great Wall of China.

In fact, Mr. Sanford’s insistence upon pushing the mad scheme of tuition tax credits for private school over the past year was, I think, the last straw for Mrs. Tenenbaum. You may say that he was for something like this all along, and indeed he was. But it only became fully apparent about a year ago the extent to which this was something he would pull out all stops to accomplish. He went beyond merely clueless about public education to positively destructive. (He would no doubt object to that characterization, and be sincere about it; that’s because he truly has no idea what public schools are all about, and is blind to the outrageousness of his proposal.)

Anyway, while she said a number of cordial things Thursday about the governor that sounded like her old self, there was a fierce passion in her voice when, right after praising other recent governors of both parties for the things they have done to further the cause of education, she uttered the following remarks with regard to their successor:

The whole thing about vouchers without accountability is just extraordinary.
In South Carolina, we have every aspect of our public schools held accountable — the Adequate Yearly Progress, the report cards — and to give money to a system that has no accountability, for financial or student achievement, is extraordinary. We would never do that.

    And then to, not only stand by and watch it, but actively condone and invite out-of-state groups to come in and run negative ads against public education — was irresponsible. And that’s putting it lightly.
    Why would you attack your school system that you’re the head of? And demoralize people when they are trying so hard, particularly in the rural areas, against all odds? It’s unprecedented.
    If you are trying to compete with other states to bring people into South Carolina and be competitive, you do not run down your public education system.
    You celebrate. You are the one who should be leading the charge, and holding a press conference: “We’re number one in improvement in 8th-grade NAEP; our SAT scores were the highest in improvement in the country…
    You know, that’s what a proactive governor does…

    …Someone has to give people hope.
    You just have to have somebody that will give people hope and excitement, that you can do it if you all pull together.

One of the things that frustrates her (and me) about the whole PPIC affair is the way it has bled energy and attention from the ongoing work of implementing the Education Accountability Act. The irony here, as I’ve often mentioned before, is that this was a reform pushed through by a Republican governor and lawmakers before she entered office in 1999. It was an enormous undertaking that fell into her lap the day she started the job, and one she never asked for. Nevertheless, she took it one and made it her priority — and more importantly, made it WORK. Schools have been getting steadily, measurably better. And yet there are precious few Republicans who join her in taking pride in this progress, and too many who embrace the latest fad — which of course, is the precise opposite of accountability. About that, she lamented:

    Traditionally in South Carolina … South Carolina will create a new initiative and say this is what we’re going to do now, and then we lose focus, and 7 or 8 years later, we’ll want to change course, and change directions…

She cited a Rand Corporation study that was done (or came out) right when she came into office in 1999 that cited Texas and North Carolina as the two states that had done the most on education reform. She and other officials dutifully studied those states to see what they had done right. At the same time, she was much impressed by this bitter irony: “But that same report said, had South Carolina stayed the course on the (Education Improvement Act), we would have been ahead of Texas and North Carolina.”

We do indeed have short attention spans — and not only among politicians. Mrs. Tenenbaum, as I noted in my column Sunday, is pinning her hopes on the private sector being able to overcome the political sphere’s attention deficit. This reminds me of comments Larry Wilson made to our editorial board at the governor’s mansion back in 1997 (or was it ’98?) — he said the business community, which was pushing for what would become the EAA would have to keep the state focused on the goals of accountability over the next 12 years, since election cycles would interfere with continuity.

But I question the extent to which the business community has maintained its focus on the goals of accountability. I’ve seen a number of exciting initiatives come out of the private sector, and then all these high-powered private individuals go on and live their lives, leaving the initiatives to sink or float. And they generally sink.

That must not be allowed to happen with accountability. And yet, the main actors in that process have mostly moved on to other enthusiasms, leaving a less dynamic cadre to carry on. Our only hope is that the process is sufficiently rooted in the system now that it can go on without a lot of heavy pushing. And our greatest fear must be that the reform process will be derailed by either PPIC, or some other dangerous distraction.

