ANOTHER VIEW: No education in third kick of voucher mule

NOTE: This editorial originally was published in the Charleston City Paper.

South Carolina Republicans have tried to craft a private school voucher plan that could pass constitutional muster for years – and twice since 2020. Both recent incidents got them a solid  “F” from the state Supreme Courts.

S.C. Senate Education Committee Chairman Greg Hembree’s response heading into 2025?  Hold my beer.

The new plan from Hembree (R-Horry), which was unveiled at a committee hearing this week, is substantially similar to previous GOP efforts in that it funnels public money into private schools.

Which, of course, is precisely what the Supreme Court keeps trying to tell them is unconstitutional.

But Hembree now says he’s cracked the code — that one weird trick that will magically make vouchers legal in South Carolina. 

Under this plan, the legislature would pay for the vouchers with state lottery money instead of state general fund money. And everybody knows that lottery money isn’t really public money.

Right.  Even though it’s sitting in state bank accounts. And even though state legislators like Hembree  are the public’s stewards to spend it.

But as critics have pointed out, the real problem with voucher efforts is that they don’t  pass the laugh – or public smell – test. 

Why?  Because they use public money to pay for private schools. And that’s just wrong. 

As S.C. Education Association President Sherry East told the S.C. Gazette this week, the whole scheme amounts to “putting lipstick on a pig.”

“You can call it something different [with the lottery money] but the consequences to public schools will still be the same,” East said.

And as the latest test scores show, South Carolina’s children — more than 90% of whom attend public schools — can’t afford those consequences.

According to the S.C. Department of Education, fewer than one-third of 8th graders in South Carolina are currently doing math at grade level and only about half meet expectations in reading. And when you drill down, the numbers were even worse for minority students, as the City Paper noted in a previous editorial. 

“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.”

Long story short: S.C. public schools are already struggling to educate our kids in K-12 schools. And a voucher program that steals desperately-needed public resources intended for college students isn’t a solution for that problem, particularly when the voucher program is capped at 15,000 students, a tiny fraction of the state’s 800,000 K-12 population. 

Perhaps the most famous words ever uttered on the subject of education in South Carolina were those of Democratic U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings, who once wryly noted, “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.”

South Carolina Republicans, who’ve already twice ignored that bit of simple wisdom by failing to get vouchers past the state Supreme Court , should consider it carefully before they push through yet another voucher bill — and risk a third kick in 2025.