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?
Outsourcing the deliberative process
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE POSITION we take in the above editorial is an uncomfortable one. I say that not because using a “BRAC” approach to consolidate school districts is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great one. But it shouldn’t be.
Our system of representative democracy is all about the deliberative process: We, the people, elect representatives to go to Congress or the Legislature and study complex issues in detail, debate them, make tough decisions for the sake of the whole nation or state, and then come back and face the voters.
This proposal sidesteps that process: It empowers a separate body — not directly elected — to address a long-neglected statewide problem. The members of that body do all the studying and work out all the details — that is, the actual discernment. Then they hand the whole package to the elected body for a simple “yes” or “no.”
The tragedy is that this is apparently the only way that our small state can do away with the shameful waste of having 85 school districts — some of them incredibly tiny, each with its own separate administration.
Why? Because elected representatives won’t touch it. Why? Because they’re elected.
Anyone with common sense looking objectively at this can see that it would be insane not to consolidate districts. But any representative who advocates shuttering a local district faces the danger
of not getting re-elected.
So we find ourselves in a situation in which the most effective approach is to outsource the deliberative process. And school consolidation isn’t the only tough state issue that our delegates may choose to sub-contract.
S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell is proposing the same approach on tax reform. He would have a special panel draw up a list of sales tax exemptions to eliminate. Why? Because elected representatives don’t have the guts to face the narrow constituencies (from auto dealers to newspapers) whose tax breaks such a plan might eliminate.
The truth nowadays is that on some issues, our republic’s deliberative process freezes up and dies like a car engine without a drop of oil in it.
That’s how “BRAC” — for Base Realignment and Closure — entered the language to start with. It was impossible for Congress to achieve savings and efficiencies by closing and consolidating domestic military bases. Why? Because every member of Congress had to have one. Or two, or more.
Instead of an objective comparison of the relative merits of this or that military facility, followed by tough but smart decisions, the only sort of “debate” that occurred before BRAC went like this: “You keep my base open, and I’ll scratch your back, too.”
Our system is dysfunctional — at least on issues that involve sacred cows — not because representatives are out of touch, but because they are never out of touch with home long enough to collaborate seriously with their colleagues for the greater good.
Most advocates of term limits say lawmakers get “corrupted” by Washington or Columbia to the point that they forget the wishes of the folks back home. Hardly.
Syndicated columnist George Will has advocated term limits for the opposite reason. He says the only way lawmakers will stop listening to the folks back home long enough to think is if they cannot run for re-election.
I oppose term limits for various reasons, including the fact that I’d rather have laws made by people with some experience at it. But we’ve got to find some way to make critical decisions that politicians with their eyes on the next election refuse to face.
One good thing about a BRAC is that it can be seen as representative democracy the way it was intended to work: A group is delegated to study the issues with few distractions and deliberate until a rational plan emerges.
This may be the only way our elected representatives ever vote on a proposal that takes the whole state’s interest into account. A plan that makes the tough calls would probably never make it to the floor otherwise.
I like to think our system is timeless. But that reckons without technology: In the days before the 24-hour news cycle, blogs, cell phones and mass e-mails, representatives had a chance to concentrate constructively on issues and make decisions accordingly. The cacophony of modern communications makes that nearly impossible.
Some look at this situation and come up with a whole other way: skirting the republican system entirely. Gov. Mark Sanford would ask voters to curtail the Legislature’s power to appropriate, by setting an arbitrary constitutional limit on spending growth.
His reasoning sounds a bit like ours: The system isn’t working. When I asked how he could advocate undermining “small-R” republican ideals, he said: “You need to be more aware of the political environment that you’re operating in — be less, you know, idealistic, less, uh, you know, high and lofty, and just get down into the gears of how our government system actually works.”
Talk about being disillusioned. Of course, I can identify. But there’s a difference. While the BRAC idea reflects a lack of faith in the Legislature’s deliberative fortitude, it does not abandon faith in deliberation
itself. In fact, it gives the General Assembly a little help in that area.
