- BIG STORY: State officials looking at major charter school reforms
- MORE NEWS: S.C. budget writers trade earmarks for tax cuts
- LOWCOUNTRY, Ariail: Remember when?
- BRACK: Change has always been on the menu
- MYSTERY PHOTO: Old log building
- FEEDBACK: Send us your thoughts – and info
Officials looking at major charter school reforms
By Jack O’Toole, Capitol Bureau | Amid ongoing concerns about lackluster academic performance and fresh allegations of financial self-dealing, state officials are considering major reforms to rein in South Carolina’s charter school system.
The goal, officials say, is to hold the worst players and practices accountable—while preserving what’s working in a system that’s also produced some of the state’s top-performing schools.
The reform effort, which critics say is long overdue, is advancing on two fronts — a recently-introduced bill in the S.C. Senate and new regulations from the state Board of Education.
Together, the proposals aim to fix three longstanding problems, experts say: weak oversight, loopholes that let failing charter schools stay open and what watchdogs call profiteering by some private companies that serve the schools.
Fixing a weak law
As the Charleston City Paper reported last August, South Carolina is one of only three states in the country in which charter school students are underperforming their traditional public school counterparts in reading and math, according to a 2023 study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes.
At the time, education experts pointed to weaknesses in the state’s charter school law to explain the findings. In particular, they pointed to two key problems with the law — a lack of accountability for failure, and financial incentives that encouraged private colleges and education companies to put profits over pupils.
Senate Bill 454, dubbed the Charter School Accountability Act when it was introduced last month by Education Committee Chairman Greg Hembree (R-Horry), aims to address those issues with three changes to state law:
- Stronger accountability for authorizers: Under current law, authorizers — either the state Education Department or more commonly an S.C. college — must agree to sponsor a charter school and oversee its operations. Hembree’s bill would allow the Education Department to shut down any college authorizer program whose schools underperformed for three years running.
- New limits on “authorizer shopping”: A key feature of S.C. charter law is the requirement that authorizers shut down underperforming schools. But with three authorizers — Erskine College, Limestone University and soon Voorhees University — schools have been able to move from authorizer to authorizer to evade closure. The bill would place new limits on that practice, including a requirement that the current authorizer approve the move.
- More financial transparency: In the current system, authorizers and the private education companies that provide contracted services like academic and back-office support to charter schools have strong financial incentives to open new schools and keep them open. Under Hembree’s bill, charter schools would be required to post all contractual arrangements on a monthly basis.
At an April 2 Senate Education subcommittee hearing, Hembree, who saw a similar bill fail last year, stressed the collaborative effort that’s gone into this year’s version.
“We’ve been diligently working with interested parties, [including] the Department of Education and the authorizers,” he told his fellow committee members. “We’ve spent a lot of time going line by line through the bill and putting some polish on what we already had.”
Meanwhile a few blocks away from the Statehouse, the S.C. Board of Education voted last week to impose new requirements on institutions seeking to become authorizers.
Currently, colleges and universities are only required to inform the Education Department in writing that they plan to start sponsoring schools. Under the new regulation, they would have to win regulators’ approval in an application process that includes a detailed accounting of their academic standards, financial relationships and more.
To take effect, both the bill and the regulation would have to be approved by the S.C. House and Senate by the end of this year’s legislative session in May.
‘A good first step’
S.C. Education Association President Sherry East, who represents teachers in state public schools, including charters, says her organization supports the reform effort.
“We’re excited about it,” East told the City Paper on April 7. “The intentions of some charter schools are good, but the system is a hot mess.”
Specifically, she says the new financial transparency requirements are a key feature of the legislation — particularly with authorizers now creating educational services companies to contract with the schools they sponsor.
To explain why, she points to a charter school leader she spoke to recently, who said she was explicitly told not to concern herself with the school’s finances.
“She was told not to ask questions — just run the school, hire your teachers, take care of the kids and don’t worry about the money,” East said. “But, you know, she was worried about it.”
And stories like that are, at least in part, why lawmakers are considering action now, East argues.
“Legislators have figured out what’s going on,” East said. “And this bill is going to finally put a stop to it.”
Still, East says there’s more to uncover about the money trail — what Hembree called the alleged financial “shenanigans” — between authorizers and education companies in recent years. As she put it, borrowing a line from Watergate:
“Follow the money,” she said.
- Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
S.C. budget writers trade earmarks for tax cuts
By Jack O’Toole, Capitol Bureau | The S.C. Senate Finance Committee advanced a $14.4 billion budget plan this week that, in a surprise move, contained only one earmark — a $300 million expenditure to cut the state’s top income tax rate from 6.2% to 6%.
Under current law, the rate was set to drop to 6.1%, the number adopted in the S.C. House Ways and Means Committee budget plan last month.
But in light of last week’s apparent collapse of a standalone S.C. House bill that aimed to drop the rate to 3.99% while raising taxes for most filers, senators moved to accelerate the existing tax cut — and in the process, all but eliminated earmarks in this year’s state budget.
