Category Archives: South Carolina

Column on Larry Wilson’s trial balloon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talk amongst yourselves

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I see I didn’t get around to posting anything yesterday, and that’s a shame because I had meant to post this editorial from Wednesday’s paper, which was based on this news story in Tuesday’s. I wrote it (and I don’t write all that many actual editorials these days, spending most of my writing energy on columns and this forum), because I knew it would come more easily to me than to anyone else on the staff. No one else was as ticked off about it.

Anyway, in lieu of an actual posting this morning, I thought I would throw this topic out and see what your reaction is. I know what Shell Suber, Richland County Republican Party chairman, thinks about it (more or less), because we discussed an op-ed he’s sending me in response. It was an amicable discussion, as always. Even though he and I are bound to disagree about the local party’s outrageous intrusion into nonpartisan preserves, he is in other matters a reasonable man.

So until I can get back to my keyboard, in the immortal words of Linda Richman, talk amongst yourselves. Later, we’ll have some cawfee, and we’ll awl tawk. No big whoop.

Well, not exactly…

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

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

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

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

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

No juice, no Joe

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There’s no either/or:
Without the system,
you don’t get the man

“Charleston will not put up with inefficiency. We’ve been efficient too long.”
                 — Charleston District 7
                     City Councilman
                     Louis L. Waring

“I go to bed thinking about something that needs to get done for the city, and I start my day with it.”
                  — Charleston Mayor
                      Joseph P. Riley Jr.

THE PROBLEM with Joe Riley is that he’s too good at his job. This gives defenders of the status quo in Columbia an excuse to say Charleston’s success is because of the man, not the system. Therefore, they say, there’s no point in ditching Columbia’s useless council-manager form of government for the strong-mayor system that Mr. Riley embodies.
    So Mayor Riley came up from Charleston Wednesday, along with two city council members, to explain to a commission studying reform in Columbia why it’s the form of government that makes the Holy City work.
    As usual, he did a good job.
    Even to raise the question of whether it is the shape of the job or the quality of the individual whoTestify_011 fills it is to miss the point. Charleston’s is the only form of city government that could attract a Joe Riley. A person with the abilities to lead a city forward will only run for a job in which he can make full use of those abilities.
    “I certainly wouldn’t have,” said Mr. Riley when asked by panelist Dalhi Myers whether he would have been interested in the job had it been weaker. “What gets me up in the morning,” he said, “is not a ribbon I cut, but that I accomplish something of importance for my city.”
    “The achievement of getting elected ends pretty soon after the election,” he said. “After that, it’s getting things done.”
    There are, of course, people for whom the honor of being elected to a nothing job — such as lieutenant governor, or Columbia mayor — is more than enough. But it takes a job like Charleston’s to attract an actual leader: “Make it a job that has the capacity and authority,” said Mr. Riley, and “you make it more appealing” to qualified people.
    “Good point,” Columbia attorney Benton Williamson said under his breath. He was sitting next to me at the back of the hearing room. “It’s the point,” I muttered.
    None of the other common objections to strong-mayor stood up to scrutiny:

  • The “professionalism” issue. There is an antidemocratic school of thought that a city is best run by an unelected professional administrator. Mr. Riley provided the obvious answer to that: “How it works is, you hire good people.” Why do advocates of this objection assume voters wouldn’t demand that the mayor they elect hire just the kind of “professionals” that those advocates say they want? Whom do you hold accountable if a city manager hired by seven council members is a dud? Mayor Riley chooses his department heads, and they are ratified by the council. “Many of my department heads have the ability to be city managers,” he said.
  • The “bossism” worry. The city manager system was created as a reform long ago in response to mayors who had too much unchecked power. But with Freedom of Information laws and aggressive media, “Government is very transparent now,” Mr. Riley noted. Besides, the Charleston council is empowered to rein in the mayor if necessary.
  • Cronyism. If you rely on democracy to identify your city leader, how do you keep that person from staffing the city’s departments with unqualified pals and political backers? First, Mr. Riley said, “I don’t discuss politics with my department heads.” When he goes to hire them, “Everybody is going to know their backgrounds, and city council approves them.”
  • Neighborhoods will be neglected. This arises from the fear that if the person running the city is not an employee of council members representing districts, those areas will lose out. Councilmen Waring and Paul Tinkler said it doesn’t work that way in Charleston. If they have a problem, they go straight to city staff and get a quick response (a practice we’ve had to ban in Columbia, because it undermined the politically powerless manager). As a last resort, they go to the mayor. Mr. Waring described a problem he had with a traffic light that changed too quickly: “Within three days, there were more seconds on that light,” and it was fully synchronized with the one on the next block.