The contrast between such a careful, studious process of objective decision-making and what the governor is proposing — a quick Election Day show of hands, yes or no, on an unfathomably complex fiscal question — could hardly be greater.
I’m still not thrilled about having to institute a “work-around” to set policy, but comparing a “BRAC” to setting future budgets in a single plebiscite makes me feel a lot better about it.
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.
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.
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.
Mark Sanford is not a communist
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.
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.
… 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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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?
Must one be out of office
to lead on public education?
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?
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 you
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."
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 
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.
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.
Apparently, flattery will get you somewhere with me. When I received an e-mail from Chester Woodward that began with the heading, "Enjoy your editorials on state gov. Would like your thoughts on following," I broke my rule against responding at length to e-mail for the second time in as many days.
As penance — since I have resolved to spend time I once spent going back-and-forth on e-mail to this blog — I share our correspondence, with Mr. Woodward’s permission.
What Mr. Woodward proposed was as follows:
Since 2002, the budget of all areas for state govenment has been cut except the legislature. The following are a few suggestions to save money and make the legislative part of state government more efficient.
1. Eliminate the Lt. Governor’s office and Staff. About the only constructive thing that the Lt. Governor does is preside over the Senate. This can be taken care of just as efficiently by the President Pro Tempore. Others duties or jobs performed the this staff can be moved to the office of the Secretay of State without adding to their staff.
2. Since we have senatoral districts now instead of at Senator from each county, We can reduce the number of senators from 46 to 41 with the President Pro Tempore presiding over the senate and voting only in case of a tie. This will eliminate 5 senators and their staff. This will only increase the size of their districts by a small amount.3. We can also reduce the House of Representatives to 99. This will eliminate 25 representatives and their staff and will only increase their districts by a small amount.
I replied as follows:
Well, unfortunately, the savings would be small — not even a drop in
the bucket compared to, say, our annual increase in Medicaid costs.For that reason, when I look at restructuring state government, I do so
with an eye to making government work better and more logically, and be more
accountable. Your suggestion for eliminating the lt. gov. position as we
now have it fits well into my criteria — not because it would save a
lot of money, but because it is a useless office. Personally, I would
keep the title and do one of two things — have the lt. gov. run on a
ticket with the governor, and therefore be an actual partner in helping
run the government instead of a useless loose cannon as the office is
currently configured; or use the Tennessee model. In Tennessee, the lt.
gov. is a senator who is elected by the rest of the Senate to preside
over them. To most SC senators today, the lt. gov. is an object of
contempt, and they just barely tolerate his presiding role. The office
would be much more meaningful and have the opportunity to make a
difference if the lt. gov. were someone the senators respected.Oh, and as to your idea about reducing the number of senators — rather
than do that, what I’d LIKE to see is a return to having senators
elected by counties, just as U.S. senators are elected by states.
Unfortunately, the courts aren’t about to do this. The irony is that the
courts won’t allow it because single-member districts are seen as
benefiting minorities, and yet one of the biggest reasons the interests
and needs of poor, rural blacks in South Carolina are given short shrift
in the Legislature is that those areas lack advocates in
the Legislature. With districts drawn by population, the power has moved
to the cities and suburbs. If each rural district had its own senator,
with just as much power as one from Richland or Greenville county, you’d
be much more likely to see the General Assembly doing something about
the gross inequities between rural and suburban schools.
Anyway, there it is. As you can see, I make dubious assertions even more hastily via e-mail than on the blog. For instance, I have no way to support my contention that "most senators" hold the lieutenant governor (whoever he may be at a given time) in contempt. But it’s my observation that there are some senators, and they tend to be ones who run the show, see being a South Carolina senator as an office of greater import than any in the state, including that of the governor. (Historically, that was true.) Anyway, anyone with such an attitude is highly unlikely to be impressed by a lieutenant governor, which is why senators have from time to time taken steps to reduce what little power that office can boast of.
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 
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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?
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.