Earmarks — long a target of conservative budget hawks — are legislator-requested spending items that typically benefit local projects like new fire stations or nonprofit grants in members’ districts. Last year’s budget, still flush with federal COVID relief aid, contained more than $400 million in earmarks. Earmarks often are criticized as “slush fund spending.”
A visibly pleased Finance Committee Chairman Harvey Peeler (R-Cherokee), sometimes accused in the past of driving what critics call the “tax and spend” earmark process, touted the new approach.
“I joke that it’s hard to cut taxes more than Harvey Peeler,” he told colleagues at an April 9 committee meeting. “But a lot of what I say in jest is true.”
On the same day that the Finance Committee released its plan, House Ways and Means Chairman Bruce Bannister (R-Greenville) joined Peeler in lauding the decision to kill earmarks.
“Over the last few years, we’ve been able to provide for a great deal of community investments,” the chairmen said in an April 9 joint statement. “However, in this appropriations bill, we’ve agreed instead to focus on what should be every member’s top priority — tax reform.”
The Finance Committee spending plan is expected to reach the Senate floor on April 22. After passage by the full body, a joint conference committee will be appointed to work out any differences between the House and Senate budget bills, with an eye toward passing a final budget before the session ends in May.
In other recent news
S.C. treasurer petitions S.C. Supreme Court to halt efforts to remove him. State Treasurer Curtis Loftis filed a petition seeking an injunction Thursday, about a week and a half before the Senate is set to weigh whether Loftis “willfully neglected his duties” for his role in a $1.8 billion accounting error that went unreported for nearly a decade.
State officials looking at major charter school reforms. Amid ongoing concerns about lackluster academic performance and fresh allegations of financial self-dealing, state officials are considering major reforms to rein in South Carolina’s charter school system.
S.C. wildfires prompt bill increasing penalties for those who start them. Following wildfires that scorched more than 18,000 acres in South Carolina, legislators are considering increasing penalties for the people who carelessly put lives and property at risk.
S.C. House passes hands-free driving bill. With $50 million in federal highway funds on the line, the S.C. House on Wednesday passed a bill to require hands-free cell phone use while driving. The bill will now move to the state Senate for consideration.
Critics say S.C. House bill regulating wild animals doesn’t go far enough. Lawmakers are considering a bill to regulate wild animal ownership in S.C. Experts say a poisonous snake bite in Florence shows why the bill wouldn’t do enough to protect the public.
S.C. House committee kills bill to study high speed rail. A House Education and Public Works voted 2-1 Thursday to end consideration of a bill to study high speed rail opportunities in S.C. “It’s just not practical,” committee member Chris Huff (R-Greenville) told the Post and Courier. “And we already know it’s not practical.”
In-state students may be protected against future tuition increases. The S.C. Senate Finance Committee has rejected a House budget proposal that could lead to higher tuition costs for future in-state students at state colleges and universities. The disagreement will have to be worked out between the House and Senate during the budget reconciliation process later this year.
Lawsuit prompts bill changing ‘racial quota’ rules. A pair of senators wants to remove a provision in state law that requires South Carolina’s Commission for Minority Affairs to have a majority-Black governing board.
Gambling expansion draws attention at Statehouse. Efforts to expand gambling in South Carolina are getting more attention right now at the Statehouse than they have in a while, including a push to develop the state’s first casino.
S.C. Senate committee discusses vaccine bill. Some S.C. lawmakers want to bring back permanently a bill that made it illegal to require public employees to be vaccinated in the state.
24-year-old Dem wins S.C. House primary battle by 11 votes. Keishan Scott, a 24-year-old Bishopville town council member, won a Democratic primary for a S.C. House seat by 11 votes, according to a recount.
- Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
Remember when?
Award-winning cartoonist Robert Ariail has a special knack for poking a little fun in just the right way. This week, he offers his special kind of commentary on what President Donald Trump has been doing to the nation’s democracy.
- Love this week’s cartoon or hate it? Did he go too far, or not far enough? Send your thoughts to feedback@statehousereport.com.
Change has always been on the menu
By Andy Brack | Mules, phosphate and asparagus share something for South Carolina. One hundred years ago, they were pretty common. Today? Not so much.
Around 1925, the Palmetto State’s mule population was at its peak at about 210,000 animals. As related by the South Carolina Encyclopedia, they were fixtures of rural life in a state that had more than 192,000 farms and 200,000 farmers, the majority of whom were Black. (Today, there are around 38,000 farmers.) Mules plowed and hauled crops to market as well as took timber, turpentine and phosphate – three of the state’s big exports – to ports to ship out of the state. But when was the last time that you even saw a mule, a blend of a male donkey and female horse?
Same with phosphates. At the turn of the last century, South Carolinians mined the mineral for fertilizer and it was big business. The state produced more than 500,000 tons, mostly in the Lowcountry, in 1893. But by the 1920s, that dwindled to 44,000 tons. About the only remnant left today is a byway named Ashley Phosphate Road.