    Also, the mayor regularly meets with neighborhood groups, and makes it a point to “get back to them by letter within a week, telling them what we’re going to do, or why we can’t — in writing.” Why? Because like the council members, he needs those votes.
    In Charleston, there is no either/or. Neighborhoods and the city center are both well-served. The mayor appreciates the importance of meeting neighborhood needs, and the district representatives appreciate how a vital city center benefits them all. Everyone has had input into the master plans that guide the city. Yes, in Charleston, such things exist (see above editorial).
    At the end of the hearing, it was evident that some commission members were still dubious. Others were not: Responding to the “it only works in Charleston because they have Joe Riley” argument, Kirkman Finlay III said he doesn’t want to believe “there’s a higher quality of people in Charleston.” Seriously, do we really have such an inferiority complex in Columbia that we believe none of us can do this?
    One person did confess to an epiphany, but it was not a member of the commission: Councilman Tinkler, who had initially said he was there as neither an advocate nor an opponent of the idea that the strong-mayor system made a difference, made this statement at the end: “As I’ve sat here, it’s occurred to me that if it were not for the strong mayor form of government, we would not have” the success his city has enjoyed. He realized that was why the biggest challenge he had faced as a councilman was how to deal with “people beating down the doors to get in” to the city.
    Bottom line on strong-mayor:
    It is a system that works. What Columbia has is one that doesn’t.

A newspaper primer

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When I saw this headline this morning, I thought, "What an opportunity! I can write a blog item extending and reinforcing the point about editorial independence that I made yesterday."

Basically, yesterday I had an exchange with a reader that gave me the opportunity to explain the separation between editorial and advertising. I would have mentioned that editorial is just as separate from news, but that wasn’t the subject at hand. Then, lo and behold, the newsroom provides a supreme example of that this morning.

But before I could sit down and write the item, I received this comment (see the second one) from someone else accusing us of "hypocrisy" because the newsroom doesn’t follow our editorial line.

Sheesh. You just can’t win. All right, here’s a primer on how this newspaper works:

News and editorial are as separate as advertising and editorial. When I see a headline I don’t like, I’ve got less ability to do anything about it than you, the reader. You can hoot and holler and write an angry letter. I turn away and tend to my own business, because I’m not supposed to influence, or even try to influence, news decisions.

Am I complaining about that? No. Because just as I don’t try to run their business, they don’t try to run mine.

I really don’t see why some readers have trouble understanding this. Most readers seem to think it would be awful for the news to be reported to fit our editorial position, and our most vehement critics are often those who believe that line is being crossed.

Yet now I have readers criticizing us because we DON’T cross that line, or the other line between us and advertising. Oh, well. I learned long ago that different people want different things from a newspaper.

Any other questions?

Fact gets in way of perfectly good post

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A colleague points out a flaw of omission in my last posting, as follows:

She said that when the lottery was created — over our strenuous objections — we advocated that the authorizing legislation contain language that would prevent the state from doing what other states had done, which was to promote the lottery as a get-rich-quick scheme to an excessive degree. For instance, advertising in other states had portrayed people who studied and worked hard to make a living as saps, and lottery players as the smart ones who knew the way to fortune.

Well, I remembered that part. What I didn’t remember that in connection with the legislative restrictions that we advocated, the lottery operators also would be required to urge people to play "responsibly."

But here it is, clear as can be, in state law:

The commission must promote fair and responsible play, including
disclosure of the odds of winning, and must ensure that any advertising
used does not exhort the public to bet by misrepresenting, directly or
indirectly, a person’s chance of winning a prize.