August 28 column, w/ links

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Must one be out of office
to lead on public education?

By BRAD WARTHEN

Editorial Page Editor

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

We have enormous challenges
in South Carolina still, but we need to celebrate our successes. One of the
things that I have learned from Dick Riley is he said you need to motivate
people. A leader motivates people, and celebrates the good things… Success
breeds success, and if you keep working and people get excited — like, “We are making progress, let’s keep
going!”… And that’s what I hope my role has been as the bully pulpit for
education and change.

— Inez Tenenbaum, Aug. 25

INEZ TENENBAUM’s visit to our editorial board last week was an
occasion for her to tout her accomplishments and brush away questions about
political plans.

But I wasn’t interested in that stuff. I knew she had done a good
job — I had written that myself plenty of times — and I knew she wasn’t
planning to run for governor next year.

What I wanted to know was: Who is going to provide leadership
to
keep public education in South Carolina moving forward? Who is going to inspire
South Carolina to shoulder the burden of making sure our kids have futures as
bright as those of kids across the rest of the country?

The challenge before us is one that I sometimes compare to our
situation in Iraq: The odds are enormous. The likelihood of failure is high
unless we are willing to sacrifice and keep trying, no matter how hard the
slogging gets. There are no acceptable alternatives to success; we simply have
to do what it takes to win. Political leadership must rise to heights we have
not yet seen in order to inspire us to keep going in the face of daunting
circumstances. Giving up is not a rational option — and yet there are
burgeoning political movements that demand ever more loudly that we do just
that. With Iraq, it’s “Bring the troops home.” With S.C. public education, it’s
“give people tax credits to abandon the schools.”

In the case of S.C. education, the daunting circumstances mostly
have to do with rural poverty, which pulls down the averages so that it’s all
too easy to ignore the excellence in our suburban schools — or for that matter,
the gradual progress in even the most challenging areas.

Someone has to be a cheerleader for the successes South Carolina
has already had as it has implemented the Education Accountability Act of 1998,
and a goad to make us tackle the greatest unmet challenge, the one we have to
lick if we’re ever to catch up to the rest of the country — the gap between
rich districts and poor ones.

Mrs. Tenenbaum has been a good cheerleader for the successes —
although she can’t be heard easily over a governor who leads the faction that
scoffs at our accomplishments. She has also been a good administrator as the
system has adapted to the strict new regime of accountability. But her ability
to change the education conversation to what we ought to be talking about has been hampered by two things:

First, superintendent of education has never been a sufficiently
bully pulpit to get South Carolina to undertake something as difficult as going
beyond incremental improvement to dramatic change. It takes a governor — and a
governor of singular vision and charisma. That’s one reason the superintendent
job should be appointed rather than elected. (Make a list of major strategic
education initiatives — on the order of the Accountability Act, or the
Education Finance Act — that was conceived and led by anyone in that post. Short list, huh?)

Second, Mrs. Tenenbaum was the biggest vote-getter in the state
in the past two elections, and she is a Democrat. That made her a threat to the
Republican majority in the State House, and those Republicans who care more
about party advantage than the good of the state (and there are plenty such
knaves in both parties) had no hesitation about trashing public schools as a
way of getting at her. (Yet another reason why this position shouldn’t be
elected.)

Still, her eloquence in behalf of South Carolina’s most urgent
cause will certainly be missed in the halls of government. And what will
replace that?

For her part, Mrs. Tenenbaum promises to keep fighting for the
cause from the private sector. She hinted that she might start her own
foundation to add its voice to those already out there advocating continued
momentum on education reform.

Which brings me to the most disturbing point in our discussion
Thursday. Someone raised the question of what happens if the court rejects the
arguments of the poor districts that claim the state isn’t providing them with
adequate resources.

Her answer? “(I)f the court does not decide in favor of the
districts, it will have to be done by the private sector.” She said business
leaders — who were, after all, instrumental in making the Education Accountability Act happen — and other private actors will have to start a
grass-roots movement along the lines of, “so what, it didn’t meet the legal
standard, but we’re going to do something about it anyway.”

