Lesson from the Palmetto State

Editorial

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Thursday, October 5, 2006

MAY WE kindly direct your attention to an editorial from the Wall Street Journal reprinted on this page? It’ll make you feel better—at least about education in Arkansas. Not in South Carolina. Because despite all the challenges facing the pubic schools here, and there are a lot of them, we’ve also got a governor like Mike Huckabee and an education commissioner like Ken James and a state Supreme Court, all of whom keep insisting on an adequate, equitable and efficient system of public education in this state. And their efforts are starting to pay off in higher test scores and all kinds of proposed and even some enacted reforms. 

Compare the progress here with the sad plight of public education in South Carolina, which is detailed in the Journal’s editorial—statistic by statistic. Those stats include the highest high school drop-out rate in the Union and a next-to-last rating in SAT and ACT scores. But the saddest number of all is a percentage: Over the past 20 years, South Carolina has increased its spending on public education by 137 percent and now expends more than $10,000 on every student in the system if you count capital spending. Here’s more proof, if any more were needed, that just throwing still more money at the problem won’t work and may even hurt—if it distracts attention from needed reforms. 

Such as? Individual tests for students that track their progress, or lack of it, through their school years—so they can get individual attention. School vouchers that families can use to free their kids stuck in failing and failed schools—and to send a wake-up call to those schools. A grading system that lets the pubic know how each school in the system is doing and which ones need to be shut down, rather than let them go on not educating the next generation. Rewards and recognition for the best teachers in the system—the kind of teachers who produce results that show up in test scores. A greater willingness to help the kids who most need help. A new emphasis on pre-K programs for the kids who need a half-way decent chance to succeed in school—rather than let them enter years behind their classmates. More power for families who want the best for their kids and less for the teachers’ unions that keep blocking every promising change in education.

The brightest news out of South Carolina is that civil-rights groups and their leaders have awakened to the soft bigotry of low expectations. And they’re determined to fight for reform. 

The time when community leaders could be counted on to just go along with the old ways and the old inertia is fading. To quote one of those leaders: “Frankly, I’m tired of seeing young black men graduate high school without knowing how to read and write.” Not just the educational but the economic and social cost of that kind of studied neglect is intolerable. Here’s hoping it will no longer be tolerated—whether in South Carolina or Arkansas or anywhere else in the land of opportunity.