Fact noted. So now I will make these two points:

  • First, if the only reason the lottery director is urging us to play "responsibly" is that the law requires him to, that means the situation is even more ironic, not less. Doesn’t it?
  • Second, I must apologize to Ernie Passailaigue if my previous words implied hypocrisy on his part. If he’s forced by law to say words that sound hypocritical, then he’s not the hypocrite, the state is.

But then, that was always the case. Ernie’s just a guy doing a job. The guilty party here has always been the state.

Regarding Warren’s column today

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This is to lend my own perspective in support of what my colleague Warren Bolton has to say in his column today.

There are an awful lot of white folks out there who are by no means racist but who nevertheless get impatient with black folks seeming to talk about race "all the time." I’ll admit that while I don’t quite go that far, I have had a similar reaction: Sometimes it just seems odd to me that black writers or speakers will inject race into their comments on a subject that seemed — to me — to be totally unrelated.

But while I’m not the most empathetic person in the world, I have managed to figure out that the reason I have that reaction is that I’ve never had the regular experience that black folks have of race being thrown in their faces, and usually in an extremely unpleasant way. This usually happens out of the view of the kind of white folks who would never dream of doing, saying or thinking anything racist, and thus such well-meaning folk think it’s their black neighbors who have an unhealthy fixation.

Working with Warren has helped me see this. I’ll give you an example.

Sometime after Warren Bolton joined our editorial board, he wrote a column or two about the Confederate flag that was then atop our State House dome. At that point, I had already written on the subject — demanding that it come down — about 200 times since I had joined the board myself in 1994.

Warren’s style of writing about it was milder and more polite than mine. He objected to the flag’s presence in a kinder, gentler manner than was my wont. This was partly due to the difference in our personalities. But I suspect it was also because Warren knew, far better than I, what was coming.

You see, I thought I’d seen it all in the way of negative reactions from flag defenders. The editorial department secretary hated the days that one of my pieces on the subject ran, because it meant a day of fielding — and passing on to me — angry call after angry call, followed by a flood of letters.

But what I’d experienced was hugs and kisses compared to the slime that came bursting out of the woodwork from the very first moment that Warren dared to touch upon the subject. The vitriol, the pure hatred that was aimed at him was like nothing I had seen. And what was the difference between his columns and mine? Well, there were two: Mine were somewhat more provocative, and a picture of a black man ran with his.

I was already at that point tired of hearing the canard about how support for the flag never had a thing to do with race, but I really got fed up with it at that point. What provoked the hatred; what was Warren’s offense? Simple. He was guilty of having an opinion on the flag while being black.

This did not surprise Warren. He had, after all, been black all his life. But it was an eye-opener for me.

Warren quotes — with epithets blanked out — one of the worst recent phone messages he’s received. But reading about it doesn’t communicate it. You need to hear it to get the full impact (and sorry, but my attempts to convert the recording to a format that I could link to here have been unsuccessful). The caller starts out speaking VERY softly, so that Warren or anyone else listening would press the receiver more tightly to his ear, and turn up the volume on the phone. Then, without warning, he SCREAMS the really nasty parts at a volume intended to hurt the eardrum of the listener. That this stranger hated Warren could be in no doubt. Nor could the reason be obscure. He hated Warren simply because he was black, and he wanted to put that point across in as offensive and painful a manner as possible.

I’ve never had anything quite like that aimed at me. And if you’re white, you probably haven’t either. If you and I suspect black folks are just a little on the touchy side about race matters, that’s probably because they are. And they have reason to be.