What disturbed me was her assumption — and it is unfortunately
well-founded — that the political branches won’t do what’s right. It’s either
the courts or an uprising of private citizens that will provide the leadership
— not the governor or lawmakers.

She’s not the only one who thinks so. Bill Barnet, one of the
business leaders who made the Accountability Act happen and now is mayor of
Spartanburg, agrees that the impetus for progress will have to come from
outside the ranks of the elected: “Until the people in the Legislature hear the
voices of the people who elect them, they are not going to change.”

OK, fine. This is not the way representative democracy is
supposed to work, of course. We’re supposed to be able to elect leaders with
the vision and intestinal fortitude to do the right thing, however difficult it
might be, without constant prodding. But fine. If we’ve all got to organize and
hoot and holler and focus the attention of those in the State House in order to
do right by our schools, then that’s what we’ve got to do. I’m ready. Are you?

Inez shocker!

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Well, I was completely unprepared for this one. I can’t remember the last time anything this big snuck up on me to this extent, that the first HINT I had of it was when I read it in the paper.

I mean, I just had lunch with Inez last week, and not a word. Oh, well. More power to my friend and colleague Lee Bandy.

I chatted with Mrs. Tenenbaum for a few minutes this afternoon, and didn’t learn much that youTenenbaum didn’t already know. Basically, she said that she had been thinking about this all summer — that once the budget and PPIC fights were over (for THIS year) and things calmed down a bit, she was able to reflect a bit, and reached the conclusion that two terms full of remarkable accomplishments (my judgment there, not hers) were enough.

I asked whether the incessant attacks from the Republicans who fear her for her popularity among the voters (and don’t bother mentioning that loss last year in the Senate race to a guy backed by a popular president; besides, I for one didn’t want to see her in the Senate anyway) was a factor in deciding to get out of the way. I have long suspected that the insistence on the part of many Republicans upon trashing our public schools (in spite of, or perhaps because of, all the encouraging data that show how education has improved on the Tenenbaum watch) was more about her than the schools.

She didn’t agree with that outright, but she did say that it would be a relief working on remaining initiatives for further improving our schools without the burden of electoral politics. Speaking of herself and her staff, "I think we’re all relieved that I’m not going to be involved in a race." One of the things she will continue to work on, even when she’s out of office is "changing the culture of education in South Carolina, so people not only respect it but revere it."

Of course, being who she is, when I brought up Republican criticism, she brought up the Republicans who have been nothing but supportive of public education and her efforts to improve it — such as John Courson, Ronny Townsend and Ken Clark. She said Bobby Harrell has been good to work with, too — although she was surprised that he criticized recently what he termed "out-of-control" transportation costs. In light of the facts, this surprised her: "He must have cheaper gas in Charleston than we have."

A glimmer of hope

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OK, now that you think — based on my last few posts — that I’m piling on with the bad news about  Mark Sanford, let me throw you a curve. The governor said something the other day that made a very good impression on me, and I hope it will make an impression on some others over at the State House.

Cindi Scoppe’s column today, and this news story, may not make much of any impression on you because unlike me, most people live real lives and don’t sit around thinking about comprehensive tax reform the way my colleagues on the editorial board and I do. (And if so, good for you.) But please go back and read those items before we proceed. Pretend you’re listening to that "waiting for the answer" music from "Jeopardy" while I wait for you to finish reading (the column and the news story, I mean, not the "Jeopardy" link — stay on task, please).

Don’t want to read them? OK, here’s what they’re about: At a Kiwanis Club meeting in Columbia, reported the Associated Press, "Gov. Mark Sanford said Wednesday he thinks lawmakers should study how to fund education in South Carolina before they start to tweak property taxes."

This was astounding news. The governor who is all about cutting taxes, and whose principal interest in education has been in offering tax cuts to people if they will abandon the public schools, was saying Sanford_tax school funding should come before an extremely popular tax cut. And he was saying it to a mostly retired crowd (click on the picture), the very sort of crowd that tends to love to hear about property tax cuts.

