By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | A business executive with a multimillion-dollar company recently lamented over dinner how tough it was to hire smart, highly qualified technical professionals and doctors to move to South Carolina.
Why won’t they come? Because they don’t want their kids to be educated in South Carolina’s schools, which they complain are underperforming and ranked too low. Despite the fact there are good schools in pockets of the state they potentially could cherry-pick by moving to certain neighborhoods, South Carolina’s reputation as a below-average educator is too big of a hurdle. Sure, they like South Carolina’s can-do business environment, but their children aren’t experiments in a state that can’t be trusted to do the right thing on education.
So they stay in California or New York or New Jersey or the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina. They move on with their lives and they are successful. Their kids get good educations and the only time the parents may think about South Carolina is when they’re looking for a place to vacation.
And here in South Carolina? We continue to lose. Not only do we lose world-class talent, but the kids who are already here keep losing because our leaders won’t make the big investment jumps needed to finally fix our public education system. So we stay in the cellar.
But oh, we will do one thing. We’ll follow any new shiny new ball in search of a quick fix, from charter schools and vouchers to technology or different testing, all in hopes of results that show our schools to be more impressive than they actually are. We’ll play around with standards and try to micromanage how teachers teach to eke out better results. But in reality, we’re still whistling Dixie on education, year after year, generation after generation.
The only long-term strategy that is going to make a difference to get South Carolina’s public education system out of the basement is real and sustained investment in public education. (Remember, our state legislators don’t even follow the current law on funding public education. Between 2010 and 2018, they underfunded public education by $4.4 billion by not adequately funding the base student cost.)
Fast forward to now. The state has billions of short-term surplus dollars as it zooms out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And what are state legislators talking about doing – despite long neglected needs to reduce poverty, invest in education and improve access to health care? They want tax cuts. Gov. Henry McMaster and House Republican leaders are seriously pushing permanent income tax cuts of a whopping $600 million. Senate Finance Chairman Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee, wants even bigger cuts.
Sounds nice, perhaps, until you realize that these tax cuts wouldn’t be a one-time loss. That money would vanish every single year – and rise to $1 billion a year after five years or so. In other words, after about 10 years in a state that already underinvests in education, South Carolina would lose $8 billion – that’s $8,000 million – in tax revenue it could use to dig us out of our underinvestment holes.
To put that in perspective, know how many brand new schools we could get for $8 billion? Two hundred, which would serve 100,000 students.
So here’s a policy choice: Invest in new schools all over the state – and particularly in rural areas with low tax bases that suffer from awful buildings – or cut our coffers during good times, ignoring that economics are cyclical and someday things won’t be so good.
Does any of this sound smart? No. It sounds like the legislature’s priority is to continue to underinvest and continue to keep our education system in the hole. And, quite frankly, it’s an insult to South Carolina residents. An income tax cut in a state won’t benefit half of the people. But it will benefit people with more means. Is it a coincidence many of them support the Republican legislature?
For generations, South Carolina has had misplaced priorities. The General Assembly needs to get its act together and make solid, continuing, large investments in public education. More rainy days are ahead. Lawmakers need to think strategically, for a change, instead of playing the next generation for suckers.
Andy Brack, editor and publisher of Statehouse Report, also is publisher of the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!
We don’t under invest in education.
You can double the money we spend on education and that’s not going to improve anything. We need more Charter Schools. We need school choice not more of the same old throw more money at what ever problem you come up with.
Wilbur, if you really knew anything about education, and I mean anything, you would realize you must fund education fully at whole core of the primary, secondary programs, all of the way up and through to the post-secondary level, you would see South Carolina needs public education funding increased in the worst way. If you knew anything about education, you would realize the charter school program just tries to re-badge and often fail at fixing what funding and a “total-source” action would do at the local level. We need to get it right once and for all.
You know, I’ve lived in South Carolina my entire life and unfortunately we have always scored poorly in public education. Year after year critics continue to complain about our “lack of commitment” or “failure to invest in our future” yet regardless of how much we spend the results are the same. There has been a revolving door of highly paid administrators that arrive with great fanfare only to leave thereafter pointing to a variety of reasons for their lack of success.
Frankly, I no longer believe that money is the root of the problem. It’s just a very easy and convenient excuse for people to use to mask the real issues. For example, I once saw a presentation from the principal of a middle school in the Lowcountry that indicated the number one problem she faced was student pregnancy (I’m not kidding). If that’s the case, my guess is our problems have more to do with cultural and/or societal issues than financial.
As such, I appreciate Governor McMaster lowering my taxes since it seems no matter how much we spend the results are the same.
If “patience” were a virtue, then South Carolina suffers from permanent “hot-head” ignorance. It is tiring that people such as yourself think Tax cuts are the way out for everything. Most of South Carolina’s governing body claims Republican and how it is making a way for smiling faces and beautiful faces and yet you do not have the decency to fix your waning population woes (there are not many diverse and smart young families here) and you cannot get out of your own way to look at yourselves and those here through an open and clear lens. Keep following the failed so-called “Tax-Cutting” policies of failed government. The end result of worsening infrastructure (educational capital) and lack of young, smarter child-bearing adults who stay and rear their kids here will be to your downfall. We need diverse, forward growth. Not the usual “trickle-down” scare ticket!