FEMA column, w/ links & art

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Attempt to help evacuees
plagued by failure to communicate
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    THE MAN WAS walking around with a $2,000 FEMA check in his hand, and he didn’t have any idea what to do with it.
    That caused Nola Armstrong, a volunteer at the old Naval Reserve center that houses S.C. Cares’ many services for Katrina evacuees, to realize some folks needed more help than others. The Legal Services volunteers (who work out of the office pictured at right) came up with a way to provide it.Katrina_center_017
    What happened next illustrates a quandary inherent in trying to help the helpless: When someone is dependent upon you for the necessities of life, how responsible are you for what happens to them? Where is the line between compassion and condescension, between brotherly love and paternalism?
    From what I’ve seen at the S.C. Cares center, the volunteer “shepherds” know where to draw the line. But when they tried to make sure no one with mental problems got conned out of the $2,000 FEMA was sending to the head of each evacuee household, they ran into trouble with the feds.
    S.C. Cares chief Samuel Tenenbaum said that from the beginning of Columbia’s hastily organized effort, the main operating principle has been the Golden Rule: “How would I want to be treated?”
    It was decided these were not “refugees” or “evacuees,” but guests, and would be treated as such. They would not be herded into a communal shelter, but housed in motel rooms. Shuttles would Katrina_center_016take them back and forth between their motels and the center where they get medical care, eat a free meal, get reconnected with scattered relatives, make bank transactions without fees, and on and on.
    “What we set up was a community,” said Mr. Tenenbaum, and one that ran better than most.
    When it became obvious that some members of the community might be particularly vulnerable walking around town with $2,000, the organizers approached Probate Judge Amy McCulloch for help. They worried that while the center had a setup for helping the mentally ill, the checks were going to the motels. Judge McCulloch issued an order to change that arrangement. When FEMA heard about it, U.S. Attorney Johnny Gasser got involved.
    FEMA doesn’t dictate to local relief workers how to do the job, Mr. Gasser told me. “They leave it up to the locals to determine” pretty much everything, he said, including “what is the best way to distribute these checks.”
    He said FEMA had signed off on a local plan to have checks sent to the hotels. But when I sought a copy, Mr. Tenenbaum said “there was no written plan,” merely a hasty discussion on Labor Day in the mayor’s office, with planeloads of evacuees about to descend upon Columbia.
    Did Mayor Bob Coble know of any formal agreement with FEMA? “Absolutely not,” he said.
    Mr. Gasser said FEMA had two main problems with Judge McCulloch’s order: First, it departed from “the plan.” He said “FEMA’s in the crosshairs,” and feared a backlash if people who had been promised checks at their hotels had to get them somewhere else. Second, “the civil rights implications.” FEMA thought the language in the order created “a presumption that people had to prove their lucidness prior to receiving their money.”
    But “it was never about screening everyone,” said Judge McCulloch. The idea proposed by S.C.Katrina_center_008 Cares was that if the checks came to the center, where mental health services are available, conservators could be appointed for those who might need help handling money.
    “The issue was, how do we help these people to make sure nobody takes advantage of their dollars?” said Mr. Tenenbaum.
    Mr. Gasser sympathizes. “Everybody was well-intentioned,” he said. S.C. Cares’ concerns are “absolutely legitimate.” He said he told Judge McCulloch that local folks should “just get a new plan approved.”
    “It doesn’t take much time to type up an e-mail to FEMA,” he said. That doesn’t match the experience of those who tried.
    “There were many contacts, not only by me, but by people down there (at S.C. Cares), to contact FEMA” and work out the matter, Judge McCulloch said. “I personally made three phone calls to try to climb the chain” in Washington, she said. “The third person said, ‘We don’t have the authority to do this, and I personally don’t know who would.’”
    He recommended that she call the agency’s 800 number. At that point she issued the order that S.C. Cares had requested.
    “As soon as I issued the order, FEMA called me,” she said. It was the agency’s general counsel, saying “What are you doing?” She explained, and asked for help in getting the checks distributed in a more secure location, rather than leaving the job to “hotel clerks.”
    “Discussions were had,” she said. “People were asked.”
    “The next thing I knew,” she said, “I heard that the U.S. attorney’s office was going to sue me.”
    (When I called FEMA’s general counsel I got a
public affairs guy instead. “I’m not familiar with anyKatrina_center_001 plan,” he said. But, “Our policy is to mail the check to the individual where they are staying.”)
    Mr. Tenenbaum is indignant that anyone would think folks in Columbia were trying to deny anyone their “rights.”
    “Our whole philosophy was the opposite of that,” he said. The irony is, if S.C. Cares had treated its “guests” like “refugees” and kept them in a common shelter, the problem wouldn’t have arisen.
    “FEMA is incapable of getting outside the bureaucratic response and into the people response,” Mayor Coble said, adding that his advice to the agency would be: “Quit having meetings. Help the person in front of you.”
    For Judge McCulloch, “My biggest regret is that we have not solved the problem.”