And he’s RIGHT! He’s absolutely right! This is what public school advocates have been saying for years — particularly those of us who care about the biggest problem with public education in our state: the gross inequity in funding between affluent suburban school districts and their poor, rural counterparts. (More specifically, and comprehensively, what we have been saying on the editorial page is that the governor and the Legislature should look at ALL state needs — schools, roads, public safety, the whole shebang — then figure out what it would cost to address them adequately, and build a fair, sensible tax system that pays for it all. In other words, when we talk about "comprehensive tax reform," we are simultaneously talking about comprehensive spending reform.)

"If you want relief," the governor said, "then how are we going to do it in a way that still provides adequate funding for the education process?" He even mentioned the equity issue!

Another interesting thing about this story is that the lawmakers the AP contacted for reaction — some of the very ones who have been a voice of reason, putting the brakes on Mr. Sanford’s tuition tax credits and broad income tax cuts — came across as thoughtless "let’s cut taxes because it’s popular, and who cares if the state falls apart in the meantime" types.

I don’t want to pin too much on this one account of a speech. I wasn’t there, and I need to dig into this a bit before I get too excited. Mr. Sanford has expressed concern about education equity in the past, only to turn around and, absurdly, offer his tuition tax credit as the solution. (A reminder for the reality-challenged: Poor, rural families would be the last people in the state to benefit from the tuition tax credit. Why? Because they don’t pay enough income tax to qualify for the tax cut, and because even if they DID qualify for the refund, they can’t afford to come up with the tuition on the front end, and in any case there are no private schools nearby that would enroll their kids.)

But with lawmakers mindlessly determined to cut one tax in a vacuum yet again (a tax they don’t even collect, by the way; a huge part of this is lawmakers loving to meddle in local government affairs, where they don’t have to clean up the mess they create), any spark of hope that somebody out there is actually thinking about how all these issues are connected is worth fanning into a flame, if at all possible.

