Education in South Carolina*

Written for the APLS 494i class by Bob Botsch

* Note: this reading draws heavily on Charlie Tyer and Richard Young, “Education in the Palmetto State,” in South Carolina Government: A Policy Perspective (Columbia, S.C.: The Institute for Public Service and Policy Research, 2003), pp.123-163.

Introduction

In most nations education is seen as a national policy that is the responsibility of the national government. That is because education is typically seen as so important to the welfare of the nation that the national government wants to ensure that all parts of the nation have the same opportunities for education.

While Americans certainly value education and see it as the way people can better themselves and move up economically and socially, a uniform national policy would violate other values, such as parental control through locally controlled schools. K-12 education evolved from the local level with communities creating their own schools, then states gradually becoming involved. Then in the last half century or so, the national government became more involved through funding programs through grants. What we have today is a complex mixture of control and funding that involves all levels of government reflecting the federal nature of government in the U.S. Unhappily for you, South Carolina is one of the most complex states in the nation in terms of who is in charge of public education.

Out of all this complexity are a wide range of educational issues that all levels of government struggle with. Here are a few of them. Who should pay for education? Should it be all local residents or just those with children or should it be done by all in the state or even all citizens in the nation? How should money be distributed? Should it be the same per child? Should those with more educational needs get more money? How can we tell whether schools are doing a good job with all the money they spend? Are objective tests the best way to tell (as in No Child Left Behind) or are there other more subjective and qualitative ways? What should be done with those schools that do not seem to be performing? Should public tax money be allowed to be spent on children in private schools, including perhaps religious schools? If so, what controls and quality assurance requirements should be placed on private schools, if any? What should be taught in the schools? Evolution? Scientific creationism? Religion and/or religious history? Values? Birth control? Aids education? Gender roles? How much control should parents have over what is taught in the schools, or should that be left to educational professionals? What is the best size for schools? What is the best size for school districts? Should higher education be considered public education to which all citizens are entitled or a private good that people should provide for themselves? Should states encourage students from out of state to attend their public colleges and universities? How much freedom to determine content and teaching methods should teachers at all levels of education have? How much should teachers be paid and should they be allowed to organize and collectively bargain? How can we get parents more involved in the education of their children and exactly where does the responsibility of parents stop and the responsibility of schools start? The list goes on, but I will stop here.

A Brief History

The first grammar and secondary school was Boston Latin School in 1635, a school created by Massachusetts Bay Colony for those who were to become ministers. The colony also created Harvard University the next year, again for the purpose of ministerial training. But most children there and across the sparsely populated nation had no formal education. Rather, they learned a trade as an apprentice or from their parents. The elite often educated their children themselves and then sent them to boarding schools, often in Great Britain.

While we can find some examples of public support for education in the 1700s, little happened until the 1800s when many states began to get involved in public education. What happened? Reformers like Horace Mann promoted public education with missionary zeal proclaiming that education served social and political values critical to the survival of the nation. Education was seen as a way to integrate newcomers into American culture, and of course in the 1800s many immigrants were coming to the nation.

By the mid 1800s a full blown movement was underway to establish common schools (today we would call them grammar schools) in all states that had compulsory attendance. The first state to do this was Massachusetts in 1852 and the last was Mississippi in 1918 (here S.C. was not last -- thank God for Mississippi?). This did not happen all at once because business and agriculture was strong enough in places to block reforms and retain the highly profitable child labor. In the South children as young as 6 or 7 often worked in the mills, and of course in the fields with their parents to help sharecropping and tenant families survive. Moreover, some religious groups, specifically Catholics, objected to common schools that did not teach Catholic values. They won a Supreme Court case in 1925 that allowed children to attend private schools as an alternative to public schools that otherwise has compulsory attendance. So even back then we see conflicts between public and private religious schools.

As these common schools were being created, states created new governments to administer them–school districts. You may remember from the introductory chapter that the numbers of school districts were the most numerous of all local governments (67,355 in 1952 across the nation). Since then pressures to improve efficiency have forced consolidation of many of these local and often tiny school districts (13,726 in 1997).