Plays better with others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

An op-op-ed from the editor

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Some quick, friendly rebuttals to the Rev. Wiley Cooper’s op-ed piece today:

  • We don’t just want a "czar" for the city. We want one for the state, too. This isn’t some whim on our part, but something we’ve called for consistently on the state and local levels for years now. We see the weakness of mayors and governors in South Carolina as a key reason why we’re still last where we want to be first, and first where we want to be last.
  • "Czar?" Give us a break, Wiley! We’re talking about the basic concept of letting the executive run the executive functions of government, and letting the legislative body
    (in this case, the Council) set broad policy and pass laws (or ordinances). Call us crazy, but we see no point in electing executives if they don’t have the power to act effectively as executives. And note that last: We would have elections, you know. Unlike with czars, the position would not be hereditary.
  • The business analogy is completely off (aside from the fact that comparing government to business is one of the greatest fallacies in contemporary political rhetoric). Businesses have clearly defined, separate roles for directors and company officers. And that’s what we want here.
  • Note that none of the examples cited of cities that function well under a council-manager form are in South Carolina. One of the reasons we need a mayor empowered to run the city is because South Carolina cities face obstacles that communities in North Carolina and other states don’t face — such as weak annexation laws. The de facto city of Columbia is split into about 10 municipalities, two counties, between five and seven school districts (depending on how you define the area). Why? Because it’s hard to redraw city limits out to where the people and the development are going. And when you try, you end up with a feud between warring municipalities (note the spat between Columbia and Irmo over the shoestring annexation of Columbiana). Until we loosen annexation laws, get rid of special purpose districts, and do a number of other things we’ve been calling for for over a decade to throw off the chains that bind local government, we will particularly need strong leadership in the stunted arrondissement that is de jure Columbia. We have enough other handicaps without that one.
  • The central argument here is a complete non sequitur. I keep hearing this one over and over from defenders of the stagnant status quo: Just because someone is a good visionary leader who has the political skills to get elected doesn’t mean he or she can be an effective, day-to-day administrator. Well, who’s arguing with that? Of course a strong mayor would hire good people to work under him and do the things he can’t do in a 24-hour day — or that he (or she) lacks the skills to do. Call that assistant (or more likely, assistants) a chief of staff, or an operations officer, or even, if you like, "city manager." Just as long as that person answers only to the mayor — and not to a committee of seven — effective, accountable government will be possible.
  • Democracy is messy, and what I don’t understand is why opponents of this change fear it so. They don’t trust the people to elect a good, honest mayor who is actually empowered to run the city from day to day. They raise the spectre of corrupt political bosses. Yes, democracy demands of the voters a great responsibility to choose someone of ability and integrity. Let’s give them a chance.
  • Finally, I must note that Rev. Cooper is to be commended for his long-time, passionate dedication to his local neighborhood association. We need more citizens as civic-minded as he. But as we will discuss on Friday’s editorial page, neighborhood associations are among the main interests resisting a common vision for the city being implemented by a strong executive.

Rev. Cooper has his legitimately and sincerely held view of what’s best for the community, and we have ours. We think ours is based in a broader definition of the community, but he honestly disagrees. That’s what we have the op-ed page for.