July 31 column, with links

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State House needs to get real
about local government — and taxes
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
    A MEMBER of my Rotary club last week asked new House Speaker Bobby Harrell a question about property taxes.
    Unfortunately, in answering the question, he did not say anything that sounded like "comprehensive tax reform."
    This is worrisome, because after a buildup of two or three years in which it has looked constantly as though lawmakers were on the verge of getting serious about tackling the entire problem of how we fund essential services in this state, I’m starting to hear a lot of talk that sounds disturbingly like we’re in for another populist, Band-Aid round of property tax cutting without regard for anything else. (See above editorial.)
    Take, for instance, what Mr. Harrell’s Senate counterpart had to say on our July 17 op-ed page.
    This column, by the way, will make more sense if you read that column, from Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell. For stark contrast, also check out the July 26 piece by the Municipal Association‘s Howard Duvall.
    Mr. McConnell’s piece is remarkable for its lack of grounding in reality; Mr. Duvall’s for the precise opposite.
    In case you don’t have access to the Web at the moment, let me offer a few excerpts from Mr. McConnell’s piece, with a little commentary of my own:
    "As long as we have property taxes, we are in effect paying rent to the government for the use of our property…." No, we’re not. What we are doing is paying our fair share for services that benefit us enormously as property owners. Those of us who own property are ultimately the greatest beneficiaries of services that make our communities worth living in: police and fire protection, libraries and, yes, public schools.
    "Local governments can charge us as much as they want and feed their need to spend our money like they have a blank check." Local governments are run by officials who are elected with just as much legitimacy as Mr. McConnell, and who are caught between their mandate to provide everyday, essential services in their communities; state and federal mandates that they do certain things whether they want to or not; and the state Legislature’s never-ending efforts to prevent them from paying what it costs to do these things. If legislators, in their callous disregard , force local governments to raise property taxes beyond what voters find tolerable, it is the local officials who get voted out of office.
    "Their (local governments’) presumption for reform has always been more sources of revenue but fewer and fewer restriction on how and how much they can spend." Well, duh. When costs are increasing, and everybody’s beating you up over the property tax, of course you’re going to seek other sources of revenue. And where in the world do state legislators get off placing restrictions on how local council members spend the revenues that they take full responsibility (and the political risk) for raising? Here’s how this works: When lawmakers passed a bill spelling out how local governments could charge impact fees for new residential development, they forbade the locals to spend the money on the one greatest cost such development generates — public schools. So the locals have to go back to the property tax, and they — not the guilty parties up in the State House — get strung up at the polls for it.
    "Reform must be fair and, at the very least, must not produce a net increase for government in collected taxes." Oh, no. We wouldn’t want to provide rural kids with the same quality education that city kids get, or put enough troopers on the road, or make our prisons secure, or get the mentally ill out of jails and emergency rooms, or any of those other frills we can’t seem to afford with the present tax structure.
    "I hope that then the voices of the people from the mountains to the coast can drown out those of the paid lobbyists." Translation: I hope that rising dissatisfaction with the problem the Legislature created gives me the political license I need to utterly ignore the realistic counsel of the governments closest to the people.
    Local governments deal with the public at the most intimate level, where basic services are provided. They know what the public really wants from government because the public lets them know immediately when they’re failing to provide it. And they know what it costs, and they know what it’s like to be caught between the people they live among and the ideologues in Columbia who keep trying to make their jobs harder.
    I finally understand why Mark Sanford is the first governor I’ve seen Sen. McConnell get along with: Both are passionately, pedantically libertarian. And neither of them allows the reality of what happens at the business end of government — where essential services are provided to real people — interfere with them as they sit in the State House and endlessly spin their anti-government theories.
    Both of them starkly displayed this disconnect on the seat belt issue. But it matters so much more when the governor maligns public schools, or the senator trashes local government, with no regard for what’s actually happening out here in the world.