The Progressive Movement of the late 1800s, which we studied earlier in the context of local governmental reform, had an impact on schools and how they were governed. Progressives argued that professional educators should be in charge of schools and how children were taught. This began to create a conflict between parents who wanted to maintain control over their children’s education. This conflict has been a part of educational politics ever since. We see it today in many forms, whether it be standards for teaching biology, or sex education, or literature in English classes.

What happened for common or grammar schools in the 1800s happened for high schools in the 1900s. A high school education consisting of 12 years of formal education became the accepted minimal standard. (One wonders if this will extend to a four year college degree over the current century?!?) Just to give you a couple of figures. In 1900 only 10% of the population had a high school degree. By 1990 the figure had risen to 90%.

Following WWII, we saw a great expansion in higher education. The famous GI Bill allowed a whole generation of veterans to attend college after they left service, and that increased education had a profound impact on virtually all areas of life from the acceptance of diversity to economic and technological development. (The GI Bill paid for a good part of my graduate education.) Quite frankly, we have moved backwards since the 1950s and 1960s in making higher education affordable to anyone who wants to attend. Nevertheless, in 1900 only 2% of the college age population was enrolled in college and by 2000 that had risen to 60% of that age range being in college. However, the debt that the average student leaves college with has been greatly increasing in recent years because states have failed to increase higher education funding at a rate that matches inflation. Even though the additional expected income still makes college a bargain, the ability of young people to finance that debt and pay it off when they face the financial strain of starting families is becoming more and more problematic.

Educational History in South Carolina

As I compose this reading, one of those reports that we see all too frequently came out in the news showing South Caroling to be dead last in an important educational statistic – high school graduation rates. To quote The State newspaper, “Education Week reported 53.8 percent of the state’s students graduate from high school. Utah had the nation’s best graduation rate at 83.8 percent, with the national average at 70 percent for the 2003-2004 school year.” However, one has to be careful with statistics. This undercounts the percentage that eventually get degrees because it does not count those who get GED’s later. Nevertheless, it is a disturbing statistic for us all. So how did we get to where we are today? Let’s do a little history again, this time paying particular attention to South Carolina.

In the 1700s the state Assembly did create some common schools in the Charleston area to teach basic skills and moral and religious values. Nevertheless, public education for the many was very limited and did not extend very far into the interior of the state. The children of planters were either educated by their educated parents or in private schools, here and in England. One report says that no other colony sent as many children to England to be educated.

Following national trends, in 1811 the first state supported schools were created, called “pauper schools,” which no doubt did little for their reputation. The state provided very little support and they were mostly left up to local governments. Most children did not attend.

Finally, in 1868 the state constitution, written by a convention dominated by formerly enslaved people, created a public school system that was to be funded by a statewide property tax. This was a revolutionary idea for the state, even if in practice the system fell far short of the promise.

When whites took back control of state government in 1877, they quickly shifted funding to local property taxes. This meant that wealthy communities (with valuable property) could have good schools if they wanted, while poor areas would not be able to fund a decent school system no matter how much they wanted one. This same group of leaders closed down USC, which had been integrated during Reconstruction, and reopened it as a whites-only university. The disparity in white and black educational opportunity and funding would last for nearly 100 years.

Finally in 1892 the state gave some aid to poor districts and in 1894 created Winthrop as a college to train young women to be teachers (whites only, of course). By 1900 the school term across the state was only 3 months and few had much state aid. Perhaps the best statement about the state of public education in South Carolina came from the State Superintendent of Education in his report to the legislature:

“It is a misnomer to say that we have a system of public schools. In the actual working of the great majority of schools in this state, there is no system or orderly organization. Each county supports its own schools with practically no help from the state. Each district has as poor schools as its people will tolerate—and in some districts anything will be tolerated.”

In 1907 the state, again following national trends, made some move to provide a high school education. The legislature passed the High School Act that provided some state aid for high schools, though local communities had to pay for most of the costs.