New publisher column, w/ links

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Initial, feeble efforts
to figure out the new boss
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    OK, I’M GOING to withdraw from the multidirectional gossip matrix for as long as it takes to write a column — or until one of my calls to Wichita gets returned.
    As you probably know by now, I’m about to lose a good boss, and get a new one who I think is a good guy, but only time will tell. (Wait. You don’t think he’ll read this, do you?)
    Ann Caulkins, president and publisher of The State, is leaving at the end of the year to run The Charlotte Observer. Hence the call I received a while ago from an editorial type in Charlotte asking what they should expect.
    Meanwhile, Lou Heldman, publisher of The Wichita Eagle, is to take her place. Hence my calls toAnn Wichita, where I worked from 1985 until I came home to South Carolina in 1987.
    Anyway, I told my caller from Charlotte that they couldn’t do better, from the perspective of editorial. While she is from a business-side background, she’s taken a healthy interest in what we do on these pages — while respecting the consensus process by which we make decisions.
    As a publisher overall, she has led the paper surely and ably, and kept the business as a business on a sound, profitable course. (At least I think she has. I’m not good at reading spreadsheets.)
    She has been more involved in the community than any publisher I’ve ever known. I know she will be missed by folks outside our walls as much as by those of us here at the paper.
    Besides, she gave me a promotion. You can’t beat that.
    Now, on to the new guy.
    I first met Lou Heldman in 1989. He spent that summer at The State directing what was called the “25-43 Project,” or less formally, the “Boomer project.” It was a Knight Ridder effort to find ways to attract younger readers to newspapers. Yes, baby boomers were then considered young.
    I didn’t get all that involved in the project myself, but I did sit in on one or two of the brain-storming sessions, and found Lou to have a nimble and creative mind, and to be fun to work with. (I mean, on further reflection, you’ve got to assume that he is going to read this, right?)
    I had a chance to get somewhat reacquainted with him Monday night at a dinner with some other members of the paper’s senior staff and Knight Ridder Vice President (and former editor at The State) Paula Ellis.
    The dinner reinforced my previous impressions. An illustration:
    He said that when he first went to Wichita, he kept seeing the paper’s mission statement posted around the building. His mind apparently wandering during meetings (more on that later), he found himself thinking about what he saw as missing from the statement.
    He said this is what he would have added:

  • “Have fun every day.”
  • “Be proud of what we do,” which means he expects the kind of good work of which one has a right to be proud.
  • “Make a lot of money for the shareholders.” (Hey, his background might be in news, but he’s a publisher now, so cut him some slack. Besides, in my own tiny way, I am a stockholder.)

    He shared these thoughts with others, and someone suggested he had left out one important consideration. He agreed, and added it to his list:

  • “Be grateful for it all.”

    That’s the way he strikes me so far — as an approachable guy who likes to have fun while definitely getting the job done, and never forgetting to be grateful for life’s blessings.
    He also said that he needs somebody pragmatic, focused and straightforward working with him to keep him grounded and on task. First chance I got, I asked Paula if she’d put in a good word for me as one who could help him keep his feet on the ground. She laughed (a little bitterly, I thought). She did, after all, work with me for years down in the newsroom.
    But hey, I’m a professional journalist, so I’m not just going to go with my own inadequately informed impressions. To get the real skinny, I called my old friend Richard Crowson, Wichita’s editorial cartoonist. Richard and I go back to about 1974. One of the first cartoons he ever did illustrated an opinion column I wrote for our college paper at Memphis State University. We then worked together for years at The Jackson Sun in Tennessee. After I moved to Kansas, I got him to fly out, plied him with liquor, and he’s been there ever since.
    On Tuesday, I abused his trust once again and got him talking freely about what it’s like to work with Lou. I had about half a page of good quotes before I said, “You know this is on the record, right?” This was a total shock, as he had thought we were gossiping. (Not that he’d said anything bad, Lou.)
    Once he knew he was going to be quoted, he started saying stuff like, “Lou is extremelyRichard personable…. I’ll miss Lou, because I really thought he was great.”
    When I read those quotes back to him, he added, “And he’s really kind to animals.”
    He did say one or two substantive things. He said that while Lou told the Eagle’s editorial folks when he first arrived that he was politically conservative, that was probably because he had just come from a college town. Richard suggested that he was more of a centrist by “red-state Kansas” standards.
    Anyway, I’m running out of room here at the same time I’m running out of stuff I know, or think I know, on this subject. One more thing: Lou’s family is going to stay in Kansas until his kids finish the school year. In the meantime, he’ll need a place to stay. So if you know of “an old-fashioned rooming house with a wi-fi connection,” let me know, and I’ll let him know. That should put me in good with him.