July 17 column, with links

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Has South Carolina lost its way on job creation?
    STANDARD & Poor’s dramatically highlighted just how bad off our state is economically when it downgraded our bond rating (see editorial above).
    On Wednesday, new House Speaker Bobby Harrell publicly opined that South Carolina has dropped the ball on job creation and economic development.
    Former Gov. Carroll Campbell “set the standard for economic development (results) and created the model that David Beasley followed, and by following that, our unemployment rate became the third best in the country. Today, we’re third or fourth worst,” the speaker told The Greenville News.
    “My frustration,” he told The Associated Press, “is that I don’t think we’ve been focused on that Harrell since Carroll Campbell and David Beasley were governors. I don’t mean to pick on Mark, and I don’t mean to pick on Jim Hodges.”
    On Friday, he expressed frustration that anyone would think he was trying to pick a fight with his fellow Republican in the governor’s office. “I think it is a total waste of time to talk about blame and who is at fault,” he said. “I think we need to recognize where we are and prepare a road map for where we want to be, and then do it.”
    When I noted that it was inevitable that many would see his remarks as a challenge to the governor, he said: “I’m not interested in challenging anybody. I’m interested in lowering the unemployment rate and raising incomes.”
     Gov. Mark Sanford’s official reaction to the loss of the AAA credit rating was to issue a press release asserting his promise “to continue his efforts to grow South Carolina’s economy, not South Carolina’s government.” It’s tempting to dismiss that as standard libertarian/populist boilerplate, intended to win votes without saying anything.
    But it actually goes to the heart of what Mr. Sanford really believes about how he and other state leaders should go about their jobs. And that’s a problem.
    Am I saying it’s a problem that he doesn’t want to “grow government”? No. I’m saying it’s a problem that the governor fixates too much on the size and shape of government, and too little on what government needs to do and how well it does it.
    That may sound odd coming from someone as passionate about government restructuring as I am. The governor’s proposals in that regard happen to be the ones I had been pushing for more than a decade before he embraced them. But our motives are different: I want government to be more efficient and accountable because it has a huge job to do helping this state catch up with the rest of the country, and it can’t afford waste and lack of direction.
    The governor wants government to be smaller as an end in itself. He essentially doesn’t believe there’s all that much that government needs to do — just get government out of the way, and the market will take care of all.
    But the market has little interest in South Carolina, in large part because our fragmented and visionless government has neglected our roads, our health, public safety and especially the schools that strive to educate our labor force. Other states have done a far better job of keeping up the neighborhood, which encourages capital to want to move in there and not here.
    The governor’s answer is to replenish trust accounts (fine), cut income taxes (again, see above editorial) and implement an arbitrary spending cap keyed to inflation that sounds good: “(Y)ou shouldn’t grow government faster than the taxpayers’ ability to pay for it,” he says reasonably. But what he says is divorced from reality. To him, restoring funding to prior levels after years of (in some cases) double-digit cuts is “growing government.” Never mind that some of these agencies weren’t adequately funded to do their jobs before the cuts.
    (Note that I say “some.” We have praised Mr. Sanford for trying to trim or eliminate overfunded or unnecessary programs. But when lawmakers fail to go along with his targeted cuts, he wants across-the-board caps, which would further undercut the essential agencies.)
    “I don’t want to grow government, either,” Speaker Harrell said Friday. Nor is he necessarily talking about spending more money when he complains that we’re not doing enough to promote job growth. “The conversation ought to be, what is it we need to do? And then talk about what it costs to do that.” (Which is precisely how we ought to approach all government spending.)
    He suspects there’s one area where more is needed: “I think Commerce could use a little help. We’ve made Commerce a lot smaller…. We don’t want to waste any money, but we ought to look at our current level of activity and see if it’s being effective. And the results suggest it’s not.” He’d like to get past blaming and discuss this with the Sanford folks.
    Interestingly, the governor had earlier defended his administration’s efforts by boasting about how Commerce Secretary Bob Faith has restructured, streamlined and redirected the Commerce Department. In other words, he takes particular pride in Commerce being smaller. It’s one part of government he’s managed to restructure to his liking.
    As for results, “It is not just the number” of jobs, “but the quality.” Gov. Sanford said the new jobs that have been created pay 30 percent more than the state average. That’s great, if there are enough of them to pull up the state overall. But that’s not the case, which is what makes Mr. Harrell’s observations ring true.

Background on school buses

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A lot of folks may think editorials are merely a matter of the way something strikes us at a given moment, or our personal preferences or prejudices, or whatever. I hope not too many people have such misconceptions, but I can understand what might lead some folks to leap to such erroneous conclusions. After all, unlike news stories — which strive to tell you every relevant thing a reporter could learn about an event or issue — editorials tend to be like icebergs: You only see a fraction of their substance. Editorials aren’t very long, and what space they do take up is largely used for argument — rhetoric, if you will — leaving little room for the many facts that went into the conclusion being presented. Most of that remains below the water line.

So it is that I thought I’d use my blog today to show you some of the raw material that went into our editorial today on our state’s school bus problem. For some, this will strengthen the point we’re making. Others will remain unmoved. In fact, some of the more ardent despisers of our public school system and all who sail in her will object to the fact that most of the information I’m showing you came from the state Department of Education. To these fantasists, that impeaches the testimony right off the bat. Well, let me start by telling you, and them, three critical facts:

  1. I went to the Department of Education for a reason similar to the one that (allegedly) motivated Willie Sutton to rob banks: Because that’s where the information is. These are the folks who know the bus system, and the finances involved, far more intimately than anyone else.
  2. And this one is going to shock the anti-school crowd: No one at the Department of Education has ever lied to me. If they have, they certainly haven’t been caught, despite the legions of people out there who would like to catch them. In fact, they are obsessive about making sure I get each fact exactly right. If they tell me something wrong, they’re on the phone setting it straight before I realize the error — and well before I’ve published it.
  3. They didn’t "put me up" to this. In fact, to the contrary. Jim Foster and Betsy Carpentier — especially Ms. Carpentier — kept telling me how happy they were with the level of funding they got this year, because it will enable them to operate the buses, something that looked in doubt at some points in the budgeting process. They’re satisfied, for the moment, though they know that there’s a day of reckoning coming if we don’t get on a regular bus replacement schedule. My colleagues on the editorial board and I are the ones who are disgusted at the situation.

