Competition: The Pathway to Better Public Schools

In recent days there has been a lot of national attention focused on South Carolina’s representative to the Miss Teen USA pageant. Her initial spontaneous response to a question - about a survey showing that many American young people can’t locate the United States on a world map - has been the subject of newspaper stories, editorials, and television programs.

Unfortunately, most of the discussion and ridicule of this young lady is misdirected, and certainly a young teen can be forgiven for a few seconds of stage fright in front of a huge auditorium and a national TV audience. What has been overlooked, and should concern us far more than her response, are the underlying contributing factors to the question that was put to her. I’m talking about the “dumbing down” of America, about cultural illiteracy, about declining test scores, soaring dropout rates, and most bitter of all, South Carolina’s bottom of the barrel ranking in a nation that itself ranks near the bottom of all industrialized nations in math and science achievement.

Nearly a quarter century ago a national, bipartisan panel was asked to examine the quality of education in the United States. Its report entitled “A Nation at Risk” stated “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” The report added, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

In the intervening years since that sobering report was issued, little has changed despite massive increases in government spending on K-12 education. In that regard we learned the disappointing news this week that South Carolina’s SAT scores declined for a second consecutive year. In responding to the news, our State Superintendent of Education commented that “It may be that we’ve hit a point in education reform in the state and nation that we need to do more substantive change to keep up with the competition.”

Dr. Rex’s assessment that “we need to do… more to keep up with the competition” is accurate. Yet the problem may be that competition is being stifled because the system that now has the monopoly on K-12 education works tirelessly to prevent private and independent schools from being able to compete on a “level playing field” with public schools.

While our state education leaders have talked about several good ideas for improving schools – greater choice among schools, single gender classes and schools that take into account the different ways in which boys and girls learn, more rigorous course requirements, greater emphasis on basics, longer school days and longer school years, professional development of teachers – there is little real incentive for schools and districts to substantively change when there are no adverse consequences when they fail their students. In fact, many failing schools and districts argue for, and they often receive, even more money in response to repeated failure.

Our State Superintendent is right; we need “substantive change.” We can see that things like spending more, tinkering with the curricula, improving the facilities, these things have not substantively improved the quality of South Carolina’s public schools as many had predicted they would.

To set a goal, as some have suggested, that South Carolina will rank among the top half of all fifty states is itself far too modest a goal. We should do more than simply aspire to reach the mediocrity of other states. Instead we need to look at how the world’s highest performing nations educate their students and replicate their performance.

Every parent knows how quickly children grow up. We cannot continue to ask parents to sacrifice their children as we wait another 5, 10, or 25 years for schools to improve. Every year is critical in the life of a child, and no child should be sacrificed in the hope that more tinkering and more spending might finally make a difference.

South Carolina’s school system needs substantive change, and it needs it now. People who truly support our system of public education should insist on substantive change to make our system better. Competition works. Just as in sports, our schools will most likely perform better when they’re competitively challenged.