More on Ann, Lou

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OK, so I had to go back and change the headline on my last posting, which originally read, "You read it here first." Fact is, thestate.com beat me to it by a few minutes. I had mine written earlier, of course, but it took me a little too long to get back upstairs and change the item from "draft" to "publish." So I was scooped. But I suppose that’s as it should be.

But let’s see if I can accomplish another first — at least, a first for this blog. And that is to publish a video clip of the announcement down in the atrium. Let me know if it works when you try to call it up. The clip begins when Lou is starting to share his thoughts about The State as a newspaper, and the Midlands as a community. The joke about remodeling the basement in his honor is a reference to the recent flood damage, which has necessitated extensive renovation downstairs, a project that is still in progress.

In case the video doesn’t work (and as I write this, it seems that it’s still trying to load) here’s a still photo from roughly the same portion of the meeting. That’s Lou Heldman speaking front and center. At the left is Kathy Moreland, assistant to the publisher, and to the right is Paula Ellis, who is now a Lou_005 vice president with Knight Ridder. You may remember Paula from her days here in Columbia, where she served as managing editor, and later as an executive over several departments, including advertising. She then became publisher of The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News, before her move to San Jose.

Some brief comments about both Ann and Lou — which I plan to enlarge upon in a column for tomorrow’s paper (assuming I stop blogging long enough to write it):

Before Ann had to leave Monday to meet with folks in Charlotte, I popped into her office to tell her rather awkwardly that she’d been a great boss, and she would be missed. "Awkardly" because I don’t give praise easily — to peers, subordinates or bosses. I only managed it this time because it couldn’t be seen as sucking up, since she wasn’t going to be my boss any more, and I haven’t the slightest interest in ever working in Charlotte — or anywhere besides here, actually. Which reminds me — I think I forgot to congratulate her. (If I did so, it was so perfunctorily that I don’t recall.) My thoughts were running more along the lines of "Poor Ann, she has to go to Charlotte." But the fact is, this is a great opportunity for her — and a well-deserved promotion, given the size of her new paper.

I just got a call from someone in the editorial department of The Observer, wanting to know what she’s like to work with. I told them they couldn’t do better. She will be an active member of the editorial board, and will make her influence felt, but will by no means a dictator of editorial policy. She has worked really well within the consensus process we use for decision-making. The interactions we all had with her were well-grounded in mutual respect, and you can’t have a better situation than that.

Now I know I promised to share some reflections about Lou, but I’ve gotten behind now, and need to get started on that column for tomorrow — especially since my deadline is less than an hour off. So read the paper. I mean, do you expect me to give you everything free?

Papa’s got a brand-new boss

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Papa’s got a brand new boss. "Papa" being me, not that other guy. Which means that The State has a new publisher — or will soon have.

It was announced generally at 10 a.m. today in the newspaper’s atrium that Lou Heldman, president and publisher of the Wichita Eagle (where I worked from 1985 until I came here in 1987), will be replacing Ann Caulkins.

More about Lou, and about Ann’s plans, in later postings.