Anyway, all that said, here are some things I learned in the course of researching and writing the editorial, with links to the raw source material:

  • It all started with an Associated Press story that ran in the paper, in part, on Tuesday, July 5. I wrote a blog item about it that very morning. We learned more on Wednesday from a story by The State‘s own Bill Robinson, which confirmed that the sale of the used buses had taken place, and added other details, including political reaction.
  • On Friday of that week, a colleague shared with me another story from the Charleston paper that added this point of interest: South Carolina runs the oldest buses in the nation. This was attributed not only to those "educrats" over at the state department, but to a group called the Union of Concerned Scientists. This group has a thing about old school buses, so it’s kind of embarrassing to see them single out S.C. for yet another such dubious distinction.
  • I felt like this would be a pretty easy editorial. A few numbers to check out, nothing more. I certainly knew the background: It’s been years since the General Assembly has provided sufficient funds to replace buses on a reasonable schedule that keeps them safe and reliable. Then, alerted by an e-mail from SCHotline, I ran across this item. It was the usual ranting you get from right-wing talk radio, but since this guy was directly challenging things I had assumed were fact, I decided to throw his piece at the DOE and see how it reacted.
  • Jim Foster reacted by saying, "I’ve been dealing with that claptrap for several days. It’s a crock." He backed that up with this point-by-point rebuttal.
  • He also sent along this spreadsheet showing what the Legislature had appropriated for buses, and how it had appropriated it — basically, in a way that pretended to fund new bus purchases, but actually only provided a total amount that matched what was needed to fuel and operate existing buses, except for about $3 million in unclaimed lottery prize money.

To sort of walk you through that last document: The key line is line 25 (row 6 in the Excel file), entitled OTHER OPERATING EXPENSES. This refers to just about everything it takes to operate and maintain the current fleet of buses, from fuel to parts. Follow that out to the right, and you’ll see (column L) that it cost $40.7 million to operate the buses this past year. The state education department estimated that with rising costs, it would take $47.75 million (column M) in fiscal year 2006 to do no more than it did in 2005. This was of course a moving target. Diesel fuel had cost a lot less when the department had put in its initial request at the required time — last September. Since then, Inez Tenenbaum had been updating lawmakers on the changing situation. So what did the department actually get for operating expenses under this item? Check row 6, column C, and you’ll find it was about $9.5 million. Kind of short, right?

This is where it gets tricky. Rows 12, 14, 15, 16 and 18 provide more funds for operation. Lines 12, 14 and 18 appear to provide funds for purchasing buses, but the provisos allow the department to use the money for current bus operations if it needs to — which it does, since it only got $9.5 million for that purpose when it needed $47.75 million. Lastly, in columns G and H you’ll see the state department is authorized to collect $7.3 million from local districts for bus operations — if the districts have it (Ms. Carpentier said she was sure the department would get its money).

I’m just going to hurry through the rest. I’m also throwing in:

  • A spreadsheet that shows how, while diesel costs have gone up over the past three years, the General Assembly has appropriated less and less for fuel and other operating expenses (Row 11, OTHER OPERATING EXPENSES.)
  • Another that details diesel price averages over the last few years.
  • Another chart that shows how many buses and what type of buses the state has bought each year since 1979.

I also had a rather lengthy study of what the state should do regarding replacing buses, and a handy chart that showed bus purchases over time a little more simply than the spreadsheet above. But I can’t seem to find the PDF of that study at the moment, and there’s nobody here at 10 p.m. to show me how to turn the handy chart (which came as a fax) into a PDF. I’ll add those to this posting Monday, if anyone’s that interested.

