By Joe Waters, exclusive to Statehouse Report | Gov. Henry McMaster and the General Assembly are right to focus their attention on reforming and improving education in South Carolina. However, we cannot reform education without first placing the welfare, renewal and protection of the family at the center of policymaking. We must candidly recognize and address the needs of South Carolina’s families before we can do the work of fixing our public education system.
The family — with support from extended family and the broader community — is the basic unit of society and the nursery of American democracy. It is the place where we first learn to give and receive love, the meaning of duty and responsibility, and the virtues of citizenship and industry. These skills are vital for citizenship and jobs. It is very difficult for schools to teach these if they aren’t first modelled in the family and very difficult to teach anything at all if they are absent.
Moreover, what we now know about the effects of trauma, which actually and significantly impacts the neurodevelopment of the preschool age child, tells us that children raised in poverty, in homes disturbed by violence, drugs and abuse, and with the systemic effects of racism are less prepared for school because the trauma has written itself into their young brains. This is not necessarily the fault of anyone, but of social, cultural and familial circumstance. Policy alone cannot undo these circumstances, but public policy must be made to do its part.
Under these conditions, learning in school will be difficult, but not impossible. Yet, the school itself does not possess the resources necessary for overcoming the deficits of poverty in a child’s life. Why does it not possess them? Because those resources are intrinsic to the family not to the school. Therefore, schools cannot be expected to buffer the negative effects and toxic stress of all history and circumstance into which South Carolina’s most vulnerable children have been born, are being born, and will likely continue to be born unless we focus our energies on changing the trajectories of our families first. Only then will we be able to meaningfully and enduringly fix our schools.
McMaster and legislative leaders should begin even further upstream than the school system: we must develop a comprehensive family policy to give all South Carolinians the opportunity for success in school, in the workforce, and in life. Such a policy would include:
A living family wage. According to research by MIT professor Amy Glasmeier, the living family wage for a South Carolina family with two adults and two children is $24.73 an hour. The same family making $11.83 hour would be living under the federal poverty level. And, of course, the federal minimum wage, last raised over a decade ago, is well below that at $7.25 an hour. So to work a minimum wage job is to live in poverty unable to support a family. Recent studies have found that raising the minimum wage puts more money in the pockets of low-income workers while not hurting the overall economy of a state or community. Poverty drives poor outcomes for children. Let’s focus on incrementally raising the minimum wage for South Carolina workers and begin to lift more of our people out of poverty.
Health care for all. Children need health care to help them stay healthy and ready to learn in school. Research from Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families suggests that health care coverage reduces school absenteeism and improves the chances for educational and economic success well into adulthood. While children’s health care coverage has recently achieved historic highs, too many parents still aren’t covered because of South Carolina’s failure to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. These parents and caregivers miss work, lose income and have debilitating illnesses that impact the well-being of their children. Covering parents is good for children and we should do it.
Promoting the “success sequence.” Marriage is an important tool in the poverty fighting toolbox. Strong marriages make for stronger families more capable of buffering the effects of toxic stress, supporting the educational, economic and emotional well-being of children, and overcoming the dangers of poverty. Research by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution has shown that individuals who follow the “success sequence” — getting at least a high school degree, working full-time and marrying before having any children — are more likely to avoid poverty and flourish financially than those who don’t. We can positively promote marriage by ending marriage penalties in government programs; expanding vocational and apprenticeship programs that strengthen job prospects for less educated people, and create an economic basis for stable marriages regardless of social class or educational attainment; and telling the truth about the value of stable marriages to economic well-being of couples and their children.
Racial justice. South Carolina’s history of racial injustice is at the heart of our difficulties with poverty and poor educational attainment. While progress has undoubtedly been made since the era of Jim Crow, South Carolina has never reckoned well with our history of racial injustice and oppression or implemented policies to exercise a preferential option for the people and places in our state disproportionately impacted by the twin legacies of slavery and segregation. Consequently, certain areas of South Carolina (often majority African-American) continue to lag behind white majority urban and suburban areas. In order to promote racial justice, we can take practical steps like advancing criminal justice reform and important symbolic steps like officially investigating what happened at the Orangeburg Massacre and holding the appropriate parties responsible.
For too many of our children and families, it is not a great day in South Carolina. More must be done to ensure a future in which all our people flourish. We must do better helping South Carolina families so that our schools can succeed.
Greenville resident Joe Waters is the co-founder and CEO of Capita, a nonprofit startup ideas lab. It works at the intersection of research, policy, social innovation, design, and the arts to explore how the great cultural and social transformations of our day affect children and their families, and to foster a future in which all Americans flourish.
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We Can Do Better, South Carolina!
Every SC State Agency charged with providing services to children and families needs to be physically present in schools on a daily basis. Schools should serve as the Center of the Community.
Educators are overwhelmed. An accountable ‘best practices’ model needs to be in place. Our current system of operation is not accountable or effective.
There is no shared state technology system to record and document provided services, case management, or assessments for improvment related to the WELL BEING of our children. Our current stats are tragic, unacceptable, not accountable, and criminal for the best interest of children and families. As a retired educator with over 40 years of service, I am totally disgusted with our current approach. I have served on the local board of DSS, The Fourth Judicial
Circuit SC Foster Care Review Board, President of The SC Association of Attendance Supervisors, Darlington County Guardian and Litem program, and a host of local advisory boards and treatment advisory teams. Sadly, I remain embarrassed and angry by our lack of measurable progress. There is absolutely no excuse for wasted money and resources. Every elected official needs to spend a day in an elementary, middle school, highschool, special education and vocational school setting.