The legislature passed local bills to create school systems wherever legislators saw the need or responded to local desires for schools. We had a maze of school districts with nearly no uniformity in how they were governed across the state. Many school districts had just one school in them! In 1949 the state had 1,361 school districts and only a total of 3,359 schools in them all.

Gradually over the rest of the century the state began to provide more support for schools, but it came slowly and lagged whenever the state had hard economic times. In 1924 the legislature passed the “6-0-1 Law” that provided 6 months of state aid if the local area provided for one month – a total of 7 months of school each year–but only if the locals came up with the money! During the Great Depression state education spending dropped and many schools reduced operations.

The next big change came in 1951 in anticipation of concern that if the state did not improve black schools, they might be forced to integrate. The disparity was almost beyond belief. In 1951 the state spent $166.45 on each white student, while it spent $44.32 on each black student. Blacks usually had no transportation to the few schools that existed for them, while whites had busses they could ride. Blacks were given outdated textbooks that whites had worn out and often went to unpainted one-room schools, while whites often had brick buildings (like the old Aiken Elementary on Whiskey Road, which is now the county library). Finally taking seriously the requirement for the second half of the “separate but equal” doctrine of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the state passed its first sales tax, a three cents on the dollar tax, and used most of the proceeds to build new black schools. Of course, you know the rest of the story, that this was only a tactic to avoid real equality in education, and in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board (along with the S.C. case Briggs v. Elliott) that separate schools were inherently unequal. After much delay, public schools finally did desegregate in South Carolina as well as the rest of the South. However, in many parts of the state, especially in the low country, whites fled public schools and went to private “segregation academies” to avoid integration. But the result was that at least in public schools, which still educate the vast majority of students in the state, children of all races got what the state and local authorities together gave them.

The next major change was the Education Finance Act of 1977, which finally recognized the vast disparity between rural and suburban schools. Rural schools were mostly in very poor areas that could not raise much money from property taxes and wealthy suburban areas had high land values and could raise a lot more money with lower tax rates. While this helped poor areas, it still fell far short of making up for differences, and we still had two distinctly different classes of public schools across the state. This disparity led to a legal challenge that we will talk about later.

In 1984 Governor Richard Riley engineered passage of the Education Improvement Act, which added another cent to the sales tax to try and help the state catch up in education with other states. This required an extraordinary political battle that pitted traditionalists who valued a cheap uneducated labor force against progressives who saw the future in improving education. Riley won, but it was close. Despite the great potential of this change, in the years that followed, the legislature shifted money from the general fund away from education and replaced it with the sales tax money. As a result, the new money had less impact that it might have had if it was simply added to what was already being spent.

In 1998 the state played a kind of national leadership role in trying to measure performance of schools in the Education Accountability Act. The law required report cards for all schools and allowed the state to take over systems that were chronic poor performers. The law also created another state agency to oversee the tests and reports, the Education Oversight Committee. The state did take over the school district in Orangeburg County, and the result has been some improvement in that system.

One area where South Carolina has also been a national leader is in encouraging national teacher certification. The state has one of the highest rates of teachers who have achieved national certification, in large part because the state has committed significant resources to encourage teachers to go through the process. The state pays the costs for those who are successful and gives an annual salary supplement of $7,500 to those who are certified. Some state leaders question whether this is a good use of resources, but it is very popular with teachers.

Federal Involvement

The national government has long been involved in promoting education, but it has been one of promotion and providing resources through grants rather than taking on full responsibility. Sometimes the national government has tied aid to needs in other policy areas, such as the school lunch program, which helped farmers and which was based on the malnutrition that the military saw in many of its draftees who could not pass their physical exams in WWI.

We have already mentioned the GI Bill that came into effect after WWII. Other programs to all the way back to the Articles of Confederation government, such as the Land Ordinances in 1785 and 1787 that were supposed to promote education. In 1862 the Morrill Act created land grant colleges to teach agriculture and engineering. Clemson is one such school that was partially supported by that act when it was created in 1889.

More recently national grant programs supported vocational education (the Smith Hughes Act of 1917), pre-school programs for the poor (Head Start in 1965) and the major grant program that gave aid to all schools, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Both of these latter programs were part of President Johnson’s “Great Society” program. All together, the national government provides about 7% of educational spending.