Republican Leaders Hail Student Achievement Gains

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Did that headline grab you? I thought it might. It seems pretty bizarre from a recent South Carolina perspective. But I promise, I did not make this up.

I can certainly understand your suspicion to the contrary. For the last couple of years, I’ve been marveling at the way some S.C. Republican leaders (yes, that means you, governor — and some of your ideological kin) have been badmouthing our schools. This has amazed me because:

  1. Our state has actually been making remarkable educational progress by most objective measurements; and
  2. Much of this progress is thanks to Republicans having pushed the Education Accountability Act into law over the objections of many Democrats and "educrats," to use the patois of the anti-school crowd.

Why, I have wondered, don’t they just take credit, rather than trying to paint the situation as worse than it is, and blame a Democrat? The credit is there to be taken — or at the very least shared (and that might be the problem, it not being in the nature of partisans of any stripe to share credit). Why don’t they get that?

Well, at least some Republican leaders in Washington get it (something you won’t see me say often). I got an e-mail today from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce bearing the exact same headline as this posting: "Republican Leaders Hail Student Achievement Gains."

If you don’t believe me, go read it yourself. If you don’t have the time, here’s an excerpt:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Republican education leaders today highlighted improving student test scores on mathematics and reading based on 2004 long-term data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as "the Nation’s report card."  The results reveal significant improvements in overall student achievement, with noteworthy gains among minority students.  Gains in student achievement are particularly striking over the last five years, and student achievement is up overall within the three decade comparison.

…"I’m encouraged to see the progress being made in our nation’s schools on improving student academic achievement and closing achievement gaps.  This is a credit to the hard work of parents, teachers, and school personnel who are committed to student academic success," said Education Reform Subcommittee Chairman Mike Castle (R-DE).  "We’ve injected accountability into America’s schools, and students are making academic gains as a result.  We still have work to do to finally rid our schools of achievement gaps between disadvantaged students and their peers, but these results are a promising sign that we’re on the right track."

The great irony here is that No Child Left Behind isn’t nearly as good at promoting accountability and good outcomes as the EAA. So why is it that more Republicans in South Carolina don’t step up and take credit? It remains a mystery.

Oh, and by the way: You know the test that is prompting the boasting by the GOP congressmen. That’s one of the measures South Carolina has done quite well on. So why not brag about it?

S.C. goes dumpster-diving

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Did you see this today? Have you ever seen anything more pathetic? In case the hypertext didn’t work, here’s the lead of the story:

State education officials have recently begun trying to buy used buses because the state doesn’t have enough money to buy new ones. Last week, officials bid on 73 buses from 1993 that were being sent to the junkyard by a district in Louisville, Ky.

This is what we’re reduced to, thanks to our refusal to fund the most elementary infrastructure needed to get kids to school. Just to get them there, much less providing adequate educational opportunity after they get there.

We’re reduced to dumpster-diving. We’re rummaging through junkyards for school buses. When I say "we," of course, I’m not talking you and me. Who are the people performing this degrading service in our behalf so that we won’t have to soil our dainty hands? Why, it’s those fat "educrats" that the "pro-choice" crowd is always castigating — the people who get up every morning and go to work trying to provide decent schools for the state’s children with insufficient resources.

What the rest of us should do every morning is hang our heads in shame for allowing this state of affairs to continue.

Oh, and by the way, don’t fixate on the fact that South Carolina is the only state that owns all of school buses in the state, rather than letting local entities pay for them. As odd as that is — a vestige of the Legislative State, which once controlled all aspects of local affairs as well as state — it would not work simply to say, "turn it over to the districts." Our single largest problem in providing an adequate education to all children in the state is the wide disparity between the abilities of rich and poor districts to provide schools, much less take on the bus burden.

South Carolina must come up with an equitable way to fund all essential aspects of funding education in every corner of our state — and that includes a safe, reliable way of getting the kids to school to begin with.