ANOTHER VIEW: Scores show how S.C. still fails her students

EDITOR’S NOTE:  This commentary first appeared in the Charleston City Paper.  

South Carolinians are famously bound together by traditions, some seemingly as old as the earliest English footprints on the banks of the Ashley River at Albemarle Point in Charleston. But as last week’s damning statewide public school test results pointed up, some Palmetto State traditions belong on the ash heap of history – starting with our longstanding and obdurate refusal to educate all of our children.

First, a little background. Every year, South Carolina students in grades 3 through 8 take the standardized SC READY test, which is designed to measure whether they’re reading and doing math like they should for the grade they’re in.. Results are reported by the S.C. Department of Education in four categories: Does Not Meet Expectations, Approaches Expectations (, which is bureaucratese for Does Not Meet Expectations But Give Us A Little Credit), Meets Expectations and Exceeds Expectations.

And how bad were this year’s results?  Let us count the ways – starting with the fact that we’re not teaching our kids to, ummm, count.

For starters, as the Charleston City Paper reported this week, fewer than one-third of 8th graders in South Carolina are doing math at grade level and only half meet or exceed expectations in reading. But of course, those are just the top-lines  – the averages of all students across all racial, ethnic and income levels. 

It’s only when you delve deeper into the numbers – into what education professionals call the disaggregated results – that you begin to see the full dimensions of the never-ending crisis in the inadequate education that South Carolina provides her children. 

In the 8th grade, just 13% of Black children are meeting expectations in math, 34% in reading. Unsurprisingly, the news for 8th grade Hispanic kids isn’t much better – 23% are succeeding in math, 40% in reading. And finally, perhaps explaining those two results, only 19% of students in poverty are working at grade level in math, 40% in reading. 

Put simply, 70 years after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case that ended de jure segregation in South Carolina schools, we still aren’t making a good faith effort to  educate all our children. Though, truthfully, with only 43% of White 8th graders doing math at grade level and 66% meeting expectations in reading, it’s clear our state’s chronically underfinanced public education system is failing children from every background and walk of life.

That’s a tradition that South Carolina voters can and must end. So this November, demand to know how every state and local official on your  ballot is going to fix our broken education system, and vote like our children’s future depends on it. Because it does.