South Carolina’s Educational Accountability Act was one of several models for the national No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), which tied federal aid to schools improving performance of all groups of students in standardized tests that each state would choose for itself. South Carolina uses its PAC Tests (Palmetto Achievement Challenge), which are among the toughest in the nation. Meeting these requirements for all groups of students, including those in poverty and those with educational and mental disabilities, has proven a challenge for South Carolina and most all other states. Some states have rebelled. Utah, for example, has talked about giving up the roughly 7% of educational funding that comes from the national government to rid themselves of these tests that take so much teacher time and so much money. Many are seeing the costs as outweighing the benefits. They feel the national government has not delivered the money it promised to help pay for all the tests and actions to improve student scores. In recent years South Carolina has been debating whether we test too often.

Structure of Schools in South Carolina

We have already looked at the structure of schools boards across the state in the chapter on special purpose districts (pp.90-91 in the text). To summarize, school districts have nothing like home rule and have no uniformity. The 85 districts that exist in the state today range from about 500 students and a few schools to about 60,000 students attending dozens of schools. While all have school boards, some are elected (some of these are elected at-large and some in districts and some use a combination, some nonpartisan and some partisan) and some are appointed, some have fiscal autonomy and can raise property taxes to fund schools, while others need county council approval and others need legislative delegation approval if they go over a certain amount. In short, the structure of local schools is much like the structure of the courts was before unification—a hodgepodge.

Some of the smallest districts should probably be consolidated for the sake of economic efficiencies, but that cannot be done without legislative approval, and legislators are unlikely to do this when they hear that voters in their district want to maintain local control over their own schools.

At the state level the structure is almost as confused. We have a separately elected State Superintendent of Education, who is one of the constitutional officers along with the governor, lieutenant governor, comptroller, treasurer, adjutant general, and so on. The current Superintendent is currently Jim Rex, who was once dean at Coastal Carolina University. He replaced Inez Tannenbaum, who decided not to run for re-election in 2006. Both Tannenbaum and Rex are Democrats, and since they are elected separately from the governor, no guarantee exists that they will cooperate with the governor’s ideas on education. And they have not because Governor Sanford has been an outspoken advocate for school vouchers that would allow parents to spend taxpayer money on private schools. Both Tannenbaum and Rex both oppose vouchers. The last election for State Superintendent turned mostly on that question, with the Republican candidate Karen Floyd strongly advocating vouchers. Rex, the only Democrat to win statewide, won by about 500 votes. On a day to say basis the Superintendent runs the State Department of Education.

South Carolina also has a State School Board that has 17 members, one appointed by the governor and the others appointed by the legislative delegations of the 16 state judicial districts in the state. The board is given powers by the legislature, but can do very little without the approval and cooperation of the State Superintendent and State Department of Education. The State Board has little authority over the State Department of Education or the Superintendent, and can do little without their cooperation.

In addition, the state has the new Educational Oversight Committee (18 members, 2 of whom are appointed by the governor and the others by the legislature) that was created by the Education Accountability Act we discussed earlier. It can call for reforms but has little power other than that.

In this disjointed structure, the voter has a difficult time in deciding who is actually responsible for education in South Carolina. Many reformers feel that allowing the governor to name the superintendent of education as another cabinet officer would clarify who is in charge and who is to blame if we have problems. On the other hand, some observers feel that the risk is that someone like the current governor might try to undermine public education by putting vouchers in place. Of course, if he did, then voters would at least know whom to blame.

At the higher education level we also have fragmentation in public education. Public colleges and universities have often competed for funds and for programs with legislators in much the same way that they have competed on the athletic field. The closest thing we have to oversight is the Commission on Higher Education, which is supposed to act as a coordinating committee to prevent waste and duplication and to periodically review existing programs and to approve new programs. In the 1980s and 90s the commission tried hard to play more of a governing role. However, this was a losing political fight. The separate boards of trustees for schools and their supporters along with legislators who get much support from ties to local schools ultimately undermined these efforts, and the commission today has too small a budget to even do the kind of program review that they once did.

