By Bill Davis, senior editor | Alan Richard wants to be prouder of his home state. But it’s hard for the man who grew up in Piedmont and went on to cover an education beat for several state newspapers and has since moved on to national publications from his current perch in Washington, D.C.
Richard is one of the principal authors of a new report released jointly by two national education watchdogs. The report claims massive inequities in public schools nationally and displays the problem as a growing civil rights issue.
The report, “Cheating our Future: How decades of disinvestment by states continues to jeopardize equal education opportunity,” like many of its kind, calls for generally more money and a bigger chunk spent on kids in struggling economic strata.
A permanent underclass
Richard said the truth of the matter is that South Carolina, much like the rest of the country, has already created a permanent underclass in its education system.
“The question is if we are willing to dig ourselves out of it,” he says.
The report does have some bright spots for South Carolina, placing it 26th nationally when it comes to funding equity between poorer and richer community school districts. This is thanks, in part, to existing poverty-weighting in the state’s education funding formulas.
The poverty-weighting is more complicated and less robust than the plan another Piedmont native, former House Ways and Means chairman Dan Cooper, put forward before leaving the chamber a few years ago.
Funding challenges
But the new report shows the state consistently below national averages in per-pupil funding. More good news on this front may come next week, as the state House and the Senate will reconvene next week in a special session to deal with the state’s annual budget. Budget packages in both chambers include more per-pupil funding than in most years past, but still allocates about $500 per student below what state law requires.
South Carolina also somewhat dodges one of the main criticisms of the report, that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from the 1970s that allows for funding of public K-12 school districts to come from millage, or property taxes.
The criticism points out that it becomes much more easier for wealthier communities across the nation to fund their schools than poorer communities. South Carolina, by contrast, through Act 388, shifted the burden off owner-occupied homes and onto an extra statewide 1-cent sales tax.
Unfortunately for South Carolina, this also increased the burden on commercial property taxation, which was not exempted when Act 388 was enacted in the lead-up to the Great Recession, further hampering tax collections for education.
“If you live in Charleston, its suburbs, or one of the thriving areas of our state surrounding Columbia, Charlotte, Greenville and Spartanburg, economic times are looking up,” says Richard. “There are really sizable rural and urban areas of South Carolina that are not seeing that.”
For example, Richard says that one rural district has only one Advanced Placement class, delivered by a teacher it shares with another district, and the course is in French. By contrast, a friend’s kid attending school in the Lexington 1 school district recently told Richard she can take dozens of AP courses, with textbooks on school-provided iPads, and that she was preparing for a Socratic seminar that week.
Silence on report, but some general movement
So far, the silence in response to the report in South Carolina has been deafening. While everyone from the Washington Post to Huffington Post has weighed in, no statewide media in South Carolina has covered the report.
The silence echoes in the Statehouse, where several legislators groused without attribution that this reports delivers another “throw more money at the problem” education solution.
Richard says he doesn’t purport to have “the” answer, but that more needs to be done in South Carolina.
He applauds the additional $20 million Gov. Nikki Haley fought to include for rural school districts in last year’s budget, but said a bigger, more comprehensive approach is needed.
In addition to the $29 million the legislature included in last year’s budget process to hire more reading teachers, which was also pushed by Haley, an additional $5 million will likely be included once again this year for the same purpose.
House Speaker Jay Lucas (R-Hartsville) is trying to help. In January, he convened a special House education task force to review funding and policies. Comprised of legislators, stakeholders, and educational professionals, the task force was soon amended to include plaintiffs in the state’s ongoing Abbeville education equity lawsuit that has been dragging on for 21 years without a ruling from the state’s Supreme Court.
“Every child deserves the opportunity to receive an exceptional education that paves the way for tremendous opportunity and lifelong success,” Lucas said at the time.
“Effective education reform requires more than just suggestions from administrators; it demands valuable input from our job creators who seek to hire trained and proficient employees,” Lucas said. “All available avenues should be explored to guarantee our students receive a workforce-ready education that prepares each child for the 21st century.”
Other states have similar problems
South Carolina is far from the only state bedeviled by this issue. An education funding fight, in part, has reportedly led Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) to recently threaten defunding that state’s judicial branch.
Echoing former S.C. Gov. and U.S. Secretary of Education Dick Riley’s words, Richard says South Carolina faces a “generational opportunity” to improve education, get rid of “educational ghettos,” and move the state forward.
“Many people in South Carolina understand that the economy will grow faster, crime will be less of a problem, and fewer people will be on public assistance” if the state adroitly addresses its school funding inequities, says Richard.
“Take away the morality, that it’s just not right to treat people differently in these communities, it makes perfect economic sense. But it has to be more than window dressing.”
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!