Sunday column, with links

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Let’s try the American way for a change
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    WOULD YOU like Ted Kennedy to have just as much power in the day-to-day running of the federal government as President Bush? That question was for Republicans. Here’s one for Democrats: How would you like it if a President Hillary Clinton had no more control over federal agencies than Jim DeMint?
    And here’s a question for us sensible folk who don’t like either party: No matter who holds the offices, does it make any sense for the lowliest congressional freshman to have as much operational influence over, say, the Pentagon as the commander in chief?
    What if the president had to get a majority of Congress to agree on a plan before sending FEMA to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina? What if Condoleezza Rice were about to seal a deal on peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and the president were urging her to get it done before the window closed, but she decided to hold back because Dick Durbin or Rick Santorum had a few qualms? What if the president actually decided to fire Karl Rove for leaking a CIA officer’s name, but couldn’t do it because Congress didn’t approve?
    Would any of that make sense? Would it be an effective or logical way to run a government? Of course not. At least, I don’t think so. But if you think otherwise, then you must love the way we run things in South Carolina — and in the city of Columbia. The federal hypotheticals above are modeled on the way we hobble our governor, and the way Columbia denies the most basic authority to its mayor.
    What if the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were elected separately from the president? That’s the way we do it in South Carolina, with the top general in the National Guard chosen not by merit, but in a partisan election.
    What if the president were a part-time member of Congress, with but one vote in that body, and no executive powers? That describes the mayor of Columbia. He is just another member of City Council. City employees answer not to him, but to an unelected city manager. Any member of City Council is as much that manager’s boss as the mayor is, meaning the day-to-day operation of the city is pushed and pulled in seven different directions.
    I say all this to explain something about two long-held positions of this editorial board. There’s a consistent pattern here. On both the local and state levels, government is fragmented, ineffective and unaccountable.
    There is a reason why we don’t seem to be able to get our act together. Government on both levels is set up to prevent the desire of the voters for progress — in education, personal income, public health, law enforcement or any other way you want to measure it — from being met.
    If you think it’s fine that our state lags behind the nation on almost every measurement of quality of life, or if you like seeing something as big as the former Central Correctional Institution site as an untouched eyesore at the heart of our city for a decade, you should by all means resist reform. But if you’d like to see some action, demand change.
    Our current systems are designed to avoid accomplishing much of anything — no matter how much the voters may want results. Accountability is so fragmented and diffused that there is no one to blame or credit for what happens — or doesn’t happen.
    We believe in the American system: separation of powers, checks and balances, with each branch of government given the authority — no more and no less — to play its proper role.
    This is why you will see us continue to push the General Assembly to empower the governor to do the job he is elected to do.
    And it is why you will see a series of editorials, starting today, giving our views on the current discussion about whether to change Columbia’s system. As the commission charged with facilitating this debate completes its work in the coming weeks, we hope to hear your views as well.

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?

Sanford vs. Shealy

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Gov. Sanford called me Wednesday to complain about a certain op-ed piece that ran on our pages that day, and to level certain accusations at the author.

His substantial problem with the column was that he regarded it as unfair. His vote against the Violence Against Women Act was one of many, and all part of his attempt to draw attention to the fact that these programs were being financed out of Social Security — something those who voted for the bills were happy to ignore. He also noted that, contrary to his critic’s assertion that he would  “Cut taxes above all else,” he actually voted against a tax cut in 1998, and was one of only a handful of Republicans to do so (the other GOP members from South Carolina voted for it).

Beyond that, he challenged the provenance of the essay itself. He maintained that not only was contributor Ross Shealy the son of Lexington County Republican political operative Rod Shealy Sr., but that he didn’t actually write the piece himself: "That’s his Dad writing," said the governor. "I think it’s important that you know that."

Well, I appreciated the heads-up, but I suspected that the governor was mistaken on this one. For one thing, I thought the piece (while it may or may not have been entirely fair to the governor) was well-written. (And it did present a defensible view of the governor — that he has a strong aversion to spending taxes, and a stong affinity for cutting them.) And while nothing that Shealy pere has written in the past has particularly engraved itself upon my memory, I don’t recall having the thought "That’s well-written!" when reading anything purported to be by him.

For his part, when I reached him a couple of days later in an effort to reassure myself that we had not committed a fraud upon the readers, Mr. Shealy — Ross, that is — said, "Yeah, I wrote it."

This made sense to me, because although Rod Shealy and the governor may not see eye to eye, it seemed unlikely that a Republican — even a maverick Republican — would want to take that kind of chance against a popular governor of his own party. Stranger things have happened, of course, but I just really think the governor’s barking up the wrong tree.

Of course, maybe I’m just being gullible here, but Mr. Ross Shealy was pretty convincing. I believe his beef is his own. As he put it, "This governor really leaves a bad taste in my mouth." Which would help to explain why the only other time I can remember running an op-ed by this author, it also targeted Mr. Sanford for heavy criticism.

"On the political spectrum, I’m nowhere close to my brother or my Dad," he said. "I’m just not politically affiliated in any way. I don’t agree with them."

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."