Education Finance in South Carolina

While we could talk about many issues that face public education in South Carolina today, perhaps the most important one is that of school finance, because that one touches on almost all other issues.

In the early 1990s poor rural school districts joined together in a court case challenging the way schools are funded in South Carolina, arguing that basing funding on property taxes with too little state aid creates unequal treatment of these districts. In 1999 the South Carolina Supreme Court delivered its opinion essentially agreeing with the poor districts, interpreting the state constitution requires each child in every district to be given a “minimally adequate education,” and that the current system did not do so (Abbeville School District vs. the State of South Carolina). By “minimally adequate” the court said that schools had to provide the opportunity to learn to read, write and speak, understand math and physical science as well as economic, social, and political systems, history and government” (see text, pp.112-113).

The case was sent back to the lower court to determine exactly what should be done. After several years of hearings, Judge Thomas Cooper issued a ruling in late December 2005. Much of the case turned on whether “minimally adequate” meant providing an opportunity or doing whatever is necessary to bring poor children up to some standard. Judge Cooper made both sides happy and angry. He ruled that the state did not need to change the way it funded schools, but did need to do more for pre-schoolers. In the Judge’s words, “the plaintiff districts are denied the opportunity to receive a minimally adequate education because of the lack of effective and adequately funded childhood intervention programs designed to address the impact of poverty on their educational abilities and achievements.” Exactly what the state needed to do was left unclear. Currently both sides, the lawyers representing the legislature and the lawyers representing the school districts, have filed motions to have Cooper reconsider his ruling.

In the meanwhile, the legislature has taken some actions that are relevant to this case. In the name of reducing homeowner property taxes in 2006, they eliminated all homeowner property taxes for operations of schools (property taxes still fund school building programs and businesses will still pay property taxes on operations, something businesses will certainly try to change in the future). Operations money is now to come from the state, funded by general revenues and by a new additional one cent sales tax that started in the summer of 2007. A statewide funding system had the potential of removing differences between rich and poor districts, but the legislature tied funding to pre-existing budgets of districts. Does this mean that communities that want to spend more on operations will no longer be allowed to spend more? Does this mean that inequities that have long existed will never be erased? It certainly means that poor districts that need extra money to make up for their students’ poor home environments will be almost entirely dependent on help from a legislature that is dominated by members from wealthy suburbs. You can figure that one out! You can also figure that more lawsuits will be filed!

The legislature has also take steps to create a statewide four year old kindergarten program, but failed to fully fund it as of the 2007 legislative session. Providing some tax cuts took priority. Again, you can be sure that more suits will be filed on this. And we may not have heard the last from Judge Cooper.

In the area of finance in higher education, you certainly are aware of increasing tuition. That is tied to the failure of the state to increase state funding as costs go up. When I first started teaching here, students paid about a fourth of the entire cost of their education. Today the state pays about a fourth and you pay about three-fourths. Many voters thought the Education Lottery, passed by voters in the 2000 election, would make college more affordable. That has helped a few people, but they are mostly the children of middle and upper class families with home environments that value education and encourage good grades. These are precisely the families that could best afford higher education in the first place. As I heard the president of Francis Marion say a few years ago, “I am worried about the trailer park kids.” They get little help from home and do well to make B’s and C’s, certainly not the grades to get or keep scholarships if they do get them. And without financial help from home or the state, they have to work many hours each week to pay the higher college expenses. So here in a nutshell is what has happened. The legislature, feeling that the lottery is helping to fund higher education, has cut its own support, thereby driving up tuition. Those who get the help are those who need it the least. They also come from families who are least likely to spend much money on lottery tickets! So the poor buy lottery tickets to help fund the education of wealthy kids while their own kids have to pay higher tuition to make up for cuts in state support. It is Robin Hood in reverse. The system takes money from the poor to help the better off. Perhaps the real winners are the car dealers who sell new cars to college kids whose parents reward their kids for doing well enough to pay for their own college education! If you are one of those kids, you probably think we have a swell system. In politics, where you stand often depends on where you sit!