And then there’s asparagus. Back in the 1880s, South Carolina’s truck farm industry was the most robust in the nation, Florence’s Libby Wiersema writes in a coming edition of the Charleston City Paper’s Dish magazine. South Carolina, in fact, was known as the “Asparagus Capital of the World,” growing 125,000 crates of the spring vegetable in 1920. The state’s farmers developed a strategy to be the first to ship the chunky Palmetto hybrid to New York each spring, which put farmers in the enviable position of being able to get higher prices. Unfortunately, as food historian David Shields told her, South Carolina’s thick-stalked variety of asparagus fell victim to the flapper craze of the 1920s when people started thinking thinner asparagus would help make people thinner. As Wiersema amusingly wrote, “skinny was in, chubby was out and asparagus ‘fat shaming’ became a real thing. The Palmetto didn’t just hide in shame. It became virtually extinct.”
Much has changed over 100 years, including with newspapers, which ruled media back then. Radio was emerging. Television was a dream. The first full-length movie with sound didn’t come out until 1927. Science fiction hadn’t even thought of hand-held communicators.
According to the N.W. Ayer and Son’s American Newspaper Guide and Directory from 1925, the state had 18 daily newspapers, 15 that published semi-weekly and 84 weeklies for a population just over 1.6 million. Several small towns, such as Abbeville, Barnwell, Darlington, Easley, Edgefield, Sumter and Union, had two newspapers. Larger communities like Charleston and Columbia had a blend of college newspapers, Black-owned weeklies and dailies.
These days? Newspapers are drying up. Just about every county still has a weekly that’s hanging on. But there are few true dailies – The Post and Courier in Charleston just went to printing five days a week instead of seven. The handful of dailies still left generally publish less than seven times a week.
If you want to get an idea of the rapidity of the changes that America has gone through, look more closely – to, say, 30 years ago. Ask kids today if they know what the Yellow Pages are. Or what Blockbuster was. Or what a landline is. You’ll probably get a blank stare. Just three decades ago, the Internet and cell phones were not ubiquitous. The media weren’t in your face at all times. There weren’t hundreds of television channels.
The point of all of this is that America has changed dramatically over the last 100 years and change is accelerating. The future likely means more change at an even more rapid pace.
We beat a Great Depression and the Nazis. We built the strongest economy and nation in the history of the world. And now we’re seeing lots of volatility again.
Despite junk going on to dismantle government and shake up our markets, let’s keep betting on America. There’s no telling what will happen, but as Georgia writer Billy Chism reminded recently, keep the words of Winston Churchill in mind: “For myself, I am an optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else.”
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
Old log building
Here’s an old log building somewhere in South Carolina. Where? Bonus points: Tell us what’s special about this place. Send your name, hometown and guess to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
Our most recent mystery, “This one may be impossible,” was not actually impossible to four Statehouse Report super-sleuths who identified it as a photo in Columbia looking across Jarvis Klapman Boulevard toward the old power plant for the state’s old penitentiary, know as Central Correctional Institution before it closed in 1994.
Hats off to Allan Peel of San Antonio, Texas; Mike Tucker of West Columbia; George Graf of Palmyra, Va.; and Brenda A. Clark of Irmo.
- Send us a mystery picture. If you have a photo that you believe will stump readers, send it along (but make sure to tell us what it is because it may stump us too!) Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com and mark it as a photo submission. Thanks.
Send us your thoughts – and your identifying info
We’ve been getting a few good letters and would like to share them, but writers aren’t leaving phone numbers and hometowns to help us verify them for publication. We encourage you to send in your thoughts about policy and politics impacting South Carolina. We print non-defamatory comments, but unless you provide your contact information – name and hometown, plus a phone number used only by us for verification – we can’t publish your thoughts.
- Have a comment? Send your letters or comments to: feedback@statehousereport.com. Make sure to provide your contact details (name, hometown and phone number for verification. Letters are limited to 150 words.
Statehouse Report, founded in 2001 as a weekly legislative forecast that informs readers about what is going to happen in South Carolina politics and policy, is provided by email to you at no charge every Friday.
- Editor and publisher: Andy Brack, 843.670.3996
- Statehouse bureau chief: Jack O’Toole
Donate today
We’re proud to offer Statehouse Report for free. For more than a dozen years, we’ve been the go-to place for insightful independent policy and political news and views in the Palmetto State. And we love it as much as you do.
But now, we can use your help. If you’ve been thinking of contributing to Statehouse Report over the years, now would be a great time to contribute as we deal with the crisis. In advance, thank you.
More
- Mailing address: Send inquiries by mail to: P.O. Box 21942, Charleston, SC 29413
- Subscriptions are free: Click to subscribe.
- We hope you’ll keep receiving the great news and information from Statehouse Report, but if you need to unsubscribe, go to the bottom of the weekly email issue and follow the instructions.
- Read our sister publication: Charleston City Paper (every Friday in print; Every day online)
- © 2025, Statehouse Report, a publication of